Washington's 'C Street House' provides cheap rent, is registered as a church, and is run by a shadowy Washington based association known as "The Family" or "The Fellowship." The group and its activities, the subject of a 2008 book by journalist Jeff Sharlet, has over the summer of 2009 become notorious as a string of sex scandals has enveloped three national politicians who have lived at the C Street House or gone to Bible study classes there: South Carolina Republican Governor Mark Sanford, Nevada GOP Senator John Ensign, and former Republican Congressman Charles "Chip" Pickering.

According to a July 20th story from Politico.com, Virginia Congressman James "Randy" Forbes (R-VA) attends Bible study groups at the C Street House. But Forbes is less preoccupied with extramarital sex, it would so far seem, than with a crusade to turn America into a "Christian nation" by overwriting and falsifying the US historical record.

While high-profile mass media journalists such as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow have recently begun giving The Family, the C Street House, and Jeff Sharlet's research some long overdue scrutiny, another aspect of The Family's activities has been almost entirely overlooked; its promotion of fake American history, falsified to justify claims that the United States was originally founded as a Christian nation.

Symbolic of that is a fabricated George Washington quote, known as "Washington's Prayer", that for decades has been incorporated into the program of the National Prayer Breakfast, an event held by The Family every year since President Dwight D. Eisenhower attended the first National Prayer Breakfast event in 1953.

On December 8, 2007, Randy Forbes introduced a House resolution, H. Res. 888, that purported to promote "education on America's history of religious faith." In fact, the resolution was packed with 75 assertions, most of which amounted to lies and distortions of the American historical record.

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Family men are more than hypocritical. They're followers of a political religion that embraces elitism, disdains democracy, and pursues power for its members the better to "advance the Kingdom." They say they're working for Jesus, but their Christ is a power-hungry, inside-the-Beltway savior not many churchgoers would recognize. Sexual peccadilloes aside, the Family acts today like the most powerful lobby in America that isn't registered as a lobby -- and is thus immune from the scrutiny attending the other powerful organizations like Big Pharma and Big Insurance that exert pressure on public policy.

The Family likes to call itself a "Christian Mafia," but it began 74 years ago as an anti-New Deal coalition of businessmen convinced that organized labor was under the sway of Satan. The Great Depression, they believed, was a punishment from God for what they viewed as FDR's socialism. The Family's goal was the "consecration" of America to God, first through the repeal of New Deal reforms, then through the aggressive expansion of American power during the Cold War. They called this a "Worldwide Spiritual Offensive," but in Washington, it amounted to the nation's first fundamentalist lobby. Early participants included Southern Sens. Strom Thurmond, Herman Talmadge and Absalom Willis Robertson -- Pat Robertson's father. Membership lists stored in the Family's archive at the Billy Graham Center at evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois show active participation at any given time over the years by dozens of congressmen.

Today's roll call is just as impressive: Men under the Family's religio-political counsel include, in addition to Ensign, Coburn and Pickering, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham, both R-S.C.; James Inhofe, R-Okla., John Thune, R-S.D., and recent senators and high officials such as John Ashcroft, Ed Meese, Pete Domenici and Don Nickles. Over in the House there's Joe Pitts, R-Penn., Frank Wolf, R-Va., Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., Ander Crenshaw, R-Fla., Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., and John R. Carter, R-Texas. Historically, the Family has been strongly Republican, but it includes Democrats, too. There's Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, for instance, a vocal defender of putting the Ten Commandments in public places, and Sen. Mark Pryor, the pro-war Arkansas Democrat responsible for scuttling Obama's labor agenda. Sen. Pryor explained to me the meaning of bipartisanship he'd learned through the Family: "Jesus didn't come to take sides. He came to take over." And by Jesus, the Family means the Family.

Family leaders consider their political network to be Christ's avant garde, an elite that transcends not just conventional morality but also earthly laws regulating lobbying. In the Family's early days, they debated registering as "a lobby for God's Kingdom." Instead, founder Abraham Vereide decided that the group could be more effective by working personally with politicians. "The more invisible you can make your organization," Vereide's successor, current leader Doug Coe preaches, "the more influence you can have." That's true -- which is why we have laws requiring lobbyists to identify themselves as such.

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