The always compelling Christopher Hitchens has a terrific piece out in Vanity Fair (“Unanswerable Prayers”) about being an atheist with serious cancer, who is the subject of prayers. And that got me to thinking, should believers tell atheists that they are praying for them? I have a longer missive about the matter over at Secondhand Smoke, but for those who don’t wish to travel there, I suggest that prayers for atheists remain in the closet, God will still hear, and conclude:
The root meaning of compassion is to “suffer with.” I think one of our duties as human beings is to suffer with the ill by offering them emotional support at the place where they are–not from where we might be. (The same goes for the other way around, of course. Atheists with ill religious friends should not push their non belief on those undergoing a terrible struggle.) Forcing unwanted agendas on others at a time of extremis isn’t caring, but just the opposite by adding to the burden on their psyches at a time when they are most vulnerable.
What do you all think?
September 3rd, 2010 | 12:05 pm
I think it is really situational and does not require a “blanket” policy. I have an atheist friend who is receiving aggressive chemotheraphy for breast cancer. What started as a 10cm tumor has all but disappeared, causing her oncologist to say, “if you came in today, I would say you’ve never had cancer.” From the beginning, I and my children have prayed for her — with her full knowledge. In fact, she said, “I can use all the help I can get!” Will she see the hand of God in her “miraculous” cure and experience conversion? Probably (very probably!) not. But that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t know it may have been there…
September 3rd, 2010 | 1:20 pm
If I refrain from telling my agnostic friend that I will pray for him during a particular time of struggle or illness, then in that awkward silence he knows there is an unspoken prayer and that in my ‘witholding’ this spoken gesture, our friendship is less than fully authentic.
And, when my friend wishes me good luck, I don’t take offence because this was a good wish devoid of God.
I think Alana hits the nail on the head when she points out that there needn’t be a blanket policy – as Christ seemingly never treated two people in Scripture the exact same way. The strength of the existing relationship is paramount to how an offer of prayer is taken.
September 3rd, 2010 | 1:42 pm
I think Alana has a point. It depends on the atheist. Some might think the pray-er is trying to impose some belief and become more stressed. Some might interpret it as the believer’s expression of compassion and accept it as such even if the atheist doesn’t believe. I would add that it also depends on the one who’s praying. Is s/he ostentatiously pushing his or her belief or is the prayer genuinely motivated by compassion, just an “I’m praying for you, man” and left at that?
September 3rd, 2010 | 2:43 pm
Good question. The answer depends on why all the prayers. If the prayers are to make the person praying feel better, there is no point telling the atheist. If you want to make the atheist feel better, you could simply say “I hope you feel better soon”, “our thoughts are with you”, “can I do anything for you”, etc.
I don’t know why Alana calls her friend’s recovery “miraculous”. The reason for being in the hospital, under a doctors care, and the aggressive chemotheraphy was to cure the friend’s cancer. It seems modern medicine did its job.
September 3rd, 2010 | 3:45 pm
I tell ‘em I pray for them just to tick them off.
September 3rd, 2010 | 3:56 pm
Actually, I don’t tell them I’ll pray for their recovery, I say I’ll pray they find God before they die.
September 3rd, 2010 | 4:22 pm
I’m sort of in Alana’s camp on this, with the caveat that most often I don’t volunteer the information I’m praying for them – both ways, Sean – unless they say something. I love it when they ask for my “good thoughts”, because that’s the time I tell them I know exactly to Whom I can address those “thoughts”.
Something else bears comment here. My DW is the amen-master of our church’s email prayer chain. We are a small fundamental church in a large “blue” county. Regardless, she frequently [more than three times a month] receives requests from members of other churches, and from agnostics in the area who know of us, to place items on our prayer chain. Which she does, with very interesting results most times.
September 3rd, 2010 | 5:53 pm
No, it’s presumptuous and offensive.
September 3rd, 2010 | 6:27 pm
Rick, I didn’t call the cure miraculous; I called it “miraculous,” meaning some might call the disappearance of a 10cm tumor a miracle, while others (including my friend) would call it the success of modern Western medicine. That said, even the oncologist had a hard time avoiding the “m” word!
September 4th, 2010 | 1:55 am
“Should Believers Tell Ill Atheists They Are the Subject of Prayers?”
Well (speaking as an atheist) I suppose it depends on your reason for praying. Is it to claim credit with others, whether believers or otherwise, for praying? If so, it won’t get you any credit for the atheist. Or do you think prayer might result in a true miraculous cure? If it does, case closed. If not, what then?
September 4th, 2010 | 10:32 am
Like many other believers, I am fond of Hitchens – or at least the public Hitchens. Would he take comfort in knowing that I feel some sadness about his illness? Would he take some comfort in knowing that there are believers who feel this sadness? If he knows that I am a believer and am sad, he knows I pray for him. If he knows I pray for him, he knows that I, a believer, am saddened.
The bottom line is that he is a celebrity and our relationship is one-sided and very limited. It is best just to pray and not to presume upon a relationship that doesn’t exist.
September 4th, 2010 | 11:22 am
When I hear of terminal news, my first instinct is to pray, regardless of whatever worldly opinion I have of the afflicted. When I saw Mr. Hitchens’s short note, I immediately closed my eyes and offered supplication. The details are not important. In that moment I made common cause with a suffering brother against evil and death.
I pray for Mr. Hitchens, healthy or unhealthy, and should I have the opportunity, I would let him know it. Giving him that information does not preclude me from giving him comfort in other ways as well, which are also important, if not paramount.
Would I be informing him of my prayers to aggrandize myself, to rudely proselytize during a difficult ordeal, and/or to waste speech on the deaf? Perhaps — we are all tempted in subtle ways, and we all give in. But I’d like to think his knowledge of my prayers is a prayer too, a demonstration that, in good times and in bad, love is paramount, regardless of our intellectual differences.
There is no getting around Mr. Hitchens’s supreme arrogance, in life or in dying, reveling while on top of the world or suffering unspeakable torments in the chemo ward. As he pedantically reminds us, his illness effectively changes nothing — we will all pass his way soon enough — except to make all issues suddenly more urgent. That he would take this moment to remark on the delusions of us faithful once again is a note of his gracelessness. So be it. He is not intimate with the source of all grace. The proper response to people offering sympathies, whether they be efficacious or superstitious & useless, is gratitude. Just as this is not a moment for believers to lecture Mr. Hitchens about God, it is not a moment for him to remind us about how stupid is our faith.
“Serves him right” say clueless jerks who have rejected the soul of Christ. “What can it hurt?” say his loving, praying brothers in their defense — at least the brothers who are wise enough to pick their battles and sensitive enough to show some etiquette. This is no adequate defense of prayer, but rather a Pascalian wager too easily neutralized by smart unbelievers. In most cases it suffices as a defense, but not in Mr. Hitchens’s, who has so powerful and sophisticated a will to disbelief that it must be countered with an even greater power and sophistication.
Or some say nothing at all, like Francis Collins, and make their presence their prayer.
Dr. Collins has it right, of course, and even Mr. Hitchens recognizes his grace. That is how we reach the disbeliever in his heart. That is how all Christians are supposed to evangelize: by example. First we show them love undeniable, even by professional deniers, and only then, in a moment when they are adequately disposed, do we gently remind them of the source of our strength: 1 Peter 3:15-16
Prove your strength, then point towards its source. It is worse than unpersuasive to make grandiose claims on behalf of the unseen before demonstrating its power. Their eyes are closed; turn on the light. Then talk about how good the light is, how useful, how many salutary consequences derive from being able to see.
We Christians neither shrink from confessing the power of prayer, nor do we make outsized claims for it. It simply is. For atheists who want to tell us for the umpteenth time they don’t believe us, well, tell us something we don’t know.
Our intellectual differences are largely semantical. The power of love is patent, it is something we all have seen. In the guise of Francis Collins and others, it drove Mr. Hitchens to make some account of it in his Vanity Fair article. We do not disagree on the fact of grace moving through this world. We do disagree on what to call it. For us believers, Grace is personified, the Truth Itself became flesh. Non-believers (and too many faithful as well) get hung up on the details, the precise character of that love. When they ask What is Love, we say Love is a Who. There is no dispute on the power of that Love itself, and both Mr. Hitchens and his faithful brothers in Christ should concentrate on that all-important fact, one of the beliefs we hold in common.
So Mr. Hitchens is not prepared to recognize love in its fullest form, and even as he lay dying, he wants to pick fights about our differences. Let’s not allow the fight. Unbelievers are consigned to the realm of nit-picking details. Let us show, through our example, that there is a higher way.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for all sinners, now and at the hour of Mr. Hitchens’s and my death. Amen.
[cross-posted at Secondhand Smoke]
September 5th, 2010 | 9:40 am
How’s this.
If an atheist comes down with something life-threatening, don’t tell them you’re praying for them.
If they recover, tell them you prayed for them.
If they don’t recover, don’t say anything. That way, prayer can only come out looking good.
September 5th, 2010 | 11:29 pm
It seems that the right answer would be in the manner of telling. If we tell them we pray for them just to annoy them (you’re joking, I trust) then it’s wrong to say so.
But if it’s a sincere and loving gesture, I say in most instances the right thing to do is say so. If the atheist at least has some semblance of heart left, how can it not touch his heart, and maybe, just hopefully, trigger a small movement in his soul which might ultimately save it?
That the atheist has a soul worth saving is true whether he, or I, believe it.
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