Why is Chris Coons Against the Separation of Church and State?
Chris Coons’ homoerotic little boys’ “Christian” club in Washington is getting the Netflix docu-series treatment, as once again Jeff Sharlet tries to pull back the curtain on “The Family,” a Christianist group that seeks to eliminate the barrier between church and state as it spreads its hate-filled notion of the Nazarene’s message.
Can someone please ask the Wee Little Senator why he doesn’t believe in that separation — a position all the more ironic given his sophistic debate answer to Christine O’Donnell when she pointed out that the phrase never appears in the Constitution.
The focus on the fellowship’s hypermasculine energy, combined with the stringent rules of the group (sex and dating are forbidden) and the Fellowship’s demonstrated anti-LGBTQ stance, creates a strong homoerotic undercurrent throughout the series that Sharlet says is fairly true to his experience. In fact, Moss says he actually toned down the sexual subtext of Sharlet’s description of Ivanwald, so it wouldn’t be too distracting in the context of the series. “There was a Norwegian politician while I was there who liked to walk around in tiny little zebra-striped underwear and his thing was walking around and jumping into guys’ laps and making homophobic jokes,” says Sharlet. “[There’s] a lot of that uneasy joking about masculinity and the potential for it and, at the same time, this desire for intimacy that becomes really challenging for people who have a theological and ideological opposition to that.”
When will people realize that “Christians” who rail against homosexuality are simply conflicted men drawn to homosexuality and filled with self-loathing because of it?
“The primary way the Fellowship maintains influence, the series argues, is through the National Prayer Breakfast, which every president since Eisenhower has attended over the past 50 years. Though many consider the Prayer Breakfast something of a “banal event,” according to Moss, he says, “It’s really quite an impressive demonstration of influence and power.”
Most recently, the National Prayer Breakfast drew national scrutiny when Maria Butina, a Russian spy, was arrested in 2018 after having been found to have infiltrated conservative circles in the United States, in part by gaining access to the National Breakfast. (Butina pled guilty to conspiracy and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.) Butina’s arrest crystallized the true significance of the Prayer Breakfast as a hub of networking and deal-making, not to mention an exemplification of the secret power of the Fellowship: “She understood where you needed to go to find power and lobby power. And that’s what the prayer breakfast is, in part,” Moss explains”