NASA Chief Used His Last Year on the Job Boosting an Anti-LGBTQ+ Group
Administrator Bill Nelson addressed and hosted multiple events for the right-wing Fellowship Foundation
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The chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus announced last January that he was challenging the secretive Christian group known as the Fellowship Foundation for sending a Republican member of Congress to address Uganda’s 2023 National Prayer Breakfast. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) had urged Ugandans to “stand firm” in the face of economic sanctions against its new death penalty for gay people.
The caucus chair at the time, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), said in his letter to The Fellowship that there was “significant concern about the Fellowship Foundation's support for anti-LGBTQI+ causes.”
The following day, and the day after, former Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) secretly hosted, spoke at, and participated in two Fellowship events. During one, Nelson’s presentation implied that he was speaking, and advocating for his religious views, in his official capacity as the current administrator of NASA.
In fact, in his final year running NASA, Nelson attended not only the two days of Fellowship events around the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, but also hosted a spring event for students in Florida that didn’t disclose its Fellowship backing to potential applicants. At that event, too, Nelson was identified as the administrator of NASA.
Nelson and his wife have been involved with the Fellowship Foundation — the subject of a book and subsequent Netflix documentary series, both called “The Family” — for decades. That’s continued despite years of scandal and revelations about The Fellowship using prayer breakfasts and shadow diplomacy to build right-wing networks crusading against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.
With assistance from Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and a handful of Democrats, The Fellowship has made new advances injecting sectarian Christianity even into the halls of Congress. It’s poised to achieve new levels of influence with the ascent of powerful insiders in Washington.
Secular groups and advocates for LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights have warned Democrats that participating in Fellowship prayer breakfasts facilitates right-wing network-building, sometimes with devastating consequences. Despite supporting LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, Nelson is one of a handful of Democrats not heeding those warnings.
The Fellowship is best known for the National Prayer Breakfast (NPB) and its international spinoffs, as well as multiple scandals tied to its C Street lodgings for members of Congress.
Fellowship insiders blur the lines between church and state as a matter of practice. Some openly espouse prioritizing Christian beliefs over professional and ethical obligations — even the obligations of elected officials.
That said, Nelson’s work with The Fellowship assumed a lower profile after Pres. Joe Biden handed him the reins at NASA.
But last year, Nelson was a featured participant or leader of at least three Fellowship events, bringing NASA along for the ride. His involvement continued even as Democratic concerns about The Fellowship spiked.
As I revealed, The Fellowship sent Walberg to the Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast in October 2023. Walberg told Ugandans to “stand firm” in the face of international pressure against their new anti-LGBTQ+ death penalty — a law pushed by Fellowship allies. The event was replete with anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric from Walberg and other speakers.
In Walberg’s federal filing disclosing the trip, he justified The Fellowship paying for it by saying it was related to his official duties as co-chair of the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast earlier that year. Even though the NPB’s not an official event and is, in fact, run by a Fellowship offshoot and funded by The Fellowship.
After my reports on Walberg, Pocan issued an unprecedented congressional reponse. He demanded that The Fellowship release information about its prayer breakfast operations and take a stand on Uganda’s death penalty and Walberg’s remarks.
The next day, Nelson secretly participated in the first of four 2024 events run by The Fellowship and its NPB offshoot:
Jan. 31: Nelson addressed Florida participants of The Fellowship’s multi-day NPB Gathering at the Washington Hilton.
Feb. 1: Nelson attended the National Prayer Breakfast, now run by the Fellowship offshoot, on Capitol Hill
Feb. 1: Nelson addressed The Fellowship’s NPB Gathering luncheon at the Hilton.
April 5: Nelson hosted and addressed The Fellowship’s Florida Student Leadership Forum at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The events have benign titles. That’s precisely why LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights advocates join secular groups such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) warning about them.
Nelson didn’t announce or disclose his involvement in three of the events. And NASA tried to cover up some of them.
Breakfast in America
The Fellowship began the NPB in 1953, promoting it falsely as the president’s prayer breakfast. More recently, The Fellowship falsely marketed it as a congressional production, slapping congressional names — and sometimes even the Great Seal of the United States — on invitations that were actually doled out by Fellowship associates.
Not surprisingly for a theocratic event offering unvetted access to American leaders, the NPB accrued decades worth of scandal. One highlight: The right-wing networking of covert Russian operative Maria Butina.
To attract rich and powerful patrons, The Fellowship needs the semi-official veneer that Democratic participation gives their events. But several years ago, leading Democrats began bailing.
That was after my reporting revealed secret funding by Franklin Graham and revived concerns about how The Fellowship boosted right-wing allies overseas. Not to mention their successful grooming of Mike Lindell. The FFRF led a coalition of groups — LGBTQ+, religous, and secular — urging Democrats to stop helping.
The Fellowship’s solution to the Democratic exodus was simple and smart. They relaunched the National Prayer Breakfast as a new, much smaller event on Capitol Hill, limited to administration leaders, members of Congress, and plus-ones. In keeping with its other deceptions, they promoted it as a separate event, with a new board running it.
That new board, I revealed, consisted entirely of Fellowship insiders, deeply involved with the original NPB. Nelson’s wife leapt from the Fellowship board to the new one.
The Fellowship renamed the old NPB as the NPB Gathering, still taking place simultaneously, still at the Washington Hilton. Similar name. The predictable confusion was a feature, not a bug.
Democrats could now attend the new and improved National Prayer Breakfast on Capitol Hill safe from scandal. (Mostly.)
The events were separate enough publicly to reel Democrats back in, but to its Christian network, The Fellowship conflated the NPB Gathering at the Hilton with its NPB spinoff, drafting off the prestige of the Capitol Hill event attended by the U.S. president.
They even got Johnson to open a new breach in the firewall between church and state: The 2024 NPB was held for the first time inside the halls of the Capitol building.
Some Democrats continued helping The Fellowship. Including Nelson.
On Wednesday, Jan. 31, Nelson’s calendar shows, he had a NASA driver take him to and from the Washington Hilton for a half-hour event after work. “Deliver Remarks to Florida Delegates to NPB,” the entry reads.
The calendar’s reference to “Florida Delegates to NPB” is false. The new NPB doesn’t have delegations. Each member of Congress is allowed only one guest. And the “delegates” weren’t going to the NPB.
They were, in fact, Fellowship insiders and guests convening at the multi-day NPB Gathering a few miles away at the Hilton. Nelson’s event there was on day one, the night before the NPB Gathering’s big breakfast.
The Florida delegation that Nelson addressed has for years been led by a Fellowship veteran named Tim Perrier. As I revealed last year, Perrier is not just the official, volunteer chaplain of the Florida House of Representatives, with an office and everything; he’s also, secretly, been paid for years by The Fellowship, backed by undisclosed donors.
The confusion between the simultaneous NPB and NPB Gathering serves The Fellowship well, giving its Hilton event prestige and making it easier for lawmakers overseas to get their taxpayers back home to pay for the trip. If it’s a Capitol Hill event with the president (which it isn’t) why shouldn’t their governments pay for their travel, ticket, and lodging?
On Feb. 1, the morning after addressing The Fellowship’s Florida contingent, Nelson attended the actual National Prayer Breakfast on Capitol Hill. (Biden participated only with persuading by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), The Fellowship’s most visible Democrat.)
Afterward, a NASA driver whisked Nelson back to the Washington Hilton. His calendar reads “Deliver Remarks at National Prayer Breakfast Luncheon.” It shows three hours, noon to 3pm, allotted for The Fellowship’s luncheon event at the Hilton.
(Again, it’s worth noting that Nelson doesn’t refer to the event as the NPB Gathering, the name The Fellowship created to maintain the NPB association. Instead, Nelson just calls it the “National Prayer Breakfast Luncheon.”)
Those three hours in Nelson’s calendar coincide with a listing for the “International Lunch” in a program for the NPB Gathering that I obtained.
Nelson was a featured speaker at The Fellowship’s luncheon. He delivered scripted remarks explicitly evoking NASA.
Appointed officials have less leeway on some ethical issues than elected politicians do and are ethically obliged not to imply that they or their agencies endorse sectarian beliefs or private organizations, religious or otherwise.
Nelson mixed church and state, and church and NASA, explicitly. He also referred to the New Testament’s “two most important commandments of all time,” an endorsement of Christianity over other religions.
Nelson’s presentation to the luncheon began with a NASA-branded video full of exciting launches and control rooms and space imagery. The video identifies Nelson as the administrator of NASA.
“No moonshot is beyond our reach,” Nelson says in the video, over visions of NASA moonshots lifted by a stirring score. It’s setting up a theme that Nelson will turn from literal and scientific to metaphorical and religious.
The short video concludes with the NASA logo, teeing up Nelson’s live remarks. He delivers them while wearing a small NASA pin on his jacket lapel.
He begins with a prayer. “Lord, please open our minds and ears to what you want us to understand,” Nelson says. “I pray in the name of Jesus.”
Then he launches Jesus into space, pondering the possibility of life — Christian life — on other planets.
“I wonder if some of them are developed in their life, and I wonder if that’s civilized,” Nelson says, “and I wonder if Jesus and the prophets have visited them.”
He reminds everyone that he’s a government official. “I have the privilege of serving a storied organization. NASA makes history and it makes the impossible possible.”
That’s his moonshot theme. “At NASA we know a thing or two about moonshots.”
What Nelson knows about moonshots includes his assertion that God made you and “Moonshots are for you.” He asks, “So what’s your moonshot?” His answer is love, but not just any love:
“Perhaps, just perhaps, our moonshot is to make the impossible possible by living the creed and obeying the command of loving God and loving our neighbor. Love changes all things. Nothing else seems to work. Like when Jesus, out of love for the embarrassed father of the bride, turned stone jars of water for hand-washing into fine wine. Or like when Jesus out of love for a hungry crowd turned a boy’s small lunch into an all-you-can-eat for more than 5,000. Or like when Jesus out of his love said from the cross, ‘Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.’”
To that, Nelson added, “Love: The ultimate moonshot. That always works.” It does not, of course, as human history and The Fellowship’s sometimes ruinous shadow diplomacy have proved.
Nelson said obeying this commandment is not easy. But then, neither are NASA missions. “Because Jesus said we don’t just love people who are lovely … We’re supposed to love people who hate us, and pray for them. And if love is your moonshot, then your launch, your liftoff, is right when you walk out these doors.”
(The Fellowship rarely displays toward journalists the same kind of love it showers on friendly dictators. Although NASA did respond to some of my questions, they were not completely responsive and not always forthright.)
Nelson concluded his luncheon remarks endorsing the Christian commandments to love God and humanity. “If you really care about matters of faith,” Nelson said, “and believe the two most important commandments of all time, then may this moment be our moonshot.”
All told, Nelson’s speech ran just over 20 minutes out of his three hours at the Hilton. But in The Fellowship’s multi-day gathering, meals are just part of the agenda.
The 72-year-old breakfast is a center of gravity around which orbit smaller, ancillary events. Like the ones The Fellowship used to radicalize Lindell.
As one evangelical attendee noted in 2022, “When there’s a prayer breakfast in America, we don’t always pray, but we network.”
That’s a big part of why most top Democrats dropped the event. Fellowship networking in recent years has caused calamity for Guatemala and moved Ukraine rightward.
Nelson hasn’t budged. And last year, he engaged in some high-level, and potentially scandalous, political mingling at the NPB Gathering that hasn’t previously been reported.
At the international luncheon, Nelson and his wife shared a table with Rwandan President Paul Kagame. The Fellowship apparently used the NPB uphill at the Capitol to bait-and-switch Kagame into showing up at the Hilton.
According to a report by the AfroAmerica Network, someone gave Kagame the impression he’d be in the same room as Biden. Like the old days.
“Kagame's lobbyists promised the active interactions with US leaders, especially US President Joe Biden and members of the US Government and top US Senators and Members of the House of Representatives.”
That’s what the old NPB used to offer: Unfettered, unvetted, “active interactions” between U.S. officials and any dictator, lobbyist, or criminal on The Fellowship’s guest list. This time, Kagame didn’t have access to the full roster of American politicians previously hornswoggled into attending the old NPB.
And Kagame was definitely not getting past security at the new, Capitol Hill NPB. According to the AfroAmerica Network,
“…the presence of the Rwandan Dictator Paul Kagame in the US is unwelcome. Hence, the lobbyists working with Rwandan Embassy in Washington, DC, changed the plan and had to organize an event with the leaders of the state of Virginia.”
Still, the “new” Capitol Hill event had served its purpose. The Fellowship got Kagame at their Hilton event, delivering the keynote speech.
As for why Kagame was unwelcome, last February, U.S. politicians weren’t clamoring to be seen with a dictator who gets 99% of the vote, as Kagame has. Some of his political opponents — and critical journalists — fled the country or were killed.
But The Fellowship has a history of cozying up to dictators who prioritize religion — or at least the U.S. access it buys them — over democracy. According to Kagame, the Nelsons hosted the luncheon.
A picture posted online by former Malawi President Joyce Banda shows the Kagames flanked by the Nelsons. Grace Nelson appears to be sitting next to Bill Nelson, Jr., who has his own history with The Fellowship.
Related story: Bill Nelson’s “Family” History
The picture of the Nelsons and Kagames seems originally to have appeared on Kagame’s social media, but, if so, has been removed.
By no means was the day a total loss for Kagame. In addition to sitting with Nelson, Kagame got the royal treatment from Fellowship Republicans and Democrats alike.
Former Rep. Jim Slattery (D-KS) introduced “the honorable Paul Kagame” as Rwanda’s fourth president, without mentioning why there hasn’t been a fifth in the quarter century that Kagame’s held power.
Slattery credited Kagame for stopping the genocide of the Tutsis, without mentioning what happens to his enemies.
The night of the luncheon, Kagame posted that he had “received” two members of Congress, both Fellowship insiders. One picture showed Kagame shaking hands with Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD). He also shared a laugh with Coons.
Ironically, it was Coons who publicly spearheaded splitting the original NPB in two, saying that even the congressional NPB co-chairs didn’t have a good sense of who The Fellowship invited, how it chose them, who paid for all of it, or why.
And the NPB Gathering in Washington wasn’t Nelson’s only Fellowship event last year.
Servant Leadership
Nelson’s April 5 event was the annual Florida Student Leadership Forum (FSLF). It’s a Fellowship function, but that’s not disclosed to potential applicants. On the surface, it’s fairly innocuous. I reported last April, though, on the event’s theocratic leanings, deceptive marketing, and anti-LGBTQ+ ties.
Nelson helped The Fellowship launch the National Student Leadership Forum and its Florida spinoff in the early ‘90s. For the last quarter-century, he and his wife have worked on the event with Perrier, the state chaplain and Fellowship employee.
When I asked about the FSLF event beforehand, NASA suggested to me that Nelson would not be involved.
That was later contradicted by multiple social-media posts about the event. Confronted with these accounts, NASA acknowledged Nelson’s participation but declined to provide details and continued to obfuscate about The Fellowship’s role.
Related story: How NASA Covered Up for “The Family”
NASA has emphasized that Nelson participated in the FSLF in a purely private capacity, noting that NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is privately operated.
Accounts of the FSLF dinner have Nelson addressing attendees and hosting the evening with his wife. None indicate that Nelson said he was participating in a private capacity. He’s repeatedly identified as NASA administrator.
Attendees also described Nelson as advocating for his personal religious beliefs. That wasn’t a complaint; the event is mostly geared toward fellow travelers.
One student posted: “I participated in discussions with leaders featuring Bill Nelson, Administrator of NASA — National Aeronautics and Space Administration and former US Senator.”
Another student said, “I took part in dynamic conversations with esteemed leaders including UF [University of Florida] Alum, NASA Administrator, and US Senator Bill Nelson and his wife NPBF [National Prayer Breakfast Foundation] Board Secretary Grace Nelson.”
A third wrote that “It was incredible hearing insights from Bill Nelson, Administrator of NASA and former US Senator, and his wife Grace Nelson diving into the meaning of true servant leadership.”
“Today’s experience at NASA THE KENNEDY SPACE CENTRE with the Florida Student Leadership Forum hosted by Grace and Bill Nelson is riveting,” one attendee enthused. “I am now at the opening dinner where Bill is sharing some historical facts.”
An academic program of the University of Florida’s Warrington School of Business posted about “discussions featuring Bill Nelson, Administrator of NASA and former US Senator, alongside his wife Grace Nelson, where they elaborated on the importance of servant leadership.”
The references to Nelson’s government position in proximity to his dive into servant leadership — an evangelical term of art — suggest that he implicitly leveraged his government résumé to proselytize to student participants.
Author Jeff Sharlet’s book “The Family” exposed The Fellowship’s history of congressional collaborators helping to stage pseudo-official events for indoctrination under the mantles of leadership and unity. The Fellowship pushes a vision of “servant leadership” in which evangelicals amass power ostensibly to better aid the poor (in part by making them Christian).
A. Larry Ross, a Fellowship board member and spokesperson, has cited “servant leadership” as a hallmark of the NPB. Ross told me in 2020 that “The National Prayer Breakfast provides a place … to gather around the person of Jesus of Nazareth and the loving, servant leadership principles that He taught and lived.”
The “Leadership Forum” has a history of deceiving some potential attendees, while telling others explicitly what “servant leadership” is all about. The FSLF is typically only as forthright as benefits it; disclosing to avoid complaints or disappointment, striving to pose as an official government event.
A 2013 news release from the University of Central Florida, for instance, made the “Jesus” part explicit:
“Hosted by U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, the three-day forum brings together student leaders from across the state to discuss servant leadership based on the model of Jesus of Nazareth and is an off-shoot of the National Student Leadership Forum on Faith and Values in Washington, D.C.”
As I reported before the April FSLF, The Fellowship’s student “leadership” programs routinely deceive potential attendees about their religious nature, citing Jesus merely as an historic leader who happened to make the cut as a good example of leadership. After I asked NASA about the event in March, the event’s home page dropped the “Kennedy Space Center” language.
At first, Jesus was the only leader listed as a basis for the forum’s discussions. Other historic figures appeared later.
According to the FSLF website, Nelson helped start the National Student Leadership Forum in 1990, along with then-Vice President Dan Quayle and Family insiders including Slattery, then-Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), and then-Gov. John Ashcroft (R-MO).
Nelson and his wife Grace spun off the FSLF two years later, hosting the first of many over the decades. The family foundation of Nelson’s wife is a financial supporter of The Fellowship and its affiliate, the Mt. Airy Center, which helps with the student forums.
Grace Nelson reportedly said in 2007 that legislators of any party are welcome at The Fellowship’s prayer cells on one condition. They must acknowledge “the person of Jesus” as the source of their power as lawmakers.
As I’ve reported, Grace Nelson served on The Fellowship’s board as it funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to support its point man in Uganda. She’s invited an LGBTQ+ supporter to the National Prayer Breakfast, but also at least one Ugandan legislator who allegedly backed the so-called “Kill the Gays” death penalty.
(The Fellowship ultimately refused Pocan’s request to condemn the Ugandan law, or Walberg’s remarks supporting them. The organization also didn’t provide Pocan with information about its prayer breakfast networks.)
Grace Nelson issued NPB invitations in conjunction with The Fellowship’s Doug Burleigh, whose ties to Russian operatives went largely unexplored by U.S. investigators. (Last summer I reported that fired Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin had been Burleigh’s NPB guest in 2016.)
If Nelson himself was purposefully discreet about intermingling church and space before last year, it may have been in response to critical feedback after he tried it publicly early on.
Nelson raised eyebrows for injecting religion into his new job within a year of assuming NASA’s leadership. In remarks about the James Webb Space Telescope, Nelson called it “significant” that the 2021 launch was delayed until Christmas Day and quoted Biblical, unscientific claims.
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the firmament shows his handiwork,” Nelson said. “Those immortal words in Psalm 19 encapsulate the expressions that we have today — the handiwork of God — as we peer back in time, over 13 billion years ago, [and] capture the light from the very beginning of the creation.”
At the NPB Gathering this year, Nelson invoked Psalm 19 again, displaying NASA imagery of the Eagle Nebula. “Look at it on the screen,” he said. “Wow. The glory of God. That is called the Pillars of Creation. It’s also called the hand of God.”
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It’s hard to imagine a NASA official not being a scientist like Neil de Grasse Tyson
Thank you for bringing this to light. I recall press around Dr. Francis Collins and his journey of Christian faith some years ago yet I don't recall if there was any connection to the Fellowship Foundation on the level of a Bill Nelson. Was/is there any connection? It gets disturbing for me when politico's and appointees get too cozy with Jesus if it affects policy or gives cover to or legitimizes dictators. Seems like professing your faith is career enhancing in government these days which means we may see more of it. What I don't yet understand is limitations, other than the establishment clause, which apply. Lines need to be crossed to effect action?