Ben didn't want to own his girlfriend. He didn't want to submit to his mentors. Then older men invited him to Washington. By now Ben knew his cell was just one of many, that the main work of the organization was not with students in need of grooming but with "followers of Christ" in politics, business, overseas. In Washington he attended the Fellowship's only public event (the Fellowship "works best when it's clandestine," another member told him), the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Public and not-public; the President of the United States is the star speaker and much of Congress attends, but the Breakfast belongs to the Fellowship. They decide who's invited and where they sit and who attends the week of hotel suite meetings, the dinners, the receptions for generals and contractors and defense ministers around the globe.

This was not the social gospel. This was not what Ben believed. There was a man there Ben had only read about: a man said to run death squads in El Salvador. That made Ben's decision easier. He chose the girl. He left the Fellowship behind.

As the years went on, as he began to pastor his own church, he started wondering more about what he'd been a part of. That led him back to Westmont College; in particular to a man with whom he wanted me to speak to better understand his time with the Fellowship: Dr. Ronald Enroth, a sociologist who studies what he calls "spiritually abusive" religious movements.

Enroth was my first appointment at Ben's alma mater.

I later obtained the tapes of which Enroth had spoken. "All through these last forty years," Coe preaches to a small group of leaders gathered at the Glen Eyrie Castle, a Christian conservative retreat in the Rocky Mountains, "I've had the privilege of traveling to countries, I've been in China, in Vietnam with the Vietnamese, the Vietcong, Communists in Panama, Communists in Russia, the Red Guard in China, Nazis in Germany. And you know, I discovered that the same things that they make people give vows to keep, are the same things that Jesus said. . . . The only thing that was changed was the goal, the only thing that changed was the purpose. In essence, it was all the things that Jesus taught in private to the disciples. I began to realize why they were so successful in human terms." It was, he explains, the secret of Matthew 18:20, which reads "When two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them." "Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were three men," Coe continues. "Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies from nowhere. Actually, emotional and mental problems. Prisoners. From the street. But they bound themselves together in an agreement, and they died together. Two years before they moved into Poland, these three men had a study done, systematically a plan drawn out and put on paper to annihilate the entire Polish population and destroy by numbers every single house and every single building in Warsaw and then to start on the rest of Poland." Their unity of mind allowed them to kill 6 ½ million "Polish people," Coe says. "These three men by their decision alone."