Quotes from Jeff Sharlet

By ignoring the apparent contradictions of scripture, fundamentalism ignores its questions, reducing its complexity to implicit equations. Hate equals love; obedience is freedom.

To him, homosexuality is only a symbol for what he learned from the Family is a greater plague: government by people, not by God.

It's a familiar moment to students of history: the late stage of empire, hairline fractures shooting through the foundations of society. They're like cracks in the sidewalk; by the time you see them, the damage has already been done.

Talking with her was like listening to a ballad on a radio station that fades in and out as you drive, sometimes clear and sentimental and tuned perfectly to the passing land, sometimes filled with static, lost, a song played too many times.

Like Jerry Falwell and [Tim] LaHaye, [Pat] Robertson is a minister who advocates a Bible-based, pro-family agenda. Robertson, a faith healer, also claims to have controlled the course of a hurricane by directing it away from his headquarters.

private group prayers were the modern equivalent of a backroom cigar.

That's religion in America, under constant revision.

What Tim [Kreutter] is doing is owning people, training them and owning them. Even if he wants them to do good things, the principle is corrupting. It is the seduction principle.

If Trump said it was a joke, reporters reported that claim. They wanted to believe that some norms still held. Some feared that if they acknowledged just how far beyond norms he'd gone, they'd be normalizing the new American spectrum, one in which dictatorship had become not just a hyperbolic charge thrown around by each party's most heated partisans but an actual idea.

I read as easily as I breathe.

In 1936, when men such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh openly admired Hitler, it was still safe to name the style of government to which these words pointed. Human problems, Buchman told his little group that night in Lenox, require "a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy." Just as good, said Buchman, would be a "God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.

to make of this murder? Fundamentalists see in that willingness to kill innocents confirmation of Romans 13:1. This snippet of Paul's best-known epistle is a key verse for the Christian Right: "For there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God." Obeying one's superiors, according to this logic, is an act of devotion to the God

The real achievement of faith-based initiatives was not to launch flashy programs or even to buy votes for Republicans; it was to open the door for religious groups to the whole treasure house of federal social-services funding, tens of billions of dollars.

Walt Disney admired Mussolini and in 1938 quietly hosted Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, a month after Kristallnacht.

legislators organized by Coe and subsequently won the good graces of a far more powerful group of American congressmen, who helped pour a billion dollars in aid into Brazil's long dictatorship of the generals.30 "I never invite them," Coe said in 2007 of his dictator friends. "They come to me. And I do what Jesus did: I don't turn my back to any one. You know, the Bible is full of mass murderers."31

Movements are born from the problems of everyday lives, but they are not limited by them.

The Cold War was really the great struggle of the 20th Century and it shaped American political life from top to bottom.

The Family is the oldest and arguably most influential religious political organization in Washington.