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The most visible event for Fellowship participants is the National Prayer Breakfast. The annual gathering was launched by the late Senator Frank Carlson of Kansas, who talked President Eisenhower into being host of the first one in 1953. President Bush, a regular Episcopal churchgoer, will hold his initial prayer breakfast this week. It will be attended by some 4,000 people, including ranking officials from all branches of Government, plus diplomats and clergy, who will join in a 90-minute round of prayer and testimonials at a Washington hotel. (At one such session in the Reagan era, former Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin surprised fellow guests by joining them in a hearty rendition of the hymn How Great Thou Art.)
Though it is a solidly rooted Washington tradition, the National Prayer Breakfast does have its critics. Some Fundamentalists thought interfaith amity was stretched too far last year, when Saudi Arabia's Ambassador recited from the Qur'an. Hatfield complains that the breakfast has become a status symbol and "a ceremony of civil religion." He has introduced a Senate motion to abolish the affair. Many foreign observers find the whole phenomenon of Potomac piety somewhat disconcerting. "It is incomprehensible to most Europeans," sniffs a British diplomat. "It's almost as bad as Freemasonry."
Since the rise of the religious right, the semisecret involvement of so many high-powered names inevitably encourages conspiracy theories about evangelical political designs. But, in fact, the movement crosses partisan lines and remains rigorously nonpolitical. "There is a religious right that is very prominent, just as there was a very activist religious left in the '60s," says Don Bonker, a liberal Democrat from Washington State who just gave up his House seat for an unsuccessful Senate run. "But the prayer movement doesn't get into political matters. If it did, I wouldn't be involved." When it comes to politics, those who pray together do not necessarily stay together.