The Family’s Dead Sea Scrolls
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Over at my personal blog, “Call Me Ishmael,” I’ve begun posting archival documents linked to my research for The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. I began with a 1980 letter from a Family associate to then Pennsylvania state legislator Joe Pitts pledging the support of the Family — aka the Fellowship — for Pitts’ anti-abortion crusade, a decades-long struggle that is still playing out today — literally, today — as health care reform is once again held hostage by the Stupak-Pitts anti-abortion language.
The second post is a 1974 L.A. Times article describing the Fellowship — positively — as an underground movement, which I’m including here to help silence those defenders of conventional wisdom who respond to The Family by simply declaring that it doesn’t exist.
There’ll be more to come.
Jeff Sharlet is a founding editor of Killing the Buddha, coauthor with Peter Manseau of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible (2004) and co-editor of Believer, Beware (2009). Sharlet is also the author of Sweet Heaven When I Die, (2011), C Street, (2010), and the New York Times bestseller The Family (2008).