FOOD FIGHT: The War of the Prayer Breakfasts
Legal schism between dueling events promoting unity sheds light on their secrets
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The prayer breakfasts are fighting.
The 1953 original — founded by what’s now known as the Fellowship Foundation but better known as The Family — spun off a Capitol Hill version in 2023. And now a quiet legal battle between the two, previously unreported, is revealing some truths.
They’re fighting over the trademark for the phrase “National Prayer Breakfast.” And decades of misdirection by secretive breakfast organizers are now biting them in the ass.
Three years ago, I revealed multiple ways in which the organizers of America’s two big national prayer breakfasts — whatever they called the events — were working in concert, if not effectively working as one organization. That appears to have changed.
Both The Fellowship and the NPB Foundation — which was created to run the Capitol Hill spinoff — have perpetuated the misapprehension in credulous media coverage that their events are run by Congress. The Fellowship once called it the Presidential Prayer Breakfast and as recently as last week’s event used the seal of the president of the United States on its backdrop even when Pres. Donald Trump wasn’t on stage disparaging Democrats.
Despite their shared history and personnel backgrounds, however, since 2024 The Fellowship and the NPB Foundation have been fighting over which one can trademark the phrase, “National Prayer Breakfast.”
As trivial as it may sound, the battle has seismic potential. It could expose the inner workings and decision-makers of each. The rift could hobble The Fellowship’s decades-long leveraging of breakfast prestige to elevate right-wing politicians — including Trump — and policies around the world.
The Fellowship’s public faces in recent years have been former Reps. Zach Wamp (R-TN) and Jim Slattery (D-KS), both of whom now have private-sector interests. But the Fellowship board is populated by business leaders with much lower public profiles (although a recent addition is author and speaker Os Guinness). Another breakfast leader is Doug Burleigh, who figured into the Maria Butina scandal.
The NPB Foundation board, by contrast, includes well-known congressional veterans such as former Reps. JC Watts (R-OK), the chair, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and former Senators Birch Bayh (D-IN) and Tom Carper (D-DE).
In battling over the name “National Prayer Breakfast,” the groups are making statements about each other — fraud has been alleged — and revealing things about themselves that in some cases stand at odds with what they’ve led the public to believe.
The first shot appears to have been fired on March 21, 2024. That’s when The Fellowship applied to trademark the phrase “National Prayer Breakfast.”
Ten days later, so did the NPB Foundation. The battle has been playing out since in legal filings with the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office (USPTO). (It’s worth noting that any victory could have impacts on countless local gatherings that call themselves some variation on “National Prayer Breakfast.”)
The rift appears to have been reflected in last week’s dueling events. Both, as usual, claimed that prayer is a uniting force, even knowing they’re at odds with each other. But this time, for the first time, both used the title “National Prayer Breakfast.”
No House members appear to have participated in the NPB Foundation’s scaled-down Capitol Hill version. No senators appear to have joined The Fellowship’s larger event at the Washington Hilton.
Only three congressional Democrats showed up at the Hilton — co-chair Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA), and choir member Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY).
Trump not surprisingly chose The Fellowship’s breakfast, where dictator allies were feted and special interests flocked. (The Fellowship breakfast has a history of partisanship, with speakers Ben Carson and Mother Teresa assailing Pres. Barack Obama’s healthcare plans and Pres. Bill Clinton’s support for reproductive rights, respectively.)
The first year of dual breakfasts, 2023, seemed cooperative. Wamp of The Fellowship even urged the NPB Foundation’s board president, Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) to preserve the unity between them (by not speaking to me and other media).
The Fellowship even donated $46,800 to the NPB Foundation that year, a 2023 tax filing shows.
As recently as last month, the 2026 Fellowship co-chairs, Jackson and Rep. Ben Cline (D-VA), announced that the two breakfasts would reunite this year at the Hilton.
But whatever agreement there might have been appears to have crumbled at the last minute.
A subsequent invitation from NPB Foundation board members on Jan. 16 announced that they actually would hold a separate Capitol Hill breakfast. They just didn’t know where yet. Location TBA.
On the big day, Feb. 6, the NPB Foundation had no guest speaker. No big-name performer.
Downhill at the Hilton, Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) told the Fellowship audience he’d only found out the day before that he would be the keynote speaker.
Behind the scenes, the breakfast battle had been heating up .
At first, the NPB Foundation might have thought it had an easy case. As its lawyers pointed out, the Fellowship Foundation couldn’t even get its own identity straight.
The Fellowship’s lack of transparency and legal slipperiness have been assets in the past, making it tricky to figure out who was actually running things and what they were up to.
The organization was born on Dec. 15, 1942, as the National Committee for Christian Leadership. As its reach spread around the world, it was reborn on March 19, 1949, as International Christian Leadership.
After the now-deceased Doug Coe took over, he de-emphasized the focus on Christianity, touting Jesus as a spiritual figure, less polarizing. The group was reborn Dec. 1, 1971, as the Fellowship Foundation. They added a d/b/a, “The International Foundation,” on April 14, 2010, two years after becoming infamous in “The Family,” Jeff Sharlet’s book chronicling their often right-wing shadow diplomacy.
(Ironically, when I asked former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), the NPB Foundation’s leader at the time, about her ties to The Fellowship, she denied any affiliation with the “International Foundation,” even though I hadn’t used that term.)
The Fellowship’s own trademark filing reflected how flummoxed the group itself was about what it was. It took multiple tries over the course of a year to amend itself from the International Foundation of Virginia to the Fellowship Foundation of Illinois, with a stop in Maryland along the way.
It didn’t help that The Fellowship accidentally dissolved for a year.
The NPB Foundation used all of that, unsuccessfully, to accuse The Fellowship of attempting to defraud the USPTO.
Perhaps more interestingly, recently the NPB Foundation has tried a different tack.
The USPTO originally said that “National Prayer Breakfast” was too generic and descriptive to trademark. The Fellowship, could, however, argue ownership of the phrase because it so distinctively describes what The Fellowship does.
But because The Fellowship’s identity has been so slippery, NPB Foundation lawyers argued, The Fellowship can’t claim that “National Prayer Breakfast” is a distinctive phrase that people associate with The Fellowship. Because who the hell knows what The Fellowship is.
(As if on cue, the American Samoa delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives apparently showed up at The Fellowship breakfast last week believing it was run by the NPB Foundation.)
Fittingly, a website that The Fellowship submitted to the USPTO as part of its case includes a section called “Who We Are” that doesn’t say who they are and includes a picture labeled “Who We Are” that turns out to be a Getty stock photo titled “Laughing friends in restaurant eating dessert.” Not breakfast.
The NPB Foundation has also revealed how it still ties itself to The Fellowship, despite the many Fellowship scandals.
The NPB Foundation’s 2024 program, previously unseen by the public, appears in one of its filings. And it suggests that the same people who started it in 1953 are running it still.
That filing also says that the NPB Foundation is “hosting breakfast, lunch and dinner seminars, classes, meetings and workshops workshops designed to be a forum for the political, social, and business elite.”
Except that the reason offered publicly for creating the NPB Foundation was to focus just on the one breakfast. And to exclude lobbyists, the “business elite.”
One aspect of the dispute is whether The Fellowship has used the phrase “National Prayer Breakfast” continuously over the years.
The Fellowship suggests in its filings that it’s been using the phrase “National Prayer Breakfast” all along, since 1953. But an internal Fellowship document lists 1971 as the first year that term was used.
It’s intriguing that the NPB Foundation didn’t say this earlier, but now that much of its case has been rejected by the USPTO, it’s finally making a claim that, if pursued, could expose inner workings of The Fellowship.
Specifically, as of October last year, the NPB Foundation is now claiming that The Fellowship agreed to transfer the name to the NPB Foundation. The Fellowship would instead start calling its event “The NPB Gathering.” (Logically, the NPB Foundation is also claiming that The Fellowship lied to the USPTO when it said it believed no one else had the right to the National Prayer Breakfast name.)
The Fellowship denies transferring the “National Prayer Breakfast” name. But if the NPB Foundation pushes, one or both groups could disclose documentary evidence that might reveal names of Fellowship decision-makers.
The NPB Foundation may not need to infringe on The Fellowship’s cherished secrecy, however, because there’s already lots of evidence that The Fellowship agreed to change the breakfast name. At least for a while.
It’s true, last week’s Fellowship breakfast was once again called the “National Prayer Breakfast.” But now, for the first time, the invitations sported the ℠ symbol on it, asserting a kind of trademark known as a service mark:
When the split first became public in 2023, The Fellowship publicly gave every sign of ceding “National Prayer Breakfast” to the NPB Foundation.
Fellowship board member and longtime spokesperson A. Larry Ross issued a statement in January 2023 calling that year’s Fellowship breakfast “The planned NPB Gathering.” That’s what The Fellowship’s event site called it, too.
The Fellowship’s own first filing with the USPTO includes its August 2023 invitation for the following year’s Fellowship event … the “2024 NPB Gathering”:
Government filings unrelated to the dispute show that The Fellowship was not only deferring to the new, NPB Foundation event as the “National Prayer Breakfast,” The Fellowship was calling its own breakfast the “NPB Gathering.”
A Romanian government filing includes multiple Fellowship documents calling its 2024 event the “NPB Gathering.”
The Fellowship was so committed to the new name, it slapped “NPB Gathering” all over the program, going so far as to schedule an “NPB Gathering Breakfast” — literally, National Prayer Breakfast Gathering Breakfast.
The Fellowship itself posted an internal document referring to both 2023 and 2024 as the “National Prayer Breakfast Gathering.” Stills of the 2024 event on social media show The Fellowship using both “National Prayer Breakfast Gathering” and “NPB Gathering.”
(Using the phrase “National Prayer Breakfast Gathering” — without marketing it publicly as such, may be sufficient for The Fellowship to claim it never stopped using the phrase “National Prayer Breakfast.” We’ll see.)
Well into the breakfast war, according to an invitation submitted as part of a Justice Department filing, The Fellowship was still calling it the NPB Gathering just last year.
A filing with the Justice Department shows that The Fellowship’s 2025 event was not only still called the NPB Gathering, its email alias was “NPB Gathering” and the subject heading read “Invitation to the 2025 NPB Gathering.”
The Fellowship even spent money to walk its global allies through the change.
In a May 25, 2023, congressional travel filing, The Fellowship said it was paying for longtime insider Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), to give Fellowship allies in Europe “His impressions of The Gathering … [and] share how the change occurred along with the pros and cons of having a separate event at the Hilton.”
An Oct. 10, 2023, filing for The Fellowship to fly Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) to Uganda’s prayer breakfast referred to Walberg as “Co-chair of last February's bipartisan National Prayer Breakfast, which was organized in the US Capitol by another foundation.”
The same form refers to Walberg’s involvement with both “the US National Prayer Breakfast and NPB Gathering.”
It also describes The Fellowship’s involvement with the prayer breakfast in the past tense, saying The Fellowship “formerly assisted and served the weekly House and Senate Prayer Breakfast Groups in organizing the National Prayer Breakfast each year, until this previous one.”
But note the language: The filing claimed The Fellowship “assisted and served” with the breakfast. That wasn’t only past tense, it was never true.
Only today, to claim the trademark, is The Fellowship finally asserting officially that the event is theirs.
As of last summer, the USPTO had narrowed the battle down to one issue: Whether The Fellowship’s continuous use of “National Prayer Breakfast” made it distinctively theirs.
As I mentioned, the NPB Foundation is arguing that The Fellowship has been too nebulous for people to associate it distinctively with much of anything. But if the two groups continue fighting over whether The Fellowship transferred the “National Prayer Breakfast” name, one or both might end up producing evidence in the form of documents that could shed light on who’s calling the shots.
The schedule for the legal battle includes multiple deadlines throughout the year, with the last — a deadline to request an oral hearing — coming Jan. 27, 2027. That’s one week before the 2027 National Prayer Breakfast, or whatever you call it.
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One of them could call itself the “President’s Excuse Me, We’re Having Breakfast” gathering.
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