Conservatives balk at Sikh prayer, but diverse religious voices are a convention tradition

(RNS) — After some conservatives objected to her saying the Ardas, a prayer from the Sikh tradition, at the Republican National Convention on Monday (July 15), Harmeet Kaur Dhillon, a California national committeewoman who grew up in North Carolina, responded with a politely dismissive Southern phrase:

“Bless your hearts!” she posted on the social media platform X, while mentioning that she had blocked a number of commentators on her feed.

While bona fide white supremacists who consider themselves conservatives, such as Nick Fuentes — a self-identifying Christian nationalist who dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 — were among those who criticized Dhillon’s prayer, the blowback came from more mainstream quarters as well: Thomas Kidd, a professor of religious history at Baylor University, argued in his X thread that allowing “acts of worship by people of multiple faiths” suggests that “all religions are equally valid, especially in our diversity-obsessed culture.”

The controversy was a strange turn for a party for which “big tent Republicanism,” in the words of former President Ronald Reagan, has become a cautionary phrase for a GOP often characterized as too white, too Christian and too old. Since the turn of the century at least, both parties’ conventions have featured a wide array of religious speakers, and especially clerics, invited to give opening prayers, invocations and benedictions. 

Indeed, Monday wasn’t even the first time Dhillon has offered a Sikh prayer at the RNC — she also led one in 2016. And she wasn’t the first Sikh to do so: Ishwar Singh, head of the Sikh Society of Central Florida, gave the invocation at the evening session of Day 3 of the GOP convention in 2012, weeks after a gunman opened fire at a Sikh house of worship in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six and hospitalizing three.

“I hope that my presence Wednesday on the national stage will play a small part in helping Sikhs — and people of all races, faiths and orientations — be seen as part of the great American family,” Singh wrote in an editorial for CNN.

The tradition of including non-Christian voices at the major party conventions goes back more than a century at least, to an invocation given by Rabbi Samuel Sale, of St. Louis, when the Republican convention was held there in 1896. Sale’s appearance, according to a New York Times report from the time, was the result of a political compromise: The Republican Party’s Catholic and Protestant factions were so bitterly opposed to each other that a rabbi was a safer choice than a pastor or a priest from either Christian tradition.

Sale, who was known for advocating for a “universal day of rest” in the way of the Jewish Sabbath, said in his prayer:

Fill us with a deep and abiding sense of the transcendent dignity and nobility of American citizenship and of the sacred obligations that should attend it, so that we may grow from day to day in the beauty of civic virtue, and our beloved land from “hundred-harbored Maine” to the vine clad hills of the Golden Gate, from the ice-bound north to the warm and sunny south may go from strength to strength; until it achieves its destiny to become the fixed and shining mark for every bark bound for the haven of law and liberty.

Four years later, Democrats called on a rabbi at their convention as well, and ever since, rabbis have been regular guests at gatherings for both parties: In 2008, Rabbi Ira Flax offered a benediction at the RNC that included a passage in Hebrew; in 2016, Rabbi Ari Wolf, a police chaplain, delivered an invocation; and in 2020, Rabbi Aryeh Spero closed out Day 3 festivities with a prayer.

The rabbis have had plenty of company. In 2012 alone, the GOP delegates heard prayers from a Catholic bishop, an Orthodox rabbi, a Hispanic evangelical pastor, a Sikh cleric, a Greek Orthodox archbishop and two members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 2004, Imam Izak-EL Mu’eed Pasha’s invocation saw him read from the Quran. In 2016, Sajid Tarar of American Muslims for Trump was tasked with a benediction, which featured a discussion of the Prophet Muhammad.

“All babies come here in this world, and they cry in the same language,” Imam Izak-EL Mu’eed Pasha said in his prayer, citing another imam. “This is a sign from God, that we are all one, one life … that humanity is one, and that our humanity is bigger than our cultural differences.” 

Democrats, whose coalition is rooted on diversity, have more than kept pace. The head of an Islamic center delivered an invocation at the 2000 DNC, and an imam offered a prayer at the next convention four years later. In 2020, the Democrats’ convention kicked off with an interfaith service, and an entire section of the official program was dedicated to discussing then-candidate Joe Biden’s Catholic faith. This was in addition to an array of religious prayers, as well as specific delegate meetings for different people of faith — namely, an Interfaith Council, a Jewish American community meeting and a Muslim delegates assembly.

For their part, faith leaders have shown bipartisanship in their convention appearances. Greek Orthodox clerics regularly pray at both conventions in the same year, just as evangelical Christian evangelist Billy Graham did in 1968 and then-Archbishop (now Cardinal) Timothy M. Dolan in 2012.

Convention prayers are sometimes controversial less for their content than for what they are perceived to represent. Dolan caused a stir at the Democratic convention, as some delegates objected to the presence of an opponent of the party’s plank supporting abortion rights. But at both conventions, Dolan’s prayers (whose contents overlapped heavily) hinted at why diverse religious voices, Christian or otherwise, have become such a mainstay at party conventions.

“Renew in all of our people a respect for religious freedom in full, that first most cherished freedom,” Dolan said at the RNC. “Make us truly free, by tethering freedom to truth and ordering freedom to goodness. Help us live our freedom in faith, hope, and love; prudently, and with justice; courageously, and in a spirit of moderation.”