The Fellowship
A cautionary tale of the secretive Washington DC "politico-religious" society
This is part eight in a series about societies—rather than businesses or governments—that have made a meaningful impact on the world. Read the series intro here, part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here, part six here, and part seven’s intermission here.
In the imagination of the public, some societies have an image beyond their substance. This is usually powered by Hollywood (via a documentary or show), or by journalists eager for an interesting scoop. Sometimes these stories are totally contrived. But other times these people onto something, but just can’t crack the code to paint a full picture.
The Fellowship in Washington DC is actually that latter case: there’s a there there—but nobody’s really unpacked it well.
Today we’ll unpack it, if not more deeply, at least more analytically than I’ve seen thus far.
Because for such a secretive society, there’s definitely been lots of attempts to codify what’s going on with them. A Dartmouth professor wrote multiple books about them, there’s a (lame) Netflix documentary based on those books, there’s plenty of press, a lengthy Wikipedia page, and a public religious-political event each year called the National Prayer Breakfast (which every US President has attended since 1953, starting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and originally called the Presidential Prayer Breakfast).
But very little is actually known by the broader public about this particular society. In fact it’s a little bit of a preliminary problem to motivate learning about them for a reader—like, why should you care about this random group?
So to answer that, and also explore what we want to explore, let’s give a closer look to The Fellowship, not how most people would evaluate them, but rather as a religious/political society (worthy of inclusion in our Society Builders series).
My intent here isn’t to throw anyone under any buses (since despite my past limited engagement with The Fellowship, I’m not myself super involved, now or ever). My intent is just to unpack a bit about this secretive-yet-influential society that’s made a quiet impact on American society and politics, to derive insights and lessons for those who would create new societies.
As we’ll see, some of the insights here skew cautionary, but cautionary is often equally as valuable as exemplary.
Let’s dive in.
Quick Context + History
The longtime leader of The Fellowship was a guy named Doug Coe. Doug passed away in 2017, but political leaders in Washington DC regarded him as a supportive spiritual ally for years:
Hillary Clinton: "[Doug] is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."
TIME Magazine: "[Doug is] the stealth Billy Graham" who “specializes in the spiritual struggles of the powerful” as part running “a well-connected but secretive Christian group called the Fellowship Foundation.”
President George H. W. Bush (about Doug Coe): "[I’d praise his] quiet diplomacy, I wouldn't say secret diplomacy."
Doug Coe’s name became synonymous with The Fellowship during its middle-and-later years, but he actually wasn’t the founder. That would be Abraham Vereide, a Methodist minister in Seattle, in 1935.
The original animating core was a conviction by Vereide that part of his calling was to support civic and business leaders by hosting “prayer breakfasts”—that is, small recurring prayer gatherings, exclusive to leaders, where supportive prayer could be administered on behalf of their unique leadership work in the world.
Like AA, The Fellowship grew relatively quickly once it emerged from its earliest version. A quick timeline would look like this:
Founded in 1935
1937: Had over 200 prayer breakfast groups in Seattle
1940: Was hosting statewide gatherings for political leaders by (including the governor of Washington)
1941: Vereide began discussions with members of Congress about starting a regular fellowship group in Washington, D.C.
1942: Vereide moved The Fellowship’s HQ to Washington, D.C., bringing the prayer breakfast model to the nation’s capital. There they began hosting regular prayer meetings for members of Congress, government officials, and other power brokers.
Also 1942: The first U.S. House prayer breakfast group started. By this time, about 60 breakfast groups existed in major U.S. cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C.
1943: The first U.S. Senate prayer breakfast group was established.
1943: The National Committee for Christian Leadership (NCCL) was incorporated, and the office moved from Seattle to Chicago.
1944: The organization changed its name to International Christian Leadership (ICL). The first Fellowship House in Washington, D.C. was opened, serving as a hub for meetings and conferences.
1945–1946: Special prayer meetings were held for national needs, and the movement expanded internationally with outreach in Europe.
1952: The International Conference of ICCL was held in the Netherlands.
1953: The first Presidential Prayer Breakfast (later renamed the National Prayer Breakfast) was held in Washington, D.C., with President Eisenhower in attendance.
1960s: The Fellowship began distributing notes to involved members of Congress, emphasizing that the group as a whole never took formal action, but individuals could act on their own initiative.
1969: Abraham Vereide died. Douglas Coe succeeded him, shifting the organization to an even lower profile and discouraging members from acknowledging the group publicly.
1972: The organization’s name was changed to the Fellowship Foundation. The group adopted a more decentralized, “invisible” approach, serving as a catalyst for personal relationships and leadership development, while continuing to organize the annual National Prayer Breakfast.
For an organization that old, you’d think we’d know a lot about them, right? I certainly thought so. But you’ll notice pretty quickly that their Internet coverage kind of rehashes the same quotes and stories, with much hearsay and not much substantiation.
What was surprising was learning that this is actually considered a feature and not a bug by the society. The Fellowship wants to keep their work relatively secretive. For example, President Ronald Reagan said about them: "I wish I could say more about it, but it's working precisely because it is private."
Which presents a similar PR problem as intelligence agencies: if you’ve heard of their successes, they’ve still failed in a sense—because they’re supposed to be working in secret.
There’s lots of directions we could take our analysis here. Ultimately I think three distinct lenses are useful for describing their model best. But before we parse those lenses, let’s quickly look at the ideas that cohere the community together.
The Ideas
Thousands of people gather at their most public annual event (the National Prayer Breakfast) each year, and the organization ladders up to a leadership team that comprises their inner circle. What do the participants and leaders of The Fellowship believe about why they’re organized together?
There’s actually lots that can be said here, so much so that it’s probably not worth really unweaving the tapestry of ideas. The main thing you need to know about the modern-day version of The Fellowship’s ideology is that it’s centered around appreciation for “the person of Jesus.”
By that they basically mean that if you admire Jesus and his teachings, that’s all that “membership” in their community really consists of. By extension it means that regardless of actual faith commitment (or lack thereof), they would consider you a part of their group and thereby welcome to join for everything they’re up to.
… and thereby welcome to join for everything they’re up to, right? Not so fast. If you actually attend the National Prayer Breakfast, you’ll notice it’s overwhelming attended by the wealthy and the powerful—business leaders from across the world, political leaders from what-feels-like every country. And to be welcomed into the inner concentric circles of activity, you have to be invited.
… so okay, you’re thereby welcome to join for everything they’re up to if you’re rich or powerful and invited, right? Sort of—but only because the Fellowship places a preeminent focus on leaders and leadership. In their words they’re inclusive of anyone who admires Jesus—in practice they’re inclusive of leaders who can find something nice to say about Jesus (though certainly many people involved are deeply committed Christians, Muslims, and Jews too).
So what would motivate a wealthy or powerful person to want to be involved? What’s the calculus in their head for why, say, a Muslim construction titan who built half the modern Middle-East would find it worthwhile to spend a weekend each year in DC for the National Prayer Breakfast (among other meetings facilitated by the group throughout the rest of the year)?
For that answer, we turn to analyzing what The Fellowship’s model actually is (and why its model, though popular, has inherent weaknesses worth noting by for modern society-builders).
The Model
"It [the National Prayer Breakfast] totally circumvents the State Department and the usual vetting within the administration that such a meeting [with the US President] would require," an anonymous government informant told sociologist D. Michael Lindsay. "If Doug Coe can get you some face time with the President of the United States, then you will take his call and seek his friendship. That's power."
There’s a phrase coined by technology startup thinkers that best describes how The Fellowship functionally operates. That phrase is “network effects.”
The specific definition of a tech product that has network effects is this:
Network effects are the phenomenon where a product or service becomes more valuable to its users as more people use it. This increased value can lead to exponential growth and a competitive advantage.
That makes intuitive sense as applicable to a consumer social product like Instagram: its value grows as more users join because each next user can create and share content, follow others, and interact (via likes/comments). This increases the platform’s overall content diversity and engagement, making it more attractive for new users to join and existing users to stay active.
It’s less intuitive that this is what’s going on with something like The Fellowship, but I’d posit it’s the same dynamic. Specifically, The Fellowship is a community whose value to each individual network member increases as more interesting people join the network.
That’s not entirely it though. There’s a lot of organizations with interesting participants, but none quite so intertwined within the elite halls of global power. There’s a lot of interesting clubs, but only one Fellowship. And again, there’s our question about the Middle-Eastern construction titan: what makes this person motivated to be involved?
There’s three lenses that put the dynamics at play here in higher resolution:
1. “Multivocal” Lens
There’s an interestingly relevant paper in the American Journal of Sociology from May 1993, called “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434.” It’s worth quoting one part at length to make my point:
On the surface, it seems obvious that Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) did it all. Cosimo de’ Medici was multiply embedded in complicated and sprawling Florentine marriage, economic, and patronage elite networks. And he was riding herd on vast macropolitical and macroeconomic forces far beyond his control. Yet he founded a dynasty that dominated Florence for three centuries. He consolidated a Europe-wide banking network that helped induce both international trade and state making elsewhere (de Roover 1966). And he oversaw and sponsored the Florentine intellectual and artistic efflorescence that we now call “the Renaissance.”
Contemporaries deeply appreciated Cosimo’s power. Foreign princes after 1434 flocked to Cosimo’s private palazzo to work out international relations, much to the consternation of bypassed Florentine officials. Cosimo was legally enshrined on his death as the father of his country—no mean recognition from citizens as cynical and suspicious as the Florentines. Machiavelli ([1525] 1988), almost a full century later, still held Cosimo and his family in awe—attributing both all good and all evil in recent Florentine history to Cosimo’s deep and ruthless machinations.
Yet the puzzle about Cosimo’s control is this: totally contrary to Machiavelli’s portrait in The Prince of effective leaders as decisive and goal-oriented, eyewitness accounts describe Cosimo de’ Medici as an indecipherable sphinx (Brown 1961, p. 186). “Cosimo was anxious to remain in the background, hiding his great influence, and acting, when need arose, through a deputy. As a result, very little is known of the measures for which he was directly responsible” (Gutkind 1938, p. 124). Despite almost complete domination of the state, Cosimo never assumed lasting public office.⁶ And he hardly ever gave a public speech.⁷ Lest one conclude that this implies only savvy back-room dealing, extant accounts of private meetings with Cosimo emphasize the same odd passivity.⁸ After passionate pleas by applicants for action of some sort, Cosimo typically would terminate a meeting graciously but icily, with little more commitment than “Yes my son, I shall look into that” (cf. Vespasiano 1963, pp. 223, 226).
Moreover, especially after 1434, all action by Cosimo (never explained or rationalized) appeared extraordinarily reactive in character. Everything was done in response to a flow of requests that, somehow or other, “just so happened” to serve Cosimo’s extremely multiple interests.
We use the term “robust action” to refer to Cosimo’s style of control. The key to understanding Cosimo’s sphinxlike character, and the judge/boss contradiction thereby, we argue, is multivocality—the fact that single actions can be interpreted coherently from multiple perspectives simultaneously, the fact that single actions can be moves in many games at once, and the fact that public and private motivations cannot be parsed. Multivocal action leads to Rorschach blot identities, with all alters constructing their own distinctive attribution of the identity of ego. The “only” point of this, from the perspective of ego, is flexible opportunism—maintaining discretionary options across unforeseeable futures in the face of hostile attempts by others to narrow those options.
Here’s how this applies: The Fellowship’s secretiveness (or “sphinx”-ness, in this paper’s parlance) means it remains ambiguous enough (“we just love Jesus!”) to maintain open doors with everyone, unlocking possibilities for those aligned with its inner circle (or even just middle-rung-circles) that wouldn’t be open otherwise by a less multivocal network.
The big obvious differences (among many) here between Cosimo de Medici and The Fellowship are (a) one’s a person, another’s a society/network, (b) The Fellowship in its late-stage form seems to lack coherent goals, whereas Cosimo clearly had interests he used his peculiar multivocal approach to advance.
But by keeping a super-agreeable organization-wide focus on the person of Jesus, they maintain the possibility for people in the society to use its multivocality to advance their interests (coordinated both centrally by the inner circle and also more serendipitously among the organic relationships formed within the community).
2. “Motte and Bailey” Lens
Another way to look at The Fellowship’s dynamics at play is by analyzing it in terms of writer Scott Alexander’s “motte and bailey doctrine.” Here’s another excerpt to really explicate this:
I started this post by saying I recently learned there is a term for the thing social justice does. A reader responding to my comment above pointed out that this tactic had been described before in a paper, under the name “motte-and-bailey doctrine”.
The paper was critiquing post-modernism, an area I don’t know enough about to determine whether or not their critique was fair. It complained that post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”. There’s an uncontroversial meaning here – we don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society. For example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay. Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas a great big nuclear furnace. If you challenge them, they’ll say that you’re denying reality is socially constructed, which means you’re clearly very naive and think you have perfect objectivity and the senses perceive reality directly.
The writers of the paper compare this to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.
By this metaphor, statements like “God is an extremely powerful supernatural being who punishes my enemies” or “The Sky Ox theory and the nuclear furnace theory are equally legitimate” or “Men should not be allowed to participate in discussions about gender” are the bailey – not defensible at all, but if you can manage to hold them you’ve got it made.
Statements like “God is just the order and love in the universe” and “No one perceives reality perfectly directly” and “Men should not interject into safe spaces for women” are the motte – extremely defensible, but useless.
As long as nobody’s challenging you, you spend time in the bailey reaping the rewards of occupying such useful territory. As soon as someone challenges you, you retreat to the impregnable motte and glare at them until they get annoyed and go away. Then you go back to the bailey.
This is a metaphor that only historians of medieval warfare could love, so maybe we can just call the whole thing “strategic equivocation”, which is perfectly clear without the digression into feudal fortifications.
This one’s pretty simple to apply: The Fellowship uses “we just like Jesus” as its totally-defensible “motte” that everyone can get behind, and all the various other activities it gets up to as the basically-indefensible “bailey” that make them pragmatically useful.
This is obvious if you revert back to that Middle-Eastern construction titan question: why, indeed, would he spend a weekend in DC at the National Prayer Breakfast each year? Is it because he likes socializing with others who really like the idea of Jesus? Or is it because it’s gathering of valuable people that can be useful? The Fellowship, if pushed, would say “obviously he really likes the idea of Jesus” (the motte). Then they would quietly facilitate private meetings for him with other “like-minded friends,” in their vague parlance (the bailey).
So that’s one layer. But there’s one more layer to this: do you think The Fellowship’s leadership isn’t aware of why that construction titan would want to be involved? Of course they’re aware. But the motte-behind-the-motte is the ever-defensible notion (at least among insiders) of wanting to build relationships with these leaders so as to encourage them toward a relationship with Jesus. The network’s usefulness is an implicit offer in return for the explicit opportunity to build relationships that ultimately intend to teach a particular perspective on Christian faith (which we’ll skip the details of for now but, suffice to say it’s relatively unorthodox).
3. “Subculture Devolution” Lens
There’s a third lens I think is helpful for parsing this type of thing. This third lens is the subculture lens. I’m going to cobble together excerpts from the original writer’s long essay on this to make the idea as succinct as possible:
Before there is a subculture, there is a scene. A scene is a small group of creators who invent an exciting New Thing—a musical genre, a religious sect, a film animation technique, a political theory. Riffing off each other, they produce examples and variants, and share them for mutual enjoyment, generating positive energy.
The new scene draws fanatics. Fanatics don’t create, but they contribute energy (time, money, adulation, organization, analysis) to support the creators.
Creators and fanatics are both geeks. They totally love the New Thing, they’re fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs, and they spend all available time either doing it or talking about it.
If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture.
If the scene is unusually exciting, and the New Thing can be appreciated without having to get utterly geeky about details, it draws mops. Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time, and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.
Geeks welcome mops, at first at least. It’s the mass of mops who turn a scene into a subculture. Creation is always at least partly an act of generosity; creators want as many people to use and enjoy their creations as possible. It’s also good for the ego; it confirms that the New Thing really is exciting, and not just a geek obsession. Further, some money can usually be extracted from mops—just enough, at this stage, that some creators can quit their day jobs and go pro. (Fanatics contribute much more per head than mops, but there are few enough that it’s rarely possible for creatives to go full time with support only from fanatics.) Full-time creators produce more and better of the New Thing.
Fanatics want to share their obsession, and mops initially validate it for them too. However, as mop numbers grow, they become a headache. Fanatics do all the organizational work, initially just on behalf of geeks: out of generosity, and to enjoy a geeky subsociety. They put on events, build websites, tape up publicity fliers, and deal with accountants. Mops just passively soak up the good stuff. You may even have to push them around the floor; they have to be led to the drink. At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but they’ll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.
Mops also dilute the culture. The New Thing, although attractive, is more intense and weird and complicated than mops would prefer. Their favorite songs are the ones that are least the New Thing, and more like other, popular things. Some creators oblige with less radical, friendlier, simpler creations.
Mops relate to each other in “normal” ways, like people do on TV, which the fanatics find repellent. During intermission, geeks want to talk about the New Thing, but mops blather about sportsball and celebrities. Also, the mops also seem increasingly entitled, treating the fanatics as service workers.
Fanatics may be generous, but they signed up to support geeks, not mops. At this point, they may all quit, and the subculture collapses.
Unless sociopaths show up. A subculture at this stage is ripe for exploitation. The creators generate cultural capital, i.e. cool. The fanatics generate social capital: a network of relationships—strong ones among the geeks, and weaker but numerous ones with mops. The mops, when properly squeezed, produce liquid capital, i.e. money. None of those groups have any clue about how to extract and manipulate any of those forms of capital.
The sociopaths quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively. Geeks may not be completely fooled, but they also are clueless about what the sociopaths are up to.
Mops are fooled. They don’t care so much about details, and the sociopaths look to them like creators, only better. Sociopaths become the coolest kids in the room, demoting the creators. At this stage, they take their pick of the best-looking mops to sleep with. They’ve extracted the cultural capital.
The sociopaths also work out how to monetize mops—which the fanatics were never good at. With better publicity materials, the addition of a light show, and new, more crowd-friendly product, admission fees go up tenfold, and mops are willing to pay. Somehow, not much of the money goes to creators. However, more of them do get enough to go full-time, which means there’s more product to sell.
The sociopaths also hire some of the fanatics as actual service workers. They resent it, but at least they too get to work full-time on the New Thing, which they still love, even in the Lite version. The rest of the fanatics get pushed out, or leave in disgust, broken-hearted.
After a couple years, the cool is all used up: partly because the New Thing is no longer new, and partly because it was diluted into New Lite, which is inherently uncool. As the mops dwindle, the sociopaths loot whatever value is left, and move on to the next exploit. They leave behind only wreckage: devastated geeks who still have no idea what happened to their wonderful New Thing and the wonderful friendships they formed around it. (Often the geeks all end up hating each other, due first to the stress of supporting mops, and later due to sociopath divide-and-conquer manipulation tactics.)
If I’ve included this here, then it’s obvious I think this progression has already long come and gone for The Fellowship. The sociopaths (i.e., those with no interest in the ideas and total interest in using the society for their own success) have long swarmed to extract value. Which is unfortunate, for reasons we’ll circle back to.
But the interesting thing to notice is that this progression happens over time. I’m sure some subcultures progress more quickly than others from “cool creators founding a scene” to “sociopaths extracting maximum value from the increasingly-dead subculture.” But some subcultures may take a long time to progress through the lifecycle—like, say, 90 years, from The Fellowship’s 1935 founding until 2025.
Conclusion
Any honest observer of the current state of The Fellowship (or even The Fellowship ten years ago) would see a lost society, a community with real relationships built across the world but who don’t know what they exist for anymore.
And maybe that’s inevitable. Network effects are a well-worn playbook but are also maybe unstable footing for a society or community (as opposed to a consumer social Internet product).
There’s a pyramid scheme-like dynamic to these types of communities, where eventually the pull isn’t “come build something remarkable and new and helpful” but rather “come join because others you admire or want to associate with have already come and joined.” Which is ultimately inert for attracting the type of people you’d want to really come alongside and build a compelling vision of the future with, especially early-stage.
Before I wrap, it’s maybe worth explicitly stating why I find The Fellowship to be a cautionary tale. After all, they seem to have been quite successful at their “bailey” activities for several decades. Everything fades with time—so why critique them specifically?
My answer is probably more personal than anything. At the time that I was introduced to The Fellowship by a close friend, I was quite Christian. And these dynamics I’ve described here were obvious basically from the start, though my analysis has probably gotten more precise over time. It’s interesting that one of few (only?) times you see network effects in the Bible is in the temple marketplace—where Jesus aggressively runs the money-changers out of the temple. (A marketplace—where the network increases in value for each buyer and seller as total buyers and total sellers increase in number—is a type of network effect!)
Nobody involved with The Fellowship would call it a Jesus-shaped trojan horse built around multivocal-masking of their diplomatic work and leadership development for sociopaths (“leaders”) who’re extracting maximum value from the network effects that the inner circle has built up over the last 90 years (all to evangelize that inner circle’s quirky brand of theism).
But, for society founders and builders, that’s basically the most worthwhile point. The reason I’ve focused on critiquing the model instead of their activities themselves is because I suspect the model itself encourages particular dynamics—and it isn’t obvious that the dynamics of this model degrade the community over time.
In my first essay in The Society Builders, on lessons from Alcoholics Anonymous, I wrote this:
As an aside, the tradition that keeps AA as a healthy society rather than a Berkshire -or Vatican-sized conglomerate is this one (and subsequently is my favorite for its wholesomeness):
“Problems of money, property, and authority may easily divert us from our primary spiritual aim. We think, therefore, that any considerable property of genuine use to A.A. should be separately incorporated and managed, thus dividing the material from the spiritual. An A.A. group, as such, should never go into business.”
If that one tradition didn’t exist, it’s likely AA would be one of the most expansive and important businesses on the planet.
It’s been impressed upon me multiple times that despite all these dynamics, Doug Coe himself (the earlier-mentioned longtime leader of The Fellowship) was fervently passionate about the actual ideas and mission of the earlier-stage Fellowship. I can only trust that to be true, despite these dynamics of the late-stage Fellowship.
But AA seems to have gotten right what The Fellowship missed by baking into AA’s governance rules a legitimate wall between secular and sacred. I legitimately think the person of Jesus would find this community that’s so intertwined with money and power and so propelled by network effects to be quite disappointing, at least at this stage.
So I hope the (d)evolution of The Fellowship can be a useful cautionary tale for others who could build new meaningful societies that shape the next 90 years in fresh ways. Whatever is sacred to your community and whatever is secular (i.e., the “material” vs. the “spiritual,” in AA’s parlance) it’s worth protecting those sacred values with clear walls—and the best walls are baked right into the DNA of your model.