‘Heaven help Surf City’

Re “Interfaith group gets heave-ho in Surf City,” column, March 8

There’s an easy solution to the controversy over religious invocations at the

Huntington Beach City Council meetings — don’t have invocations.

After all, only 47% of Americans are members of a church, synagogue or mosque, according to a 2021 Gallup poll.

While invocations at public meetings are constitutionally protected if rotated among religions, the Huntington Beach squabble demonstrates the unnecessary entanglement of religion with secular events such as City Council meetings.

Bob Ladendorf Los Angeles

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Though a lifelong agnostic, I applaud the Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council’s participation in its city’s regular council meetings over the past 17 years.

Reflecting a wide variety of faiths, the interfaith council has shared invocations oriented toward bringing peace, love and mutual understanding to Huntington Beach. Each meeting’s invocation has been limited to one minute and has been free of proselytization and political messaging.

All well and good. That is, until the council’s new conservative majority took offense at last week’s seemingly apt invocation — to wit, reading of the iconic “First they came for ...” poem by a 1940s German Lutheran pastor.

The ensuing uproar over 60 seconds of empathetic poetry upended 17 years of idyllic invocations. And it led new City Council members to counter with a provocative four-minute invocation by an evangelical pastor who supports stolenelection fallacies and claims that “God put Donald J. Trump in office.”

All I can say is heaven help Surf City.

Roberta Helms

Santa Barbara