Blackburn Took Controversial Pastor to National Prayer Breakfast

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Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), now running for governor of Tennessee, invited a Southern Baptist Convention leader to the National Prayer Breakfast just after he was publicly accused of shrugging off sexual abuse in the church.

Blackburn’s guest would later resign from Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leadership after his adulterous relationship was revealed.

For years, Blackburn has been involved in the annual breakfast and the weekly prayer breakfasts in Congress, all organized by the secretive, right-wing Fellowship Foundation. Better known as The Family — also the title of the book and Netflix series about the group — The Fellowship uses its breakfasts to build right-wing political networks around the globe.

Blackburn has been a part of that effort and yet is seldom pressed about her Fellowship ties or the people she meets with, unmediated and unreported, under the shadowy penumbra of Fellowship events.

In 2016, the same year Russian operatives attended the National Prayer Breakfast to pursue right-wing connections, Blackburn invited SBC Executive Committee President Frank Page and his wife, Dayle, to attend.

Fellowship records I obtained show that they were Blackburn’s only guests that year. Both Blackburn and the Pages attended the breakfast but not the lunch or other, ancillary activities.

Two years later, Page announced his retirement. Then, on the same day, he announced that he was actually resigning, not retiring, because he’d been caught in a “recent” adulterous affair.

Blackburn presumably knew nothing about it. But it’s likely she knew about Page’s controversial handling of abuse claims years before she invited him.

Blackburn’s House district at the time included Nashville, home of the SBC headquarters. Nashville media covered the SBC scandal. Page was the SBC president at the time.

In 2007, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said it had received 40 complaints about SBC abuse in the prior six months, with some allegations dating back years.

Page said the SBC would teach individual churches to do better screening, but that the national leadership was powerless to do more.

In the years following, stories came out about individual victims reporting dismissiveness from Page, which he denied, as he and others refused to take steps that might help identify and stop SBC predators.

In 2008, Page endorsed an SBC report that rejected the idea of creating an SBC database, because local churches couldn’t be forced to report abusers. (It later turned out that SBC leadership had a list of their own, but didn’t use it.)

Page also told the media that anyone doubting the SBC commitment to fighting abuse had only to note that the SBC webpage linked to information about abuse.

Details about Page’s internal response would continue to come out even after Blackburn invited Page and his wife to the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast.

The day before the event, Blackburn said on the House floor that:

“I want to welcome my guests, Dr. and Mrs. Franklin Page, who will join us this week to recognize this time and to set aside time to celebrate our religious liberty and the individual freedom that becomes the focus of this week.”

That’s not actually what the National Prayer Breakfast is supposed to be about, even according to its own literature. But The Fellowship and its right-wing allies — and Page was very much a conservative — have weaponized the concept of “religious liberty” to leverage religious privileges, legal exemptions from laws other people have to follow.

And Blackburn has been in step with The Fellowship for more than a decade.

In 2009, Politico profiled The Fellowhip’s Capitol Hill townhouse, known as C Street. Blackburn was involved, she told Politico when she was still in the House of Representatives, but honored The Fellowship’s penchant for secrecy. Politico reported:

Members of both houses [of Congress] also participate in outside prayer groups and Bible study sessions. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said she attends a weekly Wednesday morning breakfast with several other congresswomen from both sides of the aisle. She said the meeting is off campus, but that’s all she would say.

That same year, journalist Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family, included Blackburn in a list of officials “under the Family’s religio-political counsel.”

She’s also a recurring participant in The Fellowship’s annual prayer breakfast. I obtained internal Fellowship documents for three years worth of guest lists. Blackburn attended in 2015 and 2016, both times without her husband, but didn’t attend in 2018.

The Pages are the only guests she invited.

Blackburn has remained active in recent years, including with the smaller, Capitol Hill prayer breakfast spinoff. She was listed, for instance, as part of the 2022 prayer breakfast’s ostensible “Honorary Senate Committee” that doesn’t actually exist in the Senate but gives The Fellowship an official-seeming imprimatur.

In 2023, constrained by new rules limiting who you could bring as a guest, Blackburn took a nonprofit leader who restores Appalachian homes.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn@MarshaBlackburn

My guest for the National Prayer Breakfast today is Walter Crouch, an East Tennessee native and CEO of @AppServProject.   The Appalachia Service Project convenes tens of thousands of volunteers every year to repair and rebuild homes throughout Central Appalachia.

7:17 PM · Feb 2, 2023 · 9.68K Views

22 Replies · 14 Reposts · 145 Likes

Blackburn didn’t set aside religious radicalism entirely at the 2023 breakfast, however, meeting afterward with Kari Lake, who wasn’t supposed to be there. As I reported, the office of Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) said he brought Lake even though she wasn’t a constituent because Jesus hadn’t checked her address.

Historically, the prayer breakfast has been more about the networking than the praying or the breakfasting. That’s evidenced in the 2015 Fellowship document I obtained.

The spreadsheet included table assignments, providing a snapshot of just how politically unbalanced the guest lists are. Blackburn was seated with tablemates including one mainstream Washington power broker, Sally Quinn, but also a hodgepodge of unfamous Fellowship associates, allies, and prospects from near and far, all on the right.

Bernold Glaser, a wealthy Australian businessman, shared Blackburn’s table. So did right-wing Croatian politician Tomislav Karamarko. Tennessee Republican leader Tommy Vallejos was also seated alongside Blackburn.

Vallejos was a Blackburn supporter in her 2018 Senate campaign, the Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle reported. Vallejos also participated in a Blackburn campaign roundtable on Hispanic issues.

But perhaps Blackburn’s most interesting breakfast partner that day in 2015 was Paul Lavelle.

In addition to sitting with Blackburn at the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast, the following year Lavelle participated in a Fellowship “breakout session” during which he met a Minnesota pillow salesman. Lavelle was good enough to speak with me about these events a few years ago.

I had reached out to Lavelle because that pillow salesman was Mike Lindell. And as I later reported. the National Prayer Breakfast and Lavelle were a big part of how Lindell became what he is today. It was Lavelle who got Lindell to do his surrender to Jesus just two years after the breakfast and has remained involved in Lindell’s various fringe movements.

This is the world into which Blackburn brought the scandal-ridden president of the Southern Baptist Convention in 2015. (It’s worth noting that Fellowship insiders have a history of using breakfast invitations to help rehabilitate religious right-wingers in the aftermath of scandal.)

That world also includes the underreported connections between Blackburn and the point man for Russian influence operations at the breakfast.

Blackburn’s connections to a key player in the Russian influence operation seem never to have been fully explored.

A Senate report did examine the ties between Russian covert efforts and the National Rifle Association (NRA). Most famously, Russian operative Maria Butina was convicted of efforts — including attending the prayer breakfast — on Russia’s behalf.

As I’ve reported, however, The Fellowship was an earlier and potentially more pivotal player in that Russian campaign. Butina’s handler, Alexander Torshin, was connected to The Fellowship years before he got connected with the NRA by a Tennessee lawyer named G. Kline Preston.

It’s not clear how, but Torshin met Preston in 2007. Preston was a Blackburn campaign operative and, Preston said, a “family friend” of Blackburn for “a long time.” ThinkProgress reported that Preston was involved in her campaigns from at least 2003 through 2014.

Blackburn has denied allegations that she met Torshin.

But Torshin, too, was at the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast with Butina and a passel of other Russians invited there by The Fellowship’s longtime point person for the former Soviet states: Doug Burleigh.

And the year after Preston met Torshin, Blackburn met with another associate of Torshin. Igor Matveev, an official from the Russian consulate in Nashville, discussed U.S.-Russia relations in 2008, Matveev later said. (In 2012, Matveev joined Preston and Torshin in monitoring U.S. elections.)

Despite her ties to Preston, Blackburn doesn’t seem to have had any significant exposure to the Russian efforts. Preston said Torshin and Butina didn’t even ask for an introduction.

But it’s also not clear anyone’s looked that hard. Mainstream media repeatedly overlooked the role of The Fellowship, with which Blackburn has been very involved. And the Senate report reflects traditional congressional timidity about probing too deeply into anything with a religious veneer.

Still, with three months to go until the general election, Tennessee’s political reporters have a brief window in which to get new information from Blackburn about who her Fellowship connections are, and what they’ve done together.

CLARIFICATION I neglected to include the fact that I emailed Blackburn’s Senate office and gubernatorial campaign for comment on Saturday, prior to the publication of this story, and received no response. My apologies for neglecting to include this information in the initial version of this post. I will update this article if there’s any substantive response.

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