Prayer: Why Christians always ‘forget to pray’

A recent Baptist Press post begs its Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) readers to not ‘forget to pray.’ There’s a reason why, of course: Christians always ‘forget to pray.’ It’s one of the most noteworthy characteristics of Christians everywhere, across the length and breadth of their religion. They don’t tend to pray much at all in private. I can see why, of course. Prayer is one of the most ridiculously time-wasting activities anybody could ever undertake, and even the most fervent Christians are well aware of that fact.

(This post went live on Patreon on 9/1/2022. If you’d like early access, please consider becoming a patron!)

My ex-husband the prayer warrior

Back when I was a young Pentecostal, my church leaders referred to my then-husband Biff as a prayer warrior. By this term, they meant that he prayed more often and with more passion than the average Christian. Many people in our community thought, as well, that Jesus paid special attention to Biff’s prayers as a result. Often, a friend of ours actually said that Biff had “the red Bat-Phone to God.” In other words, Biff had a special line of communication between himself and the Almighty Yahweh.

People got these ideas from Biff’s performances at church events and services. Nobody could swan around at an altar call quite like he could. Dude acted like he 110% felt everything he was saying.

At home, however, he never prayed at all. We spent most of our free time together, so I knew he also never read the Bible on his own time, studied Christian writings, or did anything else that everyone assumed he did in private. At most, he uttered quick, perfunctory prayers over dinner and before driving anywhere. He even joked around with those rituals, making light of them. (As a textbook narcissist, he hated even the expectation of doing anything the right way.)

In fact, I never saw Biff pray at home until he realized I’d fully deconverted and wasn’t ever returning to church. At that point, oh yes, he became a prayer machine. He’d wail and screech in our closed walk-in closet for a while, then emerge and shoot me unsettling, nasty, accusatory glares like I’d personally forced him to do all of this painful stuff he didn’t wanna do.

I still kinda wonder how he reconciles my continued apostasy with all that praying. The one time he actually put his back into being an actual prayer warrior, he failed completely. Oops. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS

Rewind to the early 1990s. While we were still married and both still in college, a friend of Biff’s wanted to have a club on campus devoted to prayer. The two of them thought it’d usher in a whole new wave of converts to Pentecostalism. Hopefully, it’d even focus Jesus’ direct attention on the sins of the school.

Biff called the club PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS. He did this specifically to annoy people who didn’t approve of fundamentalism.

(I wrote about this club more here.)

Biff had to make me one of its officers, since the friend, James, wasn’t a student anywhere. The last member of the club, Tim, agreed to be named as the required third officer, but he made clear that he’d never be attending meetings as he had scheduling conflicts.

At first, I attended at least some of the meetings to pray with Biff and James, though eventually I realized what I was really doing: talking to the ceiling in a conference room while two grown men wailed and screeched and babbled and walked around waving their arms in theatrical ways.

The end of the PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS

It was genuinely unnerving to suddenly have that realization. I’d never felt like that before. All my life, I’d prayed in contexts I recognized as fully Christian, so I’d always been able to stoke myself into feeling like I was doing something to connect to a real live god. But absolutely nothing about a small conference room at a secular university lends itself to a religious context. Nothing about my day leading up to that moment or leading away from it did, either. Suddenly, prayer had the same emotional resonance for me as, say, putting gas in my car.

After that stunning moment, I stopped attending meetings. I told Biff I also had scheduling conflicts. (It wasn’t even a lie. In reality, I always had. I’d skip classes to attend these dumb meetings. For some wacky reason he never shared, James insisted on holding these meetings at the busiest points in my daily schedule.)

I should have guessed that this meeting situation wouldn’t last long. Eventually, the school got tired of Biff reserving rooms and then nobody showing up for the scheduled meetings. They revoked the club’s ability to reserve rooms at all.

When I found out, I confronted Biff and James. It turned out that not long after I’d stopped attending prayer meetings, so had they. Each man had assumed the other would be there, since both had vehemently promised to do so.

In the meantime, Biff had simply lied to me about attending the club’s prayer meetings.

Why Biff lied about PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS

At the time, I wasn’t even half surprised that Biff had lied to me for so long about attending these prayer meetings. I just wish I’d recognized the truth dangling before both our eyes, the fact he’d realized deep down that he never wanted to confront.

Biff had figured out something about prayer that he didn’t even know he’d figured out, I think:

Prayer does a whole lot more as a demonstration than it does on its own merits. It does nothing whatsoever in the real world. No gods are listening for their followers’ prayers, nor are ready to leap into action to do as requested. But that said, oh boy, it impresses the heck out of those witnessing it, especially if it’s over-the-top demonstrative.

And nothing’s more over-the-top demonstrative than old-school Pentecostalism!

The Terms & Conditions for prayer, and all the asterisks

For a while, I tried to cling to all the asterisked Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) that Christians attach to prayer. I tried to believe that if a prayer fit into all of its T&Cs, then yes, Jesus really would do what we’d asked. If he didn’t, nobody was allowed to be upset about it. After all, they’d voided the contract! In this way, millions of Christians can ignore the evidence right in front of their noggins on a 24/7 basis.

Here is a partial list of those T&Cs:

• The request isn’t for something sinful or evil.
• It fits into Jesus’ divine plans.
• It’s for our good, not something we want that’s actually bad for us.
• The person praying is 100% fervent and passionate about the request…
• … and hasn’t committed any dealbreaking sins that need to be confessed…
• … and has no doubts at all about it being fulfilled. (Jesus Aura on point!)
• Also, nobody praying with that person can be less than 100% or have doubts at all or any sins on their consciences. (See how tricky that’d be with tens of thousands of Christians praying?)
• Oh, and everyone praying must hold the correct beliefs. Heretics’ prayers don’t get answered, pal!
• Lastly, nothing will happen if demons are working overtime to thwart Jesus’ will.

After many thousands of Christians prayed for our pastor’s protege, Daniel, to be healed of cancer and it didn’t work, I finally accepted that prayer did nothing in the real world.

My beliefs modify, then fade

For another while, I held to this sad little belief that maybe prayer just needed to be celebratory or praise-related, since Jesus was going to do what he wanted regardless. But that, too, fell by the wayside in time because it didn’t even conform to what the Bible itself asserted about prayer.

If some of it wasn’t true, then I didn’t want any of it. That’d been my last belief standing. Once it fell away, nothing remained. I deconverted.

A year or so later, Biff finally realized I was fully deconverted. That’s when he finally began praying in private, on his own time. Even then he only did it to emotionally manipulate me. If I left the house to, say, go bicycling in mid-screech-babble-wail, I’d return to find he’d obviously stopped shortly after I’d left. (Eyes dry, his face back to normal coloration, lounging on the couch, etc.)

It makes me laugh to think that there are probably still evangelicals around Biff who think he is a Grade-A, real-deal, bona fide PRAYER WARRIOR FOR JESUS.

But he’s no different from any other Christian. Get a group of them around and let them feel unguarded, and eventually one will mournfully confess that they need to work on their prayer life.

That’s Christianese. It means they know they don’t pray often enough.

“I need to work on my prayer life!”

Everywhere in Christianity, we see admonitions to Christians to pray in private more often. The exact phrase “work on my prayer life” pulls up over 31k results on Google search, and all of them say about the same thing. Here’s Rhonda, commenting on a listicle post about how to pray for friends and family (archive):

I’ve been trying to really work on my prayer life during this first month of 2012 – it’s my most difficult spiritual discipline, by far! (Probably because I’m TOO MENTALLY BUSY and need to slow down!)

Yes, I’m totally sure that’s totally why Rhonda doesn’t pray nearly enough. Or consider this blog post from a Christian in similar straits:

I have my reasons. Perhaps you can relate. We’re busy, right? We get a lot done, and hey, it’s for the Lord! It’s not like we’re avoiding God; we just don’t make time to talk to Him. Because, you know, we’re busy.

I might as well face it; I need to work on my prayer life.

As a kid, “Pray without ceasing” was the easiest Bible verse for me to memorize next to “Jesus wept.” Three simple words, but what an intimidating concept! I recall thinking, Pray all the time? Are you kidding me? I can’t do that. How would I get anything else done?

And again, yes, I’m totally sure that it’s totally just a matter of being busy and getting a lot done. Yep yep.

We see these excuses all over Christendom. I don’t know what flavor those two believe, nor care right now. Nor these Christians who are desperately trying to figure out how to pray more often. (Well, that last one is painfully obviously Catholic. But you get the idea. This is a universal concern!)

And now, don’t forget those prayers!

For many, many years I’ve watched Christians flail around trying to figure out this problem. It’s probably been a problem ever since Christians began to have a little private space and time that they could use as they pleased without supervision.

(That probably didn’t happen till the early Middle Ages. Until then, very few people got any kind of private space, much less private time. Here’s a great history of how privacy evolved over the centuries. It’s kinda dry reading, but it’s invaluable for understanding the culture and mindset of the periods each book covers.)

Today, we’ve got “We can’t forget to pray,” by Lisa Farrell. Lisa Farrell has something to do for the SBC’s International Mission Board (IMB). Specifically, she’s the “director of the IMB’s prayer office.” I’ve no clue what that means in practical terms, and there’s not a single reference to her holding the job prior to Summer 2022. She’s definitely another new hire. Also, here’s the help wanted ad for it.

At least I can tell you what the IMB is. As you might guess from the name, this SBC subgroup handles recruitment in foreign countries outside of North America. It’s far better-respected than its domestic cousin, the North American Mission Board (NAMB).

And Lisa Farrell, director of its prayer office, wants to remind Southern Baptists to do what every one of them already knows they should be doing all the time “without ceasing.”

The boilerplate admonitions about prayer

Every single piece of Farrell’s post is just boilerplate blahblah that Southern Baptists probably hear every time they attend services. Everything she tells them is stuff they all believe as points they take for granted. Like this passage:

We can’t forget to pray.

Prayer is not something we do because we can’t do anything else. Our Lord says to “pray constantly.” Prayer is the before, during and after of daily life. It is a gift that honors God. We know the prayers of the righteous have great effect. 

So we must be persistent in our unwavering prayer for these places and people. God has and never will leave or forget and He sees every person every day in these circumstances. He wants us to come to Him consistently and passionately to bring these places and people before His throne. He listens and sees. 

We can’t forget to pray. 

Same for this bit, which made me laugh again:

Whatever prayer we offer in faith, according to His will, He will answer. What a promise!

Notice the sneaky disclaimer in the middle there? Yeah, she’s talking about all those asterisked T&Cs I showed you earlier. Sure, he always answers, this petulant godling, but sometimes he just decides to say “no!” Whatcha gonna do? (Whatever you do, don’t read the Bible to see what it specifically spells out, like I did! Whoops!)

None of this is new to Southern Baptists. It wouldn’t even be new to any other Christians. I’d venture to guess most of them believe that their god at least listens to their prayers, if not answers them to some degree. The further toward extremist fundagelicalism one gets in the Christianity pool, the more believers lean those ways.

Things we never need reminding to do, real world edition

If prayer worked even in the bastardized way that Southern Baptists think it works, nobody’d ever need reminding to do it. It’d be so monumentally profitable and beneficial that it’d be the first thing they did every day upon waking, something they did all through the day, and the last thing they did at night.

Say what you want about Catholics’ canned prayers and “vain repetitions,” but at least I saw my Catholic grandparents and aunt-the-nun praying the Rosary in private on a regular basis. It did something for them personally as fervent Catholics, similar to how meditation helps those who regularly practice it.

I don’t think that most Christians even get that out of whatever they do for prayer. It doesn’t even benefit them like meditation. Thus, they shove it out of their days to make room for what actually does help them get through it: work, errands, childcare, dog-walking, chores, all that stuff. Even R&R fulfills an important function.

Those are all real things with real benefits. Nobody has to tell people to do it. They can see it needs to be done, and that if it’s not done they won’t like what happens next.

Like everyone else, Christians pare out what’s unnecessary to get the necessary done. Yes yes, pray without ceasing. Yes yes, Jesus totally answers, kinda! But this is the real world, and sometimes imaginary stuff has to take a back seat for a little while.

In short, nobody would need to “work on their prayer life” if prayer actually lived up to Christians’ claims about it. Christians know that it doesn’t do any of that, and they show us every day that they know by the way they talk about it.

How you can support Roll to Disbelieve

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community!

And now, here are some ways you can support my work:

• Patreon, of course, for as little as $2 a month! I now write Patreon posts twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with patrons getting early access 3 days ahead of time.
• Paypal, for direct one-time gifts. To do this, go to paypal.com, then go to the personal tab and say you want to send money, then enter captain_cassidy@yahoo.com (that’s an underscore between the words) as the recipient. It won’t show me your personal information, only whatever email you input.
• My Amazon affiliate link, for folks who shop at Amazon. Just follow the link, then do your shopping as normal within that same browser window. This link adds nothing to your Amazon bill, but it does send me a little commission for whatever you spend there.
• And as always, sharing the links to my work and talking about it!

Thank you so much for being a part of Roll to Disbelieve!