Suozzi Hosting Group That Refused to Condemn Uganda's “Kill the Gays” Law
Federal filing reveals Suozzi secretly invited guests to an event so toxic other Democrats fled years ago
I’m an independent journalist who covers Christian extremism and other issues.
Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) is secretly co-hosting this week’s annual convention of the Christian group that refused to condemn Uganda’s new LGBTQ+ death penalty, a federal filing shows.
Suozzi has assisted every year since at least 2020, in leadership roles, with the activities of the secretive Fellowship Foundation, a Christian group at the center of numerous scandals over the years. News accounts about guests from other countries confirm Suozzi’s leadership role this year.
The Fellowship historically has been funded by wealthy right-wing Donald Trump supporters and opponents of LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. They include GOP megadonor Ronnie Cameron and right-wing evangelical Franklin Graham, who had a co-starring role at Trump’s inauguration last month.
As I’ve reported, Fellowship guest lists historically have had limited room for non-Christians, non-Protestant Christians, or leaders from Jewish, Catholic, or non-faith backgrounds. There’s no effort at diversity or inclusion, so LGBTQ+ and women’s rights leaders are vanishingly rare.
Guests who’ve been invited and/or welcomed in Suozzi’s name include The Fellowship’s Ugandan point person who supports the parliamentary prayer group that spearheaded the “Anti-Homosexuality Act,” a right-wing Romanian prayer organizer, and the son of an Armenian official accused of corruption.
Related story: Suozzi’s Guests
Suozzi’s voting record stands in stark contrast to his Fellowship work, with both Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) giving him 100% ratings for his votes on abortion rights and LGBTQ+ issues.
But Suozzi wouldn’t be the first Democrat either ignorant of The Fellowship’s anti-LGBTQ+ networking or willing to compartmentalize it in favor of maintaining ties with Christian Republicans. Nor is he the first to flout the principles of secular organizations such as the Secular Coalition for America and, in Suozzi’s case, the Long Island, NY, partner of American Atheists.
Now, Suozzi is helping The Fellowship even after the organization split its annual event in two over myriad controversies.
As of 2023, the event once known as the National Prayer Breakfast was retitled the NPB Gathering. The president stopped showing up (although who knows what will happen this week), instead addressing the ostensibly new spinoff — still bearing the old “National Prayer Breakfast” title — held simultaneously on Capitol Hill and run by an ostensibly separate nonprofit (actually closely tied to The Fellowship).
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), The Fellowship’s most visible Democrat, explained at the time that some members of Congress had raised questions about who was invited to the old National Prayer Breakfast and who funded it.
For those reasons and more, Democrats had been bailing. There was the headline-grabbing Maria Butina scandal. Then I began exposing new instances of The Fellowship using the prayer breakfast and its global spinoffs to bolster right-wing allies and pursue right-wing goals.
The secret funding by Graham came to light. I also reported that some Fellowship funders and insiders supported Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election.
Secular and faith groups led by the Freedom From Religion Foundation flagged participating members of Congress about the work they were facilitating. Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) dropped the event. So did Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) and others.
Even after the so-called split, I revealed, The Fellowship has continued to fund the “new” National Prayer Breakfast, drafting off its prestige to woo guests and help them justify using taxpayer funds to attend the Fellowship’s NPB Gathering — which still postures as an official event.
Suozzi has continued helping with the original event, the one too toxic for Pelosi, Kaine, and others. It’s not clear every year whether he holds a specific title, but his name appears on invitations extended to a number of controversial guests, and some guests have used his invitations to their benefit back home.
Co-signing with Suozzi on this year’s Fellowship invitation was Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA). He gets a 0 rating for LGBTQ+ rights and other issues from the HRC. And another 0 rating from Planned Parenthood on abortion and reproductive rights.
A federal filing seeking a visa waiver for an Armenian invitee to attend included the invitation. It has not been made public otherwise. Suozzi did not announce his involvement or respond to emailed questions.
The invitation doesn’t give Suozzi and Cline formal titles for this year’s event. But two former members of Congress — both long-time Fellowship insiders and past co-chairs — also signed the invitations. They’re Jim Slattery (D-KS) and Zach Wamp (R-TN).
Wamp, as I’ve reported, has expressed at least twice an interest in keeping the two events connected at least secretly, notwithstanding the public spin that the events have severed. He’s also pressured Fellowship Democrats not to discuss or release details, as I learned when he cc’ed me on an email to that effect.
The Fellowship also remains involved in the weekly congressional prayer breakfasts. And Suozzi is a participant and leader in the House iteration.
In the past, as author Jeff Sharlet chronicled, Fellowship Democrats have moved to the right. Sharlet documented that dynamic with then-Rep. Tony Hall (D-IL). Just last week, I reported on Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s political journey with The Fellowship and the religious right.
Like Gluesenkamp Perez, Suozzi doesn’t seem to use these ties for political gain with voters. In fact, they’ve both kept their involvement extraordinarily quiet. No press releases. No social-media posts. But no denial, either, when I asked about it.
A variety of documents and foreign news accounts show that Suozzi has helped The Fellowship for years to boost its allies overseas. (It’s important to note that, historically, the members of Congress who let their names be used have had no idea who the vast majority of the 3,000-plus guests are. But they do know — now — the political leanings and controversy attached to some of them.)
Fellowship insiders pick the guests. And The Fellowship has little interest bringing in anyone other than its friends.
The congressional signatures on the invitations give those friends cachet back home. That’s why news accounts from overseas may cite Suozzi and others as inviting some local official, even though Suozzi may never have heard of them.
Fellowship leaders often make the unconditional — and demonstrably false — claim that prayer is uniting. With The Fellowship, that’s true in the sense that prayer brings centrist Democrats into their tent. But the Democrats typically leave their politics at the door, while the biblical exegesis is often in lockstep with Republican platforms.
And the unifying power of prayer tends to dissolve for congressional Republicans when it’s for virtues like mercy, as Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde learned the day of Trump’s inauguration.
In truth, the fruits of The Fellowship’s work are often poisonous and divisive. They radicalized Mike Lindell, who called me a scumbag after The Fellowship got him on his knees surrendering to Jesus.
They killed a UN anti-corruption task force when it threatened to investigate Guatemala’s anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical president.
They paid to fly Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) to Uganda, to buck up support for the president in the face of international sanctions over his new anti-LGBTQ+ death penalty. It was known popularly as the Kill the Gays Act.
The Fellowship over the decades has empowered dictators around the world who not only rejected democracy but used their autocracy to persecute women and LGBTQ+ people. Trump was just a little more honest — when he addressed the National Prayer Breakfast — about how some Christians see the teachings of Jesus.
In a separate piece, I’ve inventoried some of the guests who’ve been invited by Suozzi, or in his name, at The Fellowship’s annual breakfast events since 2020. What follows is a broader overview of each year’s events.
2020
During his first term, Trump’s final address at the old National Prayer Breakfast came in 2020, when Suozzi was a co-chair.
Trump used the platform afforded him by the ostensibly bipartisan event to deliver a message starkly in contrast with The Fellowship’s professed principles. And Jesus’s.
Suozzi himself had set the stage for Trump, playing beta to co-chair John Moolenaar (R-MI) in a routine that was both good-natured but also clearly cast Democrats as the “other.” Urban. Jewish-adjacent. Republicans represented the heartland, the salt of the Earth.
Moolenaar: I have 15,000 farmers in my district.
Suozzi: I know a guy named Farmer.
Moolenaar: In my district, the kids have the first day of deer-hunting season off for school.
Suozzi: In my district, the kids have off for Yom Kippur.
They were accompanied by Walberg strumming softly on his guitar, along with bandmate Phil Roe, the former Republican congressman — and opponent of LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights — from Tennessee who now sits on the board that runs the “new” National Prayer Breakfast..
While right-wing Fellowship speakers have used the spotlight to deliver overtly political messages — to the delight of Fellowship audiences — the closest Suozzi came was to warn, “No more hair jokes when the president gets here.”
Before the president spoke, Suozzi discussed Jesus’s message, “not only love thy neighbor but also your enemies.” These, Suozzi said, were “wild ideas, yet they thrive here in our midst.”
They did not.
Trump shocked even The Fellowship audience by questioning Jesus’s commandment to love thy enemies. “I don’t know if I agree,” Trump said.
Suozzi followed and, after Trump left, tried to clean up his heresy; Trump doubting Christianity’s primary moral precept:
“Love your enemies is a tough message. Not everybody seems to get it yet [laughter]. But we’re gonna work on it [laughter]. But we’re not gonna give up, are we? It’s not really a message that’s easy to sell in this world today, but we’ve gotta keep on pushing the message of love.”
That was five years ago.
The following year was COVID, and the 2021 National Prayer Breakfast went virtual. Suozzi co-chaired again. Even after, as I mentioned and reported at the time, Fellowship leaders poured money into efforts to steal the election.
A source who’d been close to The Fellowship told me at the time that while Biden may have felt an obligation to participate, that wasn’t true for Suozzi and the other co-chairs. “There’s a difference for me between [Biden] and the people that are lending their name and enabling.”
Why was Suozzi co-chairing two years in a row? A congressional source said, “They’ve had a hard time getting Democrats.” But Suozzi stepped up.
His remarks were overtly sectarian. “[W]e need Democrats and Republicans to come together. To be together in the spirit of Jesus for this prayer breakfast is a great opportunity for us to remember exactly what our lives are about.”
The event itself pushed a false but abiding right-wing narrative that, as Pres. Ronald Reagan put it in a clip that The Fellowship played, “America began as a God-loving, God-fearing, God-worshiping people.” Suozzi didn’t disavow those remarks or any others.
Pres. George W. Bush was seen in one of his prayer breakfast addresses claiming that faith “teaches us not merely to tolerate one another, but to respect one another.”
Leaving aside myriad religious passages to the contrary, The Fellowship was playing Bush’s remarks less than a month after a mob brandishing weapons and Christian slogans stormed the U.S. Capitol intending to overthrow the government and do violence to elected representatives.
Suozzi, in an attempt at complimenting Pelosi, perpetuated a smear against non-believers. Pelosi, he said, would be incapable of doing her job as well as she did, “if she wasn’t a woman of great faith.”
In 2022, the National Prayer Breakfast tiptoed back into a real-world setting. Not the Washington Hilton, where it had taken place for decades prior to the pandemic, but the Capitol Hill Visitors Center.
The thousands of international guests weren’t invited as usual to the new, scaled-down event. But The Fellowship was inching closer to getting its sectarian, Christian event, into the actual halls of power.
The co-chair roles rotate every year, from chamber to chamber, so in 2022 it was Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Mike Rounds (R-SD). But Suozzi was still in the mix.
The Fellowship listed 16 representatives on the putative “Honorary House Committee.” Suozzi was one of just five Democrats.
The Republicans celebrating the unifying power of prayer included Reps. Walberg, Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Virginia Foxx (R-VA), and Joe Wilson (R-SC), whose legacy consists primarily of shouting “You lie!” during a State of the Union speech by Pres. Barack Obama.
(Apparently not knowing that the event was limited that year, Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade hired lobbyists to try to get tickets from 11 congressional Republicans.)
The big split came in 2023. The NPB Gathering at the Hilton, National Prayer Breakfast on Capitol Hill. In Statuary Hall this time.
The point of splitting, again, was to alleviate Democratic concerns about The Fellowship’s involvement. It was essentially a fraud as Fellowship insiders retained control of the “new” event, too.
But in 2023 Suozzi was no longer in office, leaving Congress to pursue a failed race against Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY). Nevertheless, he kept helping The Fellowship, serving again as co-chair, again with Wamp, of the rechristened NPB Gathering at the Hilton.
One of the guests Suozzi had invited was Tim Kreutter, The Fellowship’s long-time man in Uganda.
One of the readings was given by Lauren Noyes, executive director of Faith and Law. As I reported last year, Faith and Law teaches congressional staffers how to be a “Christ-follower on Capitol Hill.” (Co-founder Paul McNulty is president of Grove City College, ranked one of the schools most hostile to LGBTQ+ people.)
Noyes’s work included recruiting Democrats for their study sessions and junkets. Not just any Democrats, though. “I’m really trying to make this more bi-partisan,” she wrote in one letter that found its way into a federal filing, “and would love more ideas of Christian democrats.”
Last year’s NPB Gathering was historic in a way. It was the first year that a member of Congress had directly called out The Fellowship for their anti-LGBTQ+ work.
After I reported that The Fellowship paid to send Walberg to Uganda, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) responded. At the time, Pocan was the chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, which advocates for LGBTQ+ causes, such as not being executed in Uganda.
On Jan. 30, 2024, Pocan issued a press release. He announced that he had written to The Fellowship. Pocan wanted to know the group’s position on Uganda’s law.
He also asked The Fellowship to release information about its prayer breakfast operations around the world. “I write to express my strongest concerns about the Fellowship Foundation’s potential involvement in legislation abroad,” Pocan wrote in his letter.
One day later day, Suozzi welcomed The Fellowship’s global prayer-breakfast partners at the NPB Gathering. They got this card from Suozzi and Wamp:
The invitations had gone out several months before. One that appeared in a Romanian parliamentary filing is dated Oct. 14, 2023.
That invitation included Suozzi and Wamp making a half-hearted attempt to distinguish the NPB Gathering from the National Prayer Breakfast, saying the latter was being held “separately.” (That language was dropped this year, despite the continuing confusion.)
The next sentence referred to “the special activities surrounding the NPB Gathering,” without clarifying whether that included the new National Prayer Breakfast up on Capitol Hill.
Suozzi’s guests included Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame. (Suozzi wasn’t the only Democrat involved; as I reported, Kagame shared a laugh with Coons and was hosted for a luncheon by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
Even Kagame got caught in — or caught using — The Fellowship’s obfuscation. Rwandan media reported that he thought he was attending the National Prayer Breakfast. Possibly, he just wanted people to think that he was.
This year, as I’ve documented, there are similar accounts from around the world: Politicians and local leaders claiming they’ve been invited to this week’s National Prayer Breakfast by Trump when, in fact, they haven’t been invited to the National Prayer Breakfast and definitely weren’t invited by Trump.
In all likelihood, even Suozzi hasn’t heard of the vast majority of this week’s guests at The Hilton. He just lets The Fellowship use his name to get them there.
And there’s some indication Suozzi has growing sympathies with The Fellowship’s prevailing positions on things like whether government institutions should accommodate, or even recognize transgender people.
Suozzi’s Journey
In 2021, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Suozzi told his alumni magazine that his desire to solve problems across the aisle included serving as the National Prayer Breakfast co-chair.
There is no evidence that Democratic facilitation of The Fellowship’s work has yielded a net gain for democracy or bipartisanship. Fellowship insiders rank among the most divisive, radical political leaders in Congress and have taken up positions at high tiers in Trump’s administration, which is barely working with congressional Republicans, let alone their Democratic prayer partners.
If anything, political movement due to prayer seems to be unilateral. Gluesenkamp Perez is just one Democrat who’s engaged with the Christian far-right and seems to have moved toward them.
She was one of a handful of Democrats seen as abandoning transgender people after the presidential election.
When Suozzi weighed in, it was in keeping with typical Fellowship reasoning. Religious freedom, after all, means the freedom not to hire transgender people, cover their medical care, treat them, or share a bathroom or lockerroom.
“I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports,” Suozzi said. “[W]e failed as a party to respond to the Republican weaponization of anarchy on college campuses, defund the police, biological boys playing in girls' sports, and a general attack on traditional values.” He didn’t say which tradition.
Secular groups have noted Suozzi’s wavering on issues of church and state.
In 2022, the Secular Coalition of America gave Suozzi just a 70% rating after he co-sponsored a bill to establish a national hymn, a clear violation of the First Amendment’s restriction against Congress respecting an establishment of religion.
Suozzi’s rating dropped to 57% last year after he opposed a bill to curtail militias, including Christian militias.
He had, in a Jan. 6, 2021, video, omitted Christian radicals as a threat, even as self-described Christians rampaged through the Capitol. Instead, he said, “anarchists on the left” made his list of concerns:
“We have a major problem in our country with white nationalism, white supremacy, and far-right militia groups, and we have concerns about anarchists on the left, as well.”
In an op-ed last year, Suozzi urged House Democrats — in the name of saving Ukraine — to help Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a theocrat of unprecedented scope, keep his gavel.
Long Island Atheists President Richard Schloss told me Suozzi’s district has shifted rightward.
“He’s an interesting case,” said Schloss, whose group is a partner of the national organization American Atheists.
While making allowances for bipartisan bridge-building, Schloss said his message for Suozzi is that, “[W]e expect you to protect constitutional principles on separation of church and state.”
According to Schloss, “Religion remains a private matter. He needs to keep that in mind.”
The 2025 NPB Gathering is being held Wednesday and Thursday. The National Prayer Breakfast is scheduled for Thursday.
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