The Journalist's Guide to the National Prayer Breakfast
A handy Q & A to help even corporate media avoid some of the mistakes they make every goddamn year
I’m an independent journalist who covers Christian extremism and other issues.
Since corporate media outlets often get basic facts wrong about the National Prayer Breakfast, I’ve prepared what I hope will be a helpful FAQ. Please comment with any additional questions you’d like me address.
What is The National Prayer Breakfast?
It’s an annual gathering held on the first Thursday of every February. Only some of it consists of prayer; most of it is speeches.
Who runs the National Prayer Breakfast?
The National Prayer Breakfast is run by the NPB Foundation, a private, nonprofit organization that does not disclose its donors.
Congress doesn’t run it?
Congress doesn’t run it. You’re supposed to think Congress runs it. Congress doesn’t run it.
You might think Congress runs it if you believed the headlines of NPR, the AP, CBS, or others, but if you doubt me, ask the House clerk for the budget, or the Senate operator for the National Prayer Breakfast committee or whatever. Hell, Heck, just read past the headlines and you’ll see some of those same stories say explicitly that the NPB Foundation runs it.
And who runs the NPB Foundation?
The board is made up largely by former members of Congress. But not just any former members of Congress. (Teaser!)
Who gets to go?
That changes and it’s not entirely clear. The president and members of Congress are invited. Supreme Court judges and cabinet members appear to get invites, too. But NASA’s administrator position isn’t cabinet-level and Administrator Bill Nelson got to go last year, so, it’s not clear.
Can they bring guests?
One each. It used to be a family member or a constituent. Then Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) snuck Kari Lake in and blamed Jesus. Now it’s just a family member.
Why did Bill Nelson get to go?
That’s a long story.
Wasn’t the National Prayer Breakfast a big, multi-day get-together at the Washington Hilton?
It was. That’s still going on, but it’s been renamed the NPB Gathering.
Who runs the NPB Gathering?
The NPB Gathering is run by the Fellowship Foundation (d/b/a International Foundation), a private, nonprofit organization that does not disclose its donors.
Wait, so there’s two now? Isn’t that confusing?
Yes. That’s a feature, not a bug, as I’ll explain when you ask me why.
So what’s the NPB Gathering?
The NPB Gathering started in 1953 as the presidential prayer breakfast or congressional prayer breakfast or something like that. At some point they decided to call it the National Prayer Breakfast. It became a days-long convention of sorts, with panels and cosplay contests, for all I know, held most recently (and still) at the Washington Hilton.
The flagship event was the presidential address, which they don’t get anymore because they know what they did. The first year of the split, 2023, Pres. Joe Biden gave them a shoutout from Capitol Hill. It was a little awkward and it seemed like he started to joke about how The Fellowship had been a bad boy but he caught himself.
Anyway, the presidential speech moved to Capitol Hill as did most members of Congress. The Hilton event renamed itself the NPB Gathering. The 3,000+ guests still get together at the Hilton, only now they watch the president on TV and tell each other he’s talking to them.
The real work of the NPB Gathering happens in the smaller events. These include so-called “breakout sessions,” where some good shadow diplomacy can occur. (There was an incident I don’t quite recall in which an American evangelical politician met an Iranian and decided maybe nuking Iran was bad. I may have the details wrong.) Bad shadow diplomacy also occurs.
How did the split happen?
Fellowship insiders — including some members of Congress — apparently had been discussing it for years. When Jeff Sharlet’s book “The Family” and other reports of his started coming out, people learned about The Fellowship’s decades of proselytizing and supporting/nurturing theocratic dictators around the world.
It didn’t help when Sharlet exposed The Fellowship inculcating a Ugandan parliamentary prayer group, which promptly decided The Bible was so awesome that Uganda should have its own death penalty for gay sex.
There have been other scandals since then, leading to the split. The Fellowship needs Democrats to maintain the illusion of bipartisanship that’s required to be seen as a semi-official event.
The split let them bring Democrats to the new Capitol Hill breakfast after they bailed on the old Hilton breakfast due to all the scandals.
Scandals other than the Uganda stuff?
The Jeff Fortenberry campaign-finance scandal (until the Trump Justice Department dropped the charges)
Secret lobbying for Ukraine arms (this one doesn’t really count as a scandal, per se)
Secret lobbying for Ukraine to embrace right-wing evangelical values
And then the resurrection of the Uganda scandal, with passage in 2023 of the LGBTQ+ death penalty.
This is a partial list.
So who are these people?
You mean The Fellowship?
Yes.
Odds are you’ve heard of none of the board members. GOP megadonor Ronnie Cameron has a corporate executive of his on the board, but for the most part they’re not world-shakers.
They believe in The Fellowship’s mission, which is to minister to power.
How?
That’s where the associates come in. The Fellowship has scores of associates around the country and around the world. Mostly, these are folks with no real jobs. They basically hang out with rich and powerful people.
Where do they get food?
A handful of Fellowship associates are independently wealthy. Most forge relationships with people rich enough to support them so they can spend their days hanging out with politicians no matter how much golf they have to play.
The Fellowship has loose oversight on these relationships, and serves in an administrative capacity. Money comes in from as associate’s patrons, goes into the associate’s account, and then the Fellowship turns it around and pays the associate.
As you might have intuited, this is a very bad model for incentivizing moral guidance of those in power. If your powerful disciple is sad because an associate scolds them, they won’t hang out anymore. The rich patron loses the connection, too. And gets angry.
Some associates carve out made-up gigs for themselves, while secretly backed by their dark-money donors via The Fellowship. Florida’s state House of Representatives, for instance, has an official, volunteer chaplain.
I exposed him last year as getting sometimes six-figure salaries via The Fellowship, all while hanging out with Florida Republicans (and a handful of religious Democrats). One Democratic lawmaker told me they didn’t even know he was the chaplain. They assumed he worked in the Republican speaker’s office.
And who are the other people?
You mean the NPB Foundation board?
Yes.
They’re almost entirely former insiders of The Fellowship.
Why the confusion between the two events?
The Fellowship has always presented its breakfasts — and other events — as if they’re official government events.
Their aim is to “minister” to those in power. Their method is to serve as bridges between the powerful in all social spheres: Political, corporate, cultural, whatever.
But if it looks like you’re just a bunch of people holding a prayer meeting, most people won’t be interested.
Convince everyone it’s an official event and now you’re in business, literally. Business people show up to make political connections. Political people show up to make business connections. The New York Times wrote about all this tawdry materialism several years ago.
Once the National Prayer Breakfast split for Capitol Hill, the NPB Gathering at the Hilton still needed a draw. So the two events are at the same time, with similar names and branding.
And the invitations to the NPB Gathering explicitly connect the two events, giving prestige to their allies and associates who can then hitch their wagons to the prestigious, non-scandaly one on Capitol Hill.
So everyone’s faking the faith stuff?
Who knows? But I certainly don’t think so. Faith in and of itself isn’t the problem. It’s the arrogance about the faith, the certitude that actions should be guided by faith, that faith should be embedded in everything. Especially government.
Some Fellowship people genuinely do serve the poor. But if it turns out that serving the poor bums you out, it’s pretty easy to tell yourself — and believe — that the Lord intended you for other things. Like playing golf with rich people.
That’s why the old NPB, now the NPB Gathering, is discriminatory. There’s no plan.
There’s no Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. They — a very undiverse bunch — minister to and connect with whoever they’re led to by God. Or (if you think God doesn’t exist or has better things to do) by their own preferences or inclinations.
So what kind of stuff was The Fellowship doing?
I mentioned some of the scandals. But also, Mike Lindell used to be as normal as a TV pillow salesmen could reasonably be expected to be. He became the guy we know today because, similar to those Ugandans, he took The Fellowship not just seriously but literally.
But The Fellowship helps people abide by the teachings of The Bible?
The answer to this is probably similar to who they connect with. Only in this case, it’s “Which teachings does Jesus lead them to care about?”
It is never the many Biblical imprecations against charging interest.
As for loving thy neighbor, there’s some of that. But less so when they’re challenged. Lindell called me a scumbag and former Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN) called me a snake despite my obvious charm.
So, yeah, even the people who testify to the power of prayer to transform are solid evidence that they’re wrong. They act pretty much like the rest of us. Although, come to think of it, I’ve never called them names.
So it’s not ecumenical?
It pretends to be, but The Fellowship can’t help showing their Jesus cards. Just look at the statement of the NPB Foundation about the National Prayer Breakfast. “All faiths are welcome,” it says. But first it says:
“[O]ur annual Breakfast is an opportunity for Members of Congress to pray collectively for our nation, the President of the United States, and other national and international leaders in the spirit of love and reconciliation as Jesus of Nazareth taught 2,000 years ago.”
No mention of people who put their faith in science or other religious traditions.
So it discriminates against non-believers?
Pretty explicitly. Listen to the remarks. Speaker after speaker exalts the good that prayer and religious faith do.
The unmistakeable implication is that people who don’t believe in religious stuff aren’t capable of whatever it is they claim only faith provides.
Isn’t that respecting an establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment, if an event with that message is held in the U.S. Capitol?
Yes.
How come it keeps happening?
In the past it kept happening because Democrats kept helping it to happen. Now, I suspect both events would continue regardless of Democratic assistance.
How are Democrats helping?
Remember I said the events need a bipartisan imprimatur to look official?
A handful of Democrats lend them that imprimatur. Almost always in secret.
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) is co-chairing Thursday’s NPB. There was no press release and she didn’t respond to my questions about helping The Fellowship’s anti-LGBTQ+ networking.
Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) is co-hosting today’s and tomorrow’s NPB Gathering. Which gives The Fellowship’s buddies overseas headlines like this:
Looks prestigious, right? It actually does, a lot — in ways it can be hard to appreciate here — to readers in other countries.
A connection to a U.S. member of Congress is an elevating factor. For voters. For donors. For other politicos. This is how The Fellowship network grows in power and influence — leveraged by members of Congress.
How do you know so much and are you obsessed or anti-Christian or something?
Several years ago, I obtained multiple internal Fellowship documents, a Rosetta Stone and road map. So, when something pops in the news, I hit Ctl-F and sometimes it turns out The Fellowship was doing stuff people didn’t know about. I’m an atheist and, philosophically speaking, a materialist, so I tend to hope people won’t believe things contrary to physical evidence or scientific laws. I’m also alarmed by the rising tide of Christian theocracy in my country. That said, I’m also a defender of the freedom to believe things and have in my family, personal life, and career as a journalist known some profoundly good believers, including some truly lovely conservative evangelicals, whose faith is genuine and profound and who appear unmotivated by ill will (even if they may espouse policies that do harm).
How come they’re called “The Family” and why don’t you call them that?
Some insiders have referred to the group that way, leading Sharlet to give his book about them the same title. The name stuck and I used it for years. I’ve been told they hate that name and noticed that they seldom use it and more often refer to “The Fellowship,” so I’ve switched to that. I respect their pronouns.
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 reporting with a donation or paid subscription. Thank you.
Crystal clear description of who where why what how. No one who reads this can't say they didn't know.
What an exquisite garden path you’ve produced! The journey is not unlike the boat trip down the chocolate river in Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder’s version). Thanks for the easily shared clarity and the links. You do a great job and it is much appreciated.