Notes and Backstory of Jeff Sharlet's "The Family"

Jeff Sharlet's magnum opus, The Family, is now a miniseries. Having followed this guy over fifteen years I could not be more pleased to see his work finally more prominently available.  Here is the trailer.

For those not familiar with his work, this 2009 Fresh Air interview of Jeff Sharlet is a is a good introduction.

Copied here is a blog post I composed in 2005 after visiting one of many Megachurches across the country, the one in Brownsville, Florida. 

Globally, these large congregations are a significant development in Protestant Christianity. In the United States, the phenomenon has more than quadrupled in the past two decades. It has since spread worldwide. In 2007, five of the ten largest Protestant churches were in South Korea. The largest megachurch in the United States is Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas with more than 40,000 members every weekend and the current largest megachurch in the world is South Korea's Yoido Full Gospel Church, an Assemblies of God church, with more than 830,000 members as of 2007.

Sooner or later Jeff Sharlet's two-part examination of the mega-church phenomenon will be read and commented upon throughout the Christian community. Part I, available in the current Harper's Magazine, is also available online at The Revealer, [see footnote below] where Sharlet is a principal contributor.

“Church” is insufficient to describe the complex. There is a permanent structure called the Tent, which regularly fills with hundreds or thousands of teens and twenty-somethings for New Life’s various youth gatherings. Next to the Tent stands the old sanctuary, a gray box capable of seating 1,500; this juts out into the new sanctuary, capacity 7,500, already too small. At the complex’s western edge is the World Prayer Center, which looks like a great iron wedge driven into the plains. The true architectural wonder of New Life, however, is the pyramid of authority into which it orders its 11,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups, whose leaders answer to section leaders, who answer to zone, who answer to district, who answer to Pastor Ted Haggard, New Life’s founder.

There is a lot to be said for economy of scale, critical mass, social leverage and political influence. But I'm not sure how well the idea relates to faith. Faith connects inversely with threats, uncertainties, doubts and pain. Faith is in some way the opposite of certainty. It is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. The mega-church mission seems to be the replacement of hope with certainty, the realization of seeing instead of squinting to understand the unseen.


I'm unconvinced, but who am I to argue with a wave of spectacular, unalloyed, in-your-face success. The Brownsville Assembly in Pensacola was as close as I ever got to a big church. It was too big for me, except as a visitor. I was impressed with what they had accomplished, but when I tried to imagine myself as a regular member there, I had a hard time seeing how that would be different from being in a big, well-organized club. That was several years ago and it was minuscule compared with today's big churches. I guess I'm just a small-church guy.

Mega-church enterprises are the result of the combined efforts of a lot of good people to create a haven of safety and support for each other. That part appeals to me, in the same way that I have a high regard for the Amish and Bruderhof communities. I have read about L'Arche communities which seek to incorporate into a larger community those who are, in the old language of the prayer-book "in mental darkness." In very alien environments the protection of a compound has always been used by organized groups, from missionaries to scientific expeditions to military bases.

As protected populations such groups are not only tolerated, but sometimes encouraged by the larger communities in which they are located. The greater community would rather not be aware of groups like the Branch Dravidians or other cult-like outfits who come and go as much as they like as long as they keep to themselves with their crazy behaviors.

In the case of a mega-church, what's not to like about a place where people can swim, exercise and play safely? Where the welcome mat is always out for anybody that wants to join? Indeed, we all know how dangerous the world can be. How corrupt. How full of crazy people. We know the public schools are a cesspool of immorality, watched over by a cadre of teachers and administrators whose mandate to teach competes with other assignments that have nothing to do with education.

Large numbers of people retreat into private schools, gated communities, and suburban or rural settings where they no longer interact daily with the detritus of modern civilization (if we can call a litany of social ills "civilization"). I suppose I see mega-churches as parallels to gated communities.

That's why I like the notion of small churches. Small churches, especially older ones, are the Kingdom's equivalent to tree bark...not too pretty, not very interesting (certainly not exciting), but totally essential, winter and summer, to the survival of the tree. As much as I appreciate the work of mega-churches, I fear for the safety and survival of the little ones. I remember a conversation I had with the rector of a small church. We were discussing the mega-church phenomenon and he pointed out that mega-churches "regard churches like ours as feeder churches." Small churches, not masses of infidels, are the fields of harvest for the big ones. There are a few big fish in small ponds, but I know good people whose little lives and visions could never withstand the gale forces of a big church. That is a population of Christians that I want to see protected. At this point I don't hear anybody speaking for them.

† Footnote:

Links at my old blog have mostly gone 404 Not Found but here is an excerpt from the linked article I copied elsewhere. Even then (2005, 14 years ago) the issue of white supremacy was a topic of discussion.
Harriet Meirs, for those who don't remember, was an American lawyer who served as White House Counsel to President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007.
Sharlet says...

I've a short item on Harriet Miers' church, Valley View Christian, coming out in an upcoming issue of Rolling Stone. Poking around the site, I came across a startling link, to the Gospel Broadcasting Association, which declares: "This ministry is directed to the peoples of the world which historically have embraced Christianity--namely, the Caucasians, the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts, the Scandinavians, the Germanic tribes, and kindred groups which inhabit Western Europe and North America. Because of their embrace of Christianity, these groups collectively have been known as 'Christendom', that is, 'the kingdom of Christ'. Not surprisingly, these traditionally-Christian peoples are none other than the literal, physical descendants of the tribes of ancient, Biblical Israel." The site goes on to claim that the Roman Catholic church is a Jewish conspiracy.

Zoinks! Is Harriet Miers a Christian Identity white supremacist? 

No. Whatever else she is, she's not that, and neither are her fellow Christians at Valley View. When I spoke to the church's pastor, Dr. Barry McCarty, last week, I asked him about his site's link to this racist fantasy. He was genuinely horrified. The link was supposed to be to the Gospel Broadcasting Mission, not the Gospel Broadcasting Association. He said he had no knowledge of the association; I verified this with the association's sole member, one Russell L. Harris, of Houston, Texas. McCarty saw to it that the link was promptly fixed. 

Case closed, as far as Miers is concerned. But the real puzzle here is why no one else caught this. When I pointed it out to McCarty, he was not only shocked, he was perplexed. He said he'd done perhaps 100 interviews since the announcement of Miers' nomination, with reporters who were clearly looking for an angle on the church's fundamentalism. Why hadn't they noticed the raging lunacy of the Gospel Broadcasting Association? Why was I the only one to catch it?

Certainly not because I'm a better reporter. I was writing a short item; I spent about an hour clicking on Miers' church's site links. And bam, there it was. That's all. 

Was it overlooked because the political reporters assigned to the Miers story simply had no taste or time for theology? When I spoke to McCarty and Miers' former pastor, Ron Key, both men volunteered responses on abortion and same-sex marriage before I even asked questions about the subject. They'd clearly been grilled dozens of times over, by reporters who understand Christian conservatism as no broader than these two issues. 

It can be much broader, and in the case of the Gospel Broadcasting Association, it can be much narrower. But picking up on the nuances requires reading religion, and that, apparently, was too much to ask of a press determined to declare a Miers a fundamentalist in the only terms they understood.