Even as the concept of “bipartisanship” has become as antiquated as the spittoons on the Senate floor, there’s one place on Capitol Hill where Republicans and Democrats are still getting together and getting along: the weekly prayer breakfast.
Every Wednesday when the Senate is in session, lawmakers hold a closed-door meeting on the first floor of the Capitol to eat, pray and talk. For about an hour, they discuss their families and their struggles. They pray for each other. Sometimes they even sing. Everyone is welcome — any and all denominations.
“It’s one of my favorite things,” Sen. John Boozman told NOTUS. “Every week, I make my resolutions for the week, it’s usually at the top.”
Some form of this Senate prayer breakfast has met since the 1950s, with House lawmakers holding their own gathering. In the upper chamber, it’s strictly senators-only, with the exception of the Senate’s chaplain, the Rev. Barry Black, who helps lead the breakfast.
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Over the years, the Wednesday gathering has ebbed and flowed in size, but these days, there’s about a half-dozen regular attendees from each party. And every senator who talked to NOTUS about the prayer breakfast said it is unlike anything else in their legislative lives.
“It’s a place which is very much bipartisan in nature,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, who spoke fondly of the breakfast and a separate Tuesday Bible study. “It’s a healthy place to be.”
Because it’s the Senate, the prayer breakfast of course sticks closely to procedure. The rule that helps keep it bipartisan is that the speaker of the week alternates between a Democrat and a Republican. And for each Congress, there’s a Democrat or Republican “convener” for the group.
“The only responsibility is to recruit the speakers to keep us scrupulously bipartisan,” Sen. Tim Kaine, who served as the Democratic convener a decade ago, told NOTUS. “Sometimes, depending on the week, and everybody’s got stuff going on, there might be more Rs, more Ds, but the one thing we always do is we alternate in terms of who the speaker is each week.”
Members of Congress have always been very religious, and historically, very Christian. At the moment, 86 senators out of 100 refer to themselves as Christians, though that represents a number of denominations.
Over the last decade, however, as Christians have become more sharply divided over politics, the Capitol hasn’t been spared from that politicization.
On Jan. 6, 2021, rioters carried crosses, Bibles, “Appeal to Heaven” flags and signs saying “Jesus Saves” to the Capitol. Christian Democrats have also touted their religion in opposing Donald Trump and the GOP’s policies. As Republicans debated their reconciliation bill in late June, a group of faith leaders blocked the street outside the Capitol to pray and protest the legislation, which cut Medicaid and food benefit programs. They said their Christian faith compelled them to speak up for the “poor and the least of these.” (They were arrested.)
But the senators who regularly attend the prayer breakfast swear it’s a genuinely bipartisan affair.
Democratic Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand is a regular attendee. She also goes to the Tuesday Bible study and another Bible study on Thursday. And, according to her, she is the only member who attends all three events every week. Gillibrand said the events are an important way to build relationships across the aisle, and also serve as a moral and spiritual anchor.
“When I have my faith top of mind, it really centers me. It centers my work,” Gillibrand told NOTUS. “It allows me to focus on what’s most important. It’s just a very good discipline for me to always remind myself why I’m here and why the work that I do matters.”
Gillibrand said the atmosphere at the studies has not changed in light of external political tensions within the church or the chamber. She’s usually the only Democrat at the Tuesday Bible study, which is a “rigorous” examination of scripture led by Capitol Ministries, an organization that leads similar study groups with lawmakers around the country. The Thursday gathering is also led by Black, with about five to seven senators from both parties usually in attendance.
“It’s always been very collaborative and positive, and it allows, certainly me, to form very positive relationships with my Senate colleagues,” Gillibrand said.
Another regular attendee of the prayer breakfast, Sen. Tim Scott, said in a statement that the weekly gatherings are a reminder of his mother’s teaching that “prayer is the foundation for everything.”
“The moments of prayer and fellowship, led by Reverend Dr. Barry Black and shared with senators from both sides of the aisle, ground me and remind me why I serve,” Scott said.
When Sens. James Lankford and Chris Coons were co-conveners of the weekly meetings and co-chairs of the National Prayer Breakfast in 2018 and 2019, they spoke with the media at length about the importance of the weekly meetings.
Lankford told Time that it makes “an enormous difference” to be able to go beyond politics during the prayer breakfasts. “Tell me about your family, tell me about your own personal faith journey, how did you grow up, the context, the worldview that you really see things through,” Lankford said.
Coons, for his part, wrote in a Yale University magazine that when the group meets on Wednesdays, they “don’t talk about policy, and we definitely don’t talk about politics.”
“Instead,” Coons wrote, “we talk about who we are beyond the clipped, cable news biographies written about us. We talk about our fears, our hopes, our challenges, and our families, not as legislators or politicians, but as people.”
“The Senate Prayer Breakfast,” Coons added, “is about seeing each other as more than a Democrat from Delaware or a Republican from Oklahoma (as my breakfast co-chair, Sen. James Lankford, might be described on cable TV).”
But there is one senator who you may think would be part of the prayer breakfast who is usually not: the Rev. Raphael Warnock.
Warnock told NOTUS in late July that he’s “been by” the Bible study, but “it’s not something I’ve been able to attend regularly.”
While Warnock said that was mostly over scheduling reasons, he mentioned that he questions the Christian convictions of some of his Republican colleagues — something he openly did on the Senate floor in June when he urged GOP lawmakers to “defend the rights of the poor and needy” in the reconciliation bill.
“Some of my colleagues that have shared the same scriptures should have some more conversations,” Warnock told NOTUS. “And, you know, no one owns the truth, but humbly, I wonder sometimes how people’s sense of faith drives some of the public policy decisions.”
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