US fundamentalists helped by Dutch queen

Translated from Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad:

“Wilhelmina helped evangelicals from the U.S.A.”

Published: February 6, 2010 10:50 | Updated: February 6, 2010 10:50

By our correspondent Tom-Jan Meeus

Washington, Feb. 6. Queen Wilhelmina [of the Netherlands] in the nineteen fifties contributed actively to the establishment of a society of US American evangelicals in Europe.

The secretly operating organization, The Family, according to the American religious researcher Jeff Sharlet, has by now become “by far the most powerful fundamentalist society of the USA”.

The Family, organizers of the the annual National Prayer Breakfast in the USA, is discredited because they have recently advocated the death penalty in Uganda to punish some expressions of homosexuality. The Family last year also played a role in sexual affairs of well-known conservatives in the U.S. The Family aims at “totalitarianism for Christ”, Sharlet says, and in order to get this secretly recruited hundreds of politicians in the U.S. and abroad.

The society was founded in the nineteen thirties by Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant in the U.S. After the war he sent an American pastor, Wallace E. Haines, to Europe to propagate the message of the group. Wilhelmina in the fifties, after she had given up the throne to her daughter Juliana, was Honorary President of the European branch of The Family.

From the archives of the deceased Haines, to which his son Stephen in part has given access to NRC Handelsblad, it becomes appartent that Wilhelmina had a close relationship with the pastor. She “was the principal mentor of my father in Europe”, says son Stephen Haines. She “treated [my father] like a brother,” said David Haines, another son of the preacher.

Today in NRC Handelsblad a profile of The Family, the most powerful fundamentalists of the United States.

The Family is also known as The Fellowship.

Related articles

• Dutch war crimes in Indonesia, new evidence (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Who’d A Thunk It: Wilhelmina in the Ozarks (aresidentalien.wordpress.com)
• Cartoon: Dutch Queen Abdicates (englishblog.com)
• Nazi terrorism in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Netherlands opens investigation into NSA and PRISM (dailydot.com)
• First opera in Papiamentu: Katibu di Shon (repeatingislands.com)