Saturday 6 June 2009

The Family That Preys Together.

Via Crooks and Liars, we learn the evangelical religious writing of John Eldredge - who broke away from Focus on the Family - is providing La Familia Michoacana, a notorious Mexican drug cartel, with a blueprint for the ideal organizational structure.

By using a patriarchal family model as the template for building the perfect hierarchy

... La Familia has developed into a faith-based right-wing populist social movement emanating from and orchestrated by an organization that happens to be a well-armed, well-financed violent criminal enterprise.

... an internal intelligence report on La Familia from the Mexican justice department surfaced, bringing the news that the faith-based cartel grounds its indoctrination program on the writings of macho Christian author and veteran Focus On The Family senior fellow John Eldredge, who now heads Ransomed Hearts Ministries in Colorado Springs.


Eldredge made his name as one of the prime leaders for Dobson's anti-gay crusade when he worked for FOTF. There is more about his influence in this July Dogs blogpost which also includes a grisly photograph of severed heads from an execution carried out by La Famila members. It would seem that some macho adherents of Eldredge's "muscular" and "tribal" religious doctrine are following it literally.

3 comments:

Mandos said...

There's also a movie called "The Family That Preys" by Tyler Perry, a black playwright/mass market filmmaker whose movies (usually comedies with himself in drag) seem only to get shown in large African-American markets. Anyway, "The Family That Preys" is more of a family drama than a comedy.

It has nothing to do with this post but the title reminded me of it. Aside from a certain amount of sappy sentimentalism you might like it.

fern hill said...

OMFG. That's terrifying.

One of the commenters at crooks said something: 'Religion used to be the opiate of the masses. Now it's the mental illness.' Something you've noted before, dBO.

deBeauxOs said...

Authoritarianism - that's the model followed by fundamentalist religious organizations as they exploit their followers and promote their interests; it should come as no surprise that criminal enterprises would borrow their tactics.

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