The C Street House – Washington DC's controversial home to a handful of evangelical lawmakers – is making its way back into the news this week. In his book The Family, Jeff Sharlet revealed connections between the Capitol Hill residence (the city recently revoked much of its tax-exempt status) and a secretive organization of powerful government players bent on using the mechanisms of the state to further their agenda of spreading the word of Christ around the world. If the title is any indication, his follow-up will expand this critique. C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy is due out this week.
Sharlet was on NPR's Here and Now, discussing the book and the cast of characters living at C Street House. You can hear the show here; an excerpt of his new book is here.
Meanwhile, in the New Yorker last week, Peter Boyer came out with his own piece on C Street and paints a more benign picture, advanced primarily with statements from the residents themselves.
Heath Shuler, a two-term Democratic representative from North Carolina who lives in the house on C Street and has attended a weekly prayer session sponsored by the Fellowship since he arrived in Washington, recently said, “I’ve been here the whole time, and there’s talk about what the Fellowship is, but I honestly have no idea what they’re talking about. I honestly don’t know what it is.” … One view of the Fellowship, with some popularity on the secular left, is of a sort of theocratic Blackwater, advancing a conservative agenda in the councils of power throughout the world. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a friend of the Fellowship, might dispute that view—if she spoke about the group, which she does not.
