After Pagan and atheist invocations, Tulsa City Council replaces prayer with silence

The vote to adopt a moment of silence at meetings was unanimous

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The Tulsa City Council in Oklahoma has voted to eliminate invocation prayers and just have a moment of silence at the start of meetings instead. And while they won’t admit it, we can thank a “Third-Degree High Priestess of the Artemisian Faerie Faith Tradition of Witchcraft” as well as a local atheist for getting that change to happen.

The controversy involving invocations really hit full stride back in November, when Amy Hardy-McAdams, co-owner and creator of the Strawberry Moon Herbal Apothecary & Ritual Center in Broken Arrow, was invited to give an opening prayer and used the opportunity to reference Medusa, the “Gorgon Goddess,” and the Awen.

Amy Hardy-McAdams (screenshot via Tulsa City Council)

Hardy-McAdams was actually invited to deliver that invocation by Crista Patrick, a city council member who was taking part in her final meeting after six years. As a Pagan herself, she wanted to invite someone who represented her views given that most of the recent prayers had been Christian in nature.

The response from conservatives in Oklahoma was intense. Governor Kevin Stitt and Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters were among many weighing in with comments like “Satanic prayers are welcome in Hell but not in Oklahoma.”

But even after that negative attention died down, the non-Christian invocations continued. On December 18, Jay Hovarter, president of the Atheist Community of Tulsa, gave the opening “prayer.” That invocation ended with the line, “I invite everyone to unclasp their hands in prayer and put those hands to work building a better future for all.” I find that line perfectly fine and un-controversial… but you never know when conservatives will decide to declare another Culture War battle.

With Patrick no longer on the council, I figured the invocations would only get more Christian in her absence. Turns out I was wrong.

According to the Tulsa World, the council voted last week to replace their invocations with a “silent prayer or personal reflection.” More specifically, they updated the document laying out the rules by which they conduct their meetings to change up the invocation bit.

Now, instead of an “opening prayer,” there’s an optional moment of silence. Instead of trying to accommodate various faiths and people of no faith—always a tough ask—people at the meeting can do whatever they’d like in their own minds as long as it doesn’t interfere with anyone else.

Is it still a waste of time? Sure. People can silently reflect on the drive to the meeting; there’s no reason to make it an official part of the gathering. But given the alternative, I’ll take a moment of silence any day.

The change came at the request of council member Laura Bellis, who told the Tulsa World she was thinking about this change long before those two non-Christian invocations occurred:

“For me, it’s been my past few years’ experience watching groups, especially children, … that are coming (to City Council meetings) to learn about civic engagement who are visibly wearing clothes that indicate that they are not Christian,” Bellis said. “And it’s just pained me to watch them sit through something and think, ‘Oh, this government may not include me.’”

“And then I, of course, personally have found it to be alienating on a pretty regular basis as someone who is Jewish.”

While she had been thinking about the change for a while, the Pagan invocation made clear to Bellis that now was the time to make it a reality:

Bellis said that although her proposal is not a direct response to the pagan prayer, the incident elicited enough reaction from the public to make her think the time was right to share her idea.

“That gave me more of an impetus of going, OK, a lot of people don’t feel good when, within a government setting, someone speaks on behalf of a faith that they are not a part of,” Bellis said. “And I already had an inclination from personal experience and then from seeing people in our audience who I knew it wasn’t something that they related to personally.”

This is why it’s so important to get more non-religious and non-Christian voices in the mix. They make the right people uncomfortable. They remind the community that Christianity isn’t the only game in town. And they can sometimes perpetuate changes like this one that make government meetings more inclusive of everybody.

Perhaps even more surprising was that the proposed change was supported by a unanimous council. They voted 8-0 to approve the moment of silence, with one council member abstaining. And even that sole holdout, Christian Bengel, understood the reason for the shift:

Bengel said after the meeting that for him the issue came down to First Amendment rights.

“So as a government, I need to be open to that, in my opinion,” Bengel said. “So to me, taking that form of speech away is kind of taking away a form of speech.”

He said he abstained rather than vote no because he “got the logic that was behind what they were proposing, but at the same time I didn’t agree.”

A different council member, Anthony Archie, said “I think even the evangelicals that I’ve spoken to are OK with silence.” If that’s true, well, that would be news to me. White evangelicals are almost never okay with silence… or being treated the same as people of other faiths (or no religious faith). But if they really are comfortable with this under-the-radar change, even better. That’s the right response. Usually, it takes some right-wing agitator to make them mad about something so insignificant. That hasn’t happened yet.

The Tulsa World added that while the new rules went into effect immediately, there were some people who had been told they could deliver a future invocation, and they will still be allowed to. But there will be no more new sign-ups after that.

Jay Hovarter of the Atheist Community of Tulsa told me his group was thrilled with the change: “We applaud the decision to abandon the practice by the Tulsa City Council. We hope that other public governing bodies will follow suit.”

I reached out to Hardy-McAdams and former council member Patrick for comment but I didn’t hear back from them. But they deserve plenty of credit, too, for helping create the conditions that made this change possible.

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