The National Prayer Breakfast was held yesterday but with major changes. Instead of members of Congress and the President joining a thousand people who mostly want something from them in a hotel ballroom, the participants held the breakfast in the Capitol and the thousand influence peddlers were across town in the hotel ballroom, watching the President on C-Span. About a third of those attendees come from other countries for the event, for some reason. 

As Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) said, “Some questions had been raised about our ability as members of Congress to say that we knew exactly how it was being organized, who was being invited, how it was being funded. Many of us who’d been in leadership roles really couldn’t answer those questions.” Those questions have been coming from the secular community for years. The public pressure and the growing number of members of Congress choosing not to attend forced these changes. Thanks to everyone who used SCA’s Action Alert to ask their members not to attend this year. 

Much of the funding for the event has been coming from Franklin Graham, opponent of LGBTQ rights, supporter of conversion therapy, who said,  “I can tell you right now, everybody in that room has the same agenda. They’re wanting to be able to rub elbows with somebody that they normally couldn’t rub elbows with.” But without the direct access to lawmakers now, that lobby-fest is coming to an end. It will be interesting to see how many people show up at that hotel ballroom next year. And the new organization running the Breakfast in place of the secretive group known as The Fellowship will not accept donations from Franklin Graham. 

All this is not to say that everything is fine. There should be no National Prayer Breakfast in the Capitol. This blatantly violates the idea of separation of religion and government. Now, 99 percent of members of Congress say they are religious, and many of them are serious about it. It’s like they say about school prayer: there will always be prayer in school as long as there are math tests. There will be prayer in the Capitol as well, but members of Congress could just do it privately instead of turning it into an annual event. Bottom line: they have more important things to do. We will continue to ask members not to attend in the future. We can get a bigger win.

Speaking of gathering in a hotel, that’s what SCA is doing this weekend; the executive directors of the 21 member organizations are attending SCA’s annual meeting. We have speakers on Christian nationalism, the Coalition’s legal and advocacy work, and more. The most important part of the weekend is probably the opportunity for these secular leaders to meet with each other in person and learn from one another.  But with absolutely no foreign influencers and no lobbying.