Bill Nelson's "Family" History
NASA's departing chief spent decades aiding an anti-LGBTQ+ group pursuing theocracy
I’m an independent journalist who covers Christian extremism largely ignored by corporate media. You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber.
Note: This article is a sidebar to my reporting on Nelson’s activities last year. You can read the main article here.
Forty years ago, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was just a Florida congressman. Already, though, he had ties to a secretive, right-wing Christian group whose mission he would intertwine with his government service for decades to come.
Those ties would come in handy years later, strengthening his political alliances and even helping his adult son in his first jam with police. But there’s little public record of the international leaders Nelson helped legitimize and elevate along the way as part of the theocratic group’s prayer networks.
When and how this connection began isn’t publicly known. In college, Nelson interned with Sen. George Smathers (D-FL), his roommate’s dad. Smathers was good friends with the Rev. Billy Graham, co-founder and champion of the National Prayer Breakfast.
The breakfast was the signature and most public event of the Fellowship Foundation, which has gone by several names since its founding as a corporate, anti-labor effort to leverage Jesus against the New Deal.
Even without that connection, The Fellowship would have sought to bring Nelson into the fold once he entered Congress. That’s The Fellowship’s calling, “ministering” to people in power — usually without training and free of public transparency or accountability. Typically, it means reassuring the powerful that God is with them. Whatever they do.
Author Jeff Sharlet wrote in “The Family,” his definitive book about The Fellowship, that Nelson was one of the group’s Democratic “sincere believers drawn rightward by their understanding of Christ’s teachings.”
Whatever path led Nelson into The Fellowship, by 1985 he was giving Graham’s magazine a joint interview with two other Fellowship insiders, then-Reps. Don Bonker (D-WA), now deceased, and Tony Hall (D-OH), still active with The Fellowship after also shifting rightward. The magazine, Christianity Today, didn’t identify the trio as Fellowship insiders, just as evangelicals.
Nelson complained that Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-MA) wasn’t conservative enough for Democrats. O’Neill, Nelson said, “doesn’t fit with what America looks for today in a leader.” (O’Neill today is a go-to exemplar of cross-aisle civility.)
In keeping with The Fellowship’s disregard for the separation of church and state, Nelson shrugged at a question about religion and policy-making:
“I’m not offended by religious lobbyists. For a good airing of the issues, we need input on all sides. What concerns me is when groups say their position is God’s position on a host of issues — issues that one would strain to find mentioned in the Bible.”
That didn’t stop Nelson from ignoring Biblical edicts — and the First Amendment ban on respecting an establishment of religion — to champion public prayer. Not just for himself, but as government policy.
“It is very important to me that the Democrats be perceived to be what the majority of Democrats are in this country, and that is people who favor a strong national defense, people who are God fearing, people who want prayer in their homes and generally want prayer in public schools.”
Nelson wasn’t alone. His wife was active in evangelical circles, as well.
In 1984, Grace Nelson went to Africa with a Christian group fighting hunger. The trip reportedly arose out of a congressional wives’ prayer group, likely tied to The Fellowship.
She spoke about her trip at the The Fellowship’s 1985 National Prayer Breakfast.
(Grace Nelson has been prolific inviting guests to the National Prayer Breakfast and her family’s foundation has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Fellowship Foundation and an affiliate, the Mt. Airy Center, tax filings show. She sat on The Fellowship’s board from 2001 to 2003.)
In 1990, Bill Nelson co-founded the National Student Leadership Forum. It simultaneously presented itself as a government event and concealed the Christian proselytizing at its heart. The Nelsons started a Florida version two years later.
And Nelson has perpetuated Fellowship self-mythologizing around the NPB. At a 1999 prayer breakfast for then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL), Nelson said, falsely:
“This prayer breakfast actually started when the president of the United States, in the ‘50s, Dwight Eisenhower, realized that he was so lonely for spiritual companionship.”
(Sharlet’s research has debunked this fable: The Fellowship leveraged Eisenhower’s political debt to Graham to coax Eisenhower to the first NPB, in 1953. A recent Fellowship document shows that Eisenhower skipped most subsequent NPBs and is only known to have spoken at one more.)
Closing his remarks at Bush’s prayer breakfast, Nelson thanked the right-wing co-chairs, including Mark Merrill and Pam Olsen.
Indoctrinating Students
The Florida Student Leadership Forum is another Fellowship nexus for Nelson.
The forum and Nelson’s political campaigns shared a common Tallahassee address in various years. Nelson and his wife have been connected to the forum’s current and longtime leader, a paid Fellowship associate named Tim Perrier, possibly as early as the 1990s.
A few years ago, a source close to The Fellowship told me, “[Perrier] had a long-running relationship and partnership with the Nelsons.”
Perrier and the Nelsons reportedly began working on the student forum as early as 2000. (Perrier donated $300 to Nelson’s campaign the year before.)
The Nelsons and Perrier collaborated on inviting their friends and associates to the NPB, ostensibly an ecumenical event for international civic and religious leaders. According to Fellowship documents I obtained, Perrier invited numerous wealthy Floridians, Nelson’s adult children, a friend of Grace’s who served as her husband’s campaign treasurer, and a golf pro from the Nelsons’ condo complex.
Perrier also invited former Christian Coalition leader Joel Hunter, who wanted to expand that group’s mission beyond — but not without — its opposition to LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. Nelson has called Hunter “reasoned yet passionate.”
Nelson’s proselytizing at Fellowship events appears to be effective. In 2003, he met Dimitar Tashev, a Bulgarian interning in Washington who successfully networked with a number of Fellowship politicians and later went on to serve in his Parliament.
More recently, Tashev has been a “ministry leader” with Capitol Ministries, a theocratic, right-wing group that works is to bring public officials to Jesus.
Tashev has also met Speaker Mike Johnson and at last year’s NPB Gathering connected with Jordan Peterson, the author and influencer celebrated by the right. Tashev also met up with Nelson again.
“[T]he person, who has shared the most with me, since 2003,” Tashev wrote, “about the leadership principles he follows and the principles I started to follow is Bill Nelson.”
Nelson has proselytized in other Fellowship avenues that skirt or cross the line between church and state. He participated in The Fellowship’s Congressional Fellows Program, saying it gave students an opportunity to interact with members of Congress, “both formally and informally, with an emphasis on faith and values.”
Even Nelson’s kids got involved.
The Families
By 2005, Bill Nelson, Jr., reportedly was volunteering with The Fellowship, and “helped arrange meetings with several ambassadors about its foreign missions.”
That detail became public in an Orlando newspaper report about Bill Jr.’s previously unknown criminal record.
In 2005, on Super Bowl weekend, Bill Jr. tried to get into a Jacksonville, FL, Playboy magazine VIP party. Violently, cops said. When police showed up, he threw a punch at an officer, as he acknowledged later.
Bill Jr. was charged with trespass, disorderly intoxication, and resisting arrest. His letter of apology said, “I have learned from this mistake and it will not happen again.” It did.
But that first time, the charges were dropped, and the arrest didn’t become public until the following year. Bill Jr. was arrested again.
This time it was outside his dad’s 2006 victory party on Election Night in Orlando. Or, technically, after 3am the morning after.
The charges were similar: Disorderly intoxication and battery on a police officer.
With the second arrest, details about the first one came out, including how Bill Jr. avoided criminal prosecution.
Prosecutors explained that they let the senator’s son off the hook in 2005 due to his clean record. And The Fellowship had submitted a letter vouching for Bill Jr.
Here’s how the Orlando Sentinel reported it, referring to The Fellowship as the International Foundation, its d/b/a:
“…prosecutors decided not to pursue a conviction after weighing Nelson’s clean arrest record and his willingness to apologize and perform community service.
“The International Foundation wrote prosecutors that Nelson volunteered at the Washington, D.C.-based ministry and helped arrange meetings with several ambassadors about its foreign missions.”
It’s not clear what qualified the younger Nelson, let alone the Fellowship Foundation, to conduct Christian shadow diplomacy.
Despite the fact that this was Bill Jr.’s second offense — again getting rough with police, allegedly shoving an officer — he got a slap on the wrist. Anger management and treatment for his drinking.
If there were other incidents, none appear in the records of the two counties involved. Until 2022.
Apparently neither wrist slaps nor the Fellowship’s Christian love that his dad claims changes everything had succeeded in exorcising Bill Jr.’s demons.
On April 12, 2022, Nelson allegedly drove into a parked car and got physical again. This time with a woman.
In a restaurant parking lot, Nelson allegedly hit a patron’s car and then, when she confronted him, tried to get back into his car. She blocked his way, she said in her civil complaint, and claimed that Nelson, drunk, “pushed [her] … backwards, forcefully pinning her against his car.”
Despite “continued requests,” he refused to let her go. “[E]ven with her screaming at him to release her,” her suit said.
Bill Jr., the complaint alleges, “is known in the community as someone who has a habitual addiction to the use of alcoholic beverages.” Another defendant in the case denied the claims about alcohol abuse. (The suit, which initially sought $50,000, appears to have been settled out of court.)
The patron got free of Nelson when the restaurant manager intervened and Nelson took off on foot. Police bodycam footage suggests he was in no condition to run. Police caught up and arrested him.
The bodycam footage shows Bill Jr. overhearing officers on scene discussing Orange County Sheriff John Mina. “Good guy,” Bill Jr. interjects. “Really good guy.”
As a senator, Nelson had helped Mina get elected in 2018 and then endorsed him again in 2020. As Bill Jr. is taken to a patrol car, one of the officers tells another, “I think he knows Mina.”
In the criminal case, Bill Jr., then 46, entered a plea of no contest. He had to complete a four-hour driver improvement course and pay $533.
A spokesperson told the media in 2006 that Nelson hadn’t known about his son’s first arrest at the time, suggesting he wasn’t aware of The Fellowship’s help.
But The Fellowship stands by its own, at least on some things. And Nelson has a history of siding with fellow insiders at The Fellowship, even when it meant crossing party lines.
As I previously reported, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) had worked in the Florida House with Nelson’s longtime friend and Fellowship partner, Perrier, the state’s House chaplain.
Rubio quickly connected with Nelson, Perrier’s longtime collaborator and the Senate’s other Fellowship Floridian. The Tampa Bay Times attributed Nelson’s cross-aisle connections to the Fellowship’s weekly prayer meetings:
Nelson counts among his closest friends several senators who take part in a weekly prayer group in Washington, including Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah; Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut; and Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. He also notes that Florida's junior U.S. senator, Marco Rubio, "has not come out in a position and said anything against me in this campaign."
That was 2012. Not only did Rubio give Nelson a pass, The Fellowship’s leader Doug Coe donated to him.
In 2017, Nelson and Rubio toured areas struck by Hurricane Irma. One site they visited was Ave Maria University, even though the school reportedly was “mostly intact.” The chairman, however, had been converted by The Fellowship as a young man. (The chairman’s father was a massive Fellowship donor, supporting the Ugandan prayer network that ultimately enacted an LGBTQ+ death penalty.)
The Fellowship brought Nelson together with Trump just a couple weeks into his first term. Nelson and Grace met with Trump behind closed doors at the February 2017 National Prayer Breakfast. Nelson discussed it publicly, as far as I can determine, only in one interview, telling WPLG:
“We met him [Trump} at the National Prayer Breakfast. My wife and I helped greet him as he came and right off the bat he is inquiring about additional things. I think that’s a good sign.”
WPLG’s Michael Putney reported that Nelson called it a “friendly chat” and said that “the president asked him who should head NASA.” When Putney asked Nelson whether he supported Trump’s new sanctions on Iran, Nelson responded, “Yes. That’s a good thing.”
As a senator, Nelson supported some Trump nominees and voted with Trump more often than not, USA Today reported. And more often than other Democrats did.
When Nelson lost his 2018 Senate race, Sen. John Thune (R-SD), now leader of the Senate, paid tribute. “I always knew that Senator Nelson had my back.”
Thune had come to The Fellowship as early as 2005. In an interview that year, Thune said he found fellowship with other lawmakers through The Fellowship’s “C Street ministry.” That’s the occasionally scandalous Fellowship townhouse that provides Washington lodgings for some members of Congress.
That ministry, Thune said, “initially came from Doug Coe.” Now deceased, Coe was The Fellowship’s peripatetic leader, maintaining confidential relationships with world leaders including theocratic dictators and U.S. presidents of both parties.
On the day of the 2017 NPB, Nelson announced he had invited Thune to visit Florida to “build support for funding” Everglades restoration. The trip was the following day.
With Rubio now assured to run the State Department, Thune leading the Senate, and frequent Fellowship ally Johnson back in as speaker of the House, Fellowship insiders will now control multiple levers of U.S. governmental power.
I speculated back in November that Fellowship influence might bode well for Nelson’s prospects for staying on at NASA. He was personally invested in seeing NASA return astronauts to the moon via the Artemis mission, which has been pushed back to 2026.
Fellowship ties, however, seem to benefit its Republican members more often than its Democratic ones. Nelson didn’t get the nod.
Ironically, Nelson originally insisted that only space professionals should lead NASA. He fiercely opposed Trump’s 2017 nominee for that reason and plenty of others. But he later changed his tune, giving his blessing to Trump’s new NASA chief.
Last month, Trump announced a new NASA administrator. Again, not a space professional.
Nelson’s replacement will be Jared Isaacman, an entrepreneur who’s flown to space twice as a commercial passenger. He’s never served in government.
Isaacman is the billionaire founder and CEO of Shift4, a payment-processing company.
I’m a veteran journalist and TV news producer who’s worked at MSNBC, CNN, ABCNews, The Daily Show, Air America Radio, and TYT. You can support my reporting with a donation or paid subscription. Thank you.