With ‘Just Pray NO,’ Christians have finally solved America’s drug problem

Well, that’s it for us heathens! There’s finally proof of the veracity of Christianity! With Just Pray NO, Christian prayer warriors have finally figured out exactly how to solve America’s growing drug problem. Oh, if only they’d started sooner!

Oh wait, this is just going to be another feel-good, do-nothing initiative that justifies its own existence by making Christians feel better about their utter inability to impact anything important in any meaningful way. Whoops! My bad. Amazing how similar those two things look.

(This post first appeared on Patreon on 2/16/2023. Its audio ‘cast lives there as well.)

Just Pray NO: Situation report

This is the first time I’ve ever heard of Just Pray NO, but it’s actually been around for decades. This is its 33rd go-round. Its first dozen or so iterations seem to be lost to the mists of time. The Wayback Machine doesn’t even seem to have a record of its existence. (<– That means, usually, that the page received so few visitors that the WB’s webcrawlers weren’t alerted to it.) So the earliest sign of life I could find of ‘Just Pray NO’ was an announcement for its 15th annual run in 2005. I found it over at a website that just prints press releases without any added remarks or fact checking.

Here’s the 2005 press release:

Since April 7th, 1991 “Just Pray NO!” Ltd. has sought to unite Christians from around the world in intercessory prayer on behalf of the addicted and their families. The devastation of alcoholism and other drug addiction has impacted families and communities worldwide. Not only has substance abuse been directly linked to violence and sexual immorality, but it is also a major source of income for organized crime and terrorist activities. The “War on Drugs” directly impacts the “War on Terrorism!”

The weekend of April 2nd – 3rd, 2005 has been designated as the 15th Annual Worldwide Weekend of Prayer and Fasting organized by the “Just Pray NO!” nonprofit corporation. Over the past fourteen years we have had intercessors praying to break the bondage of addiction from every state in the United States and from six continents. This year, we are again seeking to enlist one million prayer warriors from around the world to join us in battle!

We invite you to make a formal commitment to join with believers in Christ from around the globe this coming April. Put on the full armor of God and fervently pray in spirit and in truth!

The “War on Terrorism” thing was a big deal still in 2005. But don’t ask him to explain that so-called “direct impact.”

And then, he directs interested parties who either want to Just Pray NO or to find help for their addiction issues to visit the campaign’s website, JustPrayNO.org.

Their 2023 press release, which ran on Religion News Service, contains much the same information. However, it adds a lot more scary text about specific drugs like fentanyl, meth, cocaine, and nitazenes. I’d never even heard of that last one, which Just Pray NO informs us is “the opioid 40X stronger than fentanyl.”

(The DEA only says it’s equally as dangerous as fentanyl and “similar” to it in potency. Oh, hand-wringing moral panickers of the Christian Right, I can count on you to just never change.)

Everyone, meet Steven L. Sherman, the guy behind Just Pray NO

Just Pray NO is the brainchild of Steven L. Sherman. On his Amazon author’s page, he claims to be “a Jewish believer in Christ.” However, his biography makes clear that he wasn’t born Jewish and didn’t have a Jewish upbringing, or he’d have said so. I can’t even find evidence he did a formal conversion. We’re just meant to think all of this.

What he actually did was marry a Jewish woman. When he was 32, she dumped him (which means in 1980). He insinuates that she had no valid reason whatsoever to end the marriage:

Perhaps I was too busy mowing the lawn between jobs to notice, but my wife wanted out of the marriage. She wanted to do her “own thing” and move to Manhattan, and she did.

But his story gets better, and by better I mean more Men’s Rights Activist-ish: He also insinuates that he’d totally have fought for custody of their kids, but the mean ole courts just weren’t ready for that radical move yet:

Our house was sold and, as was common in those days, she was awarded custody of the kids.

So, as Jewish men commonly do in this situation, he decided to take a night job as an exotic dancer—while still teaching by day.

Shortly thereafter, he met his second wife. He proposed six months later. The happy couple soon had their own new baby, whose birth might or might not have occurred after their wedding day. (Whenever a detail is unclear in these testimonies, assume the worst.) Alas, she was Christian. Worse, she asked if the baby could be raised Christian, since his other two kids—who lived with their mom, remember—already were Jewish.

I strongly suspect that the issue wasn’t Judaism-vs-Christianity, but religion-vs-no-religion.

So, as any Jewish man commonly does in this situation, he stormed into her church to prove those ickie Christians wrong. You know, so his bride would see how silly she was for believing such nonsense. But—holy plot twist, Batman!—those TRUE CHRISTIANS™ ended up converting him! (My Evil Ex Biff did this exact same thing, though for different reasons. So very cringey.)

After his conversion, he baptized himself. He thinks that’s totes valid.

A mere three days later, without him getting any training or education in any field that’d be relevant or useful in the least, Jesus gave him his life mission: Just Pray NO.

Oh, and he’s also written a book about the Endtimes, because of course he has.

I’m not sure how I could deliberately stuff more red flags into this story.

And now, the glorious Just Pray NO origin story

According to Just Pray NO’s “About” page, in 1990 Sherman was a 42-year-old father of three (though we already know that two kids lived with their Jewish mother), a New Yorker, and a longtime junior-high-school teacher (he doesn’t say, but he taught health and PE). He claims that if asked, he’d have sneered back then that he didn’t believe much in no MEERKULS, thenkyewverymuch. However, we know that this story also takes place a mere 3 days after his self-baptism, so I’m guessing he did believe in miracles.

For a while, he says, he’d grown increasingly concerned about all the drug stuff going on with da yoots. Gosh, it just got worse and worse every year! So one night, he says, he was reading his newspaper and getting sadder and sadder with each fresh story about “illicit drugs.”

Oh but then, he began to “break out sobbing” over a story. It involved a boy who was almost 12 years old. A “neighborhood bully” had invited this boy to “smoke crack” with him, and the boy had refused. Sherman says, “He just said, ‘No!'” So the bully tried to torture him to death, then set him on fire. The poor lad escaped, but he suffered extensive deep burns.

Inspired by the boy’s story, Sherman says he totally prayed to Jesus. He informed Jesus that the whole “Just Say No” campaign (which had begun in 1984 under then-First Lady Nancy Reagan) wasn’t working. So he was asking Jesus for a better campaign. Then, Jesus graciously gave him an answer: “Just Pray NO.” OMG! Real live communication from the totes for realsies god of the entire universe!

Sherman felt that he’d been given not just a slogan, but a new direction for his life.

And here we are.

Too bad he doesn’t mention praying for that burned child’s recovery, eh? Though maybe it’s better he forgot to take that small step.

Sidebar: Somehow, Sherman makes a young crime victim’s story worse

I know what you’re gonna say about that burning story. I thought so too. Usually, these origin stories are just tall tales. So when I looked up the broad details, I was just doing due diligence. And I really surprised by what I found.

Amazingly enough, this time it actually happened. Well, sort of.

In fact, it was apparently a big story in NYC at the time.

People in the neighborhood already knew that the 13-year-old perpetrator was a thief, robber, bully, mugger, child and animal abuser, and extortionist. He didn’t “invite” his victim to smoke crack. Rather, he tried to force him to do it. And the victim didn’t just say “No!” The NY Times says that the boy, who knew very little English, explained that “he did not smoke crack.” Here’s another article about it that confirms the Times’ coverage.

The last info I could find about the victim indicates he was still alive and in critical-but-stable condition ten days later. But I don’t know his fate.

More importantly, neither does Sherman.

Unlike me, though, Sherman doesn’t seem to care that he has no idea what came of this attack. That brutalized and grievously wounded child, having fulfilled his role in the origin story, just falls out of Sherman’s mental map like a broken pin.

Just Pray NO finds friends over the years

Sherman claims that Just Pray NO was a success right out of the gate, thanks to a friendly Christian publication, Plus Magazine, running an article about it for their 2.5m subscribers. In addition, Sherman says he soon received “letters from every state in the United States.” They came from Christians saying they were going to engage in “intercessory prayer” for all those poor addicts and their families that first year. Though the weekend is supposed to include fasting, he doesn’t mention those letters detailing plans to abstain from food while doing all that praying. Some commenters do mention it on one of Sherman’s pages (relink).

With the advent of the consumer internet, Just Pray NO’s reach extended further and further. By 2007, Sherman could name-drop a number of Christian media sites that ran information about his annual event. As I mentioned earlier, nowadays they’re even getting press releases printed in major sites like Religion News Service.

Incidentally, one of the more important names he mentions in 2007 is Teen Challenge, which is an evangelical faux-rehab service. It was started by David “Cross and the Switchblade” Wilkerson, who I strongly suspect is not on the level. He’s the guy who might well be responsible for John Ramirez, a professional liar-for-Jesus who makes constant attempts to revive the Satanic Panic.

Wilkerson’s program runs like one of those creepy, totalitarian, Christian right youth camps that destroy children’s wills, abuse them, and trample their rights. In 2001, we even learned that they also prey upon Jewish kids to make them Christian—so no wonder Sherman gets along with them.

Like the rest of their ilk, Teen Challenge centers are exempt from any legal oversight.

How Just Pray NO works out for addicts

The reason I’m giving Teen Challenge so much attention is that I noticed the name mentioned in a comment to Just Pray NO’s ‘About’ page. In 2012, Julie Scholl wrote:

I just heard of this event for the first time today. Praise God for all who pray for this. My 23 year grandson was so addicted he was living on the streets just days away from death. We prayed to God for 5 years for his healing. He was in teen challenge for awhile but walked out.

Finally 7 months ago, after 5 years of praying and begging him he entered a recovery program and is still there now doing wonderful. I know only by the will of God he was saved from death. I thank God every night that he took him there and continues to be there. God is our only hope for these men and women that are addicted, only God can help.

It doesn’t sound like Teen Challenge helped her grandson much at all. (Indeed, it doesn’t sound like the program is really effective at all.) And if Jesus needed a loving grandma to pray for five solid years just to prompt her grandson to enter a (hopefully real) recovery program and stay there for a while, well, then he’s a shitty god. She seriously needs to look into Asclepius. He’d do her so much better.

(If you’re wondering if Sherman replied to her, he did. If you’re wondering if he even touched the failure of Teen Challenge to help this kid, he most certainly did not. I wonder if Teen Challenge pays him anything?)

Meanwhile, Just Pray NO has now run for 33 years. They get fewer than a million participants a year, and probably way less than that because they keep talking about wanting to sign up that many people. And here is the effect of 33 years of talking very hard at the ceiling and maybe skipping a couple meals to let Jesus know they’re really serious this time, courtesy of the CDC:

The total number of deaths in 2019 was over 70k people.

Gee, maybe it’s better if these Christians just forget to pray that weekend.

Two possible interpretations of this graph, neither of which do Just Pray NO any good

We could look at this graph as telling two different stories. But neither story helps the Christians behind Just Pray NO.

Option 1: Of course, we could cut Just Pray NO a whole lot of slack. We could say that gosh, maybe those prayers made the number of deaths considerably lower than they would ordinarily have been. That’s a really awful interpretation, though. It means Jesus deliberately chose to save some people while letting many others die. And if he requires people to pray—sometimes for years at a time—to rescue addicts, then as I said, he’s a shitty god.

The upshot here is that however many people Just Pray NO claims to have rescued from addiction, 70k others died in 2019. Is Jesus evil or incompetent? It’s the eternal question, really.

Option 2: The more likely explanation is that prayers do nothing either way. Ironically, this represents the best-case scenario for Christians.

Those just apply to the Christians who like Just Pray NO.

The real-world option: And the far-more-likely explanation is that prayers make addiction issues worse. By giving addicts a broken, shoddy roadmap to freedom from addiction, Christians guarantee that they will fail in their quest to get clean. Worse, though, Just Pray NO functions as a profligate waster of time and resources. Ultimately, these events create opportunity costs of their own. That’s time and resources not going to better uses.

By the way, we’re just talking about the prayer aspect of the events. We’re not talking about the other end of the events, which seek to connect addicts with a Jesus-flavored faux-treatment program. On his addiction resources page, Sherman proudly lists Teen Challenge alongside a number of other similar outfits and self-help books.

And we’re deffo not talking about fasting. LOL, as if. Evangelicals would likely rather sit naked on a fire ant nest than skip a single meal for better Jesus-ing.

The main benefit of this whole event seems clear

One of Sherman’s biography pages indicated that he “is presently a Recreation Specialist for the City of Dunedin, Florida.” At some point, he moved to Clearwater, which just west of Tampa proper. The job title might mean that he helped arrange activities for people, or that he booked recreational facilities for the city. If so, he sure isn’t there now. He does not appear on the city’s staff list at all. There’s a now-defunct private business by the same name in Dunedin, but his name doesn’t appear there either. (It’s registered to a private home, along with a still-active soap company. Suddenly, I’m wondering just what his wife’s name is.)

Sherman also bills himself as a Bible studies teacher. I caught his name on a Facebook-only business called Diversity Ministries—which has merged with Abundant Life Ministries, apparently. It advertised an upcoming study for September 25, 2022.

As you can see from the ad, this dude is really pressing hard on his supposed Jewish background, but I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that he’s anything but a convert—if even that. Worse, he’s a creepy Jews for Jesus type of Christian, which real Jews understandably don’t seem to like or trust overmuch.

(Interestingly, the address in the ad maps to a Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church. They don’t seem too bad; they have a strong focus on charity work, so maybe they’re okay for SDAs. However, this ministry group’s last post was January 5, 2023, and Sherman didn’t do much with them at all in the first place.)

As for book sales, it doesn’t look like he moves many copies of The Last Days Calendar on Amazon, at least. It’s #7453 in the Christian Prophecies category.

So ultimately, it sure seems to me that the main benefit of Just Pray NO is that it ekes out a better living for its creator, Steven L. Sherman, than anything else he’s got going on right now.

And y’all, I can’t say that I’m at all surprised to come to that conclusion.

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