The council’s invocations weren’t always done this way. In 1955, the city passed a non-binding resolution that invited the Aurora Ministerial Alliance to designate Christian or Jewish clergy to open the council meetings with prayer.

The Alliance is now defunct, and the practice of regularly inviting outside clergy to pray at meetings has been all but abandoned. Still, O’Connor says he hasn’t heard any complaints about the city’s current invocation process.

But Curious City has heard complaints.

One Aurora resident, Jim Schweizer, says he doesn’t see city’s diverse religious community equally represented.

“It’s only a Christian prayer,” Schweizer says. “The question is, ‘Why is it only one type of prayer? Why isn’t it a multitude of kinds of prayer?’ Buddhist. Jewish. Hindu. Muslim. There are many ways of communicating your religious beliefs. I think the way the city council is doing it now is only one way.”

An Aurora City Hall employee, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution in the workplace, says they’re baffled by the prayer. They’re concerned the practice violates the separation of church and state.

The council’s practice has supporters, too, however.

Resident Ellis Bailey says he thinks city council prayer is necessary.

“People need to be more aware of God in his leadership,” he says. “And with his leadership, it will allow us to come together.”

Rabbi Edward Friedman at Aurora’s Temple B’nai Israel says he doesn’t believe invocations are all that important. Friedman says before he moved to the B’nai Temple in September, he’d performed about six government invocations all over the country in his 41 years as a Jewish spiritual leader.

He says as long as aldermen are vague and inclusive enough to respect a community’s diversity in their prayer language, he has no problem with government officials starting meetings with an invocation.

“[Invocations] are kind of an optional component, they’re not really necessary,” Friedman says. “But if it’s important to your community, do it in a way that’s respectful to the diversity of the community. If you can’t do that, don’t do that.”

Based on what he knows about Aurora’s invocations, Friedman says the council could invite more people from the community. But as long as the prayers are kept non-denominational, it’s okay if the aldermen conduct the prayer.

But what would a judge say?

Experts we’ve consulted about council prayer agree that details about legality and constitutionality come down to who performs the prayer and how the prayer is performed.

But these relevant details won’t get legal scrutiny unless a citizen or other party with legal standing challenges the practice in court, according to Chicago-Kent College of Law Dean Harold Krent.

After that, he says, a judge will consider practices including: timing of the prayer, who performs the invocation, and whether there are opportunities for different types of religions to participate.

After getting up to speed on the particulars of Aurora’s council prayer and hearing examples of prayers available online, Krent says the city’s practices would probably hold up in court.

“Well, it’s non-denominational. Everyone had to stand up, but it was in the context of the dignity of a moment of silence and the pledge of allegiance,” Krent says. “This does not strike me as on the more problematic end of the spectrum.”

However, he says a judge might be skeptical that Aurora’s aldermen always perform the prayer.

“There’s literally no separation of church and state in that situation,” Krent says.

Still, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled the Establishment Clause isn’t always breached by prayer — even when conducted by city officials, or when a government hires its own chaplains to conduct the prayers. This was established in 1983, in Marsh v. Chambers.

In 2014’s Town of Greece v. Galloway case, the court also maintained that governments can lean towards sectarian prayer so long as they do not discriminate against minority faiths and don’t coerce people unwilling to participate.

If this seems vague and confusing, that’s because it is. Krent says the court left many questions unanswered, like how much inclusion is enough inclusion? One of the main conditions in Galloway was that municipalities couldn’t show favoritism toward one specific religion, and they should offer clergy of different faiths the opportunity to participate.

A complaint, a review and a prayer makeover

Not every complaint turns into a court decision, though. Sometimes communities respond to complaints by making their invocations more accommodating.

Twenty miles east of Aurora, the city of Wheaton used to have an invocation at the start of its council meeting. Wheaton Mayor Mike Gresk says his would operate similar to Aurora: They would call the roll, conduct the Pledge of Allegiance and then have an invocation. Unlike Aurora, Wheaton would call in a member of the clergy to conduct the prayer.

In 2009, a member of the community told Gresk they felt uncomfortable when clergy would often call upon Jesus during the council’s invocation. Gresk says the city had never heard a complaint like that before and didn’t know how to handle it. The city took action after receiving a formal complaint from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit that promotes the separation of church and state.

Wheaton then gave its invocation process a makeover, but it didn’t ditch prayer entirely. Gresk says aldermen wanted to somehow represent many residents’ religious values.

“It’s a very thoughtful prayer community,” he says, adding that he recently received a note from a neighbor who said they were praying for him. “I value it, and I’m ceaselessly amazed and impressed there are people who are concerned enough they want to pray for me.”  

The compromise involved changes to the invocation that would be less coercive to citizens who didn’t want to pray during the council meeting. One change involved conducting prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance before the official start of meetings. The prayers are not in the meeting minutes, and they’re not taped or available online. They’ve had a range of invocations, including an atheist invocation. Gresk says he has even seen people leave the room to avoid the prayer.

“We have people who come to the formal meetings and they simply don’t rise [for the pledge],” Gresk says. “Well, that’s fine. If you don’t support an organized religion that’s great. If you don’t want to stand for the pledge, you’re an American.”

Additionally, the city passed an ordinance formalizing the city council’s invocation process.

Our legal expert Krent says a judge would probably rule Wheaton’s council prayer “perfectly permissible.”

“It gives you a clear indication that if you wish to engage in the prayer activities then you may do so, but if you wish to just transact legislative business you may do so as well,” he says.

But Rabbi Friedman says having an informal prayer isn’t a foolproof solution. In fact, he thinks it could pose a bigger threat to diversity in the long run.

“There’s a greater opportunity to be non-inclusive because it’s not official,” he says. “It’s a way of saying, ‘We can avoid the consequence of the law.’”