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.

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.

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]

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.

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?

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.