The National Prayer Breakfast Drops the Charade

Amid confusion over two National Prayer Breakfasts, the underlying mission remains unchanged

Feb 05, 2026

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Pres. Donald Trump shakes hands with Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), the Fellowship Foundation’s event co-chair, at the Feb. 6, 2025, NPB Gathering, now reverting back to its original National Prayer Breakfast name. (Screengrab / C-SPAN video.)

After calling itself the NPB Gathering for three years as part of a cosmetic makeover, the original National Prayer Breakfast is back under its old name.

So there are now two National Prayer Breakfast events scheduled for Thursday.

Dating back to 1953, the singular, sprawling, original event relied on a bipartisan veneer to pull in hundreds and then thousands of guests invited by the organizers, the Fellowship Foundation, a Christian group also known as The Family. The breakfast figured in multiple scandals, and Democrats started peeling off.

The Fellowship spun off a smaller version in 2023, ostensibly run by the new, independent NPB Foundation. That allowed Democrats to attend a sanitized event.

But the “new” National Prayer Breakfast retained the original’s name, time, and much of the format. The Fellowship kept staging its renamed NPB Gathering at the Washington Hilton.

Fellowship Foundation: ~~National Prayer Breakfast~~ NPB Gathering, Washington Hilton.
NPB Foundation: National Prayer Breakfast, Capitol Hill.

Maintaining the association — and stoking confusion — let The Fellowship keep using its NPB Gathering for networking and fundraising. The cosmetic split brought enough Democrats back to the Capitol Hill breakfast for The Fellowship to keep marketing its own event as semi-official.

Other organizations hold events orbiting the two prayer breakfasts, too, exploiting the fact that global right-wing allies can come to the U.S. cheaply. The breakfast’s semi-official veneer helps visitors from foreign governments justify calling it official travel, so their taxpayers foot the bill.

But now, in The Fellowship’s 2026 invitation, which Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) shared with me, this year’s breakfast at the Hilton is dropping the whole “NPB Gathering” business and getting back to basics.

So now two events calling themselves the National Prayer Breakfast are being held on the first Thursday of February. Both claiming a 74-year history.

One or both presumably will include a speech by Pres. Donald Trump using the dual events to don a divine mantle sanctified by participating Democrats.

What remains unclear is whether this represents the organizers of each moving back together or further apart. Or they’re just messing with me. (One tantalizing hint: The Fellowship seems to have registered “National Prayer Breakfast” as a service mark, allowing them to challenge other uses of it.)

Excerpt from the Fellowship Foundation event page, including a symbol similar to the Great Seal of the United States — falsely implying it’s an official event — and tacking the “sm” service mark symbol on to “National Prayer Breakfast.” (Screengrab / CVent.com website.)

At last year’s Fellowship breakfast, Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA) and former Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN) discussed reuniting the two breakfasts in 2026. Cline and Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), apparently this year’s Fellowship breakfast co-chairs, even announced early last month that “the events at the Hilton and the Capitol will reunite as a single gathering in 2026 … at the Washington Hilton.”

And yet, on Jan. 16, the NPB Foundation invited members of Congress to their National Prayer Breakfast, not at the Hilton, but on the Capitol campus.

Fellowship Foundation: ~~National Prayer Breakfast~~ ~~NPB Gathering~~ National Prayer Breakfast, Washington Hilton
NPB Foundation: National Prayer Breakfast, Capitol Hill

So, what the hell is going on and why does it matter?

The particulars may not matter much, unless it’s another Three-Card Monte to keep a handful of Democrats in the fold. It’s their participation, no matter how token, that powers the right-wing networking, regardless of how the events get shuffled.

The Fellowship’s international iterations will still draft off the prestige of the Capitol Hill event, boosting Fellowship allies and giving The Fellowship inroads with dictators looking to make common cause with powerful Americans. Last month, for instance, Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Lou Correa (D-CA) feted El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele at The Fellowship’s first National Prayer Breakfast there.

The Fellowship’s U.S. breakfast also gives its international friends and up-and-comers a boost back home. News coverage in other countries offers a testament to how much it can matter.

The U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, Internationally

The Serbian Times made a valiant stab this week at shredding The Fellowship’s semi-official veneer, clarifying that, no, in fact, Trump did not personally invite Serbian officials to attend.

A Kenyan news outlet reported on a national party leader there attending Thursday’s prayer breakfast (at the Hilton) “to court the inner circle of the Trump administration.” If he can snag “photos of himself shaking hands with heavyweights, it signals that he is ‘presidential material.’”

The catch is that only Fellowship allies get invited. So participating Democrats are giving Fellowship allies an edge in courting U.S. power and signaling at home that they’re presidential material.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a longtime Fellowship insider. Last month he announced that his agency would hold a Critical Minerals summit today, the same day The Fellowship’s two days of breakfast events begin.

Coincidence? The Africa Report writes that the timing boosted the African presence.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo president was set to attend, too. And also bound for The Fellowship’s breakfast.

Some context: Rubio and Trump are pushing Christian causes around the world, including claiming Christian persecution to justify military strikes in Nigeria. And seeking critical resources.

One recurring event that orbits the breakfasts is the International Religious Freedom (IRF) summit. This year it kicked off Monday with Trump’s religious adviser, Paula White, and included a day for congressional lobbying today.

Then there’s the unabashed right-wing theocracy of Thursday’s National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance, courtesy of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Tony Perkins, held at the Hobby Lobby family’s Museum of the Bible.

Even superficially severed from the Capitol Hill breakfast, The Fellowship itself still provides a hub for backroom lobbying. A new filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act shows that Kenyan politicians seeking U.S. reparations for victims of the 1998 Nairobi embassy bombing used the 2024 NPB Gathering to get next to U.S. senators.

In a report submitted with the filing, one official writes that they were “unable to secure appointments with the US Ambassador to Kenya and with the US Congress,” but still found a way to get to U.S. officials: “[We] were able to attend the National Prayer breakfast [sic, they’re referring to the NPB Gathering] at Washington DC where we were able to meet various Senators and Congressmen and put forward our case.”

Kenya’s ambassador to the U.S. had advised his colleagues that “the Prayer breakfast will provide a good platform for the Members to lobby,” the filing says. He recommended using the breakfast to connect with Senators Chris Coons (D-DE), a longtime Fellowship ally, and Cory Booker (D-NJ).

The Kenyan officials got face to face with Coons and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) on Feb. 1, 2024, in one of The Fellowship’s breakout rooms at the Hilton for small gatherings before and after the breakfast. They lobbied Coons and Rounds for help on visas, bombing reparations and getting Kenyan tea and coffee into U.S. markets

The agenda for this year’s Fellowship breakfast includes similar breakout sessions:

Wednesday

Women’s Tea
Opening Dinner
Fellowship Reception

Thursday

National Prayer Breakfast
Morning Seminars

Healing Broken Nations in a Multi-Faith World
Hidden Struggles & Healing Communities: The Church’s Response
Together with Jesus - Change Your Thinking
Jesus Does

International Lunch
Afternoon Seminars

First Nations Gathering
Who is My Neighbour?
The Origins and Early History of the National Prayer Breakfast

Closing Dinner
Fellowship Reception

As for the NPB Foundation’s breakfast, this year’s Democratic co-chair is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), a longtime participant of The Fellowship’s original and a regular attendee of The Fellowship’s weekly Senate prayer breakfasts.

Gillibrand’s politics are diametrically opposed to The Fellowship’s. But that hasn’t been an impediment for her relationship-building. Similarly, as I reported Tuesday, Gillibrand also attends a weekly, right-wing Senate Bible study that teaches that the Jews killed Jesus and Catholicism is a false religion.

The NPB Foundation launched three years ago with public aspirations of transparency and disclosure and impartiality. No more far-right donors like Franklin Graham and poultry billionaire Ronnie Cameron, both bankrollers of The Fellowship.

Three years later, the NPB Foundation has released no information about its funding. Its only known backing, a single donation of $46,800, was disclosed in a tax filing I found by the donor: The Fellowship.

Of course, the biggest problem with both events is their intrinsic nature: The apparent government endorsement of religion.

Huffman, who co-founded the Congressional Freethought Caucus, last year staged the first congressional protest of the Capitol Hill breakfast.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) Action Fund led a coalition of secular and other organizations again this year urging members of Congress not to participate.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State President and CEO Rachel Laser said in a statement on Tuesday:

“The National Prayer Breakfast is deeply problematic because members of Congress are directly involved in hosting a religious event — one that overwhelmingly favors one narrow version of Christianity at the exclusion of all other beliefs. Add a Christian Nationalist organization directing the event from the shadows and President Trump habitually using the platform to launch partisan attacks on his political opponents, and you have an event that corrupts rather than celebrates religious freedom.”

Laser added that “Members of Congress and faith leaders who truly care about protecting freedom of religion, preventing government corruption of religion, and safeguarding our pluralistic democracy should boycott the National Prayer Breakfast.”

Some faith groups also recognize the dangers. After last year’s National Prayer Breakfast, the Interfaith Alliance said in a statement, “the National Prayer Breakfast clearly violates the separation of church and state and does not honor the true spirit of religious freedom. Our elected officials have a civic duty not to hold one religion as more significant than others, as done in the National Prayer Breakfast.”