When the National Prayer Breakfast Goes Off the Rails
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Every year, Washington puts on its Sunday best for the National Prayer Breakfast, a tradition that dates back to 1953 when Eisenhower reluctantly showed up because he owed Billy Graham a favor. Literally. Graham helped swing the evangelical vote for Ike, and the next thing you know, we've got a 74-year-old tradition that every president since has attended, most of Congress shows up to, and foreign leaders (including a couple of dictators) fly in for the vibes.
But let's not pretend this is just about prayer. As journalist Jeff Sharlet documented in The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, the National Prayer Breakfast was created as a recruiting tool by a shadowy Christian organization known publicly as "the Fellowship" and internally as "the Family." The breakfast itself? It's the tip of the iceberg. One-tenth of one percent of their work, by their own description. The rest of the week is a lobbying festival where defense contractors host events, foreign leaders jockey for access to American power, and deals get cut over continental breakfast.
Even longtime conservative religious leader Michael Cromartie (not a lefty, for the record) has called out the event's lack of transparency, acknowledging that people absolutely use it to gain entry to the halls of power.
So with that backdrop, let's talk about what actually happened this year.
Trump's Speech: Same Script, Different Podium
Here's the thing about Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast: it was the same speech he gives everywhere. The man does not adjust for his audience. A former presidential speechwriter noted that the tradition has always been for the president to approach this event with humility. To walk in, be humble, and speak within that context. This administration apparently did not get that memo.
Here's a taste of what he covered at a prayer breakfast:
He referenced his prior comments about not getting into heaven, then clarified that he "probably should make it" because he's done "a hell of a lot of good for perfect people." He criticized Thomas Massie and Rand Paul for their voting records. He reiterated, multiple times, that he's done more for religion than any other person. (More than Jesus? Somebody should ask.) He bragged about the economy, praised the El Salvadoran president (you know, the one who calls himself "the world's coolest dictator"), claimed credit for ending the war in Gaza, declared peace in the Middle East "for the first time in 3,000 years" (historians everywhere felt a disturbance in the Force), bragged about Melania's movie, and even mocked Mike Johnson for wanting to pray before meals.
He also claimed that Bible sales are up more than any time in the past 100 years, which is interesting when you remember he has his own Bible to sell. And he took credit for a 30%, 50%, or even 70% increase in church converts, which is basically the same energy as promising to cut pharmaceutical prices by 1000%. He's just making up numbers.
For the record: there is no comprehensive nationwide data showing a universal 30-70% rise in converts. Pew Research and Gallup polling show long-term declines or stabilization in Christian identification in the U.S. About 30% of Americans attend church weekly, roughly 40% attend at least once a month, and a majority report attending seldom or never. Church attendance isn't collapsing the way it was immediately post-pandemic, but it's not rebounding either.
The one thing he didn't lie about? Young Americans, Gen Z specifically, are attending church at higher rates than before. But that trend has nothing to do with Trump, and it's likely concentrated in evangelical churches rather than progressive ones.
Pete Hegseth: Secretary of War and Apparently Also Secretary of Theology
If Trump's speech was the appetizer of chaos, Hegseth's was the main course.
The Secretary of Defense, who prefers "Secretary of War," because of course he does, got up and declared that America was founded as a Christian nation, that it remains one "in our DNA," and that public officials have a "sacred duty" to glorify God. He also announced that the Pentagon now has a monthly prayer service, which he frames as "spiritual readiness."
Let's sit with that for a second. If you're a service member who isn't Christian — Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, anything else — your boss just told the entire country that your workplace runs on Jesus. That's not spiritual readiness. That's an EEO complaint waiting to happen.
Hegseth based his remarks on Mark 8, the passage where Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ and Jesus tells his disciples that whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for his sake and the gospel's will save it. It's a powerful passage about surrender, self-denial, and following Christ.
Hegseth used it to argue that American soldiers who die in combat gain salvation.
Read that again. He essentially said that dying for the United States is an act of salvation. That the warrior who lays down his life for his unit, his country, and his creator "finds eternal life." This is the kind of rhetoric that echoes what the head of the Russian Orthodox Church has said about soldiers fighting in Ukraine, and what medieval popes told crusaders heading to the Holy Land.
Speaking of crusaders: Hegseth has a "Deus Vult" tattoo, Latin for "God wills it," the rallying cry of the First Crusade. He also referenced George Washington praying at Valley Forge to bolster his argument that the U.S. military has always been the Lord's army. One problem: that story is fake. It's a myth. It's literally the cover art of revisionist Christian history textbooks, and it didn't happen.
He also cited "In God We Trust" as the motto of our great nation, which it is, but it wasn't adopted until 1954. It doesn't come from Washington's time.
This Is Not What Jesus Was Talking About
Here's where we need to pump the brakes, because what Hegseth did with that Mark 8 passage is a textbook example of how Scripture gets weaponized. The passage says "whoever loses his life for *my* sake," Jesus's sake. Hegseth swapped in America. He replaced Jesus with the nation-state and called it theology.
That's not Christianity.
Jesus didn't come to save a nation. The concept of "nation" as we understand it didn't even exist in the way we think about it today. The founding fathers weren't building a Christian theocracy. Many of them were deists who believed in a higher power that set the universe in motion and then stepped back. Jefferson literally cut the miracles out of the Bible. Thomas Paine wrote an entire essay against organized religion. Benjamin Franklin was a deist. From the very earliest days, this country included Jewish people, Muslims, atheists, and people of all kinds of beliefs.
And if you've ever been to Arlington National Cemetery, you already know this. The headstones aren't all crosses. You'll see Stars of David. You'll see crescent moons. The military doesn't ask what you believe before it lets you serve, or before it lets you die.
Prayer Without Action Is Just Performance
There's also the matter of the "America Prays" initiative that launched last fall, urging Americans to dedicate one hour of prayer per week and form prayer groups of 10 or more people in preparation for the nation's 250th anniversary. On its face, there's nothing wrong with encouraging people to pray for their country. But when it comes from an administration that's gutting social programs, deporting people, and cutting off aid, the "thoughts and prayers" energy is hard to ignore.
As James 1:22 puts it: "Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves." James compares someone who hears the word but doesn't act on it to a person who looks in a mirror, walks away, and immediately forgets what they look like. It's a passage about the gap between what you say you believe and what you actually do.
And James 1:26 gets even more pointed: "If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this man's religion is vain." Pure religion, James says, is visiting orphans and widows in their affliction and keeping yourself unstained from the world.
Not building prayer circles at the Pentagon. Not selling Bibles. Not claiming God is on your side while mocking the guy who actually wants to pray before dinner.
The Mirror Test
Micah 6:8 asks the question that should haunt every leader who showed up to that breakfast: "What does the Lord require of you? But to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God."
Justice. Kindness. Humility.
If you watched the National Prayer Breakfast and felt like something was deeply off, trust that feeling. You're not losing your faith. You're paying attention. And silence in the face of this kind of thing isn't neutral. As the old story goes about the German church next to the train tracks: when they could hear the cries coming from the train cars, they just sang louder.
Don't sing louder. Do something.
Be doers of the word. And when you look in the mirror, don't leave your reflection there.