Harmeet Dhillon: Praying to a false God?

On July 15, 2024, at the Republican National Convention, civil rights attorney Harmeet Dhillon led a Sikh prayer, known as ‘ardas,’ a ritual prayer performed by the Sikh community...

On July 15, 2024, at the Republican National Convention, civil rights attorney Harmeet Dhillon led a Sikh prayer, known as ‘ardas,’ a ritual prayer performed by the Sikh community before embarking on any new endeavour.¹

Dhillon walked onto the stage, offered some words, then, covered her head, folded her hands, and prayed.

However, this prayer sparked a flurry of criticism on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), with comments ranging from ‘Blasphemy’ to ‘America must turn to the Triune God.’

"Blasphemy"

"Are you serious!"

"Entirely inappropriate"

“Idolatry pure and simple”

"RNC is enslaved to the old gods."

"ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE!!"

“We have prayers to a false god???”

"RNC featured a prayer to a demon."

"America must turn to the Triune God."

“Chants to pagan gods make me very uncomfortable.”

"This is a Christian country and Jesus Christ is God. We're not gonna win without him"

At first, I was confused why all these people were so upset. So I listened to the Ardas. Maybe she offered up an aborted child as a sacrifice? Maybe she invoked Baal in her prayers? Or maybe she called upon Satan to protect Donald J. Trump?

Turns out she did none of these things.

What she did do, however, was begin a prayer with, "Dear waheguru, our one true God..." Then proceed to thank God for America and pray for guidance during this election cycle.

Remember this happened at Milwaukee's Fiserv Forum - an sports arena. On a Monday evening. It was not a church, not a Sunday morning. It was a gathering of a political group, the Republican Party (GOP).

Here’s Dhillon’s prayer:

“Dear waheguru, our one true God. We thank you for creating America as a unique Haven on this earth for all people, where all people are free to worship according to their faith. We seek your blessings and guidance for our beloved country. Please bless our people with wisdom as they vote in the upcoming election, and please bless with humility, honesty, skill, and integrity all those who conduct the election...”

The criticisms seem to spring mainly from fundamentalist Christians of all stripes and red-pilled culturally Christian atheists.

I considered not writing this as I typically avoid political commentary. My focus is on wisdom, beauty, art, craftsmanship, and meaning. But, my X feed was inundated with terrible tweets, likely because I engaged with some tweets to read the comments. The criticism extended beyond Dhillon’s prayer to the ecumenism at the RNC, where a Lutheran priest, an Orthodox Bishop, and a Catholic Bishop also offered a prayer.

This broke my heart.

So I decided to write my thoughts down to encourage you to continue seeking wisdom and to love. And secondly, as a reminder that we aren’t as different as we might think.

Our world can’t have harmony without wisdom. And without harmony, there’s no peace. Without peace, we’ll continue to kill, to fight, to race towards our destruction in the name of God that we have never known or loved.

Praying to a false God?

Did Dhillion pray to a false pagan God by saying her Ardas using ‘waheguru’? Let’s first look at how Christians understand God. Then we’ll look at how Sikhs understand God.

Christians believe in one God, who is transcendent and immanent. God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-prevading. God is before all things and all things hold in him. And God is not a being among beings like Zeus is a god among gods, but the foundation of all beings. God is wholly unique, non-composite, and sustains all existence.

Now here’s the truth - what you just read is how Sikhs understand God. Replace ‘Christians’ with ‘Sikhs’ because that’s precisely what I did.

Here’s an excerpt from the mūl mantra, a creedal affirmation repeated by Sikhs in their morning devotions:

There is one Supreme Being, the Eternal Reality. He is the Creator, without fear and devoid of enmity… The Eternal One, from the beginning, through all time, present now, the Everlasting Reality.

You see, Sikhs are monotheists like the Abrahamic religions.² They would agree with Saint Thomas Aquinas that God is Ipsum Esse Subsistens - that God’s essence is identical to his existence, that God is Existence Itself.

The term waheguru in Sikhism refers to God as the ‘ultimate teacher,’ akin to the Old Testament’s portrayal of God as a shepherd who guides his people.

This shared understanding highlights a common ground between the two faiths, despite differences in language and cultural context. The core concept remains remarkably similar. Both traditions view God as the Ultimate, Transcendent yet Immanent Reality that sustains all existence, underscoring the fundamental unity in their perception of the Divine.

Just because someone uses a particular noun from a different language to express an idea about God doesn’t make their prayer a prayer to a false god. (If that were the case, everyone who prays by using the English word ‘God’ is referring to early Scandinavian pagan deities since it derives from guð which means the governing ones.³ Here’s an example close to me, I speak two other languages and one of them is Tangkhul. In Tangkhul the term ‘Varivara’ means God but before the tribe’s conversion to Christianity, it meant the Supreme ruler of the spirit realm.)

Who owns God?

We are finite beings.

But God—Ultimate Reality, Existence Itself, Ipssum Esse Subsistens, Waheguru—is infinite and eternal. This puts into perspective our arrogance in believing that one tradition has the fullest picture of God. No human or tradition could ever comprehend the vastness and depths of the Infinite.

This is not to collapse one religion into another. That would be impossible to do. But what I’m emphasizing is that to denounce a Sikh prayer because it uses the term waheguru is like denouncing Thomas Aquinas for using ipsum esse subsistens or Augustine for using Deus instead of θεός.

Many of our problems arise due to our selfishness and our pride. We’re afraid to remove these false masks we have grown accustomed to. We rather throw out spiteful comments in the ether than to engage in civility.

This means we should approach rich traditions like Sikhism with humility, and engage with them critically—whether religious or not.

And if you’re a Christian you’ll remember this teaching from Saint Peter in 1 Peter 5:5:

Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

The situation with Dhillon is a much larger issue of our collective insistence on living in strife than harmony. To willfully continue sowing disagreement and hatred despite knowing better, reflects a deep-seated ignorance in some and a deliberate choice in others. This discord not only diminishes our humanity but betrays our call to love.

And how could we forget this message from Jesus Christ in Mark 12:

Love your neighbor as yourself.

We have to annihilate our egos if we are to grow in love. For to love, we must die to ourselves first. Ego annihilation is not the destruction of our identities, but the shedding of that which breeds contempt and division. The part that believes you and I wholly are different and other.

Can we afford to let differences in language and traditions divide us as humans—to parade our pride and call a prayer to God “a prayer to a demon”—when, in reality, our faiths are attempting to contain the fullness of the ocean in a wooden bowl?

In the end, it’s not solely the rituals, doctrines or the types of language that define our faiths, but the love we embody and the humility we practice. While they play a role in guiding the devotee’s spiritual ascent, it’s ultimately through love and humility that the rituals, doctrines, and languages find their deepest meanings.

If we remember this we might find that our paths, though different, share a profound foundation. Only then can we hope to transcend the petty divisions that keep us apart and move towards a future of harmony and wisdom.

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1. Harmeet Dhillon offered ‘ardas’ on July 19, 2016, at the GOP Convention in Cleveland. The difference between now and then is seven years, a failed assassination attempt, growing political division, inflation, and the rise of shallow cultural religiosity.

2. Nãnak, the first Sikj teacher, was influenced by the Islamic mystics - the Sufis. See my episode to learn more about Itlak Sufism - Episode 35.

3. See this discussion on the etymology of God: https://blog.oup.com/2015/08/god-word-origin-etymology-part-3/