So much for religion in the public square

July 13, 2007

The U.S. House and Senate both open each day with an official prayer — which no one attends. Each chamber has an official chaplain, but guest religious leaders are frequently invited to deliver the invocation. At least 99% of the time, no one notices or cares.

But there are exceptions. Back in September 2000, I took on a highly entertaining project while working at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Venkatachalapathi Samuldrala, a Hindu chaplain, was invited to be the very first Hindu in American history to lead a congressional chamber in prayer. AU opposes official congressional prayers, but nevertheless believes that if lawmakers are going to have one, they better be even-handed about it.

The Family Research Council didn’t see it that way. The group flipped out, said Samuldrala’s prayer could lead to “moral relativism and ethical chaos,” and explained its belief that religious liberty “was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country’s heritage.” In other words, as the FRC saw it, minority faiths are separate and unequal, First Amendment be damned.

I had a blast mocking the FRC for this, calling reporters and making the far-right group look pretty silly for demanding more religion in the public square and then balking at a religious invocation on the House floor. Eventually, the FRC not only backpedaled, it said the announcement condemning Samuldrala’s prayer was distributed by accident.

Seven years later, Christian fundamentalists have regressed. Yesterday, the Senate hosted its first Hindu chaplain in chamber history for the official invocation. It didn’t go well.

Three people were arrested in the Senate visitor’s gallery Thursday for disrupting the chamber’s morning prayer, led for the first time by a Hindu clergyman.

As Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple in Nevada, began to lead the brief prayer, two women and one man shouted, “This is an abomination,” according to the Associated Press.

Capitol Police Sergeant Kimberly Schneider tells CNN that the three were arrested in the Senate visitors’ gallery for “disruption of Congress.”

While their religion is not clear, one of the protesters told the Associated Press they were “Christians and patriots.”

Christian, maybe. Patriots, definitely not.

As a rule, it takes quite a bit of gall to heckle a religious leader during an invocation. If a non-believer mocked a Christian invocation in the Senate, one suspects it would be the lead story on Fox News every day until the end of time.

In this case, the three prayer critics were Ante and Katherine Pavkovic, and their daughter Kristen Sugar, all of whom apparently believe state-endorsed prayers are fine, just not Hindu prayers. It’s a view endorsed by a disturbing number of unhinged religious groups.

Operation Save America’s Flip Benham:

“They thought they needed to go and represent the Lord who made this nation great,” Benham said. The event, he said, is emblematic of the modern tendency of “other religions being held on a par with Christianity. Of course, we have said that is not true, that indeed Christianity is one way.” […]

“When you stand up and are arrested, and the Hindu is allowed to go free, this country has gone upside-down,” Benham added — though when asked, he later clarified that he does not believe people of other religions should be arrested for their beliefs. “Now, why are Hindus allowed here? Why are Muslims allowed here? Because we are a nation that’s free, built upon the principles of almighty God.”

David Barton’s Wallbuilders:

“In Hindu, you have not one God, but many, many, many, many, many gods,” [David Barton of WallBuilders] explains. “And certainly that was never in the minds of those who did the Constitution, did the Declaration [of Independence] when they talked about Creator — that’s not one that fits here because we don’t know which creator we’re talking about within the Hindu religion.”

The American Family Association:

“It is a watershed day in that it brings to mind some of these precedent-setting events like the day that we took prayer and Bible-reading out of school in our country [and] the day that we legalized abortion,” Smith offers. “I fear that while God has been so merciful with our country in the past, events such as are about to happen, like this in the U.S. Senate, is angering a just God. I fear that we bring judgment upon our country with such acts.”

To be clear, these groups were not directly responsible for yesterday’s disruption — the AFA, for example, condemned the heckling — but they, among others, vehemently opposed allowing a Hindu leader onto the floor to deliver a prayer.

They want more religion in the public square, just so long as it’s their religion. They want more people praying, just so long as it’s their prayer. They want Big Government to do more to promote the importance of faith, just so long as it’s their faith.

For what it’s worth, after the prayer hecklers were removed, Zed, who had been invited by Harry Reid, was permitted to finish his invocation. As a friend of mine concluded:

“America is a land of extraordinary religious diversity, and the Religious Right just can’t seem to accept that fact,” Lynn continued. “I don’t think the Senate should open with prayers, but if it’s going to happen, the invocations ought to reflect the diversity of the American people.”

Amen to that.

A few years ago in Florida the Legislature invited a clergyman who works with Goodwill. He gave a wonderful invocation that include such lines as “Lord, help these legislators who are limited by a constitutionally required irrational tax structure” and “Lord, we know our schools have infrastructure problems out the wazoo!”
Needless to say, he was not invited back.

  • Hindus are so established in this country now that I bet a lot of them don’t even care that much about this and think it’s funny.

    A lot of these bigoted stunts by right-wingers strike me as done in the hopes that it’s going to stir up something bigger- that all of a sudden we’re going to have our own white riots and organizations of racist thugs kicking ass. It’s kind of pathetic to think how futile it is. I’m not one of those who says that this stuff shouldn’t be reported and opposed, but I don’t think the goose-steppers are going to get off the ground.

    “In Hindu, you have not one God, but many, many, many, many, many gods,”

    It depends, actually- for some Hindus the different Gods are really just facets of a sort of background, impersonal creative force- kind of like how individual humans are particular manifestations of human DNA and Plato’s idea of the forms, ideal forms, whatever you want to call them, from which particular objective manifestations draw on for their existence.

    For Christians, God has three aspects- the father, the son, and the holy spirit. So who’s more right- them or the Jews, who the Christians took their God from?

    That’s why I wrote ‘there is one truth, it is known by many different names’ on the mini-report thread last night.

    ‘God’ supposedly said ‘there is only one god; you shall not have any gods before me’ to the Jews. He didn’t ‘say’ it to the Hindus. So who’s to say who’s more right? All you can do is practice from your own perspective. To Jews from 5000 years ago, it made sense that God had only one, all-encompassing aspect. Just because thousands of years ago people solved their differences of perspective and opinion on religion by locking up unbelievers in a building and burning it down doesn’t mean that’s how we have to solve those differences today. There may be a different way, called tolerance, and at least to many, modern Hindus and modern Christians are so similar in most of their mores that tolerance between them and understanding different religions as different people experiencing the same phenomena about the world, albeit in slightly differing voices, hardly has to lead to moral relativism.

  • Most Christians, like most people, are reasonable and polite. In America in particular we are obligated by the First Amendment to get along with other faiths (and non-faiths). I wonder what these three so-called Christians would think if “religion in the public square” meant burning at the stake? But what if, instead of an Inquisition-inspired ceremony it was an Iroquois-inspired one?

    When I was growing up, in the benighted ’40s and ’50s, religious shriekers, tent preachers and snake handlers were seen for the hillbillies (and con men) they were. A string of post-Nixon presidents have turned ridicule into reverence. I sometimes wish Shiva, Zoroaster, Jehovah, Jesus or Allah really did exist and would demonstrate their existence by wiping out such charlatans.

  • The U.S. House and Senate both open each day with an official prayer

    What the hell is an “official prayer?” AU should stick to an agenda of ending this practice, and not equivocate by trying to spread the love. It only makes sense that sooner or later the “official prayer” will have to be lead by a Zoroastrian, a Satan Worshiper and a member of The Church of the Subgenius…

    “Oh mighty Bob, we pray the Congress has the wisdom to release their inner slack and make way for the stark fist of removal…”

  • In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which the other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel, and some doves. Finally a monkey. The lived together in peace; even affectionately.

    Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh—not a specimen left alive. The Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.

    Mark Twain
    From The Damned Human Race

  • I’ll bet those wingnuts wouldn’t have a fit if a rabbi led the prayers, even though most Jews believe that Jesus is pretty much a mythological character.

    Somone make these people go away. They belong in an institution.

  • They want more religion in the public square, just so long as it’s their religion. They want more people praying, just so long as it’s their prayer. They want Big Government to do more to promote the importance of faith, just so long as it’s their faith.

    Well… at least they are logically consistent.

    Like the name says:

  • This is the kind of logic that just sends me over the edge, this thinking that freedom should be limited to whatever some self-appointed group of people has decided meets their particular definition of what is permissible.

    Leaving aside for the moment that I don’t understand why, if prayer in public schools is not permitted, prayer at the highest level of government is, if that particular door is open, it should be open to all. Those that believe the republic will disintegrate if we don’t have God’s official blessing need to accept that their God is not everyone’s God – or agree that prayer in the Congress should be eliminated.

    Years ago, I worked with a woman who was Jewish, who sent her young daughter to a public school in the area; I think the daughter was in first grade. As the school year moved into December, there began to be a lot of talk among the children about Christmas and Santa. One day, Susan comes home from school and starts asking her mother a lot of questions about Christmas and Jesus, and my friend explained that their family is Jewish and don’t believe that Jesus is the son of God, and so do not celebrate Christmas. Susan took this all in, and after a few moments and more “Why not?” questions and answers, she looked at her mother and asked, “But what if they’re right?”

    A question that too many people fail to consider, as they make judgments and decisions about what God is okay to worship and honor and which ones aren’t.

  • One would hope that this episode makes more broadly clear that what these people want isn’t “religious freedom”–it’s Christianist Dominionism.

    As a Jew, this makes me nervous; as an American, it makes me very, very angry. I don’t suppose the Christian-in-Chief has been asked for his reaction?

  • Some time, just as an exercise, one of these fundamentalists should try writing something about how similar Buddhism and Hinduism and all these other religions are to Christianity, instead of how different. And don’t start from the premise, “I’ve seen lots of pictures of all these Hindu gods, so that means they just worship the fire god, the storm god, the this-god, the that-god, and that’s all there is to it.” There’s a lot more to Hinduism than that.

    Or if you want to check out something by somebody who’s already done this, check out the Bill Moyers interviews on CD with Joseph Campbell, which you can find at any big bookstore, or one of Joseph Campbell’s books, like Hero With A Thousand Faces.

    To the Fundamentalists: the book you think has the answers to everything was written thousands of years ago, by people trying to understand the world around them. To really take on their exact beliefs, and to see the world as they saw the world around them, you have to reject all of the last 5000 years of science. For the rest of us, we aren’t Fundamentalists, and don’t see the world and religion as you see it, because we apply not only science to religion (ancient religious teachings), and reconcile them, but the rest of modern thought beyond natural science- the philosophy, political and moral (that was inspired by the advances in the natural sciences), etc., instead of just acknowledging the littlest bit of modern science possible. That’s why we have to modify old religious beliefs.

  • ‘ but I don’t think the goose-steppers are going to get off the ground.’

    Quite a few thought that about the original goose steppers as well

    ‘there is one truth, it is known by many different names’

    I can live with that abstract, life-affirming concept. My own ‘religion’ is that humans, blessed with extraordinary intellect and cursed with atavistic, often destructive and self-defeating, emotions, have been given a mission by the life force or circumstance to investigate and understand the universe(and ourselves) to the best of our ability, while using that understanding to sublimate our more egregious impulses. To claim that all we need to know is written in ancient ambiguous(even contradictory) texts of spurious origin, is offensive to my ‘religion’. and contrary to the best of our nature.

    The ancient text paradigm has been losing serious ground since the enlightenment. It’s advocates(through out the world) know this and must provoke conflict in order to assert their importance. True dogmatic zealots suffer from a, self-induced?, form of autism, That is why they are so focused and sometimes dangerous.

  • “What if they’re right?” A question that too many people fail to consider, as they make judgments and decisions about what God is okay to worship and honor and which ones aren’t.

    Comment by Anne

    Good point, but we don’t have to worry about them being right. We just have to worry about them hurting us because they think they’re right.

  • I think these religious extremists don’t properly understand the nature of prayer, or of religion for that matter. Prayer, in all its variegated forms, is a method of adjusting one’s attitude. It’s a psychological process that should heighten one’s awareness, calm and clear one’s mind, and orient one’s actions towards more meritorious and altruistic goals. It’s a very special and valuable activity available to the human being.

    Every religion engages in prayer, both individually and collectively. When motivated by good and worthy intentions, it has the potential to generate great benefit for oneself and others. Because it is so powerful, especially when repeated on a regular basis, the motivation is critical. If the motivation is sincerely for the benefit of others, and for the cultivation of kindness, understanding and compassion, everyone benefits. It can bring great bliss, wellbeing, peacefulness and even miraculous transformation. This is well-known, understood and documented.

    Prayer, however, is not the property of one religion alone. Life is not the property of one being alone. Happiness, salvation or enlightenment are not the fruit of one faith alone. Surely this is self-evident. To claim otherwise is to deny oneself the very blessing of prayer itself. Extremists who claim exclusivity for their religion and pray with an attitude of self-aggrandizement and superiority are doomed to perdition and should be pitied.

  • I believe we need a pirate giving the “official prayer” reading from the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

  • Anne wrote: “A question that too many people fail to consider, as they make judgments and decisions about what God is okay to worship and honor and which ones aren’t.”

    Another way to state this question, and even more appropriate for this discussion, was coined by Charles Schulz, in a Peanuts strip. After a Bible camp preacher has thoroughly scared Peppermint Patty that the ‘end of days’ are near, Linus interrupts in his understated way and asks, “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?”

  • Dale – I didn’t mean to suggest by relating that anecdote that the protesters had a point, and that it is all “the others” who need to open their minds; I meant to show that making sure all people have freedom requires one to have an open mind.

  • Still going strong, the world-wide 100,000 member Beer Church, founded by (Bellingham WA) Western Washington University students, demands equal time before both houses of Congress and the next Presidential Inauguration. As Church Founder Kendall Jones once said: “”Beer is a unifying factor in our society. It can bring positive social change and positive social interaction.” Its website states, “Any gender, any sexual preference, any nationality, any shoe size or hair style; beer drinkers of the world are all part of something much larger than themselves.”

  • RhodyJim: You’d think that the R’s would be all in favor of the FSM, considering the stripper factory and beer volcano that awaits them. Then again, they don’t like to admit that they like such things…

  • Thank you, TRUE #14

    Fundamentalism, in all religions, is the result of small minds trying to limit God to fit their understanding. It arises from abject fear of the awe, mystery and unknown that make God great – if she exists.

    Fundamentalist Christians make God look like Santa Clause for big people. Same concept, bigger mythology.

  • ‘God’ supposedly said ‘there is only one god; you shall not have any gods before me’ to the Jews.

    Actually, the commandment is “thou shall have no other gods before me” there’s nothing about there being only one god, just that yahweh is #1.

  • ie, monotheism was slow in being zccepted, and early jews didn’t want to alienate polytheists.

  • True to form, a religious post has got our pulses racing. Delicate territory, but irresistible.

    The Anne/Dale dialog has caught my eye. “What if they’re right?” Right for whom? I suppose it’s like shopping — you want to get the right thing. It’s not nice buying something then finding you’ve missed something that would have been better.

    With religion you can try it out and if it doesn’t work for you try something else (beer for example?). But if you’re lucky enough to find something that works for you, you just get on with it. No?

    Once you’ve made your choice, and you’re satisfied with it and it’s doing what you want it to do, what does it matter what other people are doing? Why this fear that you haven’t got the best? — There is no best, there is only what works for you. After that, forget the others and just get on with it. No?

    It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God or only one God which happens to be theirs.

    – modified Thomas Jefferson (Thanks, True #14)

  • Yesterday’s outbursts all boil down to intolerance, which typically surfaces when people refuse to consider — or are incapable of considering — how they’d feel if the tables were turned.

    This shouldn’t be a radical notion to today’s self-proclaimed followers of Christ — it’s expressed in Mathew 7:12, and the basis of what is commonly known as the Golden Rule. It’s not hard to understand — we teach it to children in one form or another — but without it, people end up hanging from tree limbs, at the wrong end of fire hoses, in the mouths of lions and burning at stakes.

    Whether treating others as you would be treated is in the Bible or not hardly matters, it’s flat out practical. Whether someone else or to you are the victims of intolerance is largely a matter of when, where and to whom you were born.
    (Okay, and how you vote).

  • …we don’t know which creator we’re talking about within the Hindu religion

    Yes, we do, it’s Lord Brahma, you idiot.

  • The problem is that there is a growing movement of people with “one God which happens to be theirs” who feel that it their duty to ram their “one god” down our throats ~ or up our . . .

  • I remember something happening in Russia around 1917 that began as “shouts” from the gallery of the newly installed Duma. I see the three in the gallery as just one tip of the intolerant authoritarian iceberg they represent. To my democracy such intolerance represents the true fear to fear. Forget the xenophobic delusions of our current leaders’ obsessions. -Kevo

  • Thanks for picking up this story…and noting that usually nobody is payng attention to the prayers, anyway. I guess our politicians are only pious when they’re on the campaign trial.

    Here’s an excerpt from my take on the whole thing, from my blog on progressive faith & politics (http://www.ReclaimingTheFWord.com). The “F” = Faith:

    Operation Save America’s Benham is quoted as saying:

    “When you stand up and are arrested, and the Hindu is allowed to go free, this country has gone upside-down…”

    Here’s what’s upside down: The “business” the Christian family of three was on in Washington, D.C.? They were there opposing the proposed hate crime legislation.

    No, they weren’t opposing hate crime.

    They were opposing the bill that seeks to prevent hate crimes by punishing those who commit them.

    There are so many things to say about all this I don’t even know where to start. So, I’ll just jump right to the end…with a list of things you can DO about all this:

    1. Hug a Hindu today. Don’t worry about making a religious or cultural goof, either. The “hugging saint” is a Hindu and she has been known to hand out thousands of them each day.

    2. Write or call your senator and tell him or her that you’d rather they got shouted down for the cowardly way they’re dealing with the serious issues we sent them to Washington to take care of, starting with cleaning up the mess in Iraq.

    3. Visit the cafe press store of the “unlikely Christian, Episcopalian Division” who writes the blog called Going Jesus. I don’t know her. And I don’t get any cut of their sales. But it’ll make you feel better on days like this knowing you can slap on your “WTFWJD?” baseball cap and let the watching world know you can’t figure these people out, either.

  • one of the protesters told the Associated Press they were “Christians and patriots.”

    Not according to the Pope, they’re not. Roman Catholics are good Christians, Orthodox ones are somewhat lacking, though still OK, but Protestants of all stripes are devil’s spawn. Fundie-loons aren’t the only ones who think that they own the patent.

    What kfry(@31) points out — that the rabid vermin’s Congressional disruption was almost accidental, a second thought in a way, is, to me, one of the most important factors in this fracas. They only stayed an extra day in DC after they heard that the Hindu invocation was coming up. But the purpose of the trip was to ensure that they should be able to hate and act on that hate, legally. Never mind “love thy neighbour”.

    And none of this would have happened, if we hadd had, as we’re *supposed* to have, a solid wall separating state and church. NO prayer in Congress. If an exhortation is necessary to start the day’s proceedings, then let it be selected readings from the Constitution. They seem to be sorely needed there these days, to remind the “inmates” who they swore their oaths to (hint: not to the party and not to the president).

    ~~~~~~~~~~
    Actually, the commandment is “thou shall have no other gods before me” there’s nothing about there being only one god, just that yahweh is #1. — benjoya, @24

    “there’s no god but God” comes, IIRC, from the Muslim texts. A piece of irony, which I doubt those “Christian activists” would have appreciated….

  • The greatest of all the mysteries of life, and the most terrible, is the corruption of even the sincerest religion, which is not daily founded on rational, effective, humble, and helpful action. Helpful action, observe! for there is just one law, which, obeyed, keeps all religions pure—forgotten, makes them all false. Whenever in any religious faith, dark or bright, we allow our minds to dwell upon the points in which we differ from other people, we are wrong, and in the devil’s power. That is the essence of the Pharisee’s thanksgiving—“Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are.” At every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out, not in what we differ from other people, but in what we agree with them; and the moment we find we can agree as to anything that should be done, kind or good (and who but fools couldn’t) then do it; push at it together: you can’t quarrel in a side-by-side push; but the moment that even the best men stop pushing, and begin talking, they mistake their pugnacity for piety, and it’s all over.

    John Ruskin

    From The Mystery of Life and Its Arts
    From Sesame and Lilies

    GG #13: I love that Emo Phillips joke and remember seeing him do it on an HBO special in 1989 or so. Die, heretic! classic.

  • “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
    — Thomas Jefferson, 1782

    Damn those “moral relitivists”

  • I realize that people being heckled while making a speech is certainly nothing new, but I have never heard before of someone being heckled while giving a religious invocation. This seems like some sort of first. I would be curious if any of you know of any other specific incident where such a thing happened.

  • “I realize that people being heckled while making a speech is certainly nothing new, but I have never heard before of someone being heckled while giving a religious invocation. This seems like some sort of first. I would be curious if any of you know of any other specific incident where such a thing happened.”

    I can come close, and the incident involved Flip Benham and Operation Save America. A couple of years ago, OSA (formerly Operation Rescue) picketed morning services at First Community Church in Columbus, Ohio. OSA objected to FCC’s support for same-sex relationships, the inclusion of female clergy on its staff – the female minister was referred to as “pastorette” on OSA’s web site – and FCC’s unforgivable emphasis on acceptance and grace. This is the first and only time I have had to cross a picket line to go to church. After the service, a few FCC members took the opportunity to do a little witnessing to the protesters. Nothing physical, and no minds were changed.

    I gave been a member of FCC for five years. My wife, on the other hand, is a Southern Baptist, and has no intention of leaving her church, so we go our own ways every Sunday. It’s not a bad place as Baptist churches go, but it’s still not right for me. This church had Vacation Bible School this week, and used the opportunity to raise money to purchase Bibles for Muslims. I can only imagine what they would think if a mosque raised money to provide English-language copies of the Koran for Baptists.

  • The three has shown that are not very good Christians. For one thing Christians are to live their life not only in service of God, but also of their fellow man. Jesus has said that the greatest command is to love thou God with all your heart with all your strength and with all your might. And second is like to the first to love thou neighbor as thou self. We are to live our lives as examples for others. But those people are not good example of the kind of life that Christian is to live. Their intolerance of others set a bad example Our Founding Fathers know that religion and government do not mix very well. And if we read the history of our country, we would found the dangers of religion intolerance toward others. The separation of church and state are needed to protect our religionist freedom. Bush and the religion right are destroying our country. And as a Christian I fear for country because of those who are intolerance toward other. They are not the true followers of Christ.

    • Comments are closed.