Prayer as a Political Tool

All prayers shall be submitted and approved in advance:

When Barack Obama's presidential campaign contacted Ryan Culp last year to ask him to deliver a prayer at an Obama rally in Culp's native Elkhart, Ind., the high school wellness teacher declined. "I'm a conservative Republican," Culp, who met his wife and raised his two kids in the same evangelical church in which he was brought up, said in a phone interview. "I didn't want to be perceived to be a supporter of a Democratic campaign."

Earlier this month, though, when the White House phoned Culp to say that President Obama was returning to Elkhart—this time for a nationally televised town hall meeting to sell his economic stimulus plan—and asked him to open the event with a prayer, he agreed. "It was an opportunity to say that we're not Democrats or Republicans," said Culp, 36, "but Americans searching for an answer."

The day before the president arrived in Elkhart, Culp spent an hour and a half crafting his prayer, roughly a minute and 20 seconds long, before calling an aide from the White House Office of Public Liaison to recite it for vetting, as the administration requested. "She said that it was beautiful and that there shouldn't be a problem with it but that she would call in the morning if there was," Culp recalls.

The White House had no revisions for the prayer, which opened with the line: "Dear Heavenly Father, we come to you this day thanking you for who you are—a God that cares about each of our needs, our desires, and our fears." Culp delivered it the following day at Obama's town hall meeting, landing a handshake from the president and mentions in several local papers.

A once-in-a-lifetime experience for Culp has become routine for President Obama: In a departure from previous presidents, his public rallies are opening with invocations that have been commissioned and vetted by the White House.

During Obama's recent visit to Fort Myers, Fla., to promote his economic stimulus plan, a black Baptist preacher delivered a prayer that carefully avoided mentioning Jesus, lest he offend anyone in the audience. And at Obama's appearance last week near Phoenix to unveil his mortgage bailout plan, an administrator for the Tohono O'odham Nation delivered the prayer, taking the unusual step of writing it down so he could E-mail it to the White House for vetting. American Indian prayers are typically improvised.

Though invocations have long been commonplace at presidential inaugurations and certain events like graduations or religious services at which presidents are guests, the practice of commissioning and vetting prayers for presidential rallies is unprecedented in modern history, according to religion and politics experts.

Interviews with former White House aides and official presidential archivists going back to the Carter administration turn up no evidence of similar programs, though some of Ronald Reagan's events featured invocations from clergy from a variety of religious traditions. The Reagan White House appears to have received copies of the invocations after they were delivered, as opposed to before, according to Ronald Reagan Presidential Library archivist Lisa Jones.

"If a similar thing had been done by President Bush's White House, I guarantee you there would have been a lot of people crying foul," says Bill Wichterman, deputy director of the Office of Public Liaison under President George W. Bush. "Democrats can do this with immunity, but when Republicans do it, it becomes controversial."

The Obama administration may have skirted controversy by scheduling the invocations to be delivered before the president arrives at the events—and before national cable network cameras start rolling. "Having prayers in places like Indiana where public prayers are commonplace would help the president," says John Green of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "Whereas seeing it on national TV would cause controversy because there are places where these things are less popular."

"Excuse me sir, but Sasha and Malia have submitted their bedtime prayers for review. I think we can leave the 'pony' part in, but the section about the bully on the playground will have to be dropped because the kid's Hispanic and that could cost us in California and Texas."