The National Prayer Breakfast Conned Democrats (Again)
A handful of Democrats continue abetting the event's far-right organizers and their work
I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by a few paid supporters.
In 2023, the seven-decades-old National Prayer Breakfast split into two events. It was a big deal.
For seven decades, the event had been run by the Fellowship Foundation, a secretive Christian organization founded with an anti-labor right-wing agenda and more recently building networks opposed to anti-LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. Rights such as, in Uganda, the right not to be executed.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told corporate media that questions had been raised about funding for the event, who the guests were, and who invited them to the multi-day gathering. Coons’s explanation was a fib — the questions weren’t the issue, it was the answers I was revealing.
Democrats had been bailing on the breakfast as I reported more about it. And The Fellowship can’t fully exploit the breakfast without Democrats giving it a bipartisan veneer to foster its false image as an official event.
So The Fellowship spun off a much smaller version in the Capitol itself, limited to U.S. officials and plus ones. Safe for Democrats. (The Fellowship and thousands of global guests continued to gather simultaneously downhill, at the Washington Hilton.)
A new nonprofit called the NPB Foundation ran the downsized National Prayer Breakfast at the Capitol. Its president, former Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR), in remarks to me and other journalists, vowed donor transparency and independence from The Fellowship.
It worked. Democrats came back.
Turns out, they got played. The Fellowship and its Democratic allies had suckered gullible Democrats yet again. The Fellowship continued to use even the new event for its ends — for instance, paying to send the new NPB co-chair to Uganda to bolster the anti-LGBTQ+ death penalty there. But also, the split itself was fake.
Coons and Pryor don’t seem to have been in on it. But knowing or not, in 2023, they sold the split to fellow Democrats as a permanent one, the separation genuine.
Just two years later, at this year’s NPB Gathering — the big event still run openly by the Fellowship Foundation — Republicans spilled the beans. They’re going to combine the two events again.
Once again, The Fellowship’s foreign allies will get unmediated access to everyone from the president on down. Democrats are less important now, with powerful allies like Pres. Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on board. You can’t get more semi-official than that.
Odds are, though, that a small contingent of Democrats will continue to lend the event a bipartisan mantle that Fellowship insiders use to radicalize people like Mike Lindell. After all, Democrats continued to help out this year, too — including Senators Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), as well as Reps. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), Tom Suozzi (D-NY), and others1 — even as the events gave God’s blessing to the man their party warned us was a Christian nationalist.
Here’s what happened.
Trouble in Paradise
Almost 20 years ago, journalist Jeff Sharlet started making trouble for The Fellowship. He was invited inside and had the nerve to reveal what he saw.
Sharlet exposed how The Fellowship routinely moved politicians rightward, from foreign dictators to congressional Democrats. Fellowship ties to U.S. politicians brought thousands in the door — leaders and lobbyists, saints and scoundrels — hoping for U.S. connections even if it meant acting as if they swallowed Jesus as their personal savior.
At this year’s NPB Gathering, a longtime Fellowship insider, former Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), joked about trying to convert one of the few Fellowship Democrats — former Rep. Jim Slattery (D-KS). “I’ve been trying to get him to be a Republican for years,” Brownback said.
Sharlet exposed The Fellowship’s Ugandan network pushing anti-LGBTQ+ death-penalty legislation. He raised enough of a stink that American Fellowship leaders publicly condemned the bill and at least kinda distanced themselves from their Ugandan network. (As I reported, The Fellowship still supports the Ugandan network after it revived the LGBTQ+ death penalty.)
Democrats from Pres. Barack Obama on down delivered stern lectures after Sharlet tied The Fellowship to the Uganda bill, but the party didn’t do the one thing that could hurt The Fellowship: Stop showing up.
Without Democrats, The Fellowship can’t sell the breakfast as a semi-official event. Without appearing semi-official, international guests — The Fellowship network — can’t justify using their government funds to sponsor travel and ticket costs. Democrats are the linchpin that sustains The Fellowship’s toxic networking.
The breakfast is perhaps the central public event of global, right-wing, Christian nationalism.
As Brownback put it, “This movement, probably more than any other movement around the world, has gotten the word of Jesus and the nature of Jesus into more leaders’ lives than any other movement in the world.” Their Jesus.
In terms of scandal, things went quiet for most of the Obama years — although The Fellowship did use the event to make Ben Carson a star. But then covert Russian operative Maria Butina showed up and the breakfast began cooking again.
Soon after, I obtained internal Fellowship documents and began connecting dots around the world and revealing The Fellowship’s hand behind the curtains of important trends and events:
Destroying a UN anti-corruption task force to protect Guatemala’s evangelical president
Eroding LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights in Ukraine, Poland, and elsewhere in Europe.
The Ugandan LGBTQ+ death penalty, again, now the law of the land.
The secret backing of far-right crusader Franklin Graham, a Trump ally.
Ties to illegal campaign donations that then-Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) allegedly lied to conceal.
As The Fellowship’s nonpartisan facade again peeled away, LGBTQ+ advocacy groups and others like the Freedom From Religion Foundation upped their focus on the event, asking Democrats to stop aiding The Fellowship’s work.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) stopped going. Speaker Nancy Pelosi bailed, giving political cover for every Democrat to follow suit. A leak had sprung in The Fellowship’s operation.
Redeeming The Breakfast
When the breakfast split in 2023, the new NPB Foundation’s president, Pryor, told the Religion News Service that the two events would be “completely different and totally separate.”
Pryor asked for time to show that the new board and the new breakfast would be different. "Let us show that it is going to be different and just give us a little time here.”
In a phone interview, Pryor told me the split had been in the works for at least a decade before. “We've been having discussions about whether we should take the prayer breakfast and put it into its own, single-purpose foundation … put it in its own lane and make sure it stays there.”
He called it a “friendly separation.” In hindsight, neither word seems accurate.
When I followed up with an email to Pryor and NPB Foundation board members about their ties to The Fellowship, one of them, former Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN), copied me, apparently by accident, on his email to Pryor.
Wamp’s language to Pryor was not friendly. “I made it very clear you would be wise not to speak to this group,” Wamp wrote, referring to The Young Turks, for whom I was reporting at the time.
Preserving unity with The Fellowship was Wamp’s primary concern. “More stories and more slander will only lead to more division,” Wamp wrote2. Pryor hasn’t responded to me since.
Pryor had told me he would ask the board about donation disclosures. It hasn’t made any in the two years since.
Just like The Fellowship, the NPB Foundation ended up letting lobbyists attend its new event and powerful guests break the rules. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) invited right-wing provocateur Kari Lake even though she couldn’t be his plus-one due to living outside his district. Gosar’s office told me Jesus didn’t check her address.
Wamp appeared to confirm The Fellowship’s continued involvement in the NPB Foundation, telling The Fellowship audience this year that “[W]e were able to meet in a small group in the Capitol.” We.
I haven’t yet reported fully on another aspect of the spun-off National Prayer Breakfast — how the right and The Fellowship still use it to their benefit, even though it’s now held at the Capitol, drafting off the event’s prestige and status to boost other events.
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.
Instead, she told me 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. Like Wamp, she raised no specific objection to my reporting.
Later in 2023, I discovered who was funding the new breakfast. But not because the NPB Foundation disclosed it. (In fact, as of today, they haven’t filed a public tax return for 2023.)
Some NPB Foundation funding was disclosed in another organization’s tax filing, as I reported last year. The donor was, no surprise, The Fellowship.
The Fellowship donation totaled $46,800, just shy of the roughly $50,000 it costs to keep the breakfast logistics afloat in between the annual ticket revenues. That’s what Graham used to donate to The Fellowship for the old breakfast.
We don’t, however, know the original source of that $46,800. The Fellowship’s tax filing doesn’t disclose it.
(An anonymous donation to the NPB Foundation for $10,000 was funneled through a separate, donor-advised fund, according to another filing I found.)
While the NPB Foundation board has had some turnover, its connections to The Fellowship remain strong. Wamp said outright at last year’s NPB Gathering that the two events are still connected. He also foreshadowed how temporary the public split might be:
“[A]t this moment we’re still in this capacity where the international prayer breakfast is here and the National Prayer Breakfast is there at the same time. Simultaneous. Connected that way.”
The NPB Foundation was even run briefly by a longtime Fellowship insider who — along with her husband, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) — was funded by The Fellowship in right-wing networking with political prayer groups, especially in Europe.
When I informed Pryor in January 2023 that everyone on the new NPB Foundation board had ties to The Fellowship, he said the new group had needed The Fellowship’s experience to get the new event running.
Soon, though, he said, the new event would leave the nest. “I would just say, look, give us a year or two and and see where we are,” he told me.
Let’s See Where They Are After a Year or Two
Pryor’s pledges of independence won plenty of attention from the media, much of it wrong. It worked, and Democrats came back. Not just Pelosi and Kaine.
Now, the split is already blurring, the feint having served its purpose.
Fellowship leaders over the past year spoke on several occasions — not to the media but amongst themselves, at the NPB Gathering — about ending the split.
Trump spoke at both events this year, negating the whole purpose of the separate Capitol Hill event. His remarks at the ostensibly nonpartisan NPB Gathering promoted Christian nationalism, rejecting historic American secular values and demonizing Democrats.
Spiritual advisor Paula White introduced Trump to the Fellowship audience as “the greatest champion — of any president that has ever been — of religion, of faith, and of God.”
Fellowship insiders, too, reflect the partisan inequity. Wamp teased Slattery, the Democrat, for speaking longer than his allotted three minutes and then spoke longer than Slattery had.
Earlier that day, at the Capitol, Democratic speakers at the NPB offered mushy, ecumenical thoughts about God. Attendees helpfully made clear that the pretext of prayer’s unifying power is just marketing bullshit; they applauded references to Republicans, and sat on their hands for Democratic shoutouts.
But with Trump back at the helm, it was the NPB Gathering where Christian nationalism really let its flag fly. Trump touted a new commission on religious liberty that barely fig-leafs its promotion of Christianity. His other remarks included the following:
The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel “would’ve never happened” if he’d been president.
“[W]e want to have a believer in this position [the presidency].”
“Americans are reasserting our true identity as a people ordained by God to be the freest and most exceptional nation ever to exist on the face of the Earth. But we weren’t that for four years.”
“[T]he other side,” Democrats, “oppose religion and they oppose God.” (Which is only true of some Democrats — and some Republicans.)
When Trump wrapped his remarks and was joined by Fellowship leaders on stage, it sure sounded like the two events would be reunited as soon as February 2026.
Rep. Ben Cline (R-PA) referred to Trump’s dual appearances that morning and told him, “as the co-chairs of the breakfast next year, we want to make it easier on you. We want to bring the members [of Congress] back here for next year’s prayer breakfast. One-stop shot.”
Cline then addressed God, telling God what God did last year and why: “You spared [Trump’s] life that day in Pennsylvania for a reason, that he would once again be elected by the voters and once again serve as president of these United States.”
Instead of protesting or offering an alternative exegesis, Cline’s co-chair, Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), reinforced Cline’s message with a theocratic message of his own. “[I]n spite of our protestation,” Jackson said, disenfranchising his secular constituents, “there is still a God adjudicating all of the affairs of the United States of America and the world.”
Jackson and Trump then shared a warm handshake — as Trump noted earlier, “I’ve actually met some very nice Democrats here.”
Wamp came back, feeding the hungry audience false hyperbole about the popularity of Christian music3. And it was Wamp who gave the fullest account of the split and — its purpose fulfilled — the coming unsplit.
Like Cline, Wamp suggested the split is over: “I believe what you’re seeing today is the beginning of the reunification of this.”
According to Wamp, the split was always temporary. It had two causes — one of which no one had ever mentioned before, possibly because it’s gibberish.
“Two big things drove this temporary separation,” Wamp said. One was COVID, as everyone had said publicly. The other was “security,” which Wamp couldn’t coherently explain.
“Back in the day … we didn’t have the security issues we have today and most senators didn’t have any security. And today many senators have security and many House members have security and we have many more security challenges. So the gathering in person became problematic. So we are, we are grateful that you stuck with us through these changes.”
First of all, “back in the day” was a reference to when Brownback was still in the Senate. That was as late as 2011. But according to Pryor, The Fellowship was discussing splitting the breakfast before 2011.
More confusing is the question of why congressional security would be an issue. Heads of state have attended with security details for decades. Trump was there this year.
And most incoherent of everything in Wamp’s putative explanation … if security issues were a concern in 2023, why aren’t they still? It’s not as if members of Congress feel safer today. Trump literally just pardoned a small army for attacking Congress.
Wamp never explains what changed between 2023 and 2025. Let alone why the separation would have been seen as temporary in 2023 or ever.
Or why Coons and Pryor said publicly that there were questions about the event under The Fellowship.
The obvious explanation is that Wamp casually lied to his fellows to avoid the potentially uncomfortable candor he advised Pryor not to practice. The split worked to bring Democrats back, so now there’s no need for it, and no need for honesty about it.
Lying is common among Fellowship leaders.
The Fellowship routinely, illegally, used the Great Seal of the United States to imply official status. Credulous media routinely report the lie that Congress ran the original breakfast. Fellowship leaders still spin the fairy tale that Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower attended the first breakfast because he craved Fellowship fellowship (he owed a political debt to evangelist Billy Graham; Fellowship records confirm Eisenhower attending only two more times out of his eight years in office, while his absence was confirmed for four of those years).
Interestingly, after I first reached out to Heitkamp, she responded that, “I have not had any affiliation with the International Foundation.” That’s the d/b/a that Fellowship insiders often use.
The End Times
If the prophecies of Wamp and Cline come to pass, the National Prayer Breakfast will be back next year as one event, with Trump and other powerful U.S. politicians mingling over the course of several days with thousands of international political movers and shakers and backers and wannabes.
It’s also possible the two events will continue, but much more interwoven. (The Fellowship likes the theocratic symbolism of breakfasting at the Capitol, but it can’t accommodate the 3,000-plus who flock to the Hilton from around the world.)
Brownback offered his own prophecy, more sweeping than just one, cold, annual morning in Washington. “The National Prayer Breakfast movement is back,” he said. “It’s back stronger, it’s gonna be bigger than ever, and it’s global. Keep pushing it.”
At a time when Trump is super-charging the government with theocracy in ways not seen since the anti-Communist theocratic fervor of the 1950s, when the breakfast was born, a newly reunited National Prayer Breakfast would give the global, far-right Christian movement a sprawling engine of new power with which to propel their causes around the world.
Only one Democrat, however — Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) — raised a stink about this year’s Capitol Hill prayer breakfast. Huffman co-founded the Congressional Freethought Caucus and has been perhaps the loudest voice in Congress against the theocratic encroachments of The Fellowship and Johnson.
Huffman’s protest was dismissed by Christian Republicans who threw the participation of Klobuchar and Hassan at him. Democratic participation in the name of unity again turned into ammunition against even a modest defense of constitutional secularism.
The only question now is whether Christian nationalism will have advanced sufficiently by next year that even The Fellowship’s Democratic accomplices will stop helping out.
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.
Speakers at this year’s NPB included Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Reps. Andre Carson (D-IN) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL).
Wamp never clarified to me what he believed I’d gotten wrong in my reporting.
Wamp claimed interest among young people increased by 45% in each of the previous two years. In fact, the share of Christian/gospel listeners who are millennials or younger increased from 39% to 45% over the previous two years. It’s not clear whether Wamp erred out of disregard for the truth or simple innumeracy. And even the genuine statistics could could be explained for reasons other than a rise in young interest, such as by older listeners dying or improving their musical tastes.
Yes, Democrats are stupid enough to make repulsive repugnant republican hypocrites look like disciples. How appalling.
Perhaps the moron Klobuchar can go on MSNBC late at night and insipidly giggle about it. 😡