Recently, Heidi left the following comment (slightly edited):
I love coming up with my own practical deconstructions, such as: Why does God care more about popular people? Every time there’s a prayer chain for someone, isn’t it just an admission that God is keeping a tally, and once the prayee is sufficiently supported by the numbers, then that person will be healed? I guess the person with few friends is out of luck where God is concerned.
For the uninitiated, a “prayer chain” is a group of Christian church members who agree to pray for a person or circumstance when the chain is activated either by the pastor or whoever is in charge of it. Typically, a church member calls the pastor with a prayer request, asking others to pray for him, or a member is made aware of a “need” someone has and passes that need along to the pastor or whoever is in charge of the prayer chain. The pastor then calls one or more people on the chain, who then call one or more people until everyone on the prayer chain knows about the need. Sometimes, one person handles the chain activation, calling everyone on the list. The goal, of course, is to get as many people as possible begging God to save/heal/deliver someone or meet some sort of need. The thinking is that the more people who bug God in prayer, the more likely it is that God will favorably grant the prayer request.
The Bible diverges in two directions when it comes to God answering prayers. On one hand, the Bible portrays God as an instantaneous prayer-answering deity. Ask and it shall be given to you, right? Most Christians learn early on that God rarely, if ever, answers prayers immediately. Believers are encouraged to have faith, pleading with God without ceasing to answer their prayers. These prayers rarely, if ever, get answered either. Christians love to trumpet to the world that their peculiar deity answers millions, billions, and gazillions of prayers every day, but when pressed for evidence for their claim, believers turn deaf and dumb.
When my partner and I deconverted seventeen years ago, one of the first things we wrestled with was our past prayers. Both of us were praying people — morning, noon, night, before meals, at church, in the car, together, and alone. I suspect between the two of us, we uttered over 100,000 prayers for ourselves and other people. Yet, when we gave an honest accounting of our prayers, we concluded that only a handful of prayers couldn’t be explained naturally. Most of our prayers went unanswered, and those we thought were answered by God were actually answered by self, family, church members, or friends. Virtually every answered prayer was of human origin. And the few that weren’t were not enough to convince us that the God of the Bible exists, that he is personally involved in our lives, and that he answers our prayers. What we were left with was a few experiences we could not explain. Live long enough and you too will have similar experiences; things you can’t explain.
Heidi raises an excellent point about prayer chains. The same can be said for corporate prayer meetings. Evangelical churches often set aside one day a week for members to gather together and corporately pray. I grew up in an era when Baptist churches typically held prayer meetings on Wednesday or Thursday evenings. Some churches take praying seriously, spending an hour or more beseeching God, while others give lip service to the notion of a prayer meeting, taking requests from the congregation and then offering a single prayer, usually given by the pastor, for the people and needs mentioned. Sadly, most church prayer meeting nights are long on gossip and short on prayer.
The thinking goes, that the more people who pray for a person or need the more likely it is that God will answer their prayers. God is waiting and willing to answer prayer, but only if enough prayers come into Prayer Central. Picture God sitting in Heaven with a scorecard, putting a “I” on the card every time a Christian prays for Sister Bertha’s gallbladder or Brother Ernie’s hemorrhoids. Once the prescribed number of “I” are marked on the scorecard, God answers the prayer in the affirmative. As Heidi notes, pity the poor person who has few friends or isn’t well known. They never get healed because they don’t have enough people praying for them.
Why does God operate this way? Why doesn’t he help and heal people the moment they ask? Why does praying seem to be an exercise in futility; a practice that may comfort people, but rarely brings healing and deliverance? As with most things, Christians only count the “hits’ when deciding whether God answers prayers, ignoring the “misses” — which are statistically far more common than affirmatively answered prayers.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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We can be pretty certain that prayer doesn’t work. It doesn’t work at an individual level because, as Heidi says, almost all prayers if seemingly answered can be explained by natural means (I’m slightly puzzled by those that can’t apparently be explained away immediately). It similarly doesn’t work at a population level because all serious studies undertaken have resulted in chance being entirely responsible for any desirable results (and one suggested worse outcomes). I’m not even sure what is meant by prayer. If it’s praying for other people that they get well, or that wars in Gaza and in Ukraine end, then I can understand that. I do it myself, though I don’t invoke a deity and I don’t call it prayer. On the other hand, if I’ve misplaced my car keys, or I’m hoping my offer for a new house is accepted, then that’s surely not prayer but, rather, fairy godmother syndrome, god granting wishes.
There’s also a more fundamental reason I take issue with prayer. When atheists raise the ‘problem of suffering’ (or evil) as an argument against god they are pounced on from a great height by apologists, who then ridicule ‘stupid atheists’ because, of course, if god failed to allow suffering then we wouldn’t have free will. Personally I don’t think the argument from suffering is an especially strong one (though John Loftus disagrees), but the denial by apologists of the argument doesn’t square with the idea that a deity is busy answering prayers. A deity who allows natural catastrophes like famine in Africa, floods in Spain, or wildfires in Los Angeles, but who intervenes to save 90 year old grannie from dying today of a stroke so as to give her another year or two, doesn’t make logical sense.
Great observation, Bruce. Whilst deconverting, I began to ponder about answers to prayer – having, like you, spent many hours doing it, on my own, in prayer meetings or nights of prayer. In 2014, I had major surgery and made a good recovery. 300 were praying for me – well, 300 folks on the prayer chain knew I was in hospital. Would I get better if only 200 of them actually prayed for me? At the same time, nights of prayer were being held for a 29yo pastor who was expecting his first child and had brain cancer. I wondered what these participants actually voiced all night long, our omniscient god knew of his illness and the request was a simple one, to heal the guy and ‘bless’ his pregnant wife. I thought ‘vain repetitions’ were forbidden. The church prayed for 8 hours – and I had a picture of god, up there on his throne with a stopwatch saying, ‘Excellent, my sheeple, keep it up for just 2 more hours and I’ll consider healing Tim’. He didn’t, and the answer to prayer was thought to be that he just lived long enough for his newborn child to be placed in his arms.
Various thoughts:
#1 – (from above) “As with most things, Christians only count the “hits’ when deciding whether God answers prayers, ignoring the “misses” — which are statistically far more common than affirmatively answered prayers.”
Yes! Way back at the beginning of my Christian fervency, I still remember this little nugget of wisdom that someone told me regarding God answering prayer (and, at the time, I thought it was brilliant — but now I can only eye-roll): “Sometimes God says ‘Yes’, and sometimes God says ‘No’. ” At the time, I thought this was some amazing insight. Now, I see it more clearly translated as: “On a very rare occasion, God says ‘Yes”, but 99.9% of the time, God says ‘No’. ”
#2 – Also around that same time period, the “prayer chain” was jokingly understood as a simple re-defining of “God’s gossip mill”.
#3 – Is it just me? Nowadays, whenever I watch group prayer in some church video, the prayer seems to be more about telling God / Jesus / Holy Spirit what to do to achieve a demanded / expected outcome rather the humbly presenting one’s need to God. And then, after completing such demands / expectations, the group prayer is ended with a soft, meek and gentle: “But, not my will be done, only Thy will be done”.
My family has a text chain which frequently is used to identify health issues or personal crises of family members. Inevitably everyone on the chain except me will respond that they will be praying about this issue with the more devout among the family claiming healing or beseeching the Holy Spirit. If the matter works out well there is the inevitable cry of praise god or similar comments. None of this has anything to do with the magical intervention of a personal god but I politely leave these observations to myself. Such nonsense.
I didn’t really pray much after I was in high school – a little in college – and not much at all after college. Through my childhood and teen years, Southern Baptist church and fundamentalist Christian school hit hard on the notion of praying, and we sure did a lot of praying at church and school. But I didn’t see that it helped all that much. People got sick, and sometimes they got better and sometimes they didn’t. If I studied thoroughly for a test, I would do well; if I slacked off on studying, I wouldn’t do as well. I prayed before most tests, but the outcome was clearly linked to my study habits. It was really clear in college! After leaving evangelicalism when I was 24 and moved away from the Bible Belt, the notion that prayer was responsible for outcomes seemed even less likely. I still did pray now and then, but it was more like a “just in case” situation.
However, the feeling of a safety net due to a deity reachable by prayer became apparent when I was examining whether I believed in God or not. When I realized I didn’t believe, I felt like I was left without a safety net, without a backup. I realized how much in life is outside my control – outside anyone’s control. That was a scary feeling, and I had never felt more like an adult in charge until then.
Prayer gives comfort because there’s hope – hope that a magic wizard will swoop in and fix the issue. Some things just can’t be fixed, and we need to brace ourselves for those situations and make plans for the consequences.
When I was a kid, I started liking the film “It’s A Wonderful Life” because I liked the idea that if you are a good person, good things will come back to you. These days, I find it harder to watch because the entire premise is that an angel, “second class,” is sent to help George Bailey only because the appropriate number of god-botherers sent a prayer chain upwards to heaven…even though the big book of people’s troubles said this was George’s big night! So, “Joseph, COO of Angel Management” had access to information that George Bailey’s dire decision was coming up, but he forgot until a bunch of prayerfolk voices wafted up to him! This is no way to run a heaven, IMHO, so the movie doesn’t work for me so much anymore.