Secular Group Blasts Gillibrand for Aiding National Prayer Breakfast
Rep. Jared Huffman: “I expect this kind of thing from Republicans who have fused extreme Christian nationalism and theocracy into their political identity."
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A leading national secular organization is criticizing Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) for her continued involvement with the National Prayer Breakfast. The organization claims her office hasn’t even responded to their attempts to discuss the issue.
Despite the breakfast organizers using it to pursue a right-wing agenda — including opposition to organized labor and LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights — Gillibrand has been involved for 17 years, at least since becoming a senator.
I reported Saturday that Gillibrand will co-chair again this year, at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday.
According to Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, this year’s breakfast will move out of the Capitol Building. It’s been held there for the last few years, symbolically and literally injecting religion into a secular space at the heart of the U.S. government.
Huffman said his office has been notified that the event is being held in the Senate’s Russell Office Building. He didn’t address Gillibrand specifically, but said it’s still an “affront” to hold the breakfast on Capitol Hill and called out participating Democrats:
“I expect this kind of thing from Republicans who have fused extreme Christian nationalism and theocracy into their political identity. But I’m dismayed that some Democrats still choose to play footsie with this scandal-plagued prayer breakfast movement.” (Huffman’s full statement is below.)
The original breakfast started in 1953, run for decades by the Fellowship Foundation, aka The Family. It largely steered clear of scandal until the past couple of decades, when author Jeff Sharlet began revealing The Fellowship’s history of shadow diplomacy and others joined him in tracking Fellowship relationships with dictators, lobbyists, and shady interests around the world.
The Fellowship relies on Democratic participation to give the U.S. prayer breakfast a semi-official veneer that lets international allies justify using their taxpayer funds to attend. It was secretly, for years, funded by right-wing evangelical crusader Franklin Graham, whose father Billy Graham helped start the event (and cultivated a less partisan image).
As scandals mounted — Russian spies, Ukrainian lobbyists, adultery, money laundering, campaign-finance violations, anti-LGBTQ+ networking, Uganda’s LGBTQ+ death penalty, abetting corrupt officials, radicalizing Mike Lindell — Democrats began to bail.
(A handful of Democrats, such as Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Lou Correa (D-CA) are still engaged with The Fellowship, helping inaugurate El Salvador’s new National Prayer Breakfast last month with self-professed dictator and human-rights abuser Nayib Bukele.)
In the wake of COVID, The Fellowship spun off an ostensibly new, scaled-down National Prayer Breakfast to be held on Capitol Hill, with limited attendance. A new, transparent organization would run it, called the NPB Foundation. Democrats could feel okay attending.
The original event, renamed the NPB Gathering, was to be separate, still run by The Fellowship, still attended by thousands of Fellowship allies.
Despite claims of severed ties, however, both organizations continued to work together. It worked. Very briefly. Corporate media were largely conned, headlining, falsely, that Congress was now in charge of the new event.
Then a Fellowship insider and breakfast leader, former Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN), accidentally cc’ed me on an email to the president of the new NPB Foundation board. Stop talking to me, Wamp said. Maintain ties with The Fellowship.
The board never did disclose its donors. And a Fellowship tax filing I found showed that The Fellowship was bankrolling the new, separate National Prayer Breakfast.
Last year, at The Fellowship’s NPB Gathering, they were already talking about recombining the two events. And there’s still some confusion this year about how many prayer breakfasts are being held and where.
Reps. Ben Cline (R-VA) and Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) last month even announced that the two events would recombine this year, a scenario they discussed at last year’s NPB Gathering. It’s still not clear what happened with that or if the two events this year will be linked in some way beyond the covert ties.
It almost doesn’t matter. Whatever takes place will still suffice for The Fellowship’s purposes.
The Fellowship and a constellation of right-wing Christian events and organizations continue to draft off the prestige of the National Prayer Breakfast. And even the putatively new event continues to violate constitutional safeguards against respecting an establishment of religion.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) has for years led efforts by multiple secular and faith groups to educate members of Congress about how Fellowship leaders and other insiders use the two events to further theocratic and political causes.
European LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have asked Democrats to stop participating.
FFRF Action Fund President Annie Laurie Gaylor said in a statement that her organization “made several attempts to meet with Senator Gillibrand’s office about our concerns with the National Prayer Breakfast and to learn more about her perspective.” Gaylor said that, “Our requests went unanswered.”
Gaylor contrasted Gillibrand’s participation with her public image and the causes she has championed:
“Her participation in the breakfast is equally disappointing and bewildering. She presents herself as a strong supporter of women’s and LGBTQ rights, the separation of state and church and other democratic ideals. Yet the senator’s choice to give cover and credibility to the Fellowship Foundation as co-chair of a Christian nationalist event undermines all of that work.”
Fellowship allies have been pushing the event, literally, into the heart of American governance. Just this past November, Cline and Jackson re-introduced legislation that would put the National Prayer Breakfast in the Capitol Rotunda, the symbolic heart of America’s legislative branch, a branch that includes greater religious diversity all the time, and more openly secular members, as well.
The closest The Fellowship got was Statuary Hall, which Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) allowed the NPB Foundation to use for recent prayer breakfasts. (Johnson, co-founder of one of the right-wing events that orbits the breakfast, falsely referred to the breakfast’s “traditional location” in the Capitol.)
Huffman said he’s “glad” that this year’s breakfast is not in the Capitol Building itself, although it’s still being held in the Capitol complex. The new location, he said, is the Russell Building’s Kennedy Caucus Room.
The room was renamed as the Kennedy Caucus Room in 2009 to honor three former senators: President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Bobby Kennedy (D-NY), and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA). Ironically, the Kennedys were Catholic; The Fellowship leans Protestant and even supported allies who crusaded against Catholics1.
The Senate website identifies the Kennedy Caucus Room as having witnessed historic hearings on the Titanic, Pearl Harbor, and Watergate.
Statement by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA)
“I’m glad this Christian nationalist church service has been demoted from Statuary Hall, but it’s still an affront to church-state separation and true religious freedom to have an official state-endorsed sectarian church service inside the Capitol complex. There are hundreds of churches in Washington they could use, but they insist on doing this at the Capitol because they want to chip away at the secular guardrails of our Constitution. I expect this kind of thing from Republicans who have fused extreme Christian nationalism and theocracy into their political identity. But I’m dismayed that some Democrats still choose to play footsie with this scandal-plagued prayer breakfast movement. If they want to pray with folks who are driving hateful, violent, racist, anti-LGBTQ policies at home and in places like Africa and Latin America, they should go back to the influence-peddling spectacle at the Hilton, or just do it in a church. The citadel of our secular democracy belongs to Americans of all faith perspectives including non-Christians and non-believers.”
Statement by FFRF Action Fund President Annie Laurie Gaylor
“We have made several attempts to meet with Senator Gillibrand’s office about our concerns with the National Prayer Breakfast and to learn more about her perspective. Our requests went unanswered. Her participation in the breakfast is equally disappointing and bewildering. She presents herself as a strong supporter of women’s and LGBTQ rights, the separation of state and church and other democratic ideals. Yet the senator’s choice to give cover and credibility to the Fellowship Foundation as co-chair of a Christian nationalist event undermines all of that work.”
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New York voters have been asleep at the wheel on Gillibrand. We are no longer. She has skated to reelection every six years. No longer. Watch for a robust primary against her. (Unfortunately that’s about 5 years out.)
Gillebrand is a collaborator and always has been. Think back to the things she's been spotted doing...go back to her calling for al frankens resignation from the Senate giving the GOP an instant majority. She's been GOP in drag the whole time, dog whistled Mamdani and refused to endorse him, was heard behind closed doors with Dems during the debate over first shutdown op in 2025 bullying her colleagues and Schumer out of shutting down to stop the big beautiful bill. She is my #1 kill her career list, someone needs to get her to resign, primary isn't good enough. This is why people are so unhappy with dem party, the NY contingent is totally collaborating to sell out NY environment, farmers, businesses and the people here don't even understand the problem well enough, buffalo gvmt captured by GOP through the former corrupt mayor. It's like a dumpster fire here politically, don't trust NY leadership. Mamdani is the face of the progressive wing here who are fighting a huge machine dem contingent. NY Dems are why Dems lost the house majority.