Ray Comfort explains how to get prayers answered⁠—er, heard by Jesus

The evangelical money train still has a few stops to make and a few sheep yet to fleece, and nowhere can we see that fact illustrated better than by the fact that Ray Comfort still has a career. His latest book seeks to explain exactly how Jesus decides to answer prayers. However, Comfort offers readers nothing beyond the usual word salad and hand-waving that we expect out of his end of Christianity.

Truly, there is nothing new under the evangelical sun. But this book represents quite an audacious bait and switch, one that even I wasn’t expecting!

(This post first appeared on Patreon on 1/23/2023. Its audio ‘cast lives there too!)

Ray Comfort: One of evangelicals’ very worst and most obvious hucksters

When we think about the worst, most obvious hucksters in evangelicalism, a few names spring to mind: Kent Hovind, Todd Bentley, even Jim Bakker. We could name many others besides—this is one sheepfold rife with predators! But for me at least, one name eclipses them all:

Ray Comfort.

There is not one single type of evangelical grifting and con-jobbery that this guy hasn’t tackled. And he has quite a fanbase, even as much of a sniveling, willfully-ignorant, cravenly-dishonest midwit as he is. Seriously, he’s got it all.

No other evangelical huckster comes close. He’s been truckin’ along for about 20 years now, with no signs of stopping.

And he’s figured out exactly how to appeal to his chosen target customers.

Ray Comfort’s greatest hits

Remedial-level, fallacy-filled apologetics? Ray Comfort has you covered with The Way of the Master, which came out in the early 2000s, along with many of his printed books and videos.

Tribalistic sneering at atheists, his chosen enemy? We find that constantly in his work, particularly in books like You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think (2009). Elsewhere, he accused atheists of being the emotional equivalent of toddlers who were furious at their parents for not letting them eat candy for dinner.

Sad, cringey attempts to sell evangelical pseudoscience? For sure, constantly. This guy’s a die-hard Creationist. In 2009, he published a Creationist version of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. As was quickly pointed out by Eugenie C. Scott, then the executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), Ray Comfort omitted the chapters that most damaged his case and included a lengthy Creationist sermon of his own.

Shameless use of terror and fearmongering to evangelize? Well, it wouldn’t be a Ray Comfort production without that!

The usual tiresome evangelical culture wars? Of course!

Lying-for-Jesus? Always.

He even showed up in the Calvinist rah-rah pseudo-documentary American Gospel a few years ago. While cameras followed him around, he pulled his “Are you a good person?” schtick on unsuspecting college students. Yes, of course he’s Calvinist.

Sometimes he messes up in spectacular ways. Who can forget his infamous “Banana Argument.” In this now-famous clip from about 2007, he tried to argue that modern, domesticated, and seedless bananas were PROOF YES PROOF of Creationism⁠—even “the atheist’s nightmare.”

If you ever find out that a given Christian even thinks Ray Comfort has some good ideas, regard that admission as a perma-blinking turn signal on the information superhighway. He is the all-flavor end run of bad apologetics, shoddy evangelism, reflexive cruelty, fearmongering, and pseudoscience.

And now Ray Comfort is back with a new book—and an interesting different focus

You might have noticed that a whole lot of Ray Comfort’s past work pretended to have, as its goal, engaging with atheists in order to convert them. I say “pretended” there because there’s no indication that any atheists got converted, ever, by an evangelical practicing his suggested techniques.

Instead, it sure seemed like his entire goal was selling books to evangelicals. Once he made his sale, he neither knew nor cared if his suggestions actually worked. And by all accounts, they didn’t work at all.

All through the late 2000s and early-to-mid-2010s, though, people in ex-Christian and atheist communities heard evangelicals parrot his catchphrases whenever a new book or video dropped or gained renewed attention.

Well, he’s back. This time, though, he focuses directly on evangelicals themselves—and, interestingly, on their prayers.

In his brand-new book, How to Make Sure God Hears Your Prayers, Comfort seeks to show evangelicals how they can be super-sure to get the answers they want from Jesus.

This shift fits in with what I’m seeing of evangelicals’ online antics these days. They seem far less focused on direct engagement with heathens and on persuasion, and way more interested in retention of the members they still have left. Ray Comfort might be a sneaky, dishonest little weasel, but he’s got an excellent nose for trends. It doesn’t surprise me that he leaped on this one so early. (Or maybe he just got tired of being humiliated by debunkers.)

Prayer has always been a big dealbreaker

The topic of his book, getting prayers answered, is also an interesting choice when it comes to retention. Prayer is the intersection of the real world and the imaginary supernatural one. Christians pray to Jesus, who then acts upon what they raise to his attention.

Or rather, they pray to Jesus, who then doesn’t act at all.

Many ex-Christians, including myself, can testify that our last acts of devotion as Christians were strangled, anguished, choked-out prayers begging Jesus for something, anything, that we could use as a safe anchor for our faith. We got nothing at all back for those efforts.

Many of us can also testify that it was noticing the great discrepancy between evangelicals’ hype about prayer and the reality of it in the real world that got us doubting.

My own discoveries about prayer ended my faith

For me, I’d already been noticing that discrepancy when my church’s junior pastor got brain cancer. Despite having literally tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people praying for his magical healing, he died. It was hugely confusing and frightening to me at the time.

Later, I found out that the night this pastor died, Biff had shown up at the hospital, Pompeiian olive oil in hand, to offer last-ditch prayers for magic healing—only to get thrown out of the room on his ear by the man’s angry family. They didn’t want Biff’s grand theatrics. No, they just wanted to help their loved one pass in peace while surrounded by love.

Though I understand now exactly why they reacted that way, at the time it blew my ever-lovin’ mind.

So I did my own Bible study. I laid out all the Bible verses about prayer, and then compared those verses to how Christians engaged with the subject. The results, if we set them as a Venn diagram, were two completely different circles that didn’t even touch. All at once, I realized that Christians had, over many centuries, added a lot of hand-waving and weasel-wording to their beliefs about prayer to make it all sound like it worked. But it didn’t. Not at all.

Prayer just didn’t work to do anything in the real world.

And nobody was allowed to say so.

So now here’s Ray Comfort to tell Christians what they needed to know 1800ish years ago

It’s just so comical to me to imagine Ray Comfort swaggering up to the bar and slapping his silly little book on the bartop, then declaring that here, at last, is the information Christians have needed for 1800ish years. Here, at last, is an instruction manual for prayer. At last, Christians will know exactly how to pray in a way that totally definitely will get Jesus to do what they want and need.

Yep, totally.

Amazing that nobody has hit upon the magic formula in all that time, ain’t it? You’d think someone, somewhere would have figured it out. But no, the court jester of evangelicalism was the one fated to puzzle out this unsolved mystery.

The way Ray Comfort puts it, Christians just don’t know “the etiquette” required to get the job done. As he told Christian Post:

There are certain things we have to do if we want an audience with the king of England. You don’t just show up in your pajamas and begin chatting. There is a certain etiquette that must take place.

And that’s exactly the same with God, but the etiquette is so much more high. The Scriptures say that “who should enter the hill of the Lord? He that has clean hands and a pure heart.” Scripture also warns that God will not hear your prayer if you have sin in your heart, and the Bible tells us that our sins make a separation between us and God.

Not that God doesn’t hear us, He’s omniscient. He sees all and knows all. But He takes no regard unless we do what He says when it comes to approaching His throne. So, it’s important that we understand this.

What an interesting choice of words there. Really flies in the face of all that “Daddy God” and “Abba, Father” bullshit that evangelicals were chirping just 10 or 15 years ago.

But let’s look at the middle paragraph for a minute. It contains the book’s central idea.

Examining some hilariously bad Bible references

First of all, the Bible verse about “the hill of the Lord” is from Psalm 24. In context, we see that it has nothing whatsoever to do with prayer, but rather with comfort and reassurance.

Ray Comfort doesn’t even try to quote the verses about “sin in your heart.” But they’re probably from well after the Gospels. The Gospels contain nothing but promises that Christians’ prayers would be answered in the affirmative every time. The will of Jesus’ followers would be done, period. And that went double if they prayed together with other followers!

As the years passed, the earliest Christians realized that Jesus was not, in fact, returning any day now. He was not, in fact, working miracles through their prayers. In response, they had to cobble together a belief system that took divine inaction into account.

That’s when they began inserting the weasel wording and hand-waving that Christians use to this very day. These are the asterisks they created to explain why prayers were not being answered as Jesus had promised they would be. For example:

• 1 John 3:22: Obedient Christians that please Jesus get their prayers answered.
• Philippians 4:19: If a Christian doesn’t actually need what they’re asking Jesus to do, then Jesus won’t do it.
• James 1:5-7: If anyone involved in the praying has even a speck of doubt that it won’t happen, that spoils the magic completely.
• James 4:3: Selfish or sinful requests get ignored.

Of course Ray Comfort isn’t citing verses from the Gospels. They contain almost none of those asterisks. And naturally, he’s not sharing anything Jesus is supposed to have said or done regarding prayer requests. If he did that, then his readers would instantly know that Jesus wasn’t at all a stickler for etiquette.

If his interview starts off so poorly, the book is gonna be awful.

Ray Comfort’s first requirement: FEAR

In the interview, Ray Comfort offered a few pointers on how to get prayers answered.

First and foremost, the person praying needs to “fear God.” And what does “fear” mean, here? Well, let’s let him explain:

Jesus said, “fear not him who has power to kill your body and afterwards do no more, but fear him who has power to kill your body and cast your soul into Hell.”

He was saying if someone plunges a knife into your chest, don’t fear that, compared to the fear of falling into the hands of a living God. That’s more than a reverential fear. That’s fear and trembling. The Bible says of Jesus, “He was heard in that He feared.” He had that necessary reverence and trembling before the throne of God and He was heard because of that fear.

Ray Comfort makes his god sound like a psychopath. But what else is new? My old crowd thought Matthew 10:28 (which is the verse in question here) meant something very different: that Yahweh certainly could kill our bodies and cast us into Hell, but he loved us and would never harm us. (You can see similar reasoning here.)

My old crowd also thought that the “fear” here meant a healthy show of respect, similar to how people are respectful around weapons, large animals, and hot stovetops. But Ray Comfort clearly means a sense of terror here. If Christians can’t work themselves into a fearstruck, gibbering mess, then their prayers just won’t work.

Gosh, it’s so weird that Jesus answered the prayers of all kinds of people in the Gospels without them sounding terrified of him! And presented a child to his followers as an example of the perfect Christian!

Ray Comfort’s fear of death drives him ever onward

A while ago, I heard a God Awful Movies review that speculated that Ray Comfort is just a very terrified person. Dude’s worst fear is dying, being dead, and finding nothing but oblivion beyond this life. It makes perfect sense. He seems as fragile as a house of cards built on a fault line. Every time I’ve ever seen him in a video, he seems like he is holding himself together with spit and baling-wire. One false move, and he’ll be curled up under his chair shrieking incoherently in a panic attack over death.

He’s always stressing Hell and having safety from Hell, but it’s more than just Hell that drives him so hard. Death itself seems to be his main trigger.

That said, his utter fear of his own mortality has given him a long career as an evangelical panderer. But clearly his work hasn’t dissipated a single bit of that fear. Maybe it’s only gotten worse as he gets older and has nothing but a long string of gleefully-debunked talking points to show for his life.

Whatever the cause of his neurotic behavior, he clings so hard to those talking points because they are all that he sees as standing between him and endless oblivion. If he loses faith in his talking points, he loses his sense of safety from oblivion.

Also, Comfort credits his “fear of God” as the reason why he obeys his tribalistic rules. You’d really think that someone who thinks Jesus lives inside him would have found better reasons to follow rules than just his fear of punishment. That’s one of the worst ways to get people to obey. Good parents already know this. But evangelicals have always loved using fear (and punishment) to force obedience from others.

Hearing Comfort talk like this is just so chilling. This guy is so messed up.

Ray Comfort’s erroneous definition of faith

Another reason Ray Comfort gives for Christians’ prayers going unanswered has to do with their lack of faith. As I mentioned above, the New Testament’s writers added lack of faith as an asterisked condition in the same way. He’s not telling us anything different. But he does rationalize his admonition in a very familiar way: by redefining faith, then mislabeling what Christians have as that false definition.

In Christianity, faith means belief without any good reason to have belief. It means belief without evidence. That’s the whole reason Christians must have faith in their religion. Reality provides no evidence to back up any of their claims. But they have faith anyway.

However, somewhere around the 2000s, Christians began smarting at their complete lack of evidence. Americans in particular began to want evidence for claims before putting faith in them, and American Christians were no different. The thriving pseudoscience scene offered Creationism as PROOF YES PROOF of one Bible myth. Alas, their paltry attempt at evidence was easily knocked down by knowledgeable scientists.

So around the mid-2010s, I began seeing Christians redefine faith. And they did so in the exact way that Ray Comfort does in this interview.

And now, a false comparison

Here’s how Ray Comfort describes faith in his interview:

When the Bible speaks of faith, it’s not speaking of an intellectual assent, it is speaking of an implicit trust. In the same way, we would trust a surgeon to operate on us. We trust his integrity. We trust his ability. I have faith in my wife, I trust her integrity. That’s the sort of faith that pleases God, and without that, it’s impossible to please Him.

You can’t have any relationships in society without faith. Say to your boss, “I’ve got no faith in you,” and you’ll lose your job. [. . .] Say that to your friends and you’ll lose your friends. Without faith, you cannot live. We have faith in doctors, we have faith in pilots, we have faith in surgeons, we have faith even in some politicians.

So, that sort of faith is the faith that we need to approach God when it comes to prayer. The Bible says, “without faith, it is impossible to please Him.”

The problem is that nobody can trust Jesus’ integrity or ability. He’s never demonstrated either quality in any reliable, predictable, observable way.

How this false comparison works

One hopes that Comfort’s wife has demonstrated her integrity in reliable ways for many years. She’s demonstrated that he can rely on that quality.

Similarly, a surgeon doesn’t get to operate on people if they don’t repeatedly and reliably demonstrate trustworthy knowledge and technique. We could say the same of pilots and even, to a far lesser degree, of politicians. If politicians repeatedly demonstrate that they cannot do the job, they either get removed or they’re Republicans.

But none of that applies to Jesus. No Christians have ever even credibly demonstrated that they’ve even talked to the guy.

You can’t have faith in something that is very obviously not reliable or predictable.

If someone even tries to make such a case, though, evangelicals instantly regurgitate thought stoppers about Jesus not being “a tame Lion.”

Jesus becomes the Schrödinger’s cat of their religion. He is both constantly seen and active and answering, and also never seen, quiet as the grave, and silent. The only real constants are his inconstancy⁠—and, of course, the impossibility of figuring out anything about why he does whatever he does (or doesn’t do).

But really, in the end, it apparently doesn’t matter if Jesus answers prayer or not

So far, Ray Comfort has admonished Christians for not being terrified enough of Jesus, and for not having the right kind of faith in him. The fear part is an interesting new non-reason, but the other one’s as old as the hills.

Now we will learn that Ray Comfort doesn’t actually even believe his own offered non-reasons for prayers not being answered. The really important thing about prayer, for him, is that Christians feel happy about whatever happens as a result. As he puts it:

And that’s what faith actually is. It’s trusting that God answers our prayers. Sometimes He says “yes,” sometimes He says “no,” sometimes He says “hang on a minute.”

When it comes to suffering, and we’re crying out to God because a loved one is suffering, we still have to rest in faith. Charles Spurgeon said, “faith may swim where reason may only paddle.” And the reason we can trust God is because of Romans 8:28. It’s the great safety net Scripture, it says “All things work together for good to those that love God and are called according to His purposes.”

We might find ourselves in a lion’s den, with hungry lions surrounding us, or on the edge of the Red Sea. That’s when we stand still and just trust God no matter what.

So suddenly, he’s shaming Christians for even wanting their prayers answered. Their faith should be so strong that no matter what happens, they’re chill with it.

What a hilarious bait-and-switch. I wonder if any evangelicals will notice.

Probably not. They rarely pray much anyway.

How Ray Comfort baits and switches his followers

Unfortunately for Ray Comfort, faith dies away when the object of it repeatedly lets us down.

If we have faith in someone, it’s because we have reasons to have that faith. If those reasons become untrue, or if we realize they were never true, then we lose faith in that person. We can’t get it back.

If we pray and pray and pray and pray for something, having utter faith in the Gospel verses that Jesus will 100% do as we ask, but that thing doesn’t happen, then we can tell that the Gospel verses were wrong.

And if Jesus does whatever he wants anyway, then why ask him for anything? Long before I consciously figured out that prayer doesn’t work as the Bible promises, I’d stopped asking for anything in prayer. I learned that lesson long before I even recognized that I’d learned it!

The title of Ray Comfort’s dumb book is How to Make Sure God Hears Your Prayers. From what I can see, all he’s promising is that Jesus will “hear” Christians’ prayers. Not that he’ll actually do what the prayer wants. For that, Comfort refers back to the usual weasel wording of sometimes he answers yes, sometimes no, sometimes not yet. This excuse appears nowhere in the Bible that I have ever found, but it’s a favorite of evangelicals.

And if all Christians want is for Jesus to “hear” their prayers, then according to their religion’s main tenets, they already had that before cultivating redefinitions of “faith” and scaring themselves silly because a man who is blithering terrified of death thinks etiquette, of all things, is The Big Problem Here.

How dare Christians expect more than being heard!

That’s what makes this book so funny to me. Ray Comfort titled it in a way that makes it seem like it’ll show Christians how to get their prayers answered. In other words, it’ll demonstrate how to pray in a way that gets the results requested.

Even the title’s use of “Hear” could easily be interpreted that way. When a Christian says that Jesus “heard” her prayers for safety during a natural disaster, everyone understands that it means that he heard and answered those prayers with a miraculous rescue.

It’s hard even to fathom a Christian who doesn’t think Jesus at least hears prayer, though. Officially, he’s literally everywhere. So obviously he’s going to see and hear everything. Evangelicals talk about their prayers bouncing off the ceiling. They also exult in its opposite, breaking through to Heaven. But I know none of them think Jesus didn’t hear what they said. They just think he’s not doing what they asked. It’s like that clip of Stewie pestering his mom. Obviously, she hears him. She’s just tired right then.

It’s just so bizarre that this time, Ray Comfort is using “hear” as just that: being heard. Not being answered. Just being heard.

And then for good measure, he shames Christians who wanted even one bit more than that.

I hope that one day ex-Christians will testify about their faith finally draining entirely away because of this man’s shameless posturing and lying-for-Jesus in this book.

Most of all, I hope that the people who buy and read this book realize someday that there was never anything about Christianity to fear.

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