When Prayer Inspires You To Do It Yourself

Praying hands. Image source.

So I want to talk about how Christians connect the concepts of "praying for something" and "doing the thing yourself."

Back when I was evangelical, I had this belief about prayer: Prayer is so important. If we are doing some big thing for God, or if we really really need something, we absolutely have to pray about it. Of all the things we could potentially do to ensure the success of the venture in question, prayer is the most important. 

We would always say that- prayer is the most important part. If you're working on something that you feel like God wants you to do, and you work hard but you don't pray about it, well you're shooting yourself in the foot. What are you even doing, trying to do things without prayer, as if you don't need God?

When I was a college student, I was getting ready to go on a summer mission trip, and I had to send out my fundraising letters. Yeah this is a thing in evangelical culture- young people go on mission trips that cost several thousand dollars, and they write letters to adults in their church, to ask for money for the trip. The basic structure of the letter has to be like this:

I'm going on a mission trip to [some place] because [big lofty ideas about God]. Here's how you can help: First of all, pray for us. Prayer is the most important thing! Second, give me money. [but maybe word this a bit more politely]

And then I kept a list of all the people who had donated to my trip, and the amounts, to see how close I was to the target amount. I did *not* reach the target amount, and had to add a few hundred dollars of my own money. (I wrote about this here: A Little Story About a Mission Trip and Money.)

Anyway, the reason I'm telling this story is, we all had to say "prayer is the most important thing." We all had to say that if someone prays for me to raise the money, that's more effective than actually *giving* me money. We all had to say that, but nobody kept track of "I have 15 people who agreed to pray for me, wow that's great." What we kept track of was, how much money have we collected so far, and how much more do we need? When it was time to pay up, those of us who hadn't raised the whole amount had to pay for part of it ourselves. There was no part of the process where we were asked how many people prayed for us, and were judged on whether or not it was enough.

We claimed prayer was the most important thing. If someone prayed for me to be able to raise the money, if they prayed really really hard, then God would prompt various people to give me the money I needed. And, it might happen that someone is praying really hard- "God, please help Perfect Number raise the money"- spending a lot of time, a lot of emotion, really really begging- because we believed prayer was most effective if you prayed over and over, and if you "really meant it"- and then God would cause a thought to occur to this person, in the middle of their praying- "hey, what if *I* gave her some money?"

Yes, it can happen that you're praying for something, and the way God answers your prayer is by making you realize that *you* should do it. Indeed, God will only answer your prayer if you "really mean it"- and if you truly do want me to get the money for the mission trip, then you will certainly be willing to put in some of your own money. Otherwise, I guess you don't "really mean it" when you're praying, and God won't listen to your prayer.

So in this ideology, we kind of viewed prayer like this: You pray really hard for God to do something, you put a lot of emotion into it, and this hands the task over to God, who has various strategies available to accomplish what you asked, if God decides that's what should happen. Sometimes this means that God will then prompt the very same person who was praying, to make them realize that *they* have the ability to do something about it.

So I'm writing about this because I want to compare it with what I believe now. In my post The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray, I talked about conceptualizing prayer like this: We're *not* asking God to do these things; we're making a statement about how we think things should be, and this gives us clarity about what actions *we* should take to make it happen. 

In both cases, you pray for something and then you do the work yourself- but they're so different. In the ideology I used to have, God was in charge of doing the things- we just needed to pray really really really sincerely and persistently, and then God would do it. And sometimes this "God doing it" would involve, somewhat surprisingly, making you realize that *you* should do it. Kind of an unexpected and indirect thing, but sure, that's a valid strategy God can use.

But now I don't believe God acts in response to prayer. It's on us. I don't think you can pray really hard, and then sit back, assured that you've done your part to put the wheels in motion to get this done. 

You could think about the difference between these 2 ideologies as cutting out the middleman. Pray to give the task to God, and then God gives it back by giving you the realization that you should do it. I find this really ineffective and error-prone- there are several failure points where someone/Someone might bungle the handover.

And here's another example: There have been times where I saw somebody unhappy, and I wanted to help them, but I didn't know what to say. What if I said the wrong thing, and made it worse? So I prayed about it a lot. I asked God to help them feel better. And I felt good about that, because God is always perfect- if I attempted to help them, I might do it wrong, but if I pray and then God is the one who takes on the task of helping them, well, God will surely not screw it up like I would. I remember being glad that I could pray, and not take any action myself- it was a way to help, without any of the risk. 

Maybe that's bad? That you can pray, and feel like you did something, and so you no longer have the burden of being obligated to do something. Remember how we always said prayer was the most important thing? That it's more effective to pray and ask God to do something, rather than to do something yourself. Maybe this belief is not good.

The apostle James wrote, 

Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?

Is prayer the same way? If you see someone in need, and you pray for them, and do nothing else, would James say, "what good is it"? I never would have interpreted this verse that way, when I was evangelical- because I did think prayer counted as "doing something."

But also, when I was evangelical, I believed that an important part of prayer was listening to God. You pray for something, and you also sit quietly and see if God tells you anything. It very well could happen that you pray for something, and then when you sit there and listen to God, God answers by saying that *you* should do the thing. I did believe that was very important. You don't just pray and that's all- you pray and then listen for whatever God has to say about your prayers.

I saw a poll on the internet one time- a Christian was asking other Christians how they understood prayer, and the 2 choices were:

1. Prayer changes God
2. Prayer changes me

Christians say all sorts of things about prayer, but in this case, it was boiled down to these 2 views- which I agree is a helpful way of looking at it. Do you believe you pray, and then God goes and does something about it? Or do you believe you pray, and it helps you to become a better person? (Possibly by inspiring you to do the thing yourself.)

Personally I don't believe in either of those- but I think this helps clarify the differences in how Christians view prayer.

So my point is, I now believe that praying should go right along with doing the thing yourself. But in a very different way than I did back then.

---

Related:

The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray

Praying Non-Literally

The Parable of the Talents: Risk and Return in Building the Kingdom of Heaven

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Long Hunt for China’s Vanishing Elephant Slides (April 16) "She often navigates narrow alleys, old residential compounds, ruins, and abandoned industrial sites, asking for directions along the way. At some point, an elephant slide simply appears — a moment Sun describes as similar to “clearing a level” in a video game." Wow definitely check out the photos in the article - all the slides are different.

2. Harvard Legacy of Slavery Initiative Releases Database Identifying 1,613 Enslaved People (May 13, via) "Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative released a public database Tuesday identifying 1,613 people who were enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff or who labored on Harvard’s campus between 1636 and 1865." The database is here. 

3. KUA MUSIC【祢是我的一切／You Are My All In All】蔡佳靈 (2024) Mandarin Chinese cover of the worship song "You are my all in all."

4. Red vs blue button (May 16) "In other words, game theory says the correct strategy is to argue loudly and meaninglessly on the internet."

5. Unprecedented corruption and Calvinism (May 18) Linking this because I was struck by what it says about this "blessing of the bikes" event, where a Lutheran church invited motorcycle riders to "receive blessings and prayers."

These rituals can cater to a superstitious understanding of religion, with participants viewing the “blessing” as a kind of talisman against the potential danger of their vocation or avocation, and it’s important to conduct such rituals in a way that doesn’t encourage that understanding. But they can also be a demonstration of solidarity and neighborliness — a way for the church to say “You are a part of this community and we care about you.”

!!!!! Wow, this is a take I haven't heard before. In other words, we have to be careful that people do not interpret "the blessing of the bikes" to mean we are actually blessing the bikes and God will give you protection specifically because you attended this event and got "blessed." It's really striking to me that Fred frames it like 'that would be unfortunate if people interpreted it that way' [my paraphrase, not an actual quote] rather than that just being the default obvious interpretation. 

I'm over here asking "what if prayer isn't 'talking to God'" feeling like I'm breaking all kinds of rules... are there Christians out there saying, "Wow, that would be unfortunate if people interpreted prayer as literally talking to God"?

6. Results Age (May 13) "Please, we need your help. Our research suggests you're the last living descendant of the person who knew how to format this config file."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. WWND? (What would Nebuchadnezzar do?) (May 14) 

An Evangelical Case for Trump as the Antichrist (May 4) This is exactly what I'm saying! I don't even believe in "the" antichrist, but he checks all the boxes!

2. Lessons in Training, Strategy, and Discipline From the Civil Rights Movement (April 27) "With that, the civil rights movement had won. The American public had been made aware, Bevel said, 'in the most graphic way possible, that a sheriff in Alabama was beating law-abiding citizens whose only offense was asking for the right to vote.'"

3. Revealed: The Trump administration arrested the parents of at least 27,000 kids in seven months, ICE records show (May 8) "Families described scrambling for funds after a primary breadwinner was detained or deported. Teens and young adults had to drop out of school to take care of younger siblings after both parents were deported. Children were left wondering when or whether they would ever be able to see parents who had been deported back to countries where they faced death threats."

4. NYU Langone Releases Grand Jury Subpoena: Feds Want Names Of Every Trans Youth Care Patient (May 15) "In addition to the names of providers, the DOJ wants the names and medical histories of every trans youth patient who received gender-affirming care from Langone since 2020. The DOJ also asserted that “de-identified information” is insufficient." Holy crap.

Also from Erin in the Morning: Federal Court Finds Trump Admin DOJ Misled Courts To Target Trans People's Private Data (May 15) "DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case. It has misrepresented and withheld information to both this Court and the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas." 

Praying Non-Literally

The tortoise and the hare. Image source.

In my post The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray, I said that instead of viewing prayer as talking to God, "What if prayer is a ritualized way to express our hopes and our understanding of our place in the world?" And I want to flesh that out a little more.

Maybe "ritualized" isn't the right word- but what I want to say is, a mode of communication where we format the words into a certain structure/genre, but the actual meaning of it isn't the surface-level statements of that structure. The actual meaning is something more abstract and deeper, and the structure is just a vehicle for communicating those deeper ideas.

Some examples:

1. Satire

Satire is a style of writing where you take some bit of truth and then present it in an exaggerated way in order to show how ridiculous it is. So at the surface level, the statements in the satire are not true. But their purpose is to make a point.

For example, The Onion is a satire news site. The articles say things that are not true- but there's a purpose to it, and sometimes they make really insightful points. Here's an Onion link:

Experts: Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away - This one's from 2014, and it says that medical experts have publicly discussed a timeline for an ebola vaccine in terms of how many white people are affected. Okay, that's not true, no one said that. But the point it is making is that ebola is a deadly disease which the world should take seriously- but the world is not taking it seriously because mostly it's African people who are being affected by it. The point of the article is to call out the implicit racism in what kinds of issues get treated as important.

But if you just take it at face value, as if it's describing something that really happened, you will think that health experts really did say that ebola only really matters if it affects white people, and that everyone just nodded along and this is fine. No- the point of it is not to read it and accept that it's true; the point is to expose the racism in how the world was reacting to ebola.

2. Fables

A fable is a little story which is supposed to teach some kind of life lesson. Sometimes they have talking animals or magic- things that are not real. 

For example, "The Tortoise and the Hare" is an old fable where the tortoise and hare are having a race, and the hare runs fast initially but then gets distracted and doesn't finish, while the tortoise keeps plugging along and eventually crosses the finish line. And we are supposed to learn that "slow and steady wins the race."

This is not a true story, and if you think it's a true story, you'll get bogged down in all kinds of details. How did the tortoise and hare communicate with each other in order to agree on the rules for the race? Do animals understand the concept of a race? Do animals understand the concept of a finish line? If you ask all these questions, you're missing the point, because it's not a true story. But the point is to teach a lesson which is useful and true, in some sense.

3. Job interviews

On the surface, a job interview consists of an interviewer asking questions, and a candidate answering the questions. But the point is not "here is a question, now I will correctly answer the question." That's not the point at all. As a candidate, the important thing is not to answer the questions correctly; the important thing is to communicate a deeper message that says "I am the kind of person you would want to hire for this job." (And a secondary purpose is to find out information about the job, so you can decide for yourself if you would even want to work there or not.)

So for example, the interviewer asks, "What's your biggest strength?" You're not supposed to say what your actual biggest strength is, by some absolute objective measure. Maybe you're really good at making animal sounds, or pouring milk into cereal in exactly the right proportions, or making babies laugh... perhaps you're in the top 1% of people in some weird little niche ability, such that it would make sense to say that's your biggest strength. No! Don't tell the interviewer that!

The answer you actually need to give to this question is not "what's your biggest strength" but "talk about a strength you have, that is related to this job, that will make the interviewer believe that you are a person they should hire."

Or, maybe the interviewer says, "Tell me about a problem you had in your previous job, and how you solved it." You don't have to take this super literally. Maybe you can't think of an example from your previous job, but you have a good example from the job you worked at before that. That's fine! Talk about that! It's not about the literal words of the interviewers' questions; it's about communicating a deeper message about what kind of person you are, and that you are a competent person they would want to hire.

Don't *lie* in a job interview, obviously, but it's okay to not directly answer the question but instead talk about something along the lines of the general idea of the question, with the primary goal being presenting yourself as a good job candidate, rather than literally answering the question.

The surface-level statements all need to be true, but the actual *meaning* of the job interview is not in the surface-level statements.

4. Sharing links to news stories

Let's say you have a website, and you post links to news articles. And a lot of these links are about some topic, like, immigrants committing crimes, or something. Each individual story is true on its own- statistically, there must be immigrants who commit crimes; any large population will inevitably have some members who commit crimes. It's certainly possible to collect the facts about specific cases where this happens, and write true news articles.

So, each individual story is true, but the effect of sharing so many of them is that it creates the impression that this is really common. That's the "deeper meaning" being communicated. And this might be unintentional in a lot of cases- maybe you consume a lot of content related to some certain topic, and it makes you subconsciously believe that whatever you're reading about is more common and normal than it is in reality.

You can even get cases where something happens, and we feel like we shouldn't talk about it because it plays into some harmful political narrative. I really hate this, this tendency to want to cover up true facts about specific real events just because we know that people will not take those facts as simply describing the literal events that happened, but will draw sweeping conclusions. 

5. "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

People are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up. I recently realized, when kids answer this question, it's not about what job they're actually going to have when they grow up. It's a way of expressing their interests and their sense of identity. So it's not literally true, but it's still communicating something meaningful.

When I was a kid, I had this book where every page was one of the grades from kindergarten to 12th grade, and every year you were supposed to glue a picture of yourself onto the corresponding page, and write some stuff about what your life was like that year- and each page had the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" along with some checkboxes with potential jobs. For the earlier pages, like for kindergarten kids, the choices were like, "doctor", "firefighter", "policeman", and then you flip ahead to the high school pages and they're like "engineer", "salesperson." Middle-school-Perfect-Number was like, wow this really exposes how fake the whole "what do you want to be when you grow up" thing is. 5-year-old kid checks the box that says "firefighter" but then they grow up a little bit and we don't even offer that checkbox any more, nobody actually believes you when you're 5 years old and you say you're going to be a firefighter.

But! It turns out, it *was* useful and meaningful, even though it has no actual connection to the job the kid will have, decades into the future. It's not actually about that. It's about how the kid understands their own identity, and what they imagine their ideal life to be.

6. Prayer

So now we come back to prayer. Full disclosure, I don't pray, because of all the, uh, unfortunate implications when you really take seriously the belief that God takes action in response to prayer. God's gonna help me with whatever first-world problem is bothering me, while not taking action to help other people with much bigger problems? God's going to choose to take action to answer prayers of people who believe the correct things and pray with the correct attitude... and therefore if some horrible tragedy happens to you, it must be your own fault for not praying correctly?

I just don't want to be a part of that at all. It makes sense that *I* prioritize myself, and I put in more effort to solve my "first-world problems" than I do to help victims of human-rights violations on the other side of the world, but God is supposed to be objective and love everyone equally- it is quite ****ed up if They are actively intervening to help me, when there are wars and atrocities happening to other people.

But here's an idea I'm starting to explore: Prayer isn't *literally* talking to God. God does not hear our prayers and then take action in response to them. Instead, prayer is about using the literary structure of "here's a message we want to tell God" in order to communicate deeper ideas about how we view ourselves and what kind of world we want.

For example: In my 2016 post, Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk, I looked up statistics about the leading causes of death in the US- the top causes are heart disease and cancer. But people aren't constantly praying "God, protect us from heart disease." Instead, people pray for safety from violence, plane crashes, terrorism, etc- things that statistically have a very small chance of affecting you personally. I pointed out that people pray about the things that they are worried about, rather than the things that truly pose a danger to them. And that if Christians truly believe that God acts powerfully in response to our prayers, we should harness that power by identifying the biggest actual threats- using statistics, not whatever fearful thoughts pass through our heads after reading the news- and targeting our prayers toward those threats.

But in that post, I also said this is a terrible idea because then we would have to think about heart disease and cancer constantly, and stress ourselves out, in order to pray most effectively. That's a terrible way to live, and I just cannot believe in a God who chooses to give protection to people according to the amount of worrying they do over heart disease and car accidents which are most likely to occur within 10 miles of their home.

But get this: What if prayer *isn't* a process by which we convince God to intervene in our lives and help us? What if it's *not* true that by naming a specific scenario in your prayers, you tweak the probability of that specific scenario occurring in real life? What if it's not about affecting God at all, but it's about our own feelings and how we view ourselves? If viewed that way, it does make sense that the things people pray about are the things they're worried about, and it doesn't make sense to come up with additional worries to pray about in order to get additional protection from God.

Okay, here's a question: Maybe Christians already *do* view prayer non-literally, and it's just me who misunderstood it and thought God was really gonna do something? Well, no. Christians talk about how they went through medical troubles or financial troubles, and God helped them through it *because* they prayed. "Prayer works!" So people really do believe that God acts in response to prayer.

Still, though, Christians don't actually act in accordance with that belief. They don't treat prayer as something so urgent and powerful, with the Almighty God of the universe standing by to listen to whatever thoughts and requests we have. In practice it's more like... kinda boring and feels like it's not accomplishing anything.

Another thing: Back when I was evangelical and I prayed a lot, I used to wonder why we're supposed to pray over and over for the same thing. I would spend lots of time begging and begging God, over and over, the same things over and over. But, why isn't it enough to just tell God 1 time? Why do They need to be reminded over and over? Are They just really bad at staying on task, and They'll forget to do it if you don't keep reminding Them? Do They need some kind of to-do list app? Jesus said, "your Father knows what you need before you ask him", so why do we even need to pray at all, let alone praying multiple times for the same thing?

(I would say that part of the answer, from an evangelical perspective, is that God only answers prayers if we truly mean it and we ask with the right attitude. If you just pray 1 time and assume God will do it, then you're not taking it seriously enough, and you're acting like you're entitled to God doing things for you. You have to pray over and over to show God you're really serious and humble. Yeah- in this blog post, I'm specifically focusing on the "asking God to do things" aspect of prayer, but evangelicals would tell you that prayer is much more than that.)

Also, I'm not saying "If you look at how prayer is talked about in the bible, and how Christians talk about it, it makes sense in this 'non-literal' interpretation rather than viewing it as 'talking to God.'" No, it's not that simple- I think there are some *aspects* that line up more with the non-literal interpretation, but at the same time, there are plenty of bible verses that definitely talk about prayer like it's literally going to affect God's actions and cause things to happen in the real world.

And I'm not saying, "Well, Christians say prayer is 'talking to God' but that's not literal, it's just a symbol that points to a deeper meaning, so it's fine that people are describing it as 'talking to God'" - no, the implications of "talking to God" are very different from this "it's about how we understand ourselves and what kind of world we want to live in" that I'm describing. If you really go all in on "I'm talking to God" and try to live according to the implications of that, it's bad. So let's not say it's "talking to God" if it's not.

Anyway, this is just an idea I'm exploring. Not sure if I really believe it or not. For a long time, I've been very firm about "I don't pray" because of these issues when it's understood as "talking to God" but maybe I would be interested in it if we viewed it a different way.

---

Related

The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray

Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk

On believing that "prayer works"

What Does God Do When You Pray For An Anonymized Patient By Bed Number?

I Figured Out What The 1-10 Pain Scale Is Actually About

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Make It Myself (April 15) From xkcd.

2. Why cheap waste management is key to stopping plastic pollution (March 16, via) "In many low- and middle-income countries, people find themselves in a very different situation: less than half of solid household waste is collected. People often have little choice but to burn or dump it. But even the waste that is collected is often left in open dumps, where it’s at risk of leaking into the environment."

3. He won a major school prayer case. It took years to get a proper obituary. (April 16) "Despite all the backlash and threats his family received, Jaffree told an audience at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s convention in 1985 that he would do it all over again because he was 'absolutely committed to the idea of separation of church and state. There’s no question that my religious view is a minority, and unless people like me are willing to challenge these cases, then we don’t have a chance.'"

4. Trolleyology bad (April 20) "Do we believe this stipulation? To state the obvious, it’s ludicrous."

5. Here's some good news: Despite Apocalyptic Warnings, California Fast Food Wage Hike Didn’t Kill Jobs (April 9, via) 

6. Chinese humanoid robot beats world record for fastest human half-marathon | ABC NEWS (April 20) This is really cool, and also you have to watch the video of the robot running- it looks very funny.

---

Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Democrats file articles of impeachment against Hegseth for ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ (April 15) He absolutely should be impeached. This particular attempt isn't going to get anywhere, because the Republican Congress members have all sold their souls, but it's good that Democrats are at least trying.

2. Businesses race to apply for tariff refunds (April 20) "In fact, many retailers find themselves in a similar quandary because tariff refunds will go to whoever paid the actual customs bill. It's unclear how, or if, the refunds might trickle down to store owners who paid tariff surcharges to their suppliers."

3. Logjam of U.S. immigration applications puts millions at greater risk of deportation (April 17) "The 11.6 million pending applications in the "backlog" include forms to become a citizen, acquire a green card, work or seek asylum. There are also 247,974 applications in what USCIS calls the "frontlog," which is tracked separately. Those are applications, likely sent by mail, that have been submitted but that the agency has not physically opened and assigned a category."

These are people who are following the rules, jumping through all the bureaucratic hoops, and the government is making it harder for them. I know a lot of average Americans say the problem is just *illegal* immigration, and want a system that works for people who are doing it the *legal* way- but the MAGAs in the government *never* wanted that.

4. Epstein survivors have mixed feelings on Melania Trump's call for hearing in Congress (April 10) "'You want to retraumatize us and ask us to go in front of Congress and tell them our story, which we have told some of them already,' Lacerda said. 'And then do absolutely nothing.'"

5. ICE deported 174 Daca recipients through most of last year, agency head says in letter (April 18, via) 

6. The white evangelical Bible in the news (April 16) "And so it was darkly hilarious to watch white American evangelical leaders rushed to Twitter and in front of the cameras to proudly reveal that they cannot recognize the Bible when someone quotes it back to them." This whole entire post is spot-on.

7. Montana Supreme Court Rules Its Constitution Entirely Protects Trans Citizens In Landmark Ruling (April 17) "Transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Federal Judge Vacates Kennedy Declaration, Permanently Blocks Trump's Trans Youth Care Hospital Threats (April 21) "On the government’s core argument—that the Kennedy Declaration was merely Kennedy’s personal, non-binding opinion—the judge was withering: 'Defendants’ jurisdictional arguments are based on the bald-faced lie that the Kennedy Declaration amounts to nothing more than one man’s musings on gender-affirming care. This Court is not persuaded by Defendants’ attempts to gaslight it into believing that the Kennedy Declaration does anything other than what it says.'"

The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray

Image text: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." Image source. 

I was recently thinking about the Lord's Prayer, and I realized that if I don't view it as "talking to God," I actually really like it. 

In my experience in Christianity, prayer is defined as talking to God. We believed that God is literally on the receiving end, listening to what we're saying in real time, having opinions about the things that we prayed about, making decisions about what actions to take in response to our prayers. As the Christian cliché says, God always answers our prayers with "yes", "no", or "wait."

But now that I'm ex-evangelical and the concept of a "personal relationship with God" really weirds me out, I don't pray. I don't want to talk to Them. I very much don't want to talk to Them. I don't want Them to be there reacting to my prayers in ways that steamroll my freedom to have my own opinions and think my own thoughts and make my own choices.

For many years, I've been saying "I don't pray." But just now I've thought of something, a whole different way to conceptualize what prayer is. Get this: What if prayer is a ritualized way to express our hopes and our understanding of our place in the world?

I think there are some subgroups within Christianity that view prayer something like this. Many many times, when I was evangelical, I encountered other Christians who prayed in ways that felt "fake" to me, like they didn't really believe an all-powerful God was right there listening and taking it seriously. Using language that's flowery rather than language that reflects the urgency and power of literally talking to God. A lot of sentences starting with "may."

Now I'm like, maybe there actually *is* something to that, and I shouldn't just dismiss it as "fake." I'm still coming from a very evangelical mindset on this. 

There's no way I'm the first Christian to come up with the idea "maybe we should conceptualize prayer in some way other than 'talking to God'" - but if I ever encountered this when I was evangelical, I would have dismissed it as fake Christians not taking their beliefs seriously. But here's an idea, what if there are Christians who pray in ways very different from how I did, because they have a well-thought-out belief system where that would make sense, not because they're "not taking it seriously." (Do leave a comment if you have experience with a thoughtful and robust belief system that values prayer but doesn't view it as "talking to God.")

So let's walk through the Lord's Prayer. (It comes from Matthew 6:9-13, but the language I'm using here isn't the exact wording from the bible, it's the wording that is traditionally used in churches.) I want to talk about how I understood this when I was evangelical, and how it now means something new and exciting and inspiring to me, if I view it as a picture of what I want the world to be like, rather than "talking to God."

Our Father, who art in heaven

When I was evangelical: God (he/him) is our Father, and we are talking to God. He is all-powerful, and he is listening and doing things in response to our prayers.

But now: In some ways, we can use the metaphor of God being like a father (also mother, also nonbinary parent). In particular, it means all humans are children of God; we are all equal, and all deserve to have a good life. We should care about people, all over the world, people who are different from us- we are all God's children.

Hallowed be thy name.

When I was evangelical: God's name is holy. We want everyone to recognize that God's name is holy. Ugh, isn't it terrible that people don't believe in Jesus, don't respect God's name, don't dedicate their lives to Jesus like they're supposed to?

We're talking directly to God here, saying, hey God, *I* know that your name is holy and deserving of respect, doesn't it suck that other people don't know that? Can you do something about that, God? Can you get people to believe in you?

But now: We want God's name to be honored. And so *we* as Christians need to behave in such a way that people see we are doing good, and they respect our beliefs because of that. Yeah, this is on us. A lot of Christians are acting like Christianity means we're better than other people, and we're gonna pick fights over displaying the ten commandments in schools, and other such nonsense. But imagine this, imagine if Christians were known for doing good. Imagine if people were like "oh, Christians, they're always feeding the hungry and fighting for equal rights for everyone." Imagine that. I think if that were true, then "hallowed be Thy name" would be true.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

When I was evangelical: In heaven, God is in charge, and everyone obeys God's will. That's the way it's supposed to be, and we want it to be like that on earth too. We want everyone to become a Christian and believe what they're supposed to believe, and obey God like they're supposed to.

But now: The kingdom of heaven is a world where there is justice and freedom and everyone is able to have a good life, and we need to do the work of bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth. This is something that *we* need to do. *We* need to fight for a better world. 

Give us this day our daily bread

When I was evangelical: We are dependent on God for everything, and we shouldn't forget that. We are pathetic and shouldn't feel like we are competent to do anything ourselves. We are nothing without God, and we should pray for even our basic daily needs, because we are dependent on God for everything. Yes, we should even be *asking God* to provide for our basic food needs. We worship the sort of God who is petty and might smite us if we aren't grateful enough.

But now: I feel like, I'm lucky that I have enough money that I'm able to take care of my needs. (I don't thank God for this, because that would imply that God chose to give me money and chose to not give other people money.) We should help other people who are in need. We want to live in a world where everyone has enough food.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors

When I was evangelical: We are all sinners who deserve to go to hell. You have to forgive anybody who sins against you, no matter how bad it is, or else God might not forgive *your* sins and you'll go to hell.

Yeah, and we should directly ask God to forgive our sins, to remind ourselves that he's not obligated to do it, and we shouldn't take it for granted, because we're sinners who don't deserve that.

But now: We should have some grace and understanding for other people who mess up and hurt people in ways that we've also messed up and hurt people. Like, if someone gets mad at you over some little thing, they shouldn't do that, but also, you should think to yourself "well, there have been times I've gotten unfairly mad at people, and that was wrong" and so don't judge them too bad for it.

I *don't* believe we're required to forgive literally everything. What if someone's a murderer or child abuser or something? The teaching that victims always have to forgive is a big part of how sexual abuse gets covered up and allowed to continue in conservative religious environments.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil

When I was evangelical: Oh, we're all such horrible sinners, we're susceptible to temptation, and we need God to help us not sin.

But now: I'm not sure about the "temptation" part- I don't really know where "temptation" fits into an ex-evangelical ideology. Maybe temptation to just kinda take the easy way out, to just take care of ourselves and not look for ways to do more and help other people- this isn't a specific discrete event where we make a choice to do the right or wrong thing, but more about our overall lifestyle.

And again, this is on us. Know yourself, know your emotional needs, and use that knowledge to set up good habits for yourself. Make deliberate choices about what kind of lifestyle you want to live. If you have a tendency to waste time on social media, for example, set up your life so that it's inconvenient to do so.

Maybe I'm discounting the role of God too much here. Many people can tell you about some feat of willpower or emotional health they accomplished, and they say "God helped me do that- I could not have done it myself." I have had experiences like that too. They felt so real, that I still believe in them now, even though I'm like "I don't really believe in that."

For "deliver us from evil," how about we understand that as keeping us safe from the evils going on in this world- rather than our own "evil"/ "sinful nature"? We want people to be safe from evil- and so that means we should take action and help people.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

When I was evangelical: God is all-powerful, and God wins in the end. Even though here on earth, a lot of people are not living the way God wants, and not believing in God like they're supposed to, fortunately it won't be like that forever. Eventually God will get everyone under his control.

But now: Even though we see bad things happening in the world, it will get better. There is something greater than the power-hungry exploitation which defines so much of how the world works. This isn't "just the way it is"- we should fight for a better world than that. God, heaven, justice, will win in the end. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

---

What if we don't view prayer as "talking to God," asking God to do all the things that *we* think should be done, assuming God agrees with us, confident in our superiority because we believe the right things and other people don't? 

What if instead, it's a way of expressing our vision for how we want the world to be- and we're not telling it to God and asking God to act according to our ideas, because that relies on the assumptions that God agrees with us, and that God is the one who primarily takes action. No, we proclaim that this is the way we want the world to be, and then we have to do it. We're not telling God to do it- if we were, then we just need to say it really really sincerely, performing the right emotions, and that's enough- no, God is not going to answer our prayer and do this; we need to do it ourselves. 

If we don't view prayer as "talking to God," then it's obvious that the act of just *saying it* isn't enough. We need to take action. We need to be the sort of people who are working in the direction of "thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven."

---

Follow-up posts: 
Praying Non-Literally
When Prayer Inspires You To Do It Yourself

Related

"Hey God, you and I both know..." 

"On earth as it is in heaven"

When You Believe God is Out to Get You

A rock with the words "God answers prayer" on it. Image source.

I recently posted this link, Asylum-seekers thought they were following the rules. Now some are told to start over, and I have some more things I want to say about it.

The article is about how the MAGA government is using this strategy to screw over immigrants who are applying for asylum: Find some minor part of the process that wasn't done exactly according to the rules, and then say that it invalidates the whole process. (And in some cases, it was not the applicant's fault- they didn't have an interview because the government did not have any available times to do interviews.)

On one level, I understand that people can make the argument that this is what the rules say, so this is how it should work- if you don't follow all the steps correctly, then you don't get approved. But take a step back and ask what the overall goal is. For these MAGAs, it appears to me that the goal is to deport as many immigrants as possible. So they're looking for anything they can use as a reason to reject someone's application. 

But the original intention of the asylum system is this: Some people are forced to leave their home countries because they are genuinely in danger. In that kind of situation, they *should* have the right to live in the US. And if you're thinking about it from this perspective, you don't reject people just because they didn't do every single step perfectly. You give them support to help them through all the steps, and/or just don't make it an issue if some of the less-important steps aren't quite done perfectly.

These 2 contrasting perspectives- which I'll call "the government is out to get you" vs "people *should* get approved if they genuinely meet the criteria"- well, they made me think about how evangelicals talk about God. Is God out to get us, or do They genuinely want to help people?

---

The most obvious example of "God is out to get you" is the evangelical teaching about salvation. Who goes to heaven, and who goes to hell? Well, evangelicals believe this: Everyone deserves to go to hell. You have to be totally perfect and sinless to go to heaven. Yeah, sure, God loves us, God wants us to go to heaven, he's sad that we're all going to hell- but his hands are tied. That's the rules. If you have committed any sin at all, at any point in your life, you deserve to go to hell, and so God has to send you to hell. 

Oh, but, good news, God figured out a workaround. Jesus came and died on the cross, to take all our sins onto himself, so that we would appear to be perfect and sinless and therefore can go to heaven. But, in order to get your sins forgiven, you have to "pray the prayer" to "ask Jesus into your heart." You have to believe the correct things about Jesus. You have to really really sincerely believe. If you jump through those hoops correctly, then God is allowed to let you into heaven. If not, well, his hands are tied. 

Yes, apparently God loves all of us, but rules are rules, and if people didn't believe the correct things in the correct way and have the correct attitude in their hearts, sadly God just can't let them into heaven. They will be tortured in hell forever. I was taught that this was the gospel, this was the central message of Christianity, this is what we need to tell the world.

But, sometimes people would ask, what about someone who has never heard of Jesus? It doesn't seem fair for them to go to hell if they never had a chance to do all those correct steps to get to heaven. 

When I was evangelical, and non-Christians brought up this point to argue that God is being unfair, I answered by saying "well, one idea I've heard is 'people will be judged based on what they knew.' God will determine if you *would have* believed in Jesus, if given the chance, and let you into heaven on that basis." 

I said it like this- "one idea I've heard"- because I didn't know if that was for real. Sure, it seems better and more fair to say "people will be judged based on what they knew"- but is that in the bible anywhere? Are we just making this up to feel better about our religion? Carving out this exception for people who have never heard of Jesus- is that really valid?

Plus, it leads to all kinds of contradictions with other evangelical beliefs. If it's true that people go to heaven even if they've never heard of Jesus but "would have" believed, then it's not really so important for Christians to go into all the world as missionaries and tell people about Jesus. In fact, perhaps people have a better chance of getting into heaven if they've never heard, because then God judges them based on this "what if you had heard about Jesus in an ideal way" standard- maybe that gives them a better chance than "they kinda sorta heard about Jesus but not in that much detail, and so they never really gave it any thought, and didn't convert to Christianity." 

But you very much do NOT see Christians saying "hey, maybe we *shouldn't* be missionaries, because 'God judges people based on what they knew.'" Instead, you see Christians saying "We NEED to send missionaries to tell everyone about Jesus, to save them from hell! !!! This is so important! People are in danger of going to hell! This is something worth giving your life for!" 

No, this "God judges based on what they knew" idea isn't something that evangelicals truly believe and have thought through the implications of. It's just something we say when someone raises the objection that the criteria to get into heaven seem unfair. To be consistent with the rest of evangelical Christian ideology, you'd have to believe that God's hands are tied- he loves people and wants them to go to heaven, but rules are rules and there's nothing he can do about it.

The question of "what if someone didn't believe in Jesus because they've never heard" is sort of the easiest one. For all the other reasons that someone might not believe in Jesus because they had a bad experience with Christianity, evangelicals don't discuss whether there might be some kind of carve-out exception to help them. No. Rules are rules. God's hands are tied.

For example, what if someone is gay, and Christians are so mean to them about it, that they leave the church and don't believe in Jesus? What if someone is sexually abused by their pastor, and Christians are so heartless and victim-blamy about it, that they leave Christianity behind? What if someone really really wants to believe in God, and they pray and pray for God to show them They are real, they try everything they can, and they never get any response from God, so they give up on it? No, evangelicals think all these people are going to hell. Rules are rules.

As I said in my 2015 post When Christians Say "We're Sorry":

If Christians really are sorry, they know that people need to heal on their own terms.

But of course, like I said earlier, believing in hell screws this all up. Because how sorry can you really be, and how much freedom can you really allow a victim to have, when you believe in a God who won't care about that on judgment day? When you believe in a God who doesn't care that church people hurt this person, and for their own mental and emotional health, they never went to church again... when you believe in a God who says you're out if you don't believe these specific doctrines about Jesus- no excuses.

How sorry can you really be when you worship a God who puts "the gospel" above caring for victims?

If all this is true, I want to ask this question: Does God actually want people to go to heaven?

Yeah, I know the evangelical answer to that is of course God wants everyone to go to heaven! God wants it so much that he came and died for us!

But then, why are so many people failing to get "saved" because of reasons that don't really feel like good enough reasons to send someone to hell? Doesn't it seem like, if God really wanted people to go to heaven, They could set up a different system, to genuinely help people get on the path to get there? Rather than rejecting a huge proportion of humanity because they didn't believe the "right" things in the "right" way.

And yeah, I know the evangelical answer to this is, well those people must have not *really* wanted to follow God. On some level, they wanted to rebel against God, and these other factors are just excuses. God gives us free will, and some people choose to reject him. He respects their decision. (And sends them to hell for it.)

I know that's the "answer," but I don't buy it.

Also, many evangelicals have experienced salvation anxiety- ie, the worry that perhaps, when we prayed to commit our lives to Jesus, we didn't quite do it in *exactly* the right way, and therefore we're not really "saved" and we're going to hell. Maybe we didn't say the right words, or maybe we didn't "really mean it." So much worry and psychoanalyzing yourself. It's common for evangelicals to "pray the prayer" many many times, just in case all the previous times you somehow did it wrong. Children praying to Jesus every night to save them from hell, and still constantly worried that they didn't quite have the right feelings or right motivations, so what if it didn't "count"?

I submit to you that this is not a God that wants people to go to heaven. This is a God who is out to get us.

---

There are plenty of other circumstances where Christians believe that God set up some kind of thing for people's benefit, but people didn't quite follow all the technicalities of all the rules, and so missed out on the entire thing. We should be asking, did God actually want people to have those benefits, or not? Setting up a system of confusing rules, where one mistake means you fail the entire thing. Doesn't seem like something one would do if one wanted people to actually succeed.

For example, you're praying for something, and it doesn't happen. You keep praying for it, for a long time, and it still doesn't happen. What gives? Doesn't the bible say "whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours"? Didn't Jesus say, "You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it"? And yet many people have the experience of praying for something for a long time, and God doesn't make it happen.

Well, the evangelical answer for this is that these biblical promises about prayer come with all kinds of caveats. Maybe the problem is that you prayed for something that was outside of God's will. Maybe the problem is that you prayed with the wrong motives. Maybe the problem is that you have some sin in your life that you haven't repented of, and so God is refusing to answer your prayers.

A lot of Christians have had the experience of wanting something so bad- something very serious, like for a family member to be healed of a serious medical problem- and trying everything they possibly can to get their prayers to "work." Trying so hard to make sure you have the right feelings and the right motives while praying. Trying so hard to make sure you're not doing anything that God might interpret as sinful. Troubleshooting. Why isn't this working?

Yeah, the model we're working with here is that God has set up a system where They answer prayers. God's power to give us whatever we ask is right there, available to us. But you have to do all of the steps perfectly. If you don't quite meet all of the criteria completely perfectly, well, that must be the reason God isn't answering your prayer.

Kind of makes you wonder if God actually wants to answer prayers at all. Rules are rules, God's hands are tied... But maybe if They actually wanted to answer prayers, if They actually wanted these promises to mean anything, They could have gone about this differently. 

Another example: Years ago, I had some health problems, and that caused me to no longer believe in the concept of "trusting God." Because, apparently I can't "trust God" to not let health problems derail my whole life. What does "trusting God" even mean, if apparently this is within the range of things which God is okay with allowing to happen to me? Trust him to do what, exactly? Not letting my internal organs try to ruin my life for no reason is apparently NOT something I can trust God for.

Anyway, I once told a Christian friend my whole sad story about my health problems and why I don't trust God. (This was way after it had happened, and I wasn't having those problems any more.) And she said, "Maybe God was trying to teach you something."

Ugh. Geez. Maybe God was trying to teach me something. Yeah, this is something that Christians believe, that God allows bad things to happen to us because They have "a plan" and maybe They're trying to teach us to love Them more or be a better person or something like that.

And I said, "Well then God did a bad job, because I didn't learn anything from this, and that's not my fault." See normally, in this ideology, it would be *my fault*, that God made these bad things happen to me, with some high-minded purpose about teaching me something important, and I totally missed that message- that would be my fault. Must have been because I didn't have the right attitude, I didn't pray the right way, whatever, that's how I missed out on this very important lesson that God wanted to teach me by [checks notes] making me feel sick all the time. My fault. Not God's.

If God wanted to teach me something, maybe They could have gone about it in a different way. Also, isn't God all-knowing? They knew this wasn't gonna work, but They did it to me anyway? This God seems really bad at planning.

You have to ask, did this God actually want to teach me something, or not?

---

Here's what it all adds up to: In this ideology, there are amazing wonderful things that God wants to give us because God loves us so much. But, any little mistake on our part might ruin the whole thing. These big grand promises about how God loves everyone and wants everyone to go to heaven, how God is so eager and ready to answer prayer and to give us good things- contrast that with the reality that oh, apparently only a small percentage of people are able to get those good things, because everyone else makes some minor mistake and therefore loses out on the whole thing.

Kinda looks like God doesn't actually want to do those things for us.

I wish Christians would stop asking "what did I do wrong, that is stopping God from answering my prayers" and instead ask "why did God set up a system where you only get your prayers answered if you pray in the exact perfect way, and then not do anything to help us know what that exact perfect way is?"

Because, isn't the point that we are not perfect, and that's okay, God loves us and meets us where we are? We were not able to reach God, so God came down to us. We aren't able to be good enough on our own, but God's love makes up for it. Isn't that what Christianity is about? "We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans." "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." "We love because he first loved us.""

As for me, I'm a Christian, but I don't pray and I don't believe God intervenes in the world, because of questions like this. When you believe God intervened in some specific way to help you with some specific thing you experienced, then that raises all sorts of questions about all of the times that God did not intervene to help people, and however you answer those questions, it can't lead to anywhere good. It leads to victim-blaming, or perhaps a belief that God has biases about who is worth helping and who isn't. No, I don't believe in that.

When Christians give all sorts of reasons why it's right for God to send someone to hell for not believing the right things, or why God's not helping you or answering your prayers because of some little thing you didn't do perfectly, this isn't a God who genuinely loves people and wants to help them. This is a God who is out to get you.

---

Related: 

ICE and Hell 

I'm SO HAPPY I Won't Be Praying During Childbirth

I Didn't Like the Ocean in "Moana" Because it was Too Much Like God

"Hallow" and self-centered Christianity

Logo for the Hallow app. Image source.

Apparently there's a prayer app called "Hallow." Amanda Marcotte writes about it here: An atheist's unnerving descent into Hallow, the prayer app beloved by MAGA celebrities. I want to highlight this part of her article, because it's very insightful:

Most of this material doesn't seem political, but it does encourage a form of small-minded narcissism, with the relentless focus on the self. The Jesus of the Hallow app isn't much concerned about social justice or caring for the downtrodden, but about being your good buddy who strokes your hair after a bad day at work. The "demonic" forces the believer is called upon to resist aren't grave evils like human rights abuses. Satan seems more interested in frustrating you with traffic than, say, installing a fascist leader in the White House to destroy democracy. It doesn't seem political, but the project of lulling users into not caring about anything outside their immediate self-interest suits the goals of the MAGA movement. And it's probably more persuasive to ordinary people than overt right-wing propaganda. This isn't the Christianity of the liberal Christians I know, who volunteer, donate money, and care very much about electing better leaders. This is a "don't worry your pretty head about all that stuff" kind of Christianity. 

Wow. This is really a spot-on description of the evangelicalism I was raised in. ("Hallow" was made by Catholics, actually. But this description feels familiar to me, as an ex-evangelical.)

The way this article describes the Hallow app- about how it offers encouragement for little mundane issues like disagreements with one's coworkers, etc- how it's just about you and your own little world and God's place in it- all of this feels very normal and expected, to me. It's honestly a bit jarring how Marcotte seems to have expected a Christian prayer app to be about "social justice or caring for the downtrodden." Yeah sure, in my experience evangelicals kinda care about those things, but they are way far down the list- the most important thing is your own heart, your own attitude towards God, your own personal devotion to God, your habits around praying and reading the bible. 

"don't worry your pretty head about all that stuff" is absolutely right. I really have heard evangelicals say the real-world results of our attempts to do good don't matter. The only thing that matters is that God sees that your heart is in the right place. Seriously. Evangelicals really say that the whole world belongs to God, and if God wants a thing to happen, it's going to happen- nothing we can do to change that- so the only thing we really have control over is our own attitude, and that's what God will judge us for.

Evangelicals *do* take action to help the world. Sure, yes, they do. There are evangelical charities. Plenty of churches have food pantries to help local people in need. But as I said, it's way far down the list. That's not what comes to mind, when evangelicals consider questions like "what does it mean to be a Christian?" or "what does God want us to do?" The answers to those are, read the bible more, pray more, work on your personal relationship with God.

I find I am 0% surprised that when conservative Christians made a "prayer app," it ended up being about nothing more than the little world inside your own head. The little God who closely tracks your feelings as indicators of how devoted you are, but does nothing about human rights abuses in the world.

---

See also, this post from the Slacktivist: Toddlers on a treadmill: Why evangelicals can’t even take baby steps toward justice

Related:

On believing that "prayer works"

"Hey God, you and I both know..." 

Renee Bach, who had no medical training, opened a clinic in Africa. Just like missionaries are supposed to.

"Hey God, you and I both know..."

Praying hands. Image source.

Recently I wrote a post called Believing in the God You Want, where I mentioned that I don't think it's good to have a "personal relationship with God" because then you start to think "God agrees with me" and you won't be open to finding out when you're wrong about things. I want to elaborate on that here.

---

"Hey God, you and I both know..."

Okay let me explain the "Hey God, you and I both know..." thing. When you pray for some event xyz to happen, it's because you think xyz would be a good thing, and you think that God thinks xyz would be a good thing. So when you pray for it, and you listen to God and you don't hear any pushback from Them saying They disagree with it, it increases your confidence that God agrees with you about xyz.

This is not really a big deal if you're praying for something fairly uncontroversial, like "God, help my friend who is sick to get better." But what about these other common prayer requests:

• "God, help so-and-so to see that you exist, and become a Christian."
• "God, so-and-so shouldn't be dating their partner such-and-such because [they are gay/ one of them is Christian and one is not/ insert additional judgy reasons], help them realize that and break up."
• "God, our culture has turned away from you by [being woke/ letting gay people be on tv/ allowing no-fault divorce/ allowing children to not say the 'under God' part of the Pledge of Allegiance/ any other culture war issue], please make people stop doing that and come back to you."

Basically, prayers that say "I'm right, and other people are wrong- and obviously God is on my side on this issue." When you pray like that, and you do it day after day, and you feel emotionally connected to God and don't have any sense of something being a bit off when you pray like that- it reinforces the idea that God does indeed agree with you about what other people's correct behavior should be on these issues.

---

I should mention that sometimes God does push back

Now, in my experience in evangelical Christianity, it's NOT true that every time you set out to pray for xyz to happen, you end up even more convinced that God agrees with you on xyz. Sometimes God does "push back." (I mean, I no longer believe in that kind of "personal relationship with God" so in general I don't think it's actually *God* who is "pushing back"- but I mean the person who is praying experiences it that way.)

For example, one time I was praying about something, and I realized that my feelings about it were kinda racist, and that obviously God loves people of all races equally, so I was in the wrong. Praying made me realize that I was wrong, that God did not agree with me on whatever I initially was going to pray about.

I remember another time, one of my Christian friends was telling me about struggling with low self-esteem, and praying about it, and feeling like God was telling her she was the one being selfish for making such a big deal about her self and her self-esteem. Thinking about it now, this kind of seems uh not helpful, and she probably should have gone to therapy. But the point is, she went to pray about something, and the process of praying changed her mind. 

Yes, I had experiences like that too- praying in a way that you're totally open to whatever God has to say- sometimes you feel that God is saying you're viewing the situation all wrong.

But, importantly, that's not likely to happen on any of the big culture-war issues, because evangelicals are just so confident that God agrees with them on those. You can see the examples I gave here are along the lines of "I am so thoroughly sinful that my sin has biased me to thinking about these things in the wrong way." Rather than "Maybe the things that I hear in church all the time, which we all take for granted, actually aren't true."

Here's another way God might "push back"- suppose you are worried about losing your job, so you pray that God won't let it happen, but then you lose your job anyway, but then months later you're in a much better situation, and you conclude that actually it was good that you lost your job. So you decide that when you prayed about it back then, God didn't agree with you on it. You pray for something to happen, but then much later realize it wasn't the right thing.

When that kind of thing happens though, people describe it like this: "I prayed for abc to happen, but on some level I didn't really feel peace about it when I prayed. Now I understand why I felt that way- it's because God knew that abc wasn't right for me." I am extremely curious about whether this is an accurate representation of what happened, or just a justification they came up with after-the-fact. Maybe sometimes you "don't feel peace" about something, but then everything goes fine and you forget that you had those feelings. 

---

Mormons

In college, I had a bunch of Mormon friends, and they were always going on about how non-Mormons should read the Book of Mormon and pray to ask God about whether it's true, and everyone who has done this has concluded that it's true. I guess this is one of the common Mormon talking points, because they were ALWAYS advising people to do this "experiment."

(I'm very skeptical about this statistic "everyone who has done this has concluded it's true." When I was evangelical, we also threw around supposed "facts" like that. Very skeptical about whether anyone actually did any kind of study to measure this- or is it just like, if you said you tried it and you're not convinced about being Mormon, well you must have done it wrong.)

My Mormon friends said, why not try it? What's the harm? You want to find the truth, right? 

And yes, I did want to be open to whatever God wanted to tell me, to finding the truth no matter what it was, even if it meant I had been wrong and needed to change.

But I never tried this "experiment." I never prayed and asked God, "Is the Book of Mormon true?" Because every time I imagined myself going into the presence of my God and asking him "Is the Book of Mormon true?" it just felt so ridiculous, so embarrassing. Like if I genuinely prayed that with an open mind, my God would answer, "What are you talking about? Of course not."

It's like, if you have a friend that you've known for a long time, and you've talked to them a lot about their opinions on some certain topic, and then one day out of the blue you come up to them and say "Is it true that [something that people who disagree with them on that topic would say]?" Of course they would be completely shocked, and respond, "What? What on earth? Where is this coming from?" and you would feel ridiculous for even asking the question.

That's why I never asked God about if Mormonism was true. Evangelicals believe Mormonism is a cult, and so of course my God believed that. Of course my God would be flabbergasted if I came up to him with an open mind and asked if it was true.

So my point is, if you feel like you really know God, you'll be so confident that God believes you are right and other people are wrong.

---

I changed, but God can't change

When I was evangelical, I had a lot of anti-queer opinions, because that's a key part of what it means to be evangelical. I believed that God intended everyone to be straight. I believed that it wasn't necessarily bad to have feelings of same-sex attraction, but it would be a sin to ever "act on" them- for example, by being in a same-sex relationship. Gay and bi people should just repress themselves, and then in the long run, they'll see that that's what's best for them. Living a "homosexual lifestyle" may seem like a good thing, but it's actually harmful to those who do it. Oh and also, gay people are pushing a "homosexual agenda" to destroy marriage or something.

On the internet, I found blogs written by gay Christians. They talked about their own feelings and experiences. As it turns out, they were not trying to destroy marriage. They were just trying to obey God, like I was. They talked about how they had tried conversion therapy, tried so hard to repress themselves, tried to follow "God's rules," and the result was so bad. And then when they accepted themselves, accepted their queer identity, everything was so much better. They talked about how good and healing it was to finally be in a same-sex relationship.

So basically, I found out that all those evangelical talking points about how gay people are so bad and they hate God, and if they just tried harder, they could become straight- I found out that was all lies. So I changed my beliefs on that.

But what about God?

I changed my beliefs because I came across information I didn't have before. But what about God? God knows everything. There were 3 possible explanations:

1. God really does buy into all the anti-gay bullshit propaganda.
2. God has known all along that it was all lies, and that actually we should accept queer people.
3. God discovered this information at the same time I did, and changed his views.

I felt option 3 wasn't possible because God knows everything. 

For option 2, I felt it wasn't possible because of how real it had felt, back then when I prayed for God to stop same-sex marriage from being legal, back when I had prayed that God would help gay people see the error of their ways... I remember one time, there was a facebook thread I was replying to, and I really spent a long time thinking about what exactly to say, and praying about it, writing a draft and then deleting parts I wasn't totally sure about, and in the end I was very confident that I was saying what God wanted me to say... This was an important part of my "personal relationship with God" back then, asking God for help with navigating "hate the sin, love the sinner." And it all felt very real- there was never any feeling that God was hinting "maybe you're wrong about this."

If God knew all along that I was wrong, why didn't he ever say anything about it?

I was talking about this to someone, years ago, and their explanation was that God *did* "say something about it"- that God led me to find the information that helped me change my beliefs. I know there are ex-evangelical Christians who conceptualize it this way, and continue to have a "personal relationship with God." That's fine for them, but I feel it doesn't match what I experienced. For me, it was so real, the way I connected with God while promoting things which turned out to be harmful. I just can't believe that God was sitting there the whole time thinking "she's wrong about this" and didn't say anything to me about it at all. (Maybe this could be explained as "God knew I wasn't yet ready to listen and change my beliefs" but I mean he could have at least said *something*.)

When I changed my beliefs on queer acceptance, it felt like rebelling against God. It did NOT feel like I was following where God was leading me.

So I was left with option 1- that my God really did believe gay people were sinning and should just try harder to be straight, and were pushing a "homosexual agenda" to destroy America or whatever.

And so I had to abandon that God. I believe in a totally different God now. And I'm not willing to have a "personal relationship" with any God again.

(A similar thing happened when I found out about white privilege and systemic racism- why didn't God ever mention those things to me before???)

---

Conclusion

One of the biggest reasons that I don't pray is that I'm very uncomfortable with assuming that God agrees with me. If I pray for xyz to happen, there's the assumption that God also should believe xyz is a good thing. I can't get into that again- that's something that was really bad for me, when I was evangelical. I can't have a "personal relationship with God" again.

---

Related:

Believing in the God You Want 

They Prayed About It (a post about the #NashvilleStatement)

We did a dirty thing. We prayed at her wedding.

My Racist Personal Relationship with God 

An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God

This is what a "personal relationship with God" looks like. Be very afraid. 

Forgiveness for Sins You Don't Know You've Committed

There's a person on one side, the word "God" on the opposite side, and a chasm between them labelled "sin." Image source.

I read this blog post by Sildarmillion, Reflecting on the Act of Praying after Learning to Submit, where she talks about her view of prayer (coming from a Muslim perspective). Here's one part that struck me, and I want to talk about it:

On a different but related note, I also notice that people are constantly praying for forgiveness. I often wonder for what sins they are asking for forgiveness. More often than not, people are seeking forgiveness just in case they unconsciously made any mistakes. But they are not taking the time to reflect and think about whether they really made mistakes, and what mistakes those were. If they made mistakes, they just want God to forgive them for it, without engaging in the difficult task of actually thinking about it. They might make the same mistake every day, and they’ll keep asking for forgiveness every day, without ever learning what that mistake was. This just does not feel right to me. If God keeps forgiving them for it everyday, isn’t that like being given a free pass?

Of course I believe in praying for forgiveness for something I know that I have done wrong. Praying for forgiveness is an important part of healing, repentance, and atonement. But, I take issue with asking for forgiveness for mistakes I may have made unconsciously. I am not saying I should ignore mistakes I have made unconsciously. I am saying the opposite. I am saying I should try to become conscious of mistakes I have made unconsciously. I can understand praying to become conscious of those mistakes so I can properly rectify them. But I cannot support the idea of asking for forgiveness without me having to do any reflection or introspection on what it is that I have done wrong. I don’t like the idea of asking for forgiveness for my unconscious mistakes, so that it’s just taken care off, taken off my books, and I never have to do the difficult work of dealing with it. Yet, we are encouraged to always ask for forgiveness for unconscious mistakes. I can’t get behind it.

!!!!! This is such a good point!

I grew up evangelical; here's what I believed about sin, as an evangelical Christian: Sin is a problem because it separates us from God, and ultimately the result is going to hell. All of us sin, so we are disgusting to God and we all deserve to go to hell. (Only perfect sinless people go to heaven- but there aren't any, except Jesus.)

So, in the ideology, if Person A hurts Person B, we should be concerned for Person A because now they have committed a sin and they're going to hell, oh no! This is, uh, so incredibly backwards and messed-up... Like how about we care about Person B, the victim? Doesn't the victim deserve our compassion more than the perpetrator? But in this kind of evangelical ideology, when people talk about sin, it's like the victims don't even exist at all. 

An extreme example would be when a pastor sexually abuses a child, and then a lot of Christians come to the pastor's defense, saying it's not a big deal and we need to forgive him because "we all sin" and "there but for the grace of God go I" (meaning, "it's only because of God's grace that I didn't end up sexually abusing a child", uh, WTF?). They see the abuser and they say "that could have been me" and so they want to forgive him quickly. Very interesting that they don't look at the victim and say "that could have been me" and prioritize helping the victim. Very interesting. 

This ideology doesn't care about victims. You have to care about the one who sinned, because they're in danger of going to hell, poor thing.

So when I was a child, I prayed for Jesus to forgive my sins so I wouldn't go to hell- and yes, I sometimes did pray for forgiveness for sins I had committed without being aware of it. I wasn't taught that you literally have to pray for forgiveness for each specific sin after it's committed or else you go to hell- like if you die at the wrong point in the sin/forgiveness cycle then you go to hell. Going to hell because of a timing issue. No, my church didn't teach that, but I think there are some branches of Christianity which do. (For example, some Christians teach that you go to hell if you commit suicide- because there's no opportunity to ask for forgiveness in between the "sin" and when you die.) But still, even though I didn't believe I was at risk of going to hell for any sins I committed unaware, I was still worried that God would hold it against me. (Who knows what kind of little things God would hold against me? That was the kind of god I believed in back then.) So sometimes I did pray to be forgiven for sins I didn't even know about.

(And I'm curious about how Muslims think about these concepts- there are likely some big differences.)

I'm ex-evangelical now. I don't pray, and I'm suspicious of the general concept of forgiveness. (I believe the person who did something wrong should try to make it right- but also the victim is NOT obligated to forgive them. But if it's some small run-of-the-mill sin, the kind of thing where Person A and Person B both occasionally sin against each other because no one's perfect, then they should forgive each other.) And I no longer define "sin" as "things God says are bad" but as "things that hurt people." So it's been a long time since I've thought about the idea of praying for God to forgive you for sins you don't know you've committed.

But what Sildarmillion says makes perfect sense, and I can't believe I've never heard anyone put it that way before. If sin actually matters- if it actually hurts people- then wouldn't it be very important to find out when you've done something wrong, and learn from it so you can make it right and not do it again? If you believe that you can just ask God for forgiveness for sins you don't even know about, and They forgive you, and it's fine, well that only makes sense if you believe sin is something God arbitrarily decided to be mad at you about, for no real reason. (And yes, when I was evangelical, that is the kind of god I believed in.) I submit to you that this is kind of messed-up.

And, I have an example: Racism. 

So, I'm white, I'm from the US- I have benefitted from white privilege and systemic racism. And I didn't know about it. In school we learned that slavery and Jim Crow were very bad but fortunately Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr solved those problems and now everyone is equal. And of course I did my best to treat everyone the same. But that's not enough. Systemic racism is very real, and harms people, and if you just wander through life unaware of it, benefitting from it, well, that's a sin. Now, I don't blame white people for that, and I don't think it means we deserve to go to hell or anything like that- but we need to learn about the reality of it, and do what we can to change society so people really do have equal rights. So no, it wouldn't be helpful at all if God just "forgives" you and lets you keep on going, completely unaware.

So it doesn't make sense, this belief that you need God to forgive you for sins you don't know you've committed, without any belief that it actually matters what those sins were and maybe you need to learn from them and not commit them again. What good does it do, if you don't even know what you did wrong? That would only make sense if you believe sin is just some random technicality that God holds against you.

---

Related:

My Racist Personal Relationship with God

"Christians Aren't Perfect" When It's Convenient 

Yes, I Want Justice (A post about white evangelicals and #BlackLivesMatter)