Introduction^{Footnote 1}

The Fellowship is the organization that since 1953 has hosted the annual event often known as “The White House Prayer Breakfast,” in Washington DC, although the President attends only as a guest. Officially, the “Prayer Breakfast” (as the Fellowship Foundation is popularly known) operates as an association of like-minded, which is to say right-leaning Christian, men. In the US it has been a well of underground evangelical influence, connecting with, influencing, and sustaining elected officials who support conservative legislation. The most famous associate was Nixon’s “hatchet man” and convicted felon turned born-again Christian Chuck Colson. Prominent members of Congress who were active in the organization included the ultra-conservative Strom Thurmond (Republican Senator from South Carolina, 1956–2003) and the moderate Mark Hatfield (Republican Senator from Oregon, 1967–1997). Deeply abhorring formal organizational structure and publicity, Douglas E. Coe, the Fellowship Foundation leader from the 1960s into the 2000s, wielded great personal influence in the US and across the globe.^{Footnote 2}

The organization describes itself simply as “an informal association of individuals banded together in the spirit of Jesus.”^{Footnote 3} The doings of the Fellowship Foundation are closely guarded. Its website is singularly uninformative, presenting the organization as a generic Christian anti-poverty group. (It also refers to itself as the “International Foundation.”) The online resource does not offer details about its current activities and attempting to submit a query on the “Contact Us” form will evoke a message that the system has “reached the maximum number of entries.”^{Footnote 4} Besides the form, the site offers no contact information.

In the early 2000s, a contributing editor for Harper’s and Rolling Stone, Jeff Sharlet, spent a month living in the Fellowship community at Ivanwald, the organization’s compound in Northern Virginia. Additionally, he conducted research in the official archive, interviewed dissidents, and uncovered confidential documents. His 2008 book The Family is a wide-ranging exposé of the Fellowship Foundation in the US.^{Footnote 5} He followed up with C Street a more character-driven account of the organization’s politics, especially its sexual politics.^{Footnote 6} In addition to its evasiveness, it is ideologically promiscuous. The Fellowship, Sharlet argues, unites “any number of theological and political positions (…) in the service of an imperial ambition. Not the conquest of territory; the conquest of hearts and minds.”^{Footnote 7} Sharlet concludes that the Fellowship has only a weak adherence to religious feeling or theology; he quotes Coe separating his disdain for the apostasy of the Nazis and Bolsheviks from his appreciation for their methods.^{Footnote 8}

The Fellowship’s African Connections

Until now, the Fellowship’s African connections have not received attention from social scientists or historians.^{Footnote 9} Sharlet concentrates on the Fellowship in the American context, but its obsession with global influence and connections created a wide shared space with post-colonial African politics. On the face of it, the Fellowship Foundation is a textbook-case of “track two diplomacy.” If “track one diplomacy” is through governmental channels, track two is “unofficial, informal interaction between members of adversary groups or nations which aims to develop strategies, influence public opinion, and organize human and material resources in ways that might help resolve their conflict.”^{Footnote 10} Since the 1960s, the Fellowship has linked with foreign governments, inviting officials to the annual Prayer Breakfast. During dignitaries’ visits to Washington, the Fellowship has arranged private gatherings with members of Congress and presidential administrations. Beneath the track two networking, the Fellowship Foundation exerted itself to promote its allies in Cold War Africa: white minority states of southern Africa and western-friendly governments. It has also been suggested that the group has provided some cover for US intelligence.^{Footnote 11}

I first learned about the Fellowship’s activities in Africa from Washington Okumu, the Kenyan who mediated the last-minute inclusion of the Inkatha Freedom Party in South Africa’s 1994 elections. Long before he told me about the “Prayer Breakfast,” as he called it, he disclosed that he had had a relationship with the CIA. He explained the Fellowship Foundation’s elusiveness and loose organization in that light: “Doug Coe was more like a secretary, they wanted to deny there is no secretary, there is no organization, there is no head of it, and that’s typical CIA organization, they don’t admit.”^{Footnote 12}

The Fellowship Foundation archives have been deposited at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College in Illinois.^{Footnote 13} International records, mostly consisting of correspondence, are conveniently organized by country. In addition to Kenya, African countries include Algeria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Côte D’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, and Tunisia. Archived correspondence to Africa picks up in the mid-1960s and continues through 1987, the last year of the publicly accessible archived materials. Neither the Fellowship Foundation nor the Billy Graham Center imposes restrictions on the use of materials. The archives are not digitized but the library is willing to recommend researchers who may be contracted to photograph the files. (I have not actually visited the Billy Graham Center, but have worked with photographs made by Amber Thomas, a doctoral candidate in the history of Christianity at the University of Edinburgh who was at the time conducting her own research in the archives.)

Coe made personal outreach to several heads of state, including Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Daniel arap Moi, and William Tolbert. The most intense connections, however, were with politicians at the second tier of power. Coe and other American Fellowship Foundation personnel made trips to African countries and filed reports with their impressions and experiences of the political and religious atmosphere.^{Footnote 14}

The archives have certainly been culled of sensitive information and the surviving letters are written with caution and discretion. Yet, a close and informed reading of what was deemed suitable for public consumption could reveal useful evidence for the political history of some African countries, especially of their relations with the US, from the late 1960s through the late 1980s.

Coe worked tirelessly to cultivate an international network, keeping up a voluminous correspondence with “brothers” and those who might become brothers, around the world. (Women were “wives.”) Many of the files can be read quickly; he sent essentially same letter, by the scores, to different correspondents, often recommending readings by classic Christian writers. These letters suggest intimacy with and affection for the recipient. (Who might not have guessed the same paragraphs had been sent to many others over a course of years!) Coe’s curious self-erasure is evident in the deeply personal sentences that consistently omit the first-person singular. His November 1981 letter to Moi is typical of his missives.

The unreality of Moi reading The Imitation of Christ is palpable.

Tucked in the folders between these pastoral epistles is more mundane correspondence with a Who’s Who of influential men about spin-off prayer breakfasts, meetings, and church initiatives. Besides Moi, Coe’s Kenyan correspondents included cabinet minister James Gichuru, businessman Nicholas Biwott, Attorney General Charles Njonjo, and church leader James Mageria, as well as foreign missionaries living in the country. Most of the Kenyan correspondents had been received in Washington at least once as guests at Prayer Breakfast. Moi made his first visit to the event in 1980.^{Footnote 16} Coe visited Kenya in 1981 and continued to cultivate Moi at least through 1990, when he attended the Washington Prayer Breakfast with the Foreign Minister Robert Ouko. Moi and Ouko had a falling out during the Washington Prayer Breakfast in February 1990 and Ouko was assassinated just a few days after they returned to Kenya. Analyses of Ouko’s murder have not grappled with how the highly politicized space of the Fellowship Foundation contributed to his fatal fall from Moi’s good graces. Unfortunately, the available archival holdings do not extend to the year of Ouko’s death, but close reading of the records extending back to 1965 could provide new insight into political competition in Kenya.^{Footnote 17}

The African country where the Fellowship Foundation presence was strongest was South Africa. Beginning in 1965 Coe began corresponding with white English-speaking Christian men, to share the model of the Fellowship Foundation and offer assistance to those who wished to emulate it in South Africa. These were not the theologically isolated Afrikaner Calvinists who devised a theology of apartheid, but evangelicals, connected to a worldwide movement of English speakers. Among the men who participated in the South African Fellowship Foundation during its formation was Mangosuthu Buthelezi, then leader of the Zulu “homeland” of KwaZulu whose politics purported to oppose apartheid even while functioning within the racialized and ethnicized government structures. Buthelezi began hosting his own annual prayer breakfast in KwaZulu by 1974.^{Footnote 18} The South African most closely connected to the American Fellowship Foundation was Ross Main, an Anglican minister who resigned from his pulpit in 1973 for a sponsored residence in Washington DC, to learn about the Fellowship Foundation’s manner of organizing. The Americans funded Main’s travel to the US, Europe, and elsewhere in Africa, to meet with Christian and political leaders. The files established that the Fellowship Foundation served as conduit between South Africans and US policy makers.^{Footnote 19}

By 1974 Main was organizing regular private meetings between a “core” group of white and black politicians and church leaders in South Africa, including Buthelezi and cabinet minister Piet Koornhof. In these meetings the men claimed to meet candidly as Christians and South Africans. The South African files also contain many letters between Coe and Buthelezi. Michael Cassidy of the evangelical organization African Enterprise also corresponded with Coe.^{Footnote 20} In the late 1970s Coe, Main, and other white South Africans wrote a lot about negotiations over Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Main congratulated the group on the contributions of its associate Ken Mackenzie, a South African/Rhodesian businessman, to the process, “We continue to be amazed at how God will use a fellowship like this. When the history books are written, people will be astonished at the key role that God has given to Ken Mackenzie in the Rhodesian situation.”^{Footnote 21}

Main’s humblebrag about the history books and God was the sort of indiscretion that appears more often in letters sent to, rather than, from Coe. The Kenyan Prayer Breakfast insider Okumu (who in the 1970s and 1980s was based at the United Nations offices in Vienna) submitted similarly exuberant reports about his shuttle diplomacy between Pretoria and Dar es Salaam in 1976, but the narrative is patchy and Coe’s responses are sparse.^{Footnote 22} The language in the letters are sometimes coded; still the codes are not difficult to crack; an exchange in 1977 about Zimbabwe made reference to meetings with “Andy” in New York, who can be identified by other evidence as US Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young.^{Footnote 23} Writers were coy when they wrote announcing the arrival of an unnamed “friend” or about a “country to the north.” It has been possible to reconstruct many of these references, but researchers should understand that the archive of this secretive organization is often more suggestive than conclusive.

The Archive as a Source for International Politics

Weirdly influential and clandestine, the African history of the Fellowship merits closer research. The records of the organization itself will be a partial but sometimes surprisingly rewarding source for otherwise unknown international politics. Inevitably, the archives will not expose all doings of the Fellowship Foundation in Africa. Moreover, with its closing date of 1987 the archive will not enlighten on Coe’s early steps toward in brokering peace between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2001.^{Footnote 24} The archive may also support research into intra-Africa foreign relations and a transnational religious organization. One stunning claim by Sharlet is that South African Fellowship associate (and National Party cabinet minister) Koornhof served as a spiritual advisor to the Angolan warlord Jonas Savimbi.^{Footnote 25} The actually-existing archive is valuable for its sometimes unlikely disclosures of sensitive matters, such as Okumu’s previously unknown 1977 visit to Pretoria, but writing history from this material will require reading it in tandem with other sources. Researchers may need to bring a lot of context to this archive.

I have used this archive for research on international political connections. Perhaps, too, it could support a reconstruction of evangelical networks as religious movements in late twentieth-century Africa. The records of the Fellowship Foundation reveal a trans-national elite that claims Christianity as their common faith. This expression of Protestantism in Africa was neither mission nor indigenous, and was politically empowered. Careful and contextualized readings could bear fruit for histories of religion in Africa, but as with political history, this archive would still require other sources to complement and contextualize it.^{Footnote 26}

The records of the Fellowship Foundation are idiosyncratic and uneven, vague by design but sometimes stunningly illuminative. They probably will be most valuable as part of a multi-archive and international research process. Post-colonial history research has taken this turn; transnational projects that reveal unimagined global connections are re-energizing the field. Analytically, they contribute to the wider field of African history by raising questions about the categories that have defined the endeavor.^{Footnote 27} This work is productive and essential, but the trend toward transnational evidence-gathering and boutique archives does exclude historians who are less mobile, and who cannot afford to hire assistants. Digitalization can smooth out the playing field, but new archives are always emerging and their accessibility will lag.^{Footnote 28} As American archives become more essential to the field, US-based scholars may well consider how they will support their African colleagues’ aspirations to conduct expensive and somewhat risky research in small and idiosyncratic archives such as this one.