Prayers at council meetings cause conflict in Portsmouth and Hawaii

As the NSS awaits a date for its judicial review of council prayers, a Christian Councillor at Portsmouth City Council has stalked out of the meeting because a Muslim cleric had been invited to say a prayer.

Tory councillor Malcolm Hey left the council chamber immediately after a Christian prayer, just before Alim, Sheikh Fazle Abbas Datoo, began an address to this week’s full meeting of the Council.

Mr Hey returned when the prayer had finished and remained for the rest of the meeting. The Portsmouth News reports him as saying: “I did so because we are a traditionally Christian country, so Christian prayers are read as a matter of tradition. But I don’t feel it’s appropriate for Muslim prayers to be said, as I don’t feel we worship the same God as Muslims, so I left.”

Mr Hey is offended by Muslim prayers, but we doubt if this councillor who clearly takes his Christianity very seriously would also argue that non-believers are equally entitled to be discomfited by prayers of any kind at a meeting of a legislative body. The impression he appears to give is that the council belongs to one particular religious tradition – and that is surely no longer tenable.

Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, said: “The argument that prayers during council meetings enhance community cohesion is shown by this incident to be not just invalid, but the opposite of the truth. We fear that this kind of incident is going to become more commonplace. The only way to avoid such embarrassing and potentially inflammatory incidents is to abolish the saying of any prayers, whether of one religion or several. Councils should be secular bodies that represent the whole community.”

Portsmouth’s Lord Mayor, Councillor Paula Riches, who invited the Imam to read to the Council, objected to Cllr Hey’s actions. She accused him of being “disrespectful”. She told the BBC: “We are a multi-cultural, multi-faith city and in my particular ward I have the mosque and a Sikh temple. I’m deeply disappointed that he felt he should leave the chamber. I feel, in a way, it’s being disrespectful.”

But Cllr Hey was unapologetic, claiming his action was not racially motivated. He is also a member of the city council’s standing advisory group on religious education, which “aims to unite faith groups across the city.”

Undaunted, Cllr Riches intends to invite Catholic and Buddhist religious leaders to read prayers at subsequent meetings.

But Cllr Hey said that the mayor had not consulted anyone before issuing these invitations and his reaction to them would be the same: “I will leave for prayers by Buddhists or Hindus. They don’t worship the same God as us. I would stay for a Catholic or Jewish prayer, because they do. I think we have a tradition of Christianity in this country, our legal system is based on that, and most of our official meetings have some Christian prayers or worship as part of that event. I do not think at this point in time it’s reasonable to change our history and have, say, some Muslim tradition brought into that environment.”

The problem of prayers at governmental events is also an issue in the USA. And now the state Senate in Hawaii has become the first to ban the saying of prayers before each session.

The American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the Senate pointing out that its invocations — often specifically Christian — contravened the constitutional separation of church and state.

That prompted the state attorney general’s office to advise the Senate that their handling of prayers — by inviting speakers from various religions to preach before every session — wouldn’t survive a likely court challenge.

“Above all, our responsibility is to adhere to the Constitution,” said Democratic Majority Leader Brickwood Galuteria after last week’s vote to halt the daily prayers.

A three-member Senate committee formed to evaluate the issue recommended allowing non-sectarian, non-political invocations that avoided references to deities, but the legislative body decided to do away with prayers altogether rather than trying to find a loophole to continue them in some modified form.

The NSS’s application for a judicial review is presently awaiting a date for a hearing. Read more about it here. We invite you to make a donation towards our fighting fund; and you can do so online at or by post to NSS, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL.

Also See:
Council Prayers Campaign FAQ