Ivanwald, Sharlet found out, was an enclave where young Christian men could eat meat, study the Gospels, play basketball, and be indoctrinated into a group that promised them exceptionalism. Moss re-creates this interaction with actors, and in the scene, the dramatized Luke has the kind of vacant smile on his face that implies either total spiritual and emotional peace or devotion to Charles Manson. Luke told Sharlet that this was nonsense, and that he was simply living with a bunch of other guys who were followers of Jesus.
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Sharlet had recently met with a friend, Luke, a “promising guy” with an upper-middle-class upbringing and a “fine trajectory to his life,” who’d abandoned everything to join what his family feared was a cult.
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In 2002, Sharlet was only beginning to carve out a career as a writer when he applied to live at Ivanwald, a sort of dormitory in suburban Washington, D.C., for young men of faith whose backgrounds implied both privilege and political connections. At times, The Family’s willingness to buy into the Fellowship’s mythology to tell a more compelling story seems to distract the show from the core of the real con. But Oz was also just a man behind a curtain with a prodigious gift for self-aggrandizement. In one interview, Doug Coe, the Fellowship’s former longtime leader, is likened to the Wizard of Oz, the enigmatic architect of a kingdom.
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And yet, as the series continues, it’s unclear whether the Fellowship is as powerful as it would like to be, or whether its aura of mystery is its most distinct asset. Moss embraces the stylistic trappings of conspiratorial exposés to tell his story-dramatic reenactments, a plinky and faintly menacing piano score, selective splicing of clips featuring Maria Butina and Muammar Qaddafi. Over four and a bit hours, The Family tries to expose an institution whose most prized currency has always been secrecy, delving into its origins at the hands of a Norwegian minister and fervent capitalist, its ties to some of the world’s nastiest autocrats, its more recent amity with Russia, and its eager embrace of Trump as a “wolf-king” who can change the course of history. The Fellowship, Sharlet says in one scene, is “the darkest expression of religious life that I’ve found in 20 years.” (It’s hard to hear this quote and not immediately think about a few other potential contenders.) Members of Congress, Moss and Sharlet argue, are secretly lobbying for an invisible organization that’s been “hiding in plain sight” for the past eight decades. Based in large part on the 2008 book of the same name by Jeff Sharlet, The Family draws a through line from the Fellowship to President Donald Trump, casting the latter as a crucial component in the Fellowship’s quest for global domination. There are some ignominious second acts in American politics, but the path from one of Jesus’s own representatives on Earth to a humble agent in the fight against animal overpopulation nevertheless stands out.īut what happened to the Fellowship? The Family, a five-part documentary series by Jesse Moss that debuted on Netflix earlier this month, makes the case that this shadowy religious organization best known for the moral incontinence of some of its members is actually one of the most nefarious operations in American politics. He left office in 2011 and returned to working as a veterinarian in Las Vegas, where he also volunteers for a charity offering low-cost spaying and neutering services.
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Ensign moved out of the C Street house, and his fellow Republican senators reportedly distanced themselves from him. Then it emerged that Ensign’s parents had given the Hamptons a “gift” of $96,000 after Hampton discovered the affair, while Ensign had helped Hampton get a lobbying job at a Nevada-based consulting group. In 2009, he was forced to confess that he’d been having an extramarital affair with the wife of his staffer and friend Doug Hampton. They paid a token fee to occupy rooms rented out by a nebulous faith group that encouraged them to believe that they had been chosen as leaders by God himself, and that none but God could judge them.įor Ensign, at least, it didn’t quite work out that way. The Fellowship’s members crossed party lines, but they had a few things in common. He was one of a handful of congressmen who lived in a C Street row house owned by an organization known as “the Fellowship,” an unorthodox group home that the New Yorker once likened to a frat house for Jesus. In 2007, Senator John Ensign of Nevada was a glittering star in the Republican firmament, with a maple-syrup tan, born-again bona fides, and presidential ambitions.