This article deals with the American journalist. For the Vietnam-era American soldier, see Jeff Sharlet .
Jeff Sharlet (born 1972) is an American journalist and author best known for writing about religious subcultures in the United States. He is a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone. His work has also appeared in The Washington Post, Mother Jones, New York, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, Oxford American, New Statesman, Forward, Nerve, and The Baffler.
Sharlet is the co-creator of two online journals, Killing the Buddha, a literary magazine about religion, and The Revealer, a review of religion and media published by the New York University Center for Religion and Media. Sharlet's father is Jewish and his mother Pentecostal. His uncle, a prominent Vietnam war peace activist, was also named Jeff Sharlet.
With Peter Manseau, Sharlet coauthored Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, which was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best religion titles of 2004. "It shouldn't work, but it does...a literary leap of faith" declared Elle. Vanity Fair described it as "shot through with epiphanies and controversy."
In 2008 HarperCollins published The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. The book investigates the political power of The Family, a secretive association of Christian evangelicals.
In 2009 Beacon Press published Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, co-edited by Sharlet and Peter Manseau.