The group's leader Doug Coe is rarely seen or interviewed. How can such a powerful man remain so invisible?

A few years ago, Time magazine wanted to make a list of the 25 most powerful evangelicals. A reporter for the magazine asked me for my nomination. I said Coe, but the reporter had never heard of him. So I asked the reporter to call around to his contacts on Capitol Hill. Ask congress members whether Coe should make the power list. And sure enough, he did - under the heading, "The Stealth Persuader." Coe has been leading The Family since 1966, when he sent a memo to politicians involved with The Family telling them that the group was going to "submerge." Current documents refer to it as an "invisible" organization. But there's a sense in which The Family is hiding in plain sight. They don't have to go to great pains to avoid publicity, because too much of the media still thinks of fundamentalists as, in the infamous words of The Washington Post, "poor, uneducated and easy to command." The Family is the exact opposite. They're rich, sophisticated, and in power. They thump Bibles behind the scenes, not in public. Ronald Reagan once said, "it's working precisely because it's private." Chuck Colson, the Watergate felon who was born again through The Family and has since become one of Bush Jr.'s key religious advisors, calls The Family a "veritable underground of Christ's men all through government."  

In the book, you show Hillary Clinton has been an active participant in conservative  Bible study and prayer circles--some of the most elite groups in The Family. As voters, what should we be concerned about her ties to The Family?

Yes and no. Hillary is no stealth fundamentalist. She's a "friend" of The Family, not a member. But "friend" is a semi-formal designation within the group. It means someone who's willing to play ball, even if he or she doesn't necessarily agree with all of The Family's ideas. The problem is that The Family is so deeply embedded in Washington that Hillary is hardly unusual in her connection to the group. I don't think we should hold her exclusively responsible. Rather, we need to ask some very big and tough questions about The Family in particular and the role of religion in politics in general. Religious folk have an absolute right to participate in politics. And if The Family did so openly, I wouldn't have written this book. But they've done an end run around the Democratic process, and done deep damage to it in the process. That's what we need to be concerned about.

You also connect The Family to what you call the "Popular Front" of fundamentalism.

The biggest discovery of my book, I think, is that American fundamentalism really has to be understood as two movements - the Popular Front of televangelists and mass rallies and voter drives, and the elites of groups like The Family. There's sort of a trickle down fundamentalism that begins with the elites and winds up in the mass movements of men such as Pastor Ted Haggard, who before the world learned he was engaged in a gay affair and using drugs, was one of the most powerful public evangelicals in the country. I spent some time with Ted and his church in Colorado Springs, and what fascinated me most were not the predictable political positions - anti-gay, anti-abortion, etc. - but these ideas that had originated in The Family, particularly the notion of "biblical capitalism," a kind of free market fundamentalism. It's not surprising to hear the wealthy men who populate The Family's prayer cells espousing such ideas, but Ted Haggard managed to make them dogma in his middle class megachurch, teaching working class and middle class folks that they should simply rely on corporate chieftains chosen by God to decide what's best for them.  

So is it all about the money?

It's not, because as Ted Haggard taught us, it's also about sex. Or, as the abstinence crusaders I write about put it, "purity." It's another example of trickle down fundamentalism. Chastity has always been a Christian ideal, but the elite fundamentalists of The Family were instrumental in taking that ideal away from pornography-obsessed prudes and hectoring old church ladies and refashioning it as part of this sleek, attractive worldview which has been hugely successful at drawing young people into a fundamentalist "worldview" that extends this concern for "purity" into every sphere. So it's about sex, but it's also about money -- the "purity" of laissez-faire economics. And it's about the very terms with which we know ourselves as Americans, terms populist fundamentalists, drawing on blueprints created by The Family decades ago, are re-defining in order to create a false American history that justifies the movement's ambitions. I was surprised by how many fundamentalists I met quoted George Orwell at me to explain these ambitions. "Those who control the past," they'd say, "control the future." So it's about money, yes, and sex and the stories we tell ourselves, but most of all, it's about control. It's about power.

What do you hope readers will learn from reading your book?

The Family is narrative history, not an academic lecture. It's about big politics, but those politics play out in the day to day as stories. If we're to break free of the conventional wisdom that blinds us to groups like The Family, we need to think of both history and politics in terms of stories. We need to think about characters and motives, to pay attention to beliefs as well as actions. Doing so allowed me to see The Family for what it is. Ever since the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, the media has been declaring Christian fundamentalism in America dead every few years. And every time, it rises again, and everybody's puzzled, because they thought it was gone for good. That's because they were looking at only one half of the story. The Family is the story of the other half, elites who sustain the drive for fundamentalist power regardless of who happens to be president at the time. Family members think in the long term; those of us who love open democracy need to do the same. They see their theocratic project as a work-in-progress. Democracy is a work-in-progress, too. For them, it's about obedience. For most of us, it's about freedom. That's the difference between the Bible's Book of Revelation - all knowledge coming from above, no questions asked - and the great story of Exodus, people finding their freedom together. The Family, I hope, is a book in the Exodus tradition, a story about fundamentalists that helps point us beyond fundamentalism.