Congress members call out "ill-qualified hate preacher" who gave invocation
Nearly two dozen Congress members are demanding answers for why Pastor Jack Hibbs was allowed to give an opening prayer
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On January 30, Pastor Jack Hibbs delivered the opening prayer in the House of Representatives.
Nothing he said during his invocation was all that memorable, though he did claim the “day of judgment draws near” and that everyone will “answer to you, the great judge of heaven and Earth.” Still, it was a fairly generic invocation about Jesus that any Christian pastor could have delivered—and many have in the past.
The problem was that Jack Hibbs was there at all.
That’s because, to deliver an invocation, you have to be invited by a member of the House, and to be invited, you presumably would have to be vetted. And Jack Hibbs would fail any basic vetting. At least by any decent member of Congress.
After all, Hibbs, the pastor of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills in California, is someone who downplayed COVID during the height of the pandemic, donning a combat helmet in a video to whine about how Christians were under attack, holding mass in-person baptisms, and insisting that sin was 100% fatal and therefore deadlier than the virus.
He also said that Kamala Harris, a Baptist senator then campaigning with Joe Biden, wasn’t really a Christian at all. He later said Harris and Nancy Pelosi hold “antichrist worldviews.”
He’s an election denier. He’s violated the Johnson Amendment. He’s said the Biden administration is “pure, pure, Christless, godless evil.” He’s a science denier who once claimed that “if evolution is true, then there would be no such thing as homosexuality.” He blamed the existence of transgender people on “Demonism.” He said God’s judgment on us was evident through LGBTQ characters on the children’s show Blue’s Clues.
He called Islam “a demonic doctrine being propagated by heretics.” He said Jews in Israel could avoid the wrath of Hamas by turning to Jesus.
He defended the January 6 insurrection attempt, saying, “This is what you get when you eject God from the courts and from the schools.”
Perhaps more concerning than his rhetoric, Hibbs’ church helped take over a local public school board, using their majority to turn board meetings into church services—and eventually paying the price in court.
In short, he’s a right-wing MAGA cultist who uses his faith as a weapon to harm the marginalized and vulnerable.
As it turned out, he was recommended by a like-minded soul: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, whose ties to Christian Nationalism are both explicit and dangerous.
Now, members of Congress led by (Humanist) Rep. Jared Huffman are speaking out against the selection of Hibbs and demanding to know why chaplaincy guidelines would allow someone like him to speak while excluding other voices. The letter is signed by nearly two dozen representatives, including Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal, Katie Porter, and Ilhan Omar.
It specifically says Hibbs, who is appropriately referred to as an “ill-qualified hate preacher,” should “never have been granted the right to deliver the House’s opening prayer” given his past statements—and it brings the receipts, many of which I’ve mentioned above.
It also says Hibbs’ selection violated the Office of the Chaplain’s own rules:
Hibbs is not from the district of Speaker Johnson (i.e. the sponsoring member), Speaker Johnson did not deliver a welcoming speech, the prayer was not delivered on the last legislative day of the week, and Hibbs was Speaker Johnson’s second sponsored Guest Chaplain in the span of just a couple months, even though Members are limited to one request per Congress. Moreover, in light of Hibbs’ radical and divisive record, no reasonable person could view his invocation’s sectarian references to “holy fear,” “repentance” and “national sins” as meeting the Chaplain’s stated expectations for a prayer that is “mindful of diversity,” “transcends petty differences,” and “expresses a common aspiration to a just and peaceful society.”
The signers also point out that some of their invocation selections were rejected for various reasons. That includes atheist Dan Barker, co-president of the Freedom From Relgion Foundation, who met all the guidelines and was sponsored by his representative, Mark Pocan, in 2016 but was still denied the opportunity.
For all these reasons, we request a complete explanation of the process by which Pastor Hibbs was recommended, vetted, and approved, including the reason(s) why the Chaplain waived basic requirements of the Guest Chaplain program for Hibbs, of all people. Please also describe the steps you will take in the future to prevent someone with a hateful and divisive record from delivering the opening prayer and to ensure that people of all faiths and values are equitably represented as Guest Chaplains. Finally, please explain why the Chaplaincy has continued to prevent Members from sponsoring certain fully qualified Guest Chaplains such as Representative Mark Pocan’s constituent, Nontheistic Chaplain Dan Barker.
The letter was sent to Speaker Johnson as well as Reverend Dr. Margaret Grun Kibben, the official “Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives” and the head of that office. It has the support of numerous organizations:
The letter was endorsed by the Interfaith Alliance, Secular Coalition for America, American Humanist Association, Center for Freethought Equality, Anti-Defamation League, Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, Society for Humanistic Judaism, American Atheists, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Association of Secular Elected Officials, Center for Inquiry, Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers.
FFRF’s political arm, the FFRF Action Fund, also applauded the members of the Congressional Freethought Caucus for making the request:
"We cannot thank Rep. Huffman and his colleagues enough for calling out Speaker Johnson and Rev. Kibben on their hypocrisy, for ignoring Hibbs’ chilling history of Christian nationalism and even the House’s own rules on guest chaplains,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president. She added that the selection of a House guest chaplain should reflect a commitment to diversity, inclusion and the constitutional separation of church and state.
Whether this will amount to anything is anyone’s guess, but the fact that so many Congress members are challenging Christian Nationalism this openly is a welcome change of pace. It should be appalling that so many of their colleagues haven’t signed onto the letter and seem perfectly fine with someone like Hibbs setting the tone for then business they’ve been elected to do.
Here is an obvious solution: Get rid of invocations all together! All they accomplish is allowing Christians to mark their territory in the halls of our secular government. Invocations certainly do not result in better governance. If anything, people who convince themselves they're operating under divine sanction are capable of almost any horror.
This incident involving Hibbs would be bad enough in a social vacuum. What makes it far worse are his references to Islam when there is a Muslim House member (Ilhan Omar) present, never mind his disparaging comments regarding any Jewish member of the House. Huffman is absolutely right to call both Hibbs and Johnson out for this utterly misguided choice for delivery of an invocation, particularly for a "vetting" process which likely never happened.
And once again, considering this incident, how about dispensing with invocations entirely? Can we just start with: "The House will come to order. What is the first order of business?"