The controversy was a strange turn for a party for which “big tent Republicanism,” in the words of former President Ronald Reagan, has become a cautionary phrase for a GOP often characterized as too white, too Christian and too old. Since the turn of the century at least, both parties’ conventions have featured a wide array of religious speakers, and especially clerics, invited to give opening prayers, invocations and benedictions.
Indeed, Monday wasn’t even the first time Dhillon has offered a Sikh prayer at the RNC — she also led one in 2016. And she wasn’t the first Sikh to do so: Ishwar Singh, head of the Sikh Society of Central Florida, gave the invocation at the evening session of Day 3 of the GOP convention in 2012, weeks after a gunman opened fire at a Sikh house of worship in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six and hospitalizing three.
