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Asked Thursday at the Winter Garden City Commission meeting if people who don’t follow Jesus are welcome in the city, Mayor John Rees refused to answer.
Pressed for a response — twice — during public comment, Rees replied, “Would anyone else like to speak?”
Questions about Rees’ commitment to religious diversity among Winter Garden’s 47,000 residents surfaced after he denied an April 2 request for a proclamation for a National Day of Reason to be made at the April 24 city commission meeting. The request was made by longtime Winter Garden resident (and VoxPopuli board member) Joseph Richardson.
The National Day of Reason was created in 2003 by the American Humanist Association and the Washington Area Secular Humanists. Celebrated May 4, it raises awareness about critical inquiry, science, religious freedom, free speech, the separation of church and state and secular democracy.
Richardson told VoxPopuli that he made his request partly in response to the National Day of Prayer proclamations that Winter Garden’s mayor has issued in the past and as a way to “include everyone as opposed to only one religious group.”
“Reason is a critical part of how we got to where we are, from increasing food production for growing populations, increasing life span with improved medical care (including vaccines), to computers, land, sea, air and space travel,” he said in a text message. “The list is virtually endless.”
The mayor is the sole arbiter of which proclamations are approved, Winter Garden City Manager Jon Williams told VoxPopuli in an email. However, Williams said that if he were the decision maker, the National Day of Reason request would have been denied on the grounds that it “failed to provide any relevant information on how this would raise awareness about an issue; celebrate community events; recognize heroic acts; or honor individuals or groups who have made outstanding contributions to the Winter Garden community.”
Rees himself initially provided no reason for denying Richardson’s request. Asked about that at the April 24 city commission meeting, Rees deferred to the city manager’s explanation and said he’d “leave it at that.”
Earlier at the April 24 meeting, Rees had issued a proclamation for the National Day of Prayer to be celebrated May 1 “throughout the city of Winter Garden” wherein he requested “that prayers be poured out for our city, for our neighbors as we live, serve, work and learn together that we may be filled with all joy and peace and abound in hope.”
A records request made by VoxPopuli shows that Winter Garden has issued five proclamations for National Days of Prayer. Rees issued two of them — in 2024 and 2025. The others were issued in 1976, 1993 and 1994.
According to the privately funded National Day of Prayer Task Force, the National Day of Prayer was created in 1952 by Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman to “mobilize the Christian community to intercede for America’s leaders and its families.” The evangelist Rev. Billy Graham is said to have sparked the idea following a peace rally he led at the U.S. Capitol during the Korean War. Subsequent presidents from Reagan to Clinton have reaffirmed it.
Rees — who attended a May 1 prayer event at city hall, organized by the Cornerstone Church, where three speakers declared “Winter Garden is for Jesus” — insists he is not imposing his own religious views on the community by promoting the National Day of Prayer over the National Day of Reason.
Samantha Lawrence, staff attorney for the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin, disagrees. She sent Rees a letter, obtained by VoxPopuli, chiding him for “disparag[ing] people who show no respect for God” and asking him to rescind the 2025 National Day of Prayer proclamation and “refrain from using [his] official position as mayor to promote prayer or religion going forward.” [Rees received a similar letter last year from the foundation.]
Lawrence’s April 30 letter scolded Rees for “blatant discrimination against non-religious and non-Christian viewpoints":
“The fact that whether to issue a proclamation is a discretionary decision makes clear that proclamations are government speech, and thus as mayor you have a constitutional obligation to comply with the Establishment Clause [of the U.S. Constitution]. Contrary to your assertions, issuing a proclamation that tells residents to pray does, in fact, impose your religion on the people of Winter Garden.”
In a phone interview, Lawrence told VoxPopuli that she found the city's rationale for rejecting Richardson's request “made up.”
“Clearly people in the community were asking for a Day of Reason so that suggests that at least some of them want to raise awareness and care about having a Day of Reason,” she said.
She added that the National Day or Prayer is itself exclusionary.
“A large portion of the Florida population is not Christian, and the National Day of Prayer is explicitly Christian and, quite frankly, evangelical Christian. You could make the argument that it doesn’t even represent Catholics or other sects of Christianity. So, they’re having this prayer event that really excludes a huge portion of the population, and that doesn’t seem to bother them. Yet this Day of Reason doesn’t affect enough of the community? That sounds illegitimate.”
VoxPopuli reached out to mayors of surrounding municipalities to ask if they would issue proclamations for Days of Reason.
Windermere Mayor Jim O’Brien texted that he had “no opinion.”
In Ocoee, where Orlando House of Prayer hosted an May 1 prayer event on the city hall steps, Mayor Rusty Johnson told VoxPopui he “had no objection” to issuing a proclamation for a National Day of Reason. Then he invited me to read the proclamation at the city’s May 6 commission meeting.
Oakland Mayor Shane Taylor, however, told VoxPopuli via email that the town would offer neither proclamation.
"I believe we strive to make decisions of public policy that are based on critical thinking [and] reasoning while keeping with our country's founding and doctrines — those adhering to the First Amendment rights of no state religion and allowing individuals to have a choice to believe or not believe," Taylor said in his Sunday email. "With this, I think promoting both proclamations have no bearing on decisions made within the town's business decisions."
