In the hours after the massacre in San Bernardino last week, regular people and politicians alike began sending their “thoughts and prayers” on social media, as people and politicians so often do after horrors such as this. But this time, a debate erupted over the appropriateness of the sentiment — followed by another, considerably more annoying, conversation over whether this constituted “prayer shaming.”
This post is not really an attempt to wade into that debate. Rather, it’s a stab at taking a wider view of the point of prayer, and considering whether there is any reason even the nonreligious may benefit from offering a prayer here and there, every once in a while. More than half of Americans pray every day, and although younger Americans — those born between 1990 and 1996 — are the age group least likely to pray daily, about 40 percent of this group still claims to do so, according to a Pew Research Center survey released last month. Even a quarter of respondents who identify with no religion in particular said they prayed daily — as did, intriguingly, 9 percent of agnostics and 1 percent of atheists. Are all of these people getting any benefits from this daily activity?
In the 2000s, a spate of scientific studies were published concerning “intercessory prayer,” or prayer concerning the well-being of someone other than yourself. For example, in 2006, researchers at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (and elsewhere) reported the results of their ten-year study of more than 1,800 heart-surgery patients: Not only did the prayers of others not help them recover, but those who were prayed for were actuallymorelikely to suffer complications, “perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created,” reported the New York Times in an article headlined “Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer.” It’s kind of like the original version of “thoughts and prayers are not enough.”
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