Author: Martin Hughes

“I’ll pray for you,” when spoken by a Christian to an atheist, often makes the atheist angry. Christians usually incite this anger when they use the phrase to indicate that they are going to use God to influence the behavior or thinking of atheists against these atheists’ will. Several Christians, as well as some more peacefully-minded non-Christians, claim this anger is unjustifiable if the atheist states he or she does not believe in God. Christians may build on this claim by stating – or, at least, privately thinking —that this anger is a sign that, deep down, the atheist really DOES believe in God. But does this claim make sense? If atheists really thought prayer was a good and wholesome activity that gave them the ear of the Almighty God, wouldn’t they pray themselves? There are more plausible possibilities, and here are seven of them.

Try not to take too much offense at this honesty, but the bare fact is that when you say, “I’ll pray for you,” I, as an atheist, don’t believe in God, so I see it as you talking to yourself. As a result, from my viewpoint what you’re telling me is, “I’m going to go talk to myself about you.” This is particularly frustrating when you do this in a discussion on religion, because you’re basically saying that you aren’t going to listen to us anymore, but that instead you’re going to go talk to yourself to restore your version of who atheists are. Such wall-building makes the context of understanding that many atheists are trying to create impossible, resulting in understandable frustration.

When you say, “I’ll pray for you,” you seem to be (and, I would argue, actually are) trying to say that you’re superior to me. Now, atheists don’t believe in God, but when someone is unduly arrogant towards us, we become as angry as the next person. “But,” you say, “Atheists are arrogant towards ME.” OK, then make yourself a test case – did you get angry when they exhibited the arrogance that they, as a fellow human, were somehow superior to you? Assuming a “yes” — next question: Did you really believe you were inferior? No? But yet you claim it bothered you? The parallel is that atheists are similarly (and often more) rightfully angry when the Christian exhibits the arrogance of having a personal line to God that the atheist doesn’t have access to. Not because the atheist believes in God – that would be absurd, because in that case the atheist would simply pray to God himself. No, the anger is frustration at your arrogance, which you are in a position to understand, having experienced arrogant behavior from others towards you, yourself. P.S. If your response to this is, “But why would it bother you if you didn’t believe it,” please read this reason again; I did address this.

Most of these reasons are focused on use of “I’ll pray for you” during a conversation that has to do with religion. A lot of atheists may appreciate the phrase when you use it as they’re going through a hard time — but some atheists won’t, and they have a fairly upstanding reason for why: We atheists simply don’t think prayer really does anything. It doesn’t automatically make our situations better. In fact, in the most recent thorough study on prayer, which was done on cardiac bypass patients in 2006, letting a patient know they were being prayed for actually INCREASED the number of complications, probably because these patients had more stress because of “performance anxiety.” So we may be upset that you are doing what is, in our eyes, an ineffective and potentially harmful activity instead of engaging in practical solutions and real relationships.

We’re often upset that you TOLD us you’d pray for us. Many of us atheists are familiar with Christianity, so we know that Jesus said to keep your prayers to yourself in several places in the Bible. So, we figure, if you sincerely wanted to pray for us, there was no need to tell us. And we don’t believe in God, so why would you need to? We’re not getting anything out of it. Telling us you’ll be praying, then, seems to be a blatant attempt to tell us that you’re not convinced that we don’t need intervening from God (who we often see as, with all due respect, something of an imaginary friend), and to rub in your argument that you think we deserve your pity more than your respect (because, honestly, we think that if you respected us you would be more prone to keeping those prayers to yourself).

The phrase often underlines your separation from the atheist. For example, if you knew the atheist before their deconversion, and the atheist is already upset and angry at the way you view them now, saying “I’ll pray for you” may emphasize the fact that the relationship between yourself and the atheist has changed, and the atheist’s anger may be grief. This is not grief that you are actually going to talk to God about them (because the atheist doesn’t believe God exists), but grief that your use of the phrase underlines the difference between you. This angry grief is likely to be even more intense if there is reason for the atheist to believe you used the phrase intentionally to highlight the difference between you and the atheist.

For us as atheists, the effect of prayer is purely psychological and social. There is no God making it work, so any changes of mind that may come about due to someone saying “I’ll pray for you” will come through human interaction. If you have no strong reason to back up your statements in an argument, “I’ll pray for you” seems like a cheap trick to psychologically intimidate the atheist into either feeling inferior to you or into feeling he or she is in a position of shame or pity, or to otherwise emotionally manipulate the atheist into coming closer to your position. For many atheists, then, especially those who were formally Christian, this seems like an underhanded move, and they will feel justified in calling you out on it.

Honestly, it often seems to us as atheists that Christians are fully aware that the phrase “I’ll pray for you” bothers us, and at least some of the aforementioned reasons WHY it bothers us, and yet use the phrase anyway. It seems to us that the reason for your use of the phrase is that, in your mind and in much of culture, that phrase has been kept immune from any moral judgment, so that you can use that phrase on the offensive in an argument (fully aware of all the “reasons” on this list) and walk away from the conversation looking like a saint. Due to the “angry atheist” stereotype, the atheist often does not have the same luxury to be seen as morally justified when responding to the phrase “I’ll pray for you.” This unfairness is frustrating, and one of the ways some atheists have dealt with this frustration is by expressing it honestly, in spite of any negative consequences and any perception from Christians that they are “angry.” In any event, the growth of the non-religious and the gradual shrinking of fundamentalism seems to be making the phrase “I’ll pray for you” in an inappropriate context increasingly unacceptable.

“Grace,” in popular Christian theology, is the term for God’s act of giving you something (like “forgiveness of sins” or “eternal life”) you don’t deserve. The concept here, in many cases, is that we have offended God or broken His moral code. And although we supposedly deserve hell as a result, God has decided not to punish us with hell (or let us go to hell, depending on your theology) and has given us “eternal life” instead.

 

And for this, the story goes, you should praise God for this great gift of grace that He has given to you and all of humankind who will accept it, a gift He gave because He loves you so much that He was willing to have His One and Only Son to give up His life for you. How humbling. How exhilarating.

 

Except…not really. For three reasons.

 

It’s pretty nice to buy a three year old ice cream. It’s terrible to tell the child that he deserves poison and then give him ice cream. Especially if the child does not deserve poison. I mean, it seems that the reason grace is so wonderful, in much of Christian theology, is that we don’t deserve it, supposedly. But the best “grace,” it seems, is the kind that isn’t grace, the kind you receive simply because the person has your and society’s best interests at heart. To be sure, that viewpoint is not grace, which is why it’s awesome. I mean, think about it. When an infant is born, it doesn’t deserve anything. There’s nothing anyone automatically deserves. Deserving things isn’t the point — the point is trying to build a decent society filled with decent people. So we don’t help our kids because they deserve it or in spite of the fact that they don’t deserve it — or, at least, we shouldn’t. It seems that a good parent helps us because they want us to enrich ourselves and society; obsession with what we do and don’t deserve can distract us from that and give the child guilt trips that impede its social development.

 

The infuriating thing about this whole deal is that there is no God. So when someone is told they deserve eternity in hellfire — they’re not remotely telling the truth. That’s a completely made up guilt trip, there to instill fear and shame in other people, to control them and to maintain power by twisting their psychology and convincing them to believe fantastic stories that force them to behave in disturbing ways. Indeed, the only thing that makes grace beautiful, it seems, is fear of hell, a fear that depends on a conviction that hell is what people deserve hell. The fact that people don’t deserve hell makes grace a horrific concept, because it makes people apologetic for being in a world they belong in without any apology.

 

In Christian theology, grace is based mostly on what you believe, not what you do, as everyone has sinned and supposedly deserves eternity in hell. But there are a couple major problems with this. Some “sins,” such as same-sex marriage, are taboos in the Bible and in much of Christian interpretation of it, and yet there is no logical social reason as to why we should have the taboo outside of a supposed God’s say-so. This is an example of how the concept of sin encourages us to ignore very real circumstances people are in, ignore the love people may have for each other, and simply believe that people are immoral in spite of evidence to the contrary. In other words, the arbitrary labels of “sin” — or, in this case, “sins” made up by bigots six thousand years ago — force people to see people as sinful where no sin exist, often leading to maltreatment of these misunderstood, “sinful” people. And this is maltreatment that Christians don’t have to feel that bad about because, after all, these people are sinners.

Second, to be grateful for the concept of grace you have to think that everyone who doesn’t have it is going to hell, and be OK with that. No matter what the person does, they deserve hell and will get it if they don’t follow arbitrary rules God supposedly set up, and/or don’t believe a fairly fantastical story that has very little evidence backing it up. This mentality dehumanizes the person who is not a Christian. No matter how much we tell our Christian friends and family members that we’re human and that we don’t deserve nor are going to hell, the Christian has to think we are sinners headed for hellfire if we don’t believe their fantastic story. So no matter what we say (outside of stating we believe in outrageous 2000 year old stories), we are forced into the stereotype of an unsaved sinner, trapped in pity and low moral standing that we can’t escape from. And these stereotypes have and do affect the way we are treated on a personal and societal level in extremely disturbing ways that are ignored because of reason 3.

 

“Grace” is often used to say we shouldn’t take the past actions of those who have it into account, as much — if God has forgiven people, who are we not to? Although sometimes people insist that grace doesn’t dismiss actions — in point of fact, it often seems to.

For example, when I was a Christian, I used to see unsavory parts of church history and present action as proof FOR a God because, I thought, if things were so terrible, grace had to exist to make things less terrible. The fact that the church was abusive was proof that people in general could be abusive, which meant we all needed grace, which came from God, which brought me back to the church, no matter how dark its past or present deeds were. No matter what the church does, the concept of grace eventually launders its reputation so that it comes out with squeaky-clean moral currency that’s often proof, among those dedicated to the church (and often those outside of it), of God’s supposed blessings.

 

So when the atrocities — past and present — of the church are discussed, the answer comes back that yes, the church is terrible, but God has forgiven it. If any other organization stated it had an imaginary friend who similarly gave it grace, and was at the same time engaging in all the control the church has on people’s lives, everyone would be in uproar. The reason why everyone is not, it seems, is that the church is a major source of power that gives it great power in protecting and enriching its good reputation.

Thus, throughout history, the church has been able to enslave, colonize, and abuse individuals both physically and psychologically because 1) it has the moral authority to state that those it puts through this deserve it and much worse, so it can treat people in terrible ways without moral censure in cultures whose moral system it infiltrates and controls, and 2) it controls the concept of grace so that it can give it to itself and to those it needs to maximize its power and control over others — and thus uses the concept of grace to force less powerful individuals in the church to excuse, ignore, or justify its abuses, no matter how horrific they may be. Grace is truly the worst concept in Christianity, and as long as it stands, Christianity will perpetuate itself, controlling societies and lives without having anyone to answer to but a God of its own making who is — oddly enough — in the habit of giving it blank checks for grace.