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The nonprofit Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) has sent a letter to Congress and the White House urging a boycott of the National Prayer Breakfast, which is due to be held on Thursday morning this week.
The letter states, in part:
The National Prayer Breakfast is controversial and shrouded in secrecy. It has become a nexus for religious extremism, infiltration by Russian agents, and organized bigotry (anti-LGBTQ and anti-labor). The National Prayer Breakfast is an active marketplace of Christian nationalism, and it is not the bipartisan event that it purports to be.
Every year more members of Congress walk away from the event, including Representatives [Nancy] Pelosi, [Ro] Khanna, [Ann] Kirkpatrick, and [Ted] Lieu. And each year more and more negative stories and well-sourced documentaries about the event continue to surface. The event is framed as a way for all Americans to come together through prayer during times of difficulty and division – but instead it invites division.
This year’s prayer breakfast is being held under new auspices: the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation, controlled by Congress, was established because of concerns about the organization of the event, as Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told the Associated Press:
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The annual event “went on several days, had thousands of people attending, and a very large and somewhat complex organization,” Coons said in an interview. “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.”
The Associated Press also mentioned that past prayer breakfasts had become politically divisive. It mentioned the breakfast in 2020, after President Donald Trump had been acquitted in his first Senate impeachment trial, when he criticized the religious pretensions of Pelosi and others.
President Donald Trump holds up a newspaper with the headline that reads “ACQUITTED” during the 68th annual National Prayer Breakfast, at the Washington Hilton, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)
It did not mention the breakfast in 2015, when President Barack Obama drew a moral equivalence between historic Christianity and the Islamic State’s terror.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
