Free The Family by Jeff Sharlet

fool.
    “But,” said Bengt, “that’s not how it ends.”
    Bengt meant Jesus. I thought of the end of The Brothers Karamazov: the saintly Alyosha, leading a pack of boys away from a funeral to feast on pancakes, everyone clapping hands and proclaiming eternal brotherhood. In Africa, Bengt had seen people who were diseased, starving, trapped by war, but who seemed nonetheless to experience joy. Bengt recalled listening to a group of starving men play the drums. “Doubt,” he said, “is just a prelude to joy.”
    I had heard this before from mainstream Christians, but I suspected Bengt meant it differently. A line in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed reminded me of him: Shatov, a nationalist, asks Stavrogin, the coldhearted radical whom he had revered, “Wasn’t it you who said that even if it was proved to you mathematically that the Truth was outside Christ, you would prefer to remain with Christ outside the Truth?”
    “Exactly,” Bengt said. In Africa he had seen the trappings of Christianity fall away. All that remained was Christ. “You can’t argue with absolute power,” Bengt said.
    I put the essay down. Bengt nudged it back into my hands. “I want to know what you think of my ending.” He had written about a passage from the Gospel of John in which John, with two travelers, encounters Jesus on the road. John hints at Christ’s importance, so the two men travel with him. “Then Jesus turns around and asks the two men one question,” Bengt had written. “‘What do you want?’ he asks.” The question, Bengt thought, might mean, “Why are you following me?” or “What is it that you are doing?” But Bengt had decided that what Christ was asking was “What do you desire?”
    The word was important to him. “That’s what it’s about,” he said. “ Desire .” The way he said the word made it sound almost angry. He shifted in his chair. “Think about it: ‘What do you desire?’”
    “God?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s the answer?” I asked.
    “He’s the question,” was Bengt’s retort. Downstairs, most of the men had gone to sleep; from the living room we could hear someone quietly picking a guitar.
    “Bengt,” I said, “I don’t understand.”
    “You know,” he said, “I don’t either. That’s what I’ve kind of come to realize. The thing is, I don’t need to. I can just trust in the Lord for my directions. He’ll tell me what I need to know.”
    “A voice?” I said, surprised.
    “A prayer,” he answered. The voice he heard was his own, his prayers, transformed by his inverted theology into revelation. What he wanted was what God wanted.
    “Absence?” I said, realizing that what he’d meant by the absence of doubt was the absence of self-awareness, the absence of an understanding of his thoughts as distinct from God’s and thus always subject to—doubt. But I did not say this. Instead, I just repeated myself. “Absence,” I said, without a question mark.
    “Totally, brother.”
    He half smiled, satisfied with this alchemy of logic by which doubt became the essence of a dogma. God was just what Bengt desired Him to be, even as Bengt was, in the face of God, “nothing.” Not for aesthetics alone, I realized, did Bengt and the Family reject the label Christian . Their faith and their practice seemed closer to a perverted sort of Buddhism, their Christ everywhere and nowhere at once, His commands phrased as questions, His will as palpable as one’s own desires. And what the Family desired, from Abraham Vereide to Doug Coe to Bengt, was power, worldly power, with which Christ’s kingdom could be built, cell by cell.
     
     
     
    W HENEVER A SUFFICIENTLY large crop of God’s soldiers was bunked up at Ivanwald, Doug Coe made a point of stopping by for dinner. The brothers viewed his visit as far more important than that of any senator or prime minister. The night he joined us, he wore a crisply pressed golf shirt and dark slacks, and his skin was well tanned. He