The Folly of Prayer for Prayer’s Sake

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The New York Sun

The badness of these two books about prayer is more than coincidental: It suggests that prayer, on its own, is not a viable subject for study. After all, it belongs to the definition of prayer that it is not an autonomous activity, not simply something human beings do, like eating and sleeping. The significant thing about prayer is not that we pray, but who we pray to, what we pray for, and why we think our prayers have a chance of being heard and granted. In other words, prayer can only be understood as a part of religion. To treat it anthropologically, as if it were merely an instinctive behavior, and to bestow on it the vague approval with which our age greets all nonthreatening manifestations of “spirituality,” is to violate its essence and reduce it to triviality.


That triviality is on display, in different ways, in James Moore Jr.’s “One Nation Under God” (Doubleday, 518 pages, $29.95) and Philip and Carol Zaleski’s “Prayer: A History” (Houghton Mifflin, 432 pages, $28). Mr. Moore, an earnest amateur in the study of history and religion (he is a business school professor by trade), approaches the subject of prayer in American history in an extremely literal-minded fashion. He simply proceeds chronologically through an outline of American history, from pre-Columbian times to the present, and notes that many prominent people in that history made a habit of praying. Mr. Moore makes no attempt to account for the place of prayer in American life or to explain what makes American prayer different from, say, Mexican or Japanese prayer.


Instead, he tells us that Cotton Mather prayed, and John Quincy Adams prayed, and Aimee Semple Macpherson prayed. Sometimes he quotes an unusually quirky practice or memorable text – Mather, for instance, came up with appropriate prayers to say over each type of person he passed in the street, including the tall (“Lord, give that Man High Attainments in Christianity”) and the lame (“Lord, help that Man to walk uprightly”). But no matter who is doing the praying – politicians, artists, ministers, slaves – Mr. Moore draws the same, blandly patriotic conclusion: “prayer has pervaded American life consciously and unconsciously throughout history.”


Even when his own stories suggest that prayer has not always been seen as a simple good in American life, Mr. Moore cannot really understand why. He recounts, for example, that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention rejected Benjamin Franklin’s proposal to open each session with a prayer. But he has nothing to say about the importance of this decision, or its implications for the separation of church and state. The fact that the Founders deliberately refused to inject prayer into politics simply does not fit his pious program.


Instead, he reassures us that “While the subject of daily prayer was deferred … the larger issue of prayer in the new republic was not relegated to the sidelines.” It is no surprise that Mr. Moore concludes his survey with a homily on the need for Americans to pray more: “It is not hubris to believe in a God who expects human creation to pray.”When prayer has been drained of all specificity, amputated from religion and its accompanying strife,it becomes just a civic exercise, hardly more meaningful or objectionable than the Pledge of Allegiance.


For Philip and Carol Zaleski, who know much more about religion, prayer ought to be a thornier subject. The married authors, who teach at Smith College and edit and write for various religious publications, know full well that any prayer can only be understood as the expression of a particular faith, and that not all faiths are compatible. But they still repeat, on a more sophisticated level, the central mistake of Mr. Moore’s book – treating “prayer” as an uncomplicatedly positive human activity. Their syrupy, boosterish prose (“creation as a whole becomes a shimmering web of irrefrangible mystery,” “to trace prayer through the history of art is to track a bird of paradise through a sunset sky”) makes them sound less like scholars of prayer than like New Age cheerleaders, eager to give any form of prayer a pat on the head.


Accordingly, the Zaleskis practice a form of ecumenical leveling, lumping together the most disparate kinds of believers – Hindu mystics, Native American shamans, Catholic nuns, Japanese poets, modern painters. Rather than dwell on the incommensurable differences between these various types of faith, the Zaleskis put all their subjects into four basic categories: Refugees, who turn to prayer in adversity; Devotees, who order their entire lives by prayer; Ecstatics, who escape ordinary reality through prayer; and Contemplatives, who aspire to a complete knowledge of God through prayer.


The Zaleskis obviously admire their athletes of prayer and want us to do the same. But in curating this Prayer Hall of Fame, they have unwittingly provided the most devastating possible indictment of the religious mind. In ordinary life, if we encountered a man who repeats the same phrase 100,000 times a day, or a man who regularly falls into catatonic insensibility, or a teenage girl whose sexual desires fuel sickly fantasies of martyrdom, we would have no qualms about pronouncing them mentally ill and in need of treatment.


But if the obsessive-compulsive is reciting the Jesus Prayer, and the catatonic is a swami, and the girl is a nun, then the Zaleskis expect us to admire and revere them. And like Mr. Moore, they want us to throw out the precarious secularism the West earned after centuries of religious war so that everyone can pray their fill: “Let the muezzin sound the call to prayer, and let the church bells ring out the Angelus.”


Reading these books, one would never suspect that we are living in a moment when the people who pray the hardest – for martyrdom, purity, the defeat of the infidel – pose the greatest threat to our peace and freedom. In their insistence on making prayer happily uncontroversial, the Zaleskis and Mr. Moore both take it far less seriously than did its great antagonist, Samuel Butler, whose devastating image of prayer, from “The Way of All Flesh,” finds no response in either of their books:


“The drawing-room paper was of a pattern which consisted of bunches of red and white roses, and I saw several bees at different times fly up to these bunches and try them, under the impression that they were real flowers; having tried one bunch, they tried the next, and the next, and the next. … As I thought of the family prayers being repeated night and morning, week by week, month by month, and year by year, I could not help thinking how like it was to the way in which the bees went up the wall and down the wall, bunch by bunch, without ever suspecting that so many of the associated ideas could be present, and yet the main idea be wanting hopelessly, and for ever.”


The New York Sun

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