Netflix series struggles to tackle its complex subject
It’s the era of conspiracy theories in America. It feels as though they’ve never been more prevalent, more accepted, more shared. Currently, there’s a group of right-wing believers who wait in shared online spaces for an anonymous poster named Q to drop nuggets of information about political candidates.
They accuse them of child rape in the basement of pizza parlors without basements. They are sitting on the edge of their seats in anticipation of 50,000 indictments of government employees. They were disappointed beyond measure when JFK Jr. didn’t appear at CPAC to save the country and order the arrest of Hillary Clinton.
We have those who believe wholeheartedly that the Earth is flat (I know because I got a letter from one once after my review of Hail, Caesar!). We have parents who refuse to vaccinate their children because they think that the medical community is making enormous amounts of money from preventing childhood diseases.
Conspiracies are easy to latch onto because our brains are hardwired to find patterns. It’s how we evolved to survive. It’s important to discern which patterns matter—a task which is becoming ever more difficult.
The Family is a limited series on Netflix that presents an idea that sounds like a conspiracy—that a group of extremist religious conservatives have been systematically placing themselves in positions of power in the U.S. government and around the world. The group is notoriously difficult to nail down, shrouded in secrecy, and hardly ever discussed. The Family should be something that is easily dismissed. That it can’t be is the very definition of unsettling.
The series is inspired by “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power”, a book by journalist Jeff Sharlet. Sharlet spent years investigating the archives of The Family, even living for a month at one of their compounds. What he describes is a very cult-like culture, where young men are recruited to serve at the feet of power in D.C., with the ultimate goal of spreading their version of Christianity around the globe.
Their version of Christianity is a strange one—Sharlet claims that they aren’t very Biblical. They ignore most of the Bible and distribute amongst themselves a book simply entitled “Jesus”, which has only the words and stories of Jesus Christ from the New Testament. Given my understanding of Christianity from my own tradition, this is very much outside the mainstream.
Southern Baptists are taught that the entire Bible points to the divinity of Jesus. Take away parts of it, and the divinity would lost. Sharlet argues that The Family’s view of Jesus is one of strength and power, not love and charity. Their leader, Douglas Coe, sat with every President since Eisenhower as a spiritual advisor of sorts. He could be found in the halls of Senate and the House of Representatives, but the public and the media knew very little about it.
This was by design—Coe saw strength in secrecy. He also saw strength in authoritarianism. He argued that Christianity would be more successful if it was modelled after leaders like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Jesus, as well as most dictators, demands that He comes before others. Before self. In this way, Christianity would dominate.
In addition, Coe and the Family would preach that leaders are divinely appointed. The elite rule because God wants them to. Power is given by God and therefore the right leaders are in position. Their mistakes should be forgiven. It’s a gross exaggeration of the “render to Caesar that what is Caesar’s” lesson.
The series argues that this idea doesn’t stop the Family from trying to nudge the Lord towards certain individuals. They try to convert leaders to their way of thinking—they might send envoys to dictators and war criminals in the name of Jesus to pray with them. This is either harrowingly cynical or hopeless naïve. It’s really hard to tell.
There’s a lot about the series that’s hard to understand. It has many interviews with current and former members—including former Chattanooga Congressman Zach Wamp—who all claim that The Family is simply a prayer group to support leaders in their faith.
Which sounds an awful lot like plausible deniability. The Family hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington and the amount of power congregated in one room is too big to ignore.
Ultimately, the series fails to really capture the full picture of the subject. It’s too big, too slippery, too hidden. The Family tries to contextualize something that seems sinister. It never quite gets there.