OPINION: Phillip Adams | July 26, 2008

The Family. A comforting name for an organisation - until it's appropriated by a Charles Manson. Or a Doug Coe. Manson was content to surround himself with a "family" of young women whom he'd send off to kill people - most famously Roman Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, and some Hollywood friends.

And Manson did handstands in the spotlight his notoriety provided. The reclusive Coe is no killer, but he surrounds himself with US presidents as part of his plan to turn the US into a theocracy. As such he represents as great a threat to sanity.

Coe’s “family” dates back to the 1930s at Oxford, when the US-born Reverend Frank Buchman began his Oxford Group. With the world rapidly rearming for World War II, Buchman called for “moral rearmament”. MRA became a brand name, bought by many talented people intent on being “holy Crusaders in modern dress”.

First you had to sign up for the “four absolutes”. Absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love – a very big ask. Yet Buchman attracted a significant group of followers. The likes of morals crusader Mary Whitehouse and the Kim Beazleys, Sr and Jr.

Though tainted by some prewar enthusiasm for Hitler, MRA built up a head of steam – Alcoholics Anonymous is a famous byproduct. Though based on a fervent, feverish view of Christianity, MRA evolved into an ecumenical organisation that 70 years later is known as Initiatives of Change.

The Family, a fundamentalist elite, is a bastard American child of Buchman’s movement. It was introduced to the US by Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant intent on wreaking havoc on what he regarded as the embodiment of Satanism, the trade union movement. Veriede’s theology went something like this: for 2000 years, Christianity has directed its energies to the poor, the sick, the starving. Wrong! What has that achieved in the 2000 years since Calvary? Better to create a religion for the elite – and have, in the words of journalist and academic Jeff Sharlet, “a trickledown faith”. Only big men could change the world.

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Gus: bother-bugger! we know we know... there are secret big rich men, ruthless rulers with the moral stick and the nucular guns, while we, the every day man and woman, we can "hope and change — and vague out —" as long as we toil to produce whatever, so we can place our hoping clean hands inside the cogs of their Devilish credit machine... Indulgences these days come in the form of points on our credit card (I don't get any, World Vision gets mine for what they're worth), frequent flyer bizo and fly-bys. As if we were given stuff for nothing... The more we sin on our credit hell, the more indulgences we get... But only the big "men" can change the world... For a more hell driven greed and holy moralitude of the heavenly constricted rectum, be prepared...