When You Pray

The Danger Of Christian Prayer For This Election

Prayer occupies a strange place in our American life. It always has.

No slogan better illustrates the state of this strangeness today than “thoughts and prayers” — that worn out trope with a remarkable capacity to both mock tragedy and offend piety, depending on what sort of person you are. On the other hand, Jesus assumes prayer while giving shape to it.

“When you pray” Jesus tells his friends, “pray like this…” (Matthew 7). With Jesus, we are not confronted with our prayerlessness, but also dangerous prayer, disoriented from his discipleship. After all, Israel prayed to the golden calf, too.

So as the rising tide of the election and its aftermath closes in, I’m sitting with an unsettling perspective I cannot shake: the prayers of January 6 continue to be echoed in white evangelical churches across America.

This happens insidiously and implicitly, earnestly and ignorantly. How? In buzzwords like “national revival” and “biblical values” offered without reflection, soaked in assumption, set in a paranoid piety.

Consider the content and context of this prayer from a pastor present at January 6, preserved by my dissertation.

Let us pray, let us pray 2 Chronicles 7:14 over our nation. Let us pray. Our father says that if we will repent and pray he will hear our prayers, and he will hear us. Please pray, let us pray: Father God, Father God, we come before you Father, and we pray Lord God for peace on our nation…[Crowd begins to chant “Fight for Trump!”] We pray, God, for justice. We pray, Father, for mercy, Lord God. And we pray, Father God, for our nation to come back stronger than it ever has. We rejoice in you. Thank you, we love you. In Jesus name, Amen.

Prayer wasn’t just a feature of January 6, it also primed participants to act. Ask, how did the power network of white evangelicalism accelerate and amplify Trump’s stolen election claims in 2020? Calls to prayer. Franklin Graham, Eric Metaxas, Robert Jeffress, Paula White, Jericho Marches in December — they all called for prayer.

This is a piety that makes it possible to veil falsehoods.

The prayers of white evangelicalism are saturated in a paranoid piety, speaking out of two sides of our mouth. Trafficking in buzzwords and slogans — “biblical values” and “national revival” and “the kingdom” while telling a Christian story entangled in the myths of white supremacy.

This entanglement runs deep. It is not just for partisan court prophets. Even the earnest and unassuming pastor can give voice to that inherited impulse to pray for “national revival.” I know I have.

Whether by veiled intention or earnest ignorance, paranoid piety offers a theological charge to authoritarian propaganda with its promises for national unity and appeals to moral purity.

This piety that attempts to bypass the political storm by flying over it. But in the end, its pious silence offers theological permission for those in the pews, reinforcing rather than interrogating the entanglement of “We the People” and the people of God.

Christian prayer is a response to the God of Jesus Christ. This Name liberates. As Karl Barth observes, “for Christians who pray “hallowed be thy name” our thoughts and words and works cannot result merely in a sanctioning of the status quo.”

So this is not an attack on prayer as a religious act. It is the renewal of Christian prayer grounding ourselves in the revelation of who God is.

We must name the danger of prayer disoriented from “Hallowed be your Name.” This is a raging, nameless sort of prayer that empties the Name of its history and dresses it up as a mascot for causes called “biblical.”

By naming dangerous prayer, we acknowledge its social and political damage that comes from paranoid worship. This damage is something Lauren Winner depicts in her excellent book “The Dangers of Christian Practice.”¹

We can recognize prayer as the central act of the Christian life. The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth found the words “call upon me” in Psalm 50:15 contained “the basic meaning of every divine command.”² Prayer is primal. Which is precisely why damaging prayer is so dangerous.

The damage of paranoid prayer is bound up in the devotion it curates. The imagined reality it assumes. Dangerous prayer installs idolatry in one of its most insidious forms, the kind that is nameless, the kind that divorces the Name of Christ from his acts, that replaces the story of Israel with the storied myths of white America. That fills up the content of prayerful slogans with ideologies. Naming dangerous prayer is the repentance that shakes us awake to the Name we are to hallow.

And so quite simply: I am wary of prayers for national revival. I am unsettled by prayers laced with buzzwords and slogans that assume more than they define. From court prophets and the pious pure alike, such prayers perpetuate the vicious political cycle we are in. These prayers spin the vortex faster. They do not shatter it by invoking the God whose Name is Jesus Christ.

In practice, let’s consider “revival.” “Revival” refers to the history of Israel, in its venturing with this God from out of Egypt and to the farthest reaches of exile.

When the prophet Ezekiel stares out upon a field of bones in a vision representing exile, he asks this God “can these bones live?” It is a question concerned with Israel. But in the resurrection of Christ, this question is revealed to contain the expansive hope of Israel for all humanity.

Such a hope—and such a prayer—cannot be held back and reserved for the borders of nation-states. It is dangerous to pray against this hope, to try and contain it, or refine it into our own political imagination.

We must resist dangerous prayer. Recognizing afresh the Christian faith and its subversive prayer for enemies, for the forgiveness of all of our sins, for economic provision of bread for today for all.

Prayer that hallows the Name is the soil from which a new sort of politics grows.

1. “Christian practices may, and inevitably sometimes will, do the very opposite of what those practices were made, in their goodness (in God’s goodness, and in God’s good hopes for the church), to do. I read Christian practices with the aim of encouraging the church to anticipate the ways good Christian practices sometimes will not foster intimacy with God and growth in Christlikeness, but will rather perpetuate damage.” Lauren F. Winner. The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin (pp. 12-13).

2. “We thus understand the command, “call upon me” (Ps. 50:15), to be the basic meaning of every divine command, and we regard invocation according to this command as the basic meaning of all human obedience. What God permits man, what he expects, wills, and requires of him, is a life of calling upon him. This life of calling upon God will be a person’s Christian life: his life in freedom, conversion, faith, gratitude, and faithfulness. Karl Barth, The Christian Life, §74