Yesterday morning I had breakfast with three thousand people. It’s not every day that I can say that. This was the 60th annual National Prayer Breakfast, a key date in the political calendar of this city and country.
It was a remarkable occasion. The sheer scale of the event was dizzying. So was the guest list—which included the President, the First Lady and the Vice President. But as I sat at one of several hundred tables crammed into a cavernous hotel ballroom, gulping lukewarm coffee to combat the eye-wateringly early hour—in any other context, it would have been called ungodly—I was struck by something else: this was a uniquely American occasion. It is almost impossible to imagine it happening anywhere else in the world; certainly it is hard for me to picture political leaders and ordinary citizens in my own country coming together to pray, in public, for guidance and wisdom. But here in the United States it felt very natural.
Sitting among the Administration officials, Senators, Members of Congress, and many religious leaders were thousands of ordinary Americans drawn from every state in the union; and visitors from as many foreign countries, including the UK. We met teachers from North Carolina, a probation officer from South Central L.A., small-business owners from Illinois, social workers from Northern Ireland and an internet entrepreneur from Western Australia. Together we heard prayers led by a female Air Force colonel, an Asian-American Senator from Hawaii and an African-American college football player from Texas. We were amused and inspired by a hilarious address by best-selling author Eric Mataxas railing against phoney religion. And we marvelled at the vocal skills of an eleven year old singing prodigy, America’s Got Talent runner-up Jackie Evancho. The diversity of the crowd was as striking as the common bond they shared: thousands of people, in President Obama’s words “stepping back for a moment… from the rush and clamour of their daily lives”.
A rock-solid belief in individual liberty, including the ability to believe and worship as one chooses, is at the core of the values that bind the US and UK together. Seeing thousands of people—from all walks of life and the full spectrum of beliefs—exercise that liberty together in the nation’s capital was a powerful reminder, less than three weeks into the job, of what America is all about.