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| Giant screen at a football stadium which says "Love for Damar." Image source. |
So I want to talk about this blog post, from Hemant Mehta: An ESPN analyst’s gratuitous on-air prayers won’t help Damar Hamlin. Background info: On January 2, at a Bills-Bengals football game in Cincinnati, Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest on the field. First responders gave him CPR on the field, and took him to a hospital, and everyone was worried about whether he would live. A week later, he was transferred to a hospital in Buffalo, and now has been discharged from the hospital because he is recovering well.
Anyway, this was a big deal in the football world. A player almost died right on the field in the middle of a game. A lot of people connected to football have been showing support and love for Hamlin, and a lot of people have been praying for him.
So now we come to Mehta's post, about ESPN football analyst Dan Orlovsky actually praying out loud on tv, during his sports commentary show. Mehta says, "But it’s disgusting how some people have used the tragedy to advance their personal religious agenda" and talks about the reasons why Orlovsky should have just prayed on his own time instead of on his sports tv show.
Okay, first of all, yes, I understand why atheists wouldn't want that on their sports tv shows. This is a valid complaint.
But, second, I think it misrepresents the situation to say that Orlovsky is simply using this situation as an opportunity to push his religious beliefs on other people. I think Mehta's blog post misses the actual reason why Orlovsky prayed on tv: Because he believed that it would increase the chances that God would save Hamlin's life.
Now, obvious disclaimer, I don't know if Orlovsky conceptualizes prayer in this way- but when I was evangelical, I definitely did, and yes, the general belief about prayer in the Christian culture I grew up in was, the more you pray, the more likely it is that the thing will happen. The more people who pray for something, the more likely it is that it will happen. The more intensely and passionately you pray for something, the more likely it is to happen. The more faith you have when you pray, the more likely it is to happen.
I mean, nobody at church talked about it in terms of probabilities, but they said things like "prayer works"- they very much believed that praying for something can be a significant factor in God causing that thing to happen. I'm a math person so I call it a probability.
So, according to this ideology, the difference between praying by yourself vs praying on tv in front of thousands of viewers could be the difference between life and death for Damar Hamlin. When you use your giant platform and pray in front of your viewers, then probably a huge number of those viewers will pray with you- and God ups the probability accordingly. When you take a risk and do something weird and unpopular, like praying out loud on a sports show, that shows you really really have faith- so God ups the probability because of that. This could be the thing that puts God over the edge, so God will save Hamlin's life.
People in this ideology- like me when I was evangelical- really believe that prayer does something. That God can really intervene if he wants (I say "he" because the god I believed in back then was a "he") and so we have to beg desperately, as much as we can, to try to get it to happen.
(I should mention that many Christians, when confronted with the fact that this view of prayer doesn't really make sense, will say that, actually, prayer doesn't change things, because God already decided beforehand what would happen. But prayer is still important because it's a way for us to feel we are involved with the things that God is doing in the world. So I guess if you're a really really good Christian [I hope my sarcasm is obvious here], you will be able to guess correctly which things God has planned to happen- this is called "discernment"- and you'll pray for those, and then you'll feel so cool when those things happen- even though it's not true that your prayer had any role in causing them to happen. Okay, so, yeah, when explicitly confronted with the logic of it, Christians will claim they actually believe that prayer doesn't influence the likelihood of things happening, and things only happen if they are "God's will" regardless of how much people pray. They claim this is what they actually believe, but THEY DON'T. At church, when people are sharing their "prayer requests" and asking the other church members to pray for them, nobody says, "okay let's carefully analyze these prayer requests to try to figure out which ones are 'God's will' because, obviously, we don't actually believe prayer changes things- so we should only pray for things that are God's will." Nope.)
So, yes, in that kind of Christian ideology, people believe that "prayer works"- meaning prayer increases the probability that God will do a thing. People didn't actually use the word "probability" but the way they talked about prayer meant basically that.
Now, you might be saying, doesn't this God seem kind of like... a terrible person? Like, God is sitting up in heaven going "well I could save this person's life, quite easily, but I won't do it because not enough people prayed about it."
I mean, yeah, full disclosure, that is why I don't pray. I'm a Christian but I don't pray. I do not believe in a God who decides whether to help people based on whether you prayed about it correctly. A god like that is despicable.
And yeah, when someone wants something so bad, and they pray about it so much, and then it doesn't happen and they ask "why?" there are all kinds of answers offered by Christians. Maybe you didn't pray enough. Maybe you had the wrong motivations when you prayed. Maybe you had some sin in your life that is causing God to ignore your prayers. Maybe the thing you wanted wasn't "in God's will." Surely there must be some little thing you did wrong, that explains why this is all your fault!
So yes, we very much are talking about a God who would, for example, let your family members die because you didn't have the correct feelings when you were praying.
My point is, many people believe that the more we pray, the more God will help Damar Hamlin, and I think that's likely the motivation for Orlovsky praying on tv.
But here's another question: Today, because of social media, news is able to spread very fast. If someone is in a bad situation, it is very possible for hundreds, thousands, millions of people to hear about it right away and potentially pray for them. Compare this to thousands of years ago, when the fastest that news could travel was a guy on a horse.
So, because of social media, we can get huge groups of people to pray for specific things in a way that was completely unthinkable back when the bible was written. Does that mean that God intervenes more now than he did in the past? Because, supposedly, more prayers means more chance that God will do something. So, the invention of Facebook has led to God becoming more active in answering people's prayers. Can this be true? ... I mean, it's ridiculous.
Perhaps God takes "inflation" into account- maybe a prayer nowadays in the age of social media counts less than a prayer back then. Or, maybe God applies a scaling factor according to whether you actually know the person you're praying for or they're a total stranger you just saw on the internet.
And, people's biases affect what kinds of news goes viral, and what kind of people are seen as "real" victims who deserve our compassion/ deserve to be prayed for. For example: missing white woman syndrome. If a young, attractive, white woman is missing, there will be a ton of news coverage about it, but very little attention is given to missing people who don't fit that image. So, it's very possible that if a white woman is missing, lots of people will see the news coverage and pray for her, but a woman of color in the exact same situation will receive little news coverage and won't have a ton of strangers praying for her. Does that mean that God will help the white woman more? Doesn't something seem wrong about this? God's actions are constrained by human society's prejudices?
Maybe God has some kind of "affirmative action" policy. Maybe, to make things more fair, he credits people with additional prayers if they come from a demographic group which is less likely to be seen by the general public as deserving of help.
I think this entire line of thought is absurd- but if it really is true that "prayer works," these are the questions we need to be asking. Here's a paper that I've linked to before: Prayer and healing: A medical and scientific perspective on randomized controlled trials (2009). I love this paper SO MUCH because the "Discussion" section at the end asks a lot of EXTREMELY IMPORTANT questions which we should take very seriously if it's true that "prayer works." (And no, I don't believe "prayer works.")And another thing- this specific situation with Damar Hamlin is very unique in how it has inspired such an outpouring of support for him. I think in this case, the reason that so many people care is because of how dramatically it happened, on live tv in front of thousands of football fans, and then there were several days when he was in the hospital in critical condition and people just had to wait and see what happened- and the emotions surrounding this specific string of events inspire people to pray more so than if it had played out differently. What if it had happened somewhere else other than a football stadium full of fans, and therefore fans didn't feel the emotions of it this way, and didn't care enough to pray for him? Would God help him less because of that?
It occurs to me that some bad situations happen faster than others. Some bad situations allow more time for news to spread and people to pray about it (for example, if someone is sick and in the hospital) and some bad situations happen so fast that by the time anyone hears about it, the damage is already done (for example, being killed in a car accident). So, the "slower" tragedies surely get more prayer during the window of time where an intervention from God could make a difference, right? Does that mean that God does more to help with those "slow" situations than the "faster" ones? Like, "I would help, but I'm waiting for more people to pray about it ... oops too late."
Perhaps we can compensate for this by pre-emptively praying against those kind of "fast" emergencies that we won't hear about in time to pray for in real time. Maybe every day we should pray, "God, help everyone today who gets into some emergency situation which doesn't allow any time for their friends to hear about it and pray for them." How many times should we pray this every day so that God helps with "fast" emergencies equally to how much he helps with "slow" emergencies? Let's do the math on it! If people really believe that "prayer works," then they need to do the math on this and figure it out. Ah, but isn't prayer more "effective" if you know more details about the situation / if you have a personal connection / if it's something you really really care about? So the vague, impersonal "help anyone who gets into a 'fast' emergency" prayer ends up being a really "weak" prayer then, right? Should we imagine specific bad situations happening to specific people, and get ourselves all worked up emotionally about how bad those things would be, and then pray against them- would that produce prayers as powerful as prayers that happen in real time in response to a real situation? (Please don't do this, it would be terrible for your mental health.)
OR, WAIT, maybe this is how God handles this issue: I have heard anecdotes from Christians like "I just randomly woke up in the middle of the night and felt a burden [this means a really strong feeling that you are supposed to do something] to pray for so-and-so, so I did, and then a few days later I talked to so-and-so on the phone and found out they were in a dangerous situation at the EXACT SAME TIME that I felt I needed to pray for them! Wow what an amazing miracle! This is wonderful!" These stories are, uh, bad, because if you suddenly, out of nowhere, get a weird sense that something terrible is happening to your friends/family, this is called ANXIETY and you need to go to THERAPY and learn how to have more realistic emotions about the actual dangers that exist in the world. A terrible way to handle it would be to say "oh, maybe the reason I feel worried about so-and-so is because there REALLY IS something bad happening to them, and I need to pray as hard as I possibly can right now, because they might DIE, and it would be MY FAULT for not praying enough."
Like, how does this even work, actually? This is a common trope in stories that Christians tell- suddenly out of nowhere you have a sense that you NEED to pray for someone, and then later you find out that that person was in danger at that exact same time, but they are safe now. How does this work? Person A is in danger, so God says "oh no, I must do something!" and tells Person B to pray for Person A, so Person B prays "God, help Person A", so then God helps Person A? Doesn't this seem overly complicated? Why does God need to get Person B involved at all? It seems like God thinks Person B feeling cool about having direct communication from God is more important than Person A's safety. Because, if Person B doesn't understand what God is trying to tell them, or perhaps they've been in therapy for anxiety before and they know that it's best for their mental health to ignore random terrifying thoughts that just pop up out of nowhere, and therefore Person B doesn't pray- then does God not help Person A? You may say, well, maybe God helps Person A anyway- it's not dependent on what Person B does. Oh, so the only reason God got Person B involved was so Person B could have this cool experience of supernaturally knowing that a bad thing was happening to Person A? If that was God's goal, why give Person B thoughts of worry- why not give them thoughts of "a bad thing was happening to Person A, but it's fine now, they're okay"?
Just seems like this God is really disorganized.
Okay, so, coming back to Mehta's blog post, where this whole thing started. I'm writing about this because I think his post misrepresents the motivation that Orlovsky had for saying a whole prayer on his sports show. It kind of portrays it like, praying is a habit that religious people have when bad things happen, which is fine for them but they should do it on their own time- as if that's all there is to it. Completely missing the idea that Christians believe that prayer actually does affect what happens in the real world. (Lol, well, *I* don't believe that, and I'm a Christian...) If you don't engage with that idea, you're not really going to be able to make an effective argument about this situation.
Ah, but I am not saying "Orlovsky really does believe that praying on tv could possibly save Hamlin's life, therefore it's totally fine for him to do that and no one should criticize him." (This is a pretty minor example in my opinion- but there are much more serious examples along the same lines.) Even though a lot of Christians really genuinely believe things like that, society cannot say that means it's totally fine for Christians to just go ahead and do whatever it is they believe will influence God to save lives or whatever.
Because, here's an example, there are Christians who believe that God causes disasters to happen because the US allows same-sex marriage. And therefore, by denying rights to queer people, we are preventing God from sending hurricanes, and so we are saving lives.
Yes, there are many examples along the lines of "we need to do something/ not do something, and then God will cause some totally unrelated good thing/ bad thing to happen"- the only connection between the "cause" and "effect" being God. Rather than a cause/effect relationship there's actually evidence for in the real world. And society can't just decide "well, you have to let these religious people do this, because they really genuinely believe it will save lives." No, we can't live that way, because anyone could make up literally anything and claim that we *must* do it or else God will kill people. We can't allow that- we live in a society.
I do think it's a difficult thing, though, because people genuinely believe that our actions affect what God does to us, so it's very difficult to argue against. Difficult to find some sort of outcome that people would agree on.
In summary: I'm glad to hear that Damar Hamlin has been doing better. I am a football fan, and it was emotional for me to see so many football-adjacent people coming together like this to show support for him. A lot of people have been talking publicly about praying for Hamlin- and I understand why atheists may have a problem with this in certain circumstances. But Mehta's post misrepresents the motivation for praying on a sports tv show. It was likely motivated not by a desire to use a tragic situation to push religion on other people, but by a belief that maybe this could actually help Hamlin's medical condition. The idea that, maybe if we pray more, we can convince God to help him.
If you want to argue against this, it's important to understand the reasons behind it. And yes, let's definitely argue against the idea that "prayer works." Why would God choose not to help people just because there weren't enough prayers about it? What kind of monstrous God is this? Yes, fight against that kind of God.
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Related:
Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk
I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches
An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God
I Didn't Like the Ocean in "Moana" Because it was Too Much Like God
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