The Commentariat Speaks (26)

Talk show host David Pakman comments on Twitter about the recent spree shooting at a Nashville Christian school:

“Very surprising that there would be a mass shooting at a Christian school, given that lack of prayer is often blamed for these horrible events. Is it possible they weren’t praying enough, or correctly, despite being a Christian school?”

If you guessed that a tidal wave of negative feedback prompted Pakman to quickly delete his tweet, points for getting used to the drill.

Tone-Deaf Commentary

There’s more than one way to read Pakman’s comment, but none that cast him in a favorable light. Regardless of what he meant, it’s a stunningly tone-deaf public statement to make given the circumstances. Perhaps the reaction it provoked surprised him. Pakman tried to walk back the tweet, saying he was not mocking the faith of slain children, but rather “the absurdity of every Republican who sends thoughts and prayers and does nothing else to actually stop the scourge of gun violence”. A moment’s consideration shows that excuse doesn’t fly: the original tweet is obviously about the failure of prayer to prevent the shootings, which has nothing to do with “thoughts and prayers” for the families offered by Republicans after the event had already taken place. Regardless, rather than apologizing for his insensitivity, Pakman doubled down and used the occasion to beat the “gun control” drum.

So what did he mean then? One possible interpretation is that Pakman doesn’t believe in God or prayer at all, and was using rhetorical snark to imply that prayer simply doesn’t work. The first part of that is probably the case: Pakman has previously referred to himself as “100% Jewish” and “secular”, as well as either atheist or agnostic. The latter part only Pakman could tell us, and his after-the-fact creative reinterpretation of his intentions suggests he isn’t likely to.

Prayer That Doesn’t ‘Work’

In the absence of clarification, then, let’s just take Pakman’s words at face value. Even if we assume the comment was made in good faith and goodwill, it reflects a view of prayer that is probably more common than we realize: that when bad things happen to Christians and their families, the problem is that people are not praying enough, or that enough people aren’t praying, or that the ones who are just aren’t “doing it right”.

Is that how prayer works?

1/ Enough People Aren’t Praying

Sometimes even Christians fall into the trap of thinking like Pakman. Organized prayer chains can be a constructive way of getting all the believers in a particular group on the same page about urgent issues. Equally, they can foster the impression that we may expect the sheer number of people praying to motivate the Lord to do something he would not otherwise have done. That’s not what Jesus taught about prayer. He stressed the importance of unity in prayer over numbers praying:

“If two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.”

God is not primarily concerned about numbers: he’s concerned about his children being united in purpose. More people on their knees do not impress him. All else being equal, two concerned believers will do just fine if their hearts are in agreement.

2/ People Aren’t Praying Correctly

Pakman also suggests, however tongue in cheek it may be, that it’s possible to not pray “correctly”. He’s probably right about that, but not in the way he thinks. In Matthew, the Lord was not telling his disciples that two people who agree on any old outcome can compel the Father to answer a prayer the way they want. We know this because he goes on to say they must be gathered “in my name”, which is best understood as meaning on his behalf. A prayer offered selfishly or in contradiction to the will and purposes of God will not be effective no matter how earnestly the participants desire what they are asking for.

To be fair, I’m not sure a prayer offered for the safety of children can ever be “incorrect”, though the person praying may not be able to discern the Lord’s purposes. The desire for someone else to prosper is never a bad one, especially believing children, for whom the Lord expresses his love. Still, there are times when such a prayer may not be answered affirmatively. One such example is found in 1 Kings 14, where the Lord took a child early because he was pleased with him, rather than allowing him to live through terrible times of judgment that would shortly have taken his life in an even nastier way. These are mysteries we simply have to leave with One whose ways are higher than ours and whose love for our children greatly exceeds our own.

3/ People Aren’t Praying Enough

Another common misconception about prayer is that more is always better. In certain cases, this is true. The parable of the persistent widow is often cited to the effect that we should just keep praying the same prayers until we get an answer.

That’s a difficult parable, but I suspect Luke’s explanation is the best one: that it is intended as encouragement not to lose heart and give up praying altogether. This is borne out by the Lord’s comment at the end of the parable that failure of faith while waiting for an answer to prayer is a legitimate concern. He asks, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” It’s also a very specific prayer: the widow is looking for justice, and the implication is that she and others like her will not really find it until the coming of the Son of Man. It echoes the Lord’s Prayer, “Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That’s a prayer that will definitely be answered one day. We should never give up on it.

That said, there are certain sorts of prayers that don’t need to be offered over and over again like mantras. In fact, the Lord disparaged heaping up “empty phrases”, “many words” and long prayers offered for show. He went on to say, “Do not be like them [the Gentiles], for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” That’s not to say we shouldn’t ask, but there is no need to belabor the point or repeat ourselves endlessly. Keeping this in mind, Paul’s command to “pray without ceasing” should not be understood as an invitation to babble on interminably or repeat the same requests ad infinitum. Rather, I believe he was encouraging a readiness to pray over every issue that arises in the course of one’s day; to make no moves without keeping the Lord’s interests in mind.

Lack of Prayer?

But by far the oddest aspect of Pakman’s tweet is the statement that “lack of prayer is often blamed for these horrible events”. I can’t say I’ve ever heard that in my life about a spree killing. The US has seen a combined 23 church and Christian school shootings in the last 25 years (an average of less than one per year), with a total of 97 victims, or less than four a year in a nation of 334,000,000 people. Not once have I ever seen Christians conclude, “We should have prayed more and maybe we could’ve got those numbers down.” Come on, they were in church! What do you think they were doing?

By their very nature, spree killers appear where they are least expected, motivated at a level of almost demonic intensity. How unusual is it for them to target Christians specifically? Well, there are 3.1 million church buildings guaranteed to be in use at least 104 days a year, and roughly 10,000 Christian schools in the US in use for a bare minimum of 170. That means in any given year, your chances of sitting in a pew at a church service or at a desk in a Christian school classroom at the precise moment an enemy of the faith arrives with a gun are something in the order of 1 : 324,000,000. They are probably quite a bit lower, depending on how often your church building gets used.

Hmm, Maybe It Works After All

It’s actually even more amazing than that. According to Wikipedia, in the last five years, spree killers in the US who went after targets that were not church-related killed an average of 523 people per year in 496 separate events, more than two orders of magnitude higher than the victims from all church- and church-related shootings combined. The level of divine protection Christians have received almost without noticing it is mind-boggling. Nashville is the exception, not the rule.

That isn’t to say the safety of children and our other loved ones is not worth praying about, especially as things get crazier in our society. But it is to say that Christians can be forgiven if they don’t always make the fear of their children encountering a stray bullet the foremost focus of their prayers when they are taking or sending them somewhere danger is the exception rather than the rule. Overall, the Lord has been remarkably good to his people in that respect, something David Pakman would know if he ran the numbers and could bring himself to factor in providence as a possible explanation for the uncanny disparity between spree killings in general and those that specifically target Christians.

Seems to me prayer works just fine.