Hassan Co-Chairing Event Funded by Anti-LGBTQ+ Group
The group has used official-seeming prayer breakfasts to build global right-wing networks
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Note: This article has been revised to correct Hassan’s NPB title, which is “honorary co-chair,” rather than just “co-chair,” as originally reported. Sorry about that. - JL
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) is co-chairing next month’s National Prayer Breakfast, which is funded by the event’s original sponsor, a secretive Christian group that uses prayer breakfasts to build right-wing networks around the world.
The Fellowship Foundation, aka The Family, funded the National Prayer Breakfast (NPB) in 2023, the most recent year for which tax records are available. The NPB co-chair that year, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), later went to Uganda on The Fellowship’s dime, advising the Ugandan prayer breakfast to “stand firm” in the face of international punishment for its new “Kill the Gays” death penalty.
The Fellowship refused to condemn Uganda’s law or Walberg’s remarks.
Like a number of Democratic predecessors, Hassan has a record that’s clearly supportive of LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. But she won’t be the first Democrat whose prayer-breakfast involvement serves The Fellowship’s covert right-wing diplomacy.
As I and others have reported, The Fellowship uses prayer breakfasts here and around the world to build right-wing networks aligned against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. Their events are effective, human-rights groups warn, because Democratic participation gives them a veneer of official legitimacy.
The Fellowship spun off the “new” NPB that’s now run by the closely affiliated NPB Foundation. The NPB Foundation’s board includes multiple crusaders against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, has more Republicans than Democrats, and is overwhelmingly connected to The Fellowship and the old breakfast.
And we now know that The Fellowship gave the NPB Foundation $46,800 in 2023, according to the most recent tax filing. (An additional $10,000 of dark money came in via a donor-directed fund.)
None of this has been disclosed publicly by the NPB Foundation.
And it’s not just Fellowship money to be found in the NPB Foundation. The secrecy, too, is consistent.
Hassan’s role as “honorary co-chair,” for instance, wasn’t announced in a news release by the NPB Foundation or by Hassan. She simply showed up on the NPB Foundation website, along with Co-chair Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS).
Neither Hassan nor Marshall have extensive public histories with The Fellowship. But they do have some.
Although governors are invited to the National Prayer Breakfast, Fellowship records I’ve obtained show her as not attending in 2015, 2016, or 2018.
In the Senate, however, The Fellowship has several active members, even among Democrats, most notably Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE).
Reportedly, Hassan is a regular participant in weekly Senate prayer groups originated by and still closely associated with The Fellowship. She is said to have begun attending in 2017, her first year in the Senate. She also let The Fellowship use her name as part of its putative “honorary Senate committee” in 2022, the last NPB officially run by The Fellowship.
Hassan’s office did not respond to questions I emailed them last week.
NPB Foundation Chair Heidi Heitkamp, the Democratic former senator from North Dakota, said in 2023 that she would not communicate with me about the breakfast, but prior to that told me that she had no affiliation with The Fellowship.
Nevertheless, under Heitkamp, the NPB Foundation board has continued to pick co-chairs with Fellowship ties.
Marshall is the junior senator from a state with strong connections to The Fellowship. Senior Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS) is a longtime Fellowship insider. So is Moran’s former intern, Rep. Tracey Mann (R-KS), who co-chaired the 2024 NPB, once ran The Fellowship’s National Student Leadership Forum, and traveled on the dime of The Fellowship’s Guatemalan offshoot in 2022 and 2023.
As a House member, Marshall and his wife attended the 2018 NPB, according to Fellowship records. He invited along a doctor and the doctor’s wife from his town of Great Bend, KS, the records show.
The doctor’s first federal political donation had been to Moran in 2009. Prior to the 2018 invitation, the doctor had given Marshall a total of $5,855.46 for his campaigns. The doctor donated another $5,500 to Marshall in subsequent years.
As a senator, Marshall let The Fellowship use his name as a member of the supposed “host committee” for the 2022 NPB.
The NPB Foundation’s choice of Marshall as Republican co-chair is in line with The Fellowship’s history of anti-democratic election denial overseas and at home. Marshall voted against certifying 2021 presidential state counts and even against investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. With then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Marshall once barged into a closed-door impeachment hearing.
He’s also in lock step with his party as a staunch opponent of LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.
As a regular at the weekly Senate prayer meetings, Marshall echoes the claims by Fellowship Democrats that prayer is politically unifying and brings down the temperature. Asked at a town hall about socializing with Democrats, Marshall said he has “a good niche of friends” on both sides of the aisle from his prayer meetings, according to an undated Ellsworth County Independent Reporter story first archived in 2022.
Marshall specifically named as friends then-Senators Kyrsen Sinema and Joe Manchin, both of whom soon left the Democratic Party.
Perhaps most disturbingly, Marshall appears to be on board with The Fellowship’s efforts to conflate the supposedly separate NPB with the radical Christian activism that still orbits the event.
As I’ve written, holding the “new” NPB at the same time it was always held preserves it as the center of gravity for a small constellation of far-right events. That includes The Fellowship’s original breakfast, now renamed the NPB Gathering, but also spinoffs like the National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance.
Held at the Museum of The Bible (brainchild of the Hobby Lobby family fortune), the National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance is an openly theocratic summit courtesy of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls it a “hate summit.”
Last year, Marshall posted about anticipating the 2024 National Prayer Breakfast, lying to suggest it began “under” President Dwight Eisenhower.
(As author Jeff Sharlet has recounted, Eisenhower was roped into it at a time when he owed a political debt to Billy Graham, whose son Franklin later secretly funded the breakfast. An internal Fellowship document shows that Eisenhower skipped more of them than he attended.)
Extremist Christians and The Fellowship in particular have a history of fudging the truth to mainstream theocracy. Marshall’s post was in that vein.
Although the post says the NPB is an event he looks forward to every year, the picture is of a different event entirely. Or at least superficially.
The event shown is the Johnson’s and Perkins’s National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance.
In the three years that the “new” NPB has been in operation, the co-chairs have been:
2023: Reps. Walberg and Lucy McBath (D-GA)
2024: Rep. Mann (R-KS) and then-Rep. Frank Mrvan (D-IN)
2025: Sens. Marshall and Hassan.
Despite early, albeit vague promises of transparency, the NPB Foundation board has never said where it gets the money to stage its overtly Christian event on Capitol Hill. In the past two years it has moved from the visitor center downhill into Statuary Hall in the Capitol itself.
Mann and Mrvan introduced legislation to move the event literally under the Rotunda, the symbolic heart of America’s legislative branch.
When Senator Coons discussed the split in 2023, he said there were “a lot of questions” about the finances; where The Fellowship’s money was coming from. As The Fellowship’s new tax filing shows, even the “new” NPB’s funding is still coming from The Fellowship.
And the filing doesn’t disclose where The Fellowship got the money. But past donors have included GOP megadonor and Trump supporter Ronnie Cameron, a billionaire who’s given The Fellowship millions, and far-right global evangelist Franklin Graham.
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I just emailed Sen. Hassan to ask why, as a Democrat and a Christian, she is choosing to host a breakfast that is based on hatred of LGBTQ individuals.
Thank you for birddogging this issue, Jon and for staying on Sen. Hassan about it.
Maggie needs to hear the footsteps.