Prayer and Politics

Prayer is part of the politics of Washington. The famous National Prayer Breakfast has been taking place since 1953. President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama attended the breakfast this morning.

Although the National Prayer Breakfast is hosted by members of the U.S. Congress, some groups had asked President Obama not to attend the breakfast this year. The prayer breakfast is organized by the Fellowship Foundation which is a secretive, Washington, D.C.-based, conservative Christian organization known as The Family. "The Fellowship" or "The Family" has been linked to the introduction of legislation in Uganda that would sentence homosexuals and people who are HIV-positive to death.

Apparently the Ugandan President Museveni is a member of The Family. Jeff Sharlet, author of the bestseller "The Family," has been investigating this link for years. Sharlet spoke of the connection in an interview with Terry Gross from NPR.

GROSS: This legislation has just been proposed. It hasn't been signed into law. So it's not in effect yet and it might never be in effect. But it's on the table. It's before parliament. So is there a direct connection between The Family and this proposed anti-homosexual legislation in Uganda?

Mr. SHARLET: Well, the legislator that introduced the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of The Family. He appears to be a core member of The Family. He works, he organizes their Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which The Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda.

GROSS: So you're reporting the story for the first time today, and you found this story - this direct connection between The Family and the proposed legislation by following the money?

Mr. SHARLET: Yes, it's - I always say that The Family is secretive, but not secret. You can go and look at 990s, tax forms and follow the money through these organizations that The Family describe as invisible. But you go and you look. You follow that money. You look at their archives. You do interviews where you can. It's not so invisible anymore. So that's how working with some research colleagues we discovered that David Bahati, the man behind this legislation, is really deeply, deeply involved in The Family's work in Uganda, that the ethics minister of Uganda, Museveni's kind of right-hand man, a guy named Nsaba Buturo, is also helping to organize The Family's National Prayer Breakfast. And here's a guy who has been the main force for this Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda's executive office and has been very vocal about what he's doing, in a rather extreme and hateful way. But these guys are not so much under the influence of The Family. They are, in Uganda, The Family.

According to Center for Media and Democracy, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) had asked President Obama not to attend this year's National Prayer Breakfast.

The Fellowship has also designed the prayer breakfast to have the appearance of a government-sanctioned event; Sharlet says the event "appears to the world to be an official function of the federal government," and reports that when he attended the National Prayer Breakfast in 2003, he obtained his press credentials through the White House.

The Fellowship also operates the C Street House, a Congressional residence for which The Family illegally escaped paying taxes on the building by claiming it was church instead of a rooming house.

The Huffington Post notes that CREW believes The Fellowship is cult-like:

The group, Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, lashed out at the fundamentalist Fellowship Foundation, which has organized the breakfast with presidents and prominent Washington and world leaders since 1953.

"The National Prayer Breakfast uses the suggested imprimatur of the elected leaders who attend to give the Fellowship greater credibility and facilitate its networking and fundraising," CREW director Melanie Sloan said in a statement. "The president and members of Congress should not legitimatize this cult-like group -- the head of which has praised the organizing abilities of Hitler and Bin Laden -- by attending the breakfast."

The White House confirmed to the Huffington Post that Obama plans to attend the breakfast, scheduled for Thursday, but had no response to CREW's letter. The Fellowship is closely connected to the now-notorious C Street House near the Capitol -- essentially a dorm for ethically-troubled Republicans.

"For those who have been housed in or sought refuge at C Street House," says Sloan's letter, "a shocking pattern of unethical behavior has emerged, sparking public outrage. For example Senator John Ensign (R-NV), who lived in the house, is being investigated by the FBI and the Senate Select Committee on Ethics for events surrounding an affair he had with a former campaign staffer and his efforts to cover up that affair by helping her husband, his former chief-of-staff, become a lobbyist in violation of federal law."

The letter also mentions ethical troubles for C Street House guests Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), and Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.).

Today President Obama did attend the prayer breakfast and among his comments he mentioned the intolerable attitude against gays in the US as well as in Uganda.

We may disagree about gay marriage, but surely we can agree that it is unconscionable to target gays and lesbians for who they are -- whether it's here in the United States or, as Hillary mentioned, more extremely in odious laws that are being proposed most recently in Uganda.

President Obama also spoke about the need for civility.

But there is a sense that something is different now; that something is broken; that those of us in Washington are not serving the people as well as we should. At times, it seems like we're unable to listen to one another; to have at once a serious and civil debate. And this erosion of civility in the public square sows division and distrust among our citizens. It poisons the well of public opinion. It leaves each side little room to negotiate with the other. It makes politics an all-or-nothing sport, where one side is either always right or always wrong when, in reality, neither side has a monopoly on truth. And then we lose sight of the children without food and the men without shelter and the families without health care. Empowered by faith, consistently, prayerfully, we need to find our way back to civility.

Now, I am the first to confess I am not always right. Michelle will testify to that. But surely you can question my policies without questioning my faith, or, for that matter, my citizenship.

It is this spirit of civility that we are called to take up when we leave here today. That's what I'm praying for. I know in difficult times like these -- when people are frustrated, when pundits start shouting and politicians start calling each other names -- it can seem like a return to civility is not possible, like the very idea is a relic of some bygone era. The word itself seems quaint -- civility.

Because of the political divide and the divisive tone of Congress, President Obama really couldn't protest this prayer breakfast. For if he did, the GOP, the Christian Right, the Whollier-Than-Thous would have screamed and yelled that Obama is not a 'Christian'. That is how far we have deviated from the doctrine of Separation of Church and State.

The issue isn't that he attended the prayer breakfast. The issue is what he felt he needed to say at the prayer breakfast.

I come here to speak about the ways my faith informs who I am -- as a President, and as a person. But I'm also here for the same reason that all of you are, for we all share a recognition -- one as old as time -- that a willingness to believe, an openness to grace, a commitment to prayer can bring sustenance to our lives.

His statement speaks volumes about how far to the right President Obama feels he needs to go to appease the religious fervor of this country.

Religion - Not a Laughing Matter

Via AlterNet, remember the days when Al Franken used his humor to make a point. In the video below is Al Franken's animated comic strip, "Gospel of Supply-Side Jesus."

We can laugh at Franken's "Supply-Side Jesus."

But what is not a laughable matter is an article by Adele M. Stan at AlterNet entitled, Meet the Senators in the Creepy Right-Wing Cult Trying to Defeat Health Care Reform. This is an in depth look into the Republican Senators and Representatives of Congress who are members of a right-wing religious cult known as The Family.

You could chalk it up to nothing more than pure partisanship, this obstructionism on the part of these Republicans. Or you could say that the ideology-cum-theology of The Family, which has spent decades consolidating power within the GOP, has at last come to dominate the party even among those who do not belong to the cult. [...]

The people of South Carolina, Oklahoma, Iowa, Nevada, Kansas and Wyoming find themselves represented by at least one U.S. senator who belongs to The Family. If he subscribes to the theology of the cult of which he is a member, the senator believes himself to be anointed to his lofty position by Jesus himself -- a Jesus who tells him that his constituents' health care dilemmas are of no consequence to God; they are just the natural order of things as deemed by him.

The Jesus worshiped by The Family is neither Jesus the peacemaker, the champion of the poor, nor even Christ the personal savior. He is Jesus the power broker, who works his will through well-situated men committed to free enterprise of a most unregulated sort.

The Family members believe that God is all powerful and all controlling.

Things are as they are in the world because that's the way God wants them. The poor are poor because God ordained it to be so -- a condition that they may have earned through disobedience to the creator. The powerful are powerful -- be they murderous dictators or corporate polluters -- because they are God's chosen. Any regulated economic system, according to this theology, is less than godly, because regulation forestalls the exercise of free will.

Who are the Representatives and Senators in Congress who are members of The Family?

In the Senate members include: Sens. Charles Grassley [R-IA]; Sen. Jim DeMint [R-SC]; Sen. Tom Coburn [R-OK]; Sen. John Ensign [R-NV]; Sen. James Inhofe, [R-OK].

In the House of Representatives members include: Mike Enzi [R-WY]; Zach Wamp [R-TN]; Joe Pitts [R-PN]; and Frank Wolf [R-VA].

Government regulation is not acceptable!

There appear to be only two decipherable things about the God of The Family: his unyielding disdain for government regulation of any kind and his demand for obedience to that notion.

The Family's notion of free-market capitalism...any attempt to regulate a market means you're messing with God. This doctrine is known, in The Family's language, as "Biblical capitalism."

And so government services, by this doctrine, are against God's will; they interfere with God's markets, skewing values and disturbing the natural order of things, just as a public health-insurance plan would do to the current insurance industry. Having been exempt from anti-trust law since 1946, the health-insurance business must be as close to godly perfection as one can get, in the minds of The Family's key men.

And what of the poor and suffering, the health care-related defaults on mortgages that claim 60 percent of all home foreclosures? What of those who have no health insurance? They are simply not among the anointed. Or worse, according to a report commissioned by The Family, the cause of their poverty, the cause of all poverty, is "disobedience."

Is healthcare a privilege or a right?

South Carolina's DeMint told a reporter from his hometown newspaper, the Charleston Post and Courier, "I think health care is a privilege. I wouldn't call it a right. ..." On the House side, Family member Zach Wamp of Tennessee told MSNBC's Tameron Hall virtually the same thing in March: "Health care is a privilege."

One issue which has arisen in this healthcare debate is whether Senators and Representatives should read the legislation before they vote on it.

Sen James Inhofe, [R-OK] seemed untroubled by that dilemma: his religion would appear to demand that he oppose health care reform as a matter of principle.

As a government disruption of God's free markets, the very concept, by The Family's reckoning, is an abomination. At an August town-hall meeting, Inhofe told residents of Chickasha, Okla., according to the Express-Star of Grady County, that "he does not need to read the 1,000-page health care reform bill, he will simply vote against it." Inhofe explained: "I don't have to read it, or know what's in it. I'm going to oppose it anyways."

Appearing on C-SPAN's Washington Journal last month, Inhofe was asked by a caller to explain what bearing, if any, his religion had on his politics. "I'm a follower of Jesus," he said, "and I’m not embarrassed about it."

Other members of the Family have been in the news lately regarding other issues.

South Carolina Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, who disappeared for five days in August, ostensibly hiking the Appalachian Trail while actually visiting his Argentine mistress, and former Rep. Chip Pickering, R-La., whose affair led his wife to sue his alleged mistress for loss of affection. [...]

While the apparent hypocrisy of fallen, self-righteous prudes will grab the spotlight every time, The Family's other scandals -- its cozy relationships with despots around the world, its embrace of big business at the expense of the poor, its reinvention of Jesus as a figure contraindicated by his teachings -- should be of far greater concern to the rest of us. Especially when one considers the group's longevity and its extraordinary power.