Bill Would Move Prayer Breakfast into Capitol Rotunda
Legislation being pushed by allies of the controversial group behind the National Prayer Breakfast would relocate the event to the symbolic heart of the U.S. Congress: The Capitol rotunda.
The bill would do exactly what its title says: “Authorizing the use of the rotunda of the Capitol for the National Prayer Breakfast.” It was introduced by Rep. Tracey Mann (R-KS) and its sole co-sponsor is Rep. Frank Mrvan (D-IN).
The two are the honorary co-chairs of next week’s National Prayer Breakfast (NPB) and allies of the controversial group behind it, the Fellowship Foundation, also known as The Family.
The move would represent an unprecedented insinuation of private religious observance into the seat of the U.S. government. The Family has spent decades attempting, often successfully, to blur boundaries between church and state, and between its activities and official government actions.
Last year’s co-chair, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) used his role to justify having The Family pay for his travel to Uganda for its National Prayer Breakfast in October. It was during his remarks at that breakfast that he urged Uganda to “stand firm” against international opposition to its Anti-Homosexuality Act, which last year authorized the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”
(Walberg has since indicated he opposes some aspects of the bill, but has not withdrawn his support for Uganda’s defense of it.)
U.S. organizations that advocate for the separation of church and state quickly condemned the new rotunda bill.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation told me they’ll challenge the bill in court if it’s signed into law. It was called “deeply problematic” by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a “disgusting example” of Christian nationalism by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
If successful, the bill would help The Family claw back some of the official ground the NPB lost last year. For the first time since its founding, the 2023 event was organized not by The Family but by the new National Prayer Breakfast Foundation.
But as I reported last year, the board of the new NPB Foundation is dominated by longtime Family insiders.
And the new board has yet to make good on last year’s pledge of donor transparency. The board president who made that pledge, former Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR), left the board abruptly after only a few months.
With Pryor gone, the board never disclosed who paid for last year’s event, which was held in the Capitol Visitor Center, a modern facility not part of the main Capitol Building.
Pryor had also pledged that the ostensibly new event would stop taking money from far-right donors, after I revealed that the old breakfast’s only donor was Franklin Graham. Although Graham’s father helped create the breakfast and was known as a confidant to presidents of both parties, today Graham is best known as a global crusader against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, in the name of religious freedom.
Pryor was replaced by interim Chair Caroline Aderholt, an opponent of LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights who serves as a trustee on the right-wing, theocratically inclined Concerned Women for America. Aderholt and her husband, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), have been involved with The Family and the breakfast for years – and have taken Family-sponsored junkets abroad during which they met with and helped bolster anti-LGBTQ+ networks in other countries.
It was Aderholt’s husband who decided to restore the Great Seal of the United States to the privately issued breakfast invitations of The Family, even after the Senate Ethics Committee advised against it.
The Family has long sought to cloak the event in an official-seeming mantle, which helps to bolster the political profiles of the guests, which it chose. Even last year, some guests of The Family’s ostensibly separate event, now known as the NPB Gathering, were still touting their attendance as official, or even at the invitation of Congress or Pres. Joe Biden.
Biden aided the effort by giving a shoutout to the Family event during his remarks at the “new” NPB. Media organizations fell for it, too. Outlets including CBS and the AP headlined their stories as if Congress were taking over, which it didn’t.
That kind of coverage helps Family allies convince officials to subsidize their travel with taxpayer funds, and convince local media that they were invited by Congress or even Biden.
That’s what Bulgarian Attorney General Ivan Geshev did, with a press release announcing he was going “to participate in the 71st National Prayer Breakfast, which is given by the American President Joe Biden. Ivan Geshev's visit to the USA was at the invitation of congressmen.”
That particular ruse was busted by local media, but the true circumstances of his trip remained “A complete mystery.” Pakistani politician Sultan Mehmood Chaudhry and others were also busted.
But others got away with it. Croatian sports executive Feliks Lukas was reported to have “participated in the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington with US President Biden.” Romanian Ambassador Andrei Muraru posted on social media that his delegation attended the breakfast with “keynotes from President Biden.”
The delegation’s actual meetings included Family allies such as Walberg.
Also at The Family’s parallel event, greeted virtually by Biden, were Family guests who support anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Africa.
And even at the actual, official event, Family allies abused or broke the rules, sometimes admitting that their religious beliefs came first. The office of Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) told me he brought Kari Lake – even though it violated the new rule against non-constituents and non-family – because Jesus didn’t check her address.
The Family appears to have split off the new event in an effort to address Democratic concerns in the wake of my reporting, while still maintaining enough connection to use the “new” breakfast.
Whatever influence or optics The Family may have lost with the split might well be mitigated by moving the new event to the Capitol rotunda, perhaps the single location most symbolically central to the U.S. government, where its leaders lie in state. Family allies now might have to work harder to claim they were there, or invited by Biden, but the event itself would be seen as even more official.
Mrvan and Mann did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but both – Mann especially – have previous ties to The Family.
Family Ties
Mrvan took office in January 2021 and appears to be relatively new to The Family’s circle. When he agreed to serve as honorary co-host – helping to give the event its faux-official imprimatur – in 2022, he said in a statement:
“I ran for Congress in order to continue to be a tireless advocate to bring people together and have the difficult conversations that are necessary to bridge the great divides that are confronting our nation. On January 6, 2021, those of us who were on the House floor were gathered in a secure location, and in that uncertain moment we joined hands and prayed with House Chaplain [Margaret] Kibben. It is in that spirit of prayer from January 6 that I agreed to lend my name for the National Prayer Breakfast committee. My voting record and history as an elected official demonstrate my unwavering commitment to fight against any form of discrimination, including standing up for members of all religions and members of the LGBTQ community. I will continue to make myself present in any room in order to lend my voice to help bring people together and live up to our mission to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper.”
Mann’s involvement with The Family is lengthier and more extensive. He interned for Family insider Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) when Moran was still in the House. Mann also worked for The Family’s affiliated organization, the National Student Leadership Forum.
And a source close to The Family tells me that Mann’s sister has worked for longtime Family leader Stan Holmes for years. She’s listed as a paid employee of Holmes’s own foundation up through 2022, the most recent year for which tax filings are available.
Holmes is close to Aderholt and Mann’s sister appears in an administrative capacity on congressional filings disclosing Family sponsorship of some of Aderholt’s travel.
In 2022, Mann was flown to the National Prayer Breakfast of another country by The Family’s local spinoff there, Guatemala Prospera. His itinerary included meeting with and sharing the stage with some of the people most closely connected to last year’s attempts to steal the presidency there.
Here at home, Mann is just one of several Family insiders who supported then-Pres. Donald Trump’s lie that Biden stole the presidency. Mann had also been a birther, calling on Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate.
Secular Pushback
Secular groups and advocates for the First Amendment’s establishment clause reacted strongly to the notion of the privately run prayer breakfast occurring at the heart of the Capitol.
“Conducting a ‘National Prayer Breakfast’ at the conspicuous seat of federal government is what would be expected in a theocracy, not a republic predicated on a secular Constitution,” said Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) co-founder and Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor.
“The National Prayer Breakfast is supposed to be a private, not a governmental function. This is pure pandering and we would consider litigation if this passes,” she added. Citing Matthew 6:5, she said, “Jesus warns that when you pray, don't be like the hypocrites who love to pray in order to be seen by men, but go into your room, close the door and pray in secret.”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State President and CEO Rachel Laser said, “church-state separation and religious freedom means that our government cannot favor one faith over others or religion over nonreligion. The National Prayer Breakfast, which was created during a wave of Christian Nationalism in the 1950s, has flouted that promise.”
Laser credited the “positive development that organizers recently have tried to distance themselves from The Family – the divisive, Christian Nationalist organization that ran the event for so long,” but said that it’s “still deeply problematic that members of Congress are directly involved in hosting a religious event at the seat of our federal government.”
Perhaps most emphatic was Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) Founder and President Mikey Weinstein, who wrote in an email:
“Let me just say it so that NO ONE will be even reMOTELY confused. The fact that The Family/The Fellowship has now cravenly succeeded in manipulating both Congressional Republicans and Democrats into trying to enable bipartisan legislation to permit the holding of this repulsive, fundamentalist Christian, extremist event in the veritable CITADEL and SYMBOL of America legislative democracy, the Capitol Rotunda itself, is 100% akin to having your local fire fighters project gasoline instead of water and other fire retardants onto a 20-alarm building fire.”
Weinstein added that, “America's precious democracy and Constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state is literally on fire and no one in Washington D.C. is doing a damn thing about it!"
And Weinstein also noted that The Family’s breakfast spinoffs aren’t merely flung around the globe. Prayer breakfasts have sprouted up throughout the country, especially on military bases.
Weinstein cited “many complaints” from men and women in uniform “being relentlessly and aggressively coerced or egregiously pressured by their military superiors to attend them and also because of the exclusively fundamentalist Christian nationalist nature of these so-called “non-denominational” events.”
In fact, Weinstein said that the MRFF gets so many complaints from its 86,000 active duty armed forces members and civilians “like clockwork every year that we actually refer to late January and February as “Prayer Breakfast Season.”
Jonathan Larsen is a veteran reporter and TV news producer. He created Up with Chris Hayes at MSNBC and was a key part of the teams that launched Anderson Cooper 360 at CNN and led MSNBC’s Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Most recently he oversaw all original and investigative reporting at TYT.