National Prayer Breakfast Backed by Dark Money, anti-LGBTQ+ Group
"New" Capitol Hill breakfast is funded by the same theocratic group behind the original
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The National Prayer Breakfast gets financial backing from dark money, tax filings show, including a five-figure check from the right-wing Christian group that helped defend Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” law.
The Fellowship Foundation, popularly known as The Family, started the National Prayer Breakfast in 1953, using prayer breakfasts to build right-wing networks here and around the world. It became an annual Washington ritual and at times a scandalous one.
After high-profile Democrats fled the event and a coalition of groups urged a Democratic boycott, The Fellowship spun off a “new” National Prayer Breakfast (NPB) in 2023 on Capitol Hill. The Fellowship ostensibly ended its involvement.
But longtime Fellowship insiders remain deeply involved in the supposedly spun-off breakfast. And the “new” NPB still serves The Fellowship’s right-wing ends.
Most notably, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) co-chairing the “new” NPB helped him get congressional approval for The Fellowship to pay for his 2023 Ugandan prayer breakfast trip. Participating on The Fellowship’s dime, urged Ugandans to “stand firm” behind their new LGBTQ+ death penalty.
Congressional Equality Caucus Chair Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) responded to my reporting on Walberg by asking The Fellowship to condemn the law and Walberg’s remarks and to share information about its prayer breakfast network.
The Fellowship refused and continues to use the “new” National Prayer Breakfast to boost its right-wing networking. It has worked aggressively behind the scenes to keep the two events in lock step, even suggesting privately that the split is temporary.
Publicly, former Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) served as the first president of the new NPB Foundation board, and told me in January 2023 that his group’s new prayer breakfast, on Capitol Hill, was “still in the fundraising process.”
He said the NPB Foundation board didn’t want money from political extremes. “We just decided that we needed to be very neutral on the fundraising,” Pryor said, “and that we don't want any controversy around the fundraising.”
I specifically asked whether Fellowship boosters Ronnie Cameron — a Donald Trump megadonor — or right-wing evangelical crusader Franklin Graham could donate and Pryor said no.
(Graham was secretly the original prayer breakfast’s sole donor for years. Cameron has given The Fellowship millions and sat on its board. A top executive at his company, Mountaire, is a current and longtime Fellowship board member.)
“We don't want really conservative groups or really liberal groups,” Pryor told me. “For right now we're keeping it very sort of down the middle, if you will. … [T]here are people out there with agendas, but we don't want any kind of agenda around the program other than what it was originally intended to be.”
As author Jeff Sharlet has documented, the National Prayer Breakfast was originally intended with a definite agenda.
The Breakfast Agenda
Emerging in the same era that saw anti-Communist crusaders inject Christianity into the pledge and the national motto, the National Prayer Breakfast was part of a movement of lay businesspeople to provide “ministry” to government officials, enlisting Jesus in the pushback against New Deal reforms and organized labor.
Since then, the agenda has expanded to include boosting officials in other countries, including dictators, who share the hostility of The Fellowship’s funders to LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.
As I’ve reported, The Fellowship has been a key behind-the-scenes player in radicalizing Mike Lindell, destroying a UN anti-corruption task force in Guatemala, pushing Ukraine to embrace evangelical politics, and — as Sharlet first reported — supporting the Ugandan network that hosted Walberg and ultimately passed an LGBTQ+ death penalty.
Today, two years after my conversation with Pryor, the only sign of public fundraising for the “new” breakfast is a “Donate” button on the NPB Foundation website, which alerts potential donors that gifts can only be made via paper checks, not electronically. The IRS website shows no sign that the NPB Foundation has filed any 990s.
But The Fellowship Foundation’s 2023 filing shows The Fellowship gave the NPB Foundation $46,800 that year. The grant’s purpose, the filing says, was “Supportive Ministry.”
In addition, a filing by the Schwab Charitable Fund — a donor-directed fund that preserves anonymity — shows a $10,000 donation to the NPB Foundation sometime between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023.
When I asked Pryor who was paying for the event, he said he would talk with the NPB Foundation board about disclosing that. “We want some transparency at least,” Pryor said. “We really haven't talked about how much, you know, we are planning to disclose and how we're gonna do that.” Two years later, the answers so far are none and not.
Pryor left the board at some point in 2023, before the planned end of his term. His successor, former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), told me last January that she would speak with me once the February breakfast was over.
The following day, however, she said she had read an article of mine — apparently this one — and would no longer respond to me. “I just read your story in Salon. We are done communicating,” she wrote.
In a previous email, however, Heitkamp told me, “The National Prayer Breakfast Foundation has only one purpose, that is to facilitate an intimate gathering of Members of Congress and the President to pray for the President and the Country.”
Of course, if that were the group’s only purpose, it could gather intimately anywhere in Washington. Instead, the NPB Foundation holds it on Capitol Hill, advancing The Fellowship’s theocratic aspirations and giving the event an official veneer. Which was instantly used by The Fellowship. Because The Fellowship has its own purposes for the “new” breakfast.
One is using the “new” NPB to enable Fellowship sponsorship of anti-LGBTQ+ diplomacy. That’s easy because, to date, the main congressional players — the co-chairs — chosen by the NPB Foundation board for the “new” NPB have been Fellowship insiders and allies. Which means it’s Fellowship insiders who get to reap the benefits. Which is what Walberg and The Fellowship did.
When House members want a third party to pay for their travel, the House Ethics Committee requires them to show some tie between the trip and their congressional duties. Members of Congress can now justify Fellowship-paid trips by portraying the “new” NPB as an official event.
After all, it’s in the Capitol and the president shows up. Heitkamp even said the NPB Foundation merely “facilitate[s]” the breakfast, as if her foundation isn’t running it.
In this way, posing as an official event, the “new” NPB gives The Fellowship something to show the Ethics Committee, establishing that The Fellowship is paying for travel related to “official or representational” duties.
The Ethics disclosure form requires members to “Explain why participation in the trip is connected to the traveler’s individual or representational duties.” A Walberg staffer wrote on his form that “Rep. Walberg was a co-host [sic] of the National Prayer Breakfast…”
The Fellowship submitted a sponsor’s form, too, also citing the fact that Walberg was “Co-chair of last February’s bipartisan National Prayer Breakfast, which was organized in the US Capitol by another foundation,” the NPB Foundation. (The Fellowship’s submission is at least candid that the NPB Foundation organizes the NPB rather than merely facilitating it, as Heitkamp said.)
What the NPB Foundation is actually facilitating is The Fellowship’s shadow diplomacy and missionary networking not just overseas but here at home, too. Just a few miles away from the NPB, in fact.
The Old Breakfast Is Still Served
The NPB Foundation could have chosen to hold the “new” breakfast any day of the year, but chose instead to stage it at the same time it used to be held, the first Thursday of every February. That’s also when The Fellowship has continued to hold what used to be the original breakfast (now confusingly titled “The NPB Gathering,” to help maintain the connection) at the Washington Hilton, just downhill from The Capitol.
The two events are tied together by title, time, and the links between the groups behind them. All of this helps The Foundation because their international allies often need the same kind of “official” trip status Walberg cited — but in their case it’s to justify charging their taxpayers for the trips.
And, sure enough, some international officials — entirely predictably — have conflated the two events, purposely or not. It’s an easy mistake to make, given how confusing the two groups have made things; a convenient mistake to justify billing taxpayers, inconvenient when it comes to light.
Officials who attended the NPB Gathering at the Hilton but were reported as having attended the “new” National Prayer Breakfast (the one on Capitol Hill with Pres. Joe Biden) — include Kenyan Minister Musalia Madavadi, Kyrgyzstan MPs, a North Macedonian deputy prime minister. Bosnia and Herzegovina presidential staff, Burundi’s first lady, a Croatian sports entrepreneur, two Pakistani officials, an advisor to Kurdistan’s prime minister, Serbian royals, and more.
Coverage of Taiwan’s legislative speaker suggested (not wrongly) that the two events were affiliated. Bulgaria’s top prosecutor was actually busted by domestic media for trying to pass off his Fellowship trip as an invite to the Capitol Hill National Prayer Breakfast with Biden and members of Congress. So was a member of Parliament.
Even Biden acknowledged the ties. In 2023, referring to Pryor, Biden said, “I applaud your work to make a more intimate gathering, bringing back to its roots, but I understand we got a bunch of folks at a hotel not far from here. How many?”
That was a reference to The Fellowship’s simultaneous NPB Gathering at the Hilton. Walberg, the 2023 NPB co-chair, somehow knew the answer to Biden’s question: “About thirteen hundred.”
Biden then tweaked The Fellowship and its guests, addressing them via the remote link:
“Welcome to all 1,300. And the House invites you to come to the floor today — all 1,300 of you. No, I’m teasing. I’m teasing. Sorry.”
Around the world, hundreds of officials, business leaders, and others were either swayed to attend the NPB Gathering due to confusing it with the “new” NPB, or were able to fund their trips by exploiting the confusion. And once they got to the Hilton, The Fellowship could connect them with insiders like Tim Kreutter, point man in Uganda who supports the political prayer group behind the anti-LGBTQ+ death penalty.
And it’s not just that officials attending the NPB Gathering get to charge taxpayers by claiming they’re going to the “official” National Prayer Breakfast. Pretending they were invited to the new NPB lends prestige to Fellowship allies around the world, where the wealthy and corrupt have considerable interest in getting next to Fellowship allies with good U.S. connections.
So, wittingly or not, Fellowship allies promote themselves as attending the “official” National Prayer Breakfast. One former UK politician, an opponent of LGBTQ+ rights, touted his attendance at the NPB Gathering as if it were the actual National Prayer Breakfast.
A longtime Fellowship insider, Rob Fields, did, too, ignoring the event’s putatively non-sectarian nature to praise it as a chance to exalt Jesus. (Fields runs an organization that proselytizes to legislators, getting chaplains into statehouses.)
An entire Ukrainian organization posted about participating, as did an Armenian group and the International Institute for Religious Freedom.
In addition, entire right-wing theocratic programs continue to draft off the National Prayer Breakfast. The day before the “new” NPB next month is Speaker Mike Johnson’s overtly theocratic National Gathering of Prayer and Repentance, featuring Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. Labeled a hate-group summit by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Johnson’s summit is one end of a theocratic continuum bookended by the National Prayer Breakfast.
Even Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), one of The Fellowship’s few active Democrats, connected the two events in a 2023 post. (At 2015’s National Prayer Breakfast, according to records I obtained, Klobuchar sat with right-wing billionaire donor and Washington Examiner founder Philip Anschutz, as well as then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, soon after revealed to have a pattern of sexual assault that included religious retreats with too few beds, so seminarians had to share his.
Even without the NPB Gathering drafting off it, the “new” NPB is still an asset for the evangelical right. Fellowship insider Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) broke the “new” NPB rules in its very first year, inviting a non-constituent, Kari Lake, who then leveraged it for her political benefit.
The Fellowship’s many uses for the NPB explain the intensity with which Democrats are recruited. If its events are openly partisan, they’ll be transparently unofficial. If they’re unofficial, there goes all the networking power, travel funding, and prestige.
So it wasn’t surprising that the split came after high-profile Democrats bailed — Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) among them. In early 2023, before it was known that the NPB was splitting in two, a coalition of 30 secular, religious, and LGBTQ+ groups and leaders — led by the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) — called on Democrats to boycott the NPB.
(The European LGBTQ+ advocacy group Forbidden Colours had already warned that Rep. Juan Vargas (D-CA) and other Democrats were being duped into aiding the right-wing work of prayer breakfasts.)
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), The Fellowship’s most active Democrat, admitted there were concerns. Biden simply wasn’t comfortable with public religiosity, Coons said. “It took an effort to persuade [Biden] to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast the last three years.”
But also, Democrats were asking who was paying for all of it. “[T]here were a lot of questions raised about the finances, about who was invited, about how it was structured," Coons told NPR in 2023.
The split addressed all these issues, dramatically reducing the number of guests and ostensibly severing The Fellowship. It was a sham, but it worked.
Fission Accomplished
The Fellowship is still paying for the National Prayer Breakfast and using it for its agendas. But thanks to the deception, leading Democrats came back, including Kaine, who lamented the lobbyists and entertainment at the old one.
As I reported, though, lobbyists managed to get into the “new” NPB, too. And as for entertainment, last year the “new” NPB had Andrea Bocelli.
But the big media outlets bought it. Credulous headlines announced that the “new” NPB was now being run by Congress, even when the article itself said it’s run by the NPB Foundation.
And even the articles that got it right rarely if ever mentioned that the NPB Foundation is packed with Fellowship insiders.
At the time it launched, Pryor said that the NPB Foundation board had to lean on The Fellowship for its experience running the original breakfast. And a Heitkamp statement on the board’s site says three of them are now gone.
But the board remains entirely Christian and even the two new board members — former Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and former Rep. J.C. Watts (R-OK) — have Fellowship ties or history. (Democrats remain outnumbered on the board, which includes virulent Fellowship crusaders against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.)
Before leaving office in 2015, Landrieu posted pictures of her addressing an NPB reception — one of The Fellowship’s “breakout sessions” for NPB insiders during the multi-day event. One picture shows her alongside then-Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), a well-known member of The Fellowship.
Inhofe also accompanied Watts, an ordained minister, on a missionary trip to Africa. In 2004, when Inhofe co-chaired the NPB, Watts was the keynote speaker, according to a Fellowship document.
One of the founding NPB Foundation board members was former Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN). He’s no longer on the board — but still deeply involved in The Fellowship’s NPB Gathering. It was Wamp, a longtime NPB organizer, who emailed Pryor in 2023, telling him not to speak with me because I couldn’t be trusted.
The same email suggested that The Fellowship wanted to prevent “more division” with the new breakfast, even as Pryor was saying the “new” NPB was moving away from The Fellowship.
Then, at last year’s NPB Gathering, Wamp admitted the connection to the Fellowship audience, and said the public split was “still” in effect “at this moment,” implying it’s temporary:
“COVID separated us, and at this moment we’re still in this capacity where the international prayer breakfast [the NPB Gathering] is here and the National Prayer Breakfast is there at the same time. Simultaneous. Connected that way.”
And now, The Fellowship tax filing shows that the ties aren’t just relationships and logistics. It’s money, too. The Fellowship gave the NPB Foundation $46,800 in 2023.
The Fellowship 990 doesn’t disclose the original source of those funds. And it’s not clear how much of the event’s cost was covered by that amount.
As I’ve reported, Graham’s backing included secretly ensuring The Fellowship’s breakfast stayed afloat with annual donations of $50,000 and then, as the Obama administration came to an end in 2016, $100,000. It was Graham’s money that kept it afloat the year COVID forced The Fellowship to forgo ticket revenues.
Democrats like Coons have justified participating in the event by claiming that prayer is a uniting force. But Fellowship speakers have used the event to hammer their political agendas and their opponents.
Dr. Ben Carson became a cause célèbre to the religious right after The Fellowship gave him a breakfast platform to bash Pres. Barack Obama. Pres. Trump in his remarks at the NPB rejected the commandment of Jesus to love even your enemies.
As the FFRF said in its 2023 letter, “The event is framed as a way for all Americans to come together through prayer during times of difficulty and division — but instead it invites division.”
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 work exposing extremist Christian infiltration of our government with a donation or paid subscription. Thank you.
This all stinks to high heaven...that made up glorious village in the sky.
"Democrats like Coons have justified participating in the event by claiming that prayer is a uniting force."
Nope it's not. Some people may believe in it, but it's usually used by hypocrites, scammers, grifters and not-so-churchy people.
Please correct this error: Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-SD) is a MINNESOTA senator.