Trump Secretary of State Pick Is Part of Secret, Global Christian Network
Sen. Marco Rubio has helped the group advance right-wing theocracy in other countries
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), reportedly America’s next top diplomat, has for years been a member of a secretive Christian organization that leverages Washington connections to cultivate right-wing networks around the world.
Reports have named Rubio as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to run the State Department. His diplomatic experience already includes years as an insider at the Fellowship Foundation, aka The Family, which runs the National Prayer Breakfast.
The Fellowship has conducted shadow diplomacy for decades, sometimes with positive outcomes, but more often backing antidemocratic movements and leaders overseas long before the Big Lie, which some Fellowship leaders and right-wing funders also supported.
The State Department has worked with The Fellowship discreetly in the past, especially in pursuit of peace deals. But having one of their own running the entire department would open new doors to boost The Fellowship’s global network and export its ideas about Jesus and The Bible under cover of the U.S. flag.
European groups have warned that The Fellowship uses prayer breakfasts to pull politicians rightward and whittle away LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. For years, the Washington prayer breakfast was secretly bankrolled by Franklin Graham, as I revealed in 2021.
Just last year, The Fellowship paid to fly a member of Congress to Uganda, where he sided with Uganda’s president against global outrage over his new LGBTQ+ death penalty.
Pressed by Congressional Equality Caucus Chair Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), The Fellowship refused to disown the remarks or Uganda’s new law.
There’s no public record of how Rubio first entered The Fellowship. But I’ve pieced together details, including records I’ve obtained, of his connections to Fellowship insiders and his work with Fellowship allies overseas.
Florida Fellowship
Twenty years ago, while Rubio was in the Florida House of Representatives, the chamber’s chaplain got a new volunteer, Tim Perrier. As I reported earlier this month, Perrier wasn’t strictly a volunteer. He had been on The Fellowship’s payroll, backed by unknown donors, as early as 1999.
There’s no record of Perrier and Rubio meeting at the time. But the chaplain’s office hosted weekly prayer sessions and met individually with legislators.
Perrier’s mission is to bring people to Jesus and inject Christianity into everything, including politics.
Now the official Florida House chaplain, Perrier for decades has been connected with and worked on Fellowship events with another Fellowship insider, then-Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), the former Florida state legislator who’s now the administrator of NASA.
And when Rubio went to the U.S. Senate in 2011, he soon became personal friends with Nelson, who’d been active in The Fellowship since as early as 1990.
In 2013, Rubio reportedly addressed a side event at the National Prayer Breakfast. Rubio echoed The Fellowship’s line.
“Everything we do can be worship,” Rubio is reported to have said. “The most important goal is approval from God.”
Rubio had a prime seat at the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast. An internal spreadsheet of seating arrangements lists Rubio’s tablemates:
Right-wing Christian billionaire Phil Anschutz,
Lebanese businessman Neemat Frem, now a member of Parliament, who promotes Christian-Islamic dialogue,
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a longtime Fellowship ally,
Lebanese Christian Chadi Massaad, a Greek Orthodox businessman,
Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, later defrocked as a sexual predator,
Former Kosovo Deputy Prime Minister Slobodan Petrović,
Then-Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR), another longtime Fellowship ally,
Georgian Member of Parliament George Tsereteli, and
Poultry executive Dabbs Cavin.
The Fellowship deceitfully promotes it as a diverse event with guests invited by Congress, but even some of the less-known names are important Fellowship insiders. Cavin, for instance, was president of The Fellowship’s board at the time. He was also a top executive at GOP megadonor Ron Cameron’s poultry company.
(Cameron, a prior member of The Fellowship board, poured millions of dollars into The Fellowship’s work over the years. The year after he and Rubio breakfasted together, Cameron donated thousands to back Rubio’s Senate and presidential efforts.)
Tseretelli, too, has ties to The Fellowship. His invitation to the 2019 National Prayer Breakfast enabled him to hobnob with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
And last year Tseretelli showed up on the itinerary of a trip by Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) and his wife, both longtime Fellowship insiders and crusaders against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. The trip was paid for by The Fellowship.
Even the presence of two Lebanese guests doesn’t reflect the diversity The Fellowship claims. Only eight percent of Lebanon is Greek Orthodox like Massaad.
And ostensibly interfaith groups tied to The Fellowship, like Frem’s, are often vessels for covert Christianity. A spreadsheet for the 2016 breakfast, for instance, identifies one guest as a “collaborator in a ‘Messianic Muslim’ movement.” (Messianic Muslims are closet Christians who publicly identify as Muslim to facilitate their subtle proselytization in majority-Muslim cultures.)
When Rubio and Nelson toured Florida together in 2017 after Hurricane Irma, they visited a small school, Ave Maria University. The school’s chairman, Mike Timmis, had been converted to Christianity by The Fellowship as a young man. He even threw away his heavy metal records, according to Timmis’s father, a rich and prodigious funder of Fellowship work in Uganda.
When Nelson left the Senate, Rubio praised him and alluded to their shared Christian faith.
“I have learned through example, watching him up close,” Rubio said, “that Bill Nelson is a man of the kind of humility that our common faith tries to instill in us.”
That humility hasn’t deterred Rubio from trying to steer the course of other nations.
Rubio has been photographed with The Fellowship’s point man in Ukraine, who was later credited with getting Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to support aid for Ukraine (a scenario I outlined about a week beforehand).
The Fellowship’s Ukrainian point man also told American evangelicals they could shape Ukraine into an evangelical stronghold.
But it was the destruction of an anti-corruption task force in Guatemala — before it could prosecute the evangelical president — where Rubio took a real leadership role.
Decades of evangelization have shifted countries south of the U.S. from Catholicism toward Protestantism. Simultaneously, The Fellowship has woven networks interlacing big business, Christianity, and government.
One result: Corruption and lawlessness that have benefited drug cartels and wealthy elites, causing untold numbers of emigrants to flee their home countries for the United States.
Few are likely aware of the secretive Christian network behind the worsening conditions in their country.
An Evangelical President, Suspected of Corruption
In Guatemala, a UN anti-corruption task force was widely credited with improving things, and wildly popular with the people and even U.S. politicians of both parties.
That lasted until the task force turned its attention to Pres. Jimmy Morales, investigating whether Morales broke campaign-finance laws.
Morales, an evangelical, got elected with the help of monied elites, including some in the growing Christian network cultivated and nurtured by The Fellowship and its U.S. politicians. Some were shady.
I wrote about this a couple years ago, documenting how The Fellowship, aided by Rubio and others, methodically demolished bipartisan U.S. support for the UN task force until Morales felt emboldened enough to drive it out of the country.
The key player was The Fellowship’s man on the ground in Guatemala, Manuel Espina, son of a disgraced evangelical politician. The Fellowship rehabilitated him by connecting him with powerful Americans.
In 2013, for instance, Espina was a guest at Rubio’s residence in Washington, according to a Facebook post by Espina’s prayer breakfast organization. Other guests included Fellowship insider then-Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK).
Another photo, posted online some time before Sept. 28, 2017, shows Espina and Morales with Rubio at a private meeting with other Fellowship insiders. A source close to The Fellowship told me that the photo was taken at C Street, The Fellowship’s Washington townhouse where members of Congress live, pray, and hang out.
Illustrating the intertwining of Fellowship and State Department, the C Street picture was posted online by The Fellowship’s lead liaison to Guatemala, a Tennessee Chick-fil-A franchisee who was Guatemala’s honorary consul, complete with State Department recognition.
(His name was Tim Burchfield, and he played an overlooked part in the scandal around Russian operative Maria Butina. The Biden State Department refused to release details about Burchfield.)
Guatemalan business interests with ties to Espina lobbied Rubio and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) for help against both the U.S. ambassador and the UN task force.
A source who knew Espina for years said he was friends with Rubio, Lee and a third Fellowship insiders, Sen. Jim Lankford (R-OK).
Using Espina’s nickname, “Meme,” the source said that, “There was a friendship between Meme with Marco Rubio. They have a friendship from before and obviously Manuel used all of these friends to make this famous lobby [against the UN task force] before. I think Lankford was the other senator, and obviously with [Lee] from Utah.”
Rubio, Lankford, and Lee had secretly met with Morales and Espina at the C Street townhouse before Espina even became ambassador. Then the three Fellowship insiders spearheaded an attack on the UN enemies of their prayer partners.
All three sat on the Helsinki Commission, which decided to look into baseless allegations against the UN task force. Rubio issued a statement backing the Helsinki Commission’s efforts, but the lies ultimately fell flat. They were so blatant that Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo shot them down.
But they still gave Rubio, with Lee’s backing, enough ammunition to freeze the task force’s U.S. funding — $6 million, more than a third of its budget.
When Trump moved America’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, in line with evangelical wishes, Guatemala was one of the few countries to back him. Rubio spotlighted the efforts of Espina and Morales, saying he was “pleased that … countries like Guatemala … announced their intention to move their embassies as well.”
At some point, Guatemala’s maneuvering and Espina’s connections allowed him to get Jared Kushner, then a top White House adviser, to a $5,000 dinner.
With the U.S. now in Morales’s corner, Morales felt confident enough to banish the UN task force from the country in late 2018, before it could make a case against him.
Two months later, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), a reliable ally of The Fellowship, introduced Espina at the 2019 National Prayer Breakfast.
Coons praised Espina’s father, omitting that awkward 1990s antidemocratic power grab. “Perhaps most importantly today,” Coons said, Espina “is the sponsor of the National Prayer Breakfast of Guatemala.”
With the task force gone, even Guatemalan prosecutors fled the country. One was a presidential candidate, but with her out of the way, another religious hardliner was elected.
After Rubio won re-election in 2022, Guatemala’s new president congratulated his “dear friend,” saying, “Let us continue our excellent collaboration.”
More recently, The Fellowship has had a major — and some would say more positive — impact on Ukraine. Rubio’s connections there don’t appear as strong, but The Fellowship’s agenda, virtually unreported, is similar to its goals for Guatemala.
Turning Ukraine Evangelical
One of Ukraine’s evangelical leaders has an outsize footprint in U.S.-Ukrainian relations. That’s apparently thanks to his Fellowship connections, which now include Rubio.
The Ukrainian leader is former Member of Parliament Pavlo Unguryan. I’ve written about him on and off for years, initially due to his role as an active leader in the fight to deny LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights in Ukraine — bolstering his allies with invites to the DC prayer breakfast.
Since Russia’s invasion, Unguryan has been lobbying U.S. politicians, abetted by his Fellowship connections. He’s also tempted American evangelicals with the promise of remaking Ukraine in their god’s image.
By any measure, Unguryan’s been spectacularly successful.
American evangelical leaders and Republican allies of Ukraine credit Unguryan with leading Speaker Johnson to approve the $61 billion military funding package.
And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has quietly, subtly, aligned himself with Unguryan and his partners, who hold the priceless relationships with American evangelical politicians.
I’ve written about that, too, and the role of Fellowship insiders working with Unguryan, including Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) and other Democrats. Rubio’s name hasn’t come up, but it appears there are some ties there.
Rubio and Unguryan appear together in a 2023 Facebook photo, apparently at the Capitol during a DC trip by Unguryan. Other photos in the same post show Unguryan with Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and two Christian extremists from the Trump administration: Former Vice Pres. Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Unguryan wasn’t the only Ukrainian connecting with Rubio. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, accused of aiding Russia, paid to lobby Rubio for help, in the face of Zelenskyy’s crackdowns.
But Unguryan had a Rubio veteran on his side.
Gary Marx, who heads the group Defenders of Faith and Religious Freedom in Ukraine, reportedly helped make Unguryan’s meeting with Johnson happen.
Marx is a former advisor to Rubio’s presidential campaign and a veteran of the right-wing Judicial Crisis Network. This summer, Marx attended Ukraine’s first National Prayer Breakfast.
The picture of Rubio and Unguryan was posted by an American evangelical named Damian Williams. He posted that Unguryan brought a group together in Washington to make “plans for Ukraine's rebuild across the mountains of influence.”
That’s a reference to the so-called Seven Mountains of Influence, in which religion — evangelical Christianity — defines all human endeavors, including politics. Williams is a believer.
Unguryan nodded in a 2022 interview when Williams said their national citizenships are secondary to their religion.
“We’re very clear that our primary citizenship is kingdom of God, that we are working together across all nations to advance the kingdom of God.”
Williams also noted that, “When there’s a prayer breakfast in America, we don’t always pray, but we network.”
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Very very bad situation. Thanks. Shout it out