He also meets with six people to provide spiritual direction, a practice with roots in the Christian, Buddhist and Jewish traditions that now includes more than 5, 000 U.S. practitioners from a variety of faiths, up from 400 in 1990.
In the European elections in June, their ten-year-old party, Shooting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions, got 1.2m votes, almost 7% of the total, enough to give them six seats in the European Parliament.