This month marks an annual Christian Nationalist ritual in service of the blatantly false claim that America was founded as a Christian nation: a nakedly political prayer breakfast in the nation’s capital. Known as the National Prayer Breakfast, the event for most of its 73-year history has been the result of an unholy alliance between government officials and a secretive Christian Nationalist organization known as The Fellowship, or The Family.
The COVID pandemic and a series of scandals and bad press forced a temporary schism that led to members of Congress and a new nonprofit called the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation hosting a scaled-back breakfast on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol for a few years. While AU celebrated the apparent diminishment of The Family’s role in the event, having members of Congress host a religious event – one that was dominated by one narrow version of Christianity – in the seat of American government was still a major church-state separation problem.
The Family continued to host its version of the National Prayer Breakfast at a Washington, D.C., hotel. This year, members of Congress helping to organize the National Prayer Breakfast announced the two events will merge back together – with the implication that The Family is liking running the show from the shadows once again (if it ever really stopped).
In addition, a third, parallel Christian Nationalist event – the National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance – formed and continues to take place. Co-founded by the Christian Nationalist Family Research Council and affiliated with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), the Gathering is “without ecumenical or bipartisan fig leaves,” in the words of journalist Jonathan Larsen, who has reported extensively on the National Prayer Breakfast and The Family for the progressive news site The Young Turks and for his own Substack newsletters.
The Gathering event returns today to the National Museum of the Bible – deemed “a safe place for Christian Nationalists” by author and AU Trustee Katherine Stewart. Evangelical conveners of last year’s Gathering prayed “for America’s sins,” even as they rejoiced over the election of Donald Trump as president for a second term.
“We are profoundly grateful for God’s mercy” in placing Trump back in the White House in 2024, Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, proclaimed. In Trump, God “has granted us hope and the opportunity to advance His truth.”
More correctly, these February prayer breakfast events have a long history of celebrating and advancing Christian Nationalists’ systemic assaults on truth.
The beginnings of today’s National Prayer Breakfast and corollary National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance took place against the backdrop of Americans’ fears of communism in the post-World War II era – fears stoked by a popular young Baptist evangelist by the name of Billy Graham.
Shortly after the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bond, Graham in September 1949 in Los Angeles opened the first of what would be many massive evangelical crusade rallies across America. Day after day speaking to packed crowds in LA, Graham wove together a mythological narrative. “Western culture and its fruits had its foundations in the Bible, the Word of God, and in the revivals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” he declared.
In reality, western culture began in ancient Greece, while America’s modern western founding culture and documents were shaped by Enlightenment principles rather than religious revivals or ideology.
Condemning communism “as a war against Almighty God,” Graham began a national crusade to make America Christian. In early 1952 he led a charge to scrub from history the nation’s secular founding by calling upon Congress to declare America a Christian nation. “What a thrilling, glorious thing it would be,” he proclaimed at a rally in the nation’s capital, “to see the leaders of our country today kneeling before Almighty God in prayer. What a thrill would sweep this country. What renewed hope and courage would grip the Americans at this hour of peril.”
Fearful of communism and pressured by Graham’s national popularity, legislators quickly pushed history aside and embraced the evangelist’s mythological narrative. On April 17, 1952, President Harry S. Truman signed a bill proclaiming an annual National Day of Prayer. Public Law 82-324 read: “Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the President shall set aside and proclaim a suitable day each year, other than Sunday, as a National Day of Prayer, on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals.”
Truman subsequently proclaimed July 4, 1952, a National Day of Prayer, though it was not a formal event. The following year on Thursday, Feb. 5, the first organized National Day of Prayer, spearheaded by Graham and presided over by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower – then a mere two weeks into his presidency – included a Presidential Prayer Breakfast.
During the breakfast event, themed “Government Under God,” Eisenhower proclaimed, “all free government is firmly founded in a deeply felt religious faith.” With that statement and Graham’s advocacy, a concentrated effort to tear down the “wall of separation” between church and state – that, ironically, early Baptists in Rhode Island called for and later the nation’s founders enacted federally – began.
“Government Under God” quickly became lasting federal government language: one year later federal legislation added “Under God” to the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance, and three years later still the wording “In God We Trust” was imprinted on the nation’s currency.
Remaining a rallying point for dismantling America’s constitutional secular democracy and church-state separation, the Christian Nationalist National Prayer Breakfast and National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance continue to demand government under God – a theocracy.
AU President and CEO Rachel Laser denounced the event: “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.
“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 and instead join Americans United’s call for a national recommitment to church-state separation,” Laser added. “As America’s founders knew, the separation of religion and government is the only true guarantee of religious freedom.”
Photo: From left, televangelist Paula White-Cain from the White House Faith Office, President Donald Trump, and U.S. Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.) at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2025. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
