McCaa: Those of us in the American Middle are still praying

Many of us who sit quietly in the American political middle have always placed great faith in prayer.
The California-based Barna Group, which has polled American evangelicals since the 1980s, estimates, “Prayer is not only the most common faith practice among American adults (79% have prayed at least once in the past three months), it’s also one of the most complex and multifaceted.”
In his article “Three Decades Ago, America Lost Its Religion. Why?” Derek Thompson of The Atlantic noted, “No rich country prays nearly as much as the U.S. and no country that prays as much as the U.S. is nearly as rich.”
We do not all pray the same way, or even to the same deity. Writing for Psychology Today, author and former Dallas Morning News writer Christine Wicker has pointed to a Pew Research study indicating that the ranks of America’s prayer warriors include some atheists and agnostics, “6% of them pray every day. … And 11% pray weekly or monthly.”
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Our love of prayer has a long history. So do the results. In 1746, Massachusetts Bay Gov. William Shirley called for public prayer as a massive French fleet of 70 ships arrived with plans of attacking Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, then attacking towns from Boston to New York.
William Federer of the U.S. heritage group Amerisearch has written that “nature” intervened. A hurricane “subsequently sank and scattered the entire French fleet. With 4,000 sick and 2,000 dead, including Admiral d’Anville, French Vice Admiral d’Estournelle threw himself on his sword.”
During the War of 1812, President James Madison declared two national days of prayer, Federer recorded. After the British burned the White House, the Capitol, and other buildings, “dark clouds rolled in, and a tornado touched down sending debris flying, blowing off roofs and knocking down chimneys on British troops.” One British historian noted, “More British soldiers were killed by this stroke of nature than from all the firearms the American troops had mustered.”
Although rarely with the same jaw-dropping results, throughout our history, prayer has played a vital role during events major and minor, good and bad, public and private.
President Abraham Lincoln called for a day of “humiliation, fasting, and prayer” after the Union defeat during the First Battle of Bull Run. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman invoked national prayer days in connection with the two World Wars. Richard Nixon urged our prayers for the safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts. George W. Bush declared days of prayer following the September 11 terror attack and Hurricane Katrina.
Even when hope seemed lost, we have turned to prayer. In Christianity Today magazine, historian Eric Washington noted: “Though independent African American churches in the South existed during the antebellum period, the majority of enslaved African Americans worshiped alongside the people who enslaved them.” However, during secret gatherings they used, “prayer as a weapon to fight for their freedom, believing that God, in his grace, mercy, and kind providence, would deliver them from bondage.” Turns out, they were right, though the answer came much later than they would have liked.
Fort Worth’s the Rev. Will Ford III says his enslaved Christian forebearers in Louisiana flipped a black kettle upside down 200 years ago and prayed inside it to muffle their voices. He still has that pot.
“I believe their prayers led personally to my freedom, and nationally delivered a nation from God’s judgment,” Ford wrote.
There have been naysayers about the existence of God and the power of prayer. Thompson’s story in The Atlantic reminds us that “In the late 19th century, an array of celebrity philosophers — the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud — proclaimed the death of God.”
But we did not listen, “Deep into the 20th century, more than nine in 10 Americans said they believed in God and belonged to an organized religion,” Thompson wrote.
That changed near the turn of the century. Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith believes that’s when politics drove God from the public square. He zeroed in on three events that pushed many away from religion: the end of the Cold War, the GOP’s embrace of the Christian right, and the 9/11 terror attack.
A 2014 Pew Research Center survey confirmed the drop in Americans heavily relying on prayer and religious reflection when making major life decisions to 45% of Americans in general and 55% of Christians.
Public trust in many other institutions or ideas once considered sacred or infallible has also declined in the last 30 years. Among them Thompson mentions the police, capitalism, Congress, banks and the internet, which “made it easier for anxious individuals to build their own spiritualities from ideas and practices they find online.” To that list I would add the news media.
But the most important reason for the decline in prayer’s importance, Thompson surmises, is change in the American family. More young college graduates now focus on career and single life in their 20s, and hold off on marriage and family until later. Notre Dame’s Christian Smith agrees: “They know who they are by 30, and they don’t feel like they need a church to tell them.”
That plus family instability, Thompson suspects, helped destabilize traditional church and prayer, “Divorced individuals, single parents, and children of divorce or single-parent households are all more likely to detach over time from their congregations.”
And yet I am willing to bet the majority of the 88% of Americans still believing in someone or something greater than themselves sit comfortably and quietly in the American political middle.
Once a month my own family holds a prayer call via telephone. From Chicago, Colorado, Alabama, Georgia, Texas and around the country, McCaas chime in asking for guidance, appealing for the sick, entreating God to bless our family and heal our nation.
Even with the turmoil that is today’s world, we believe our prayers are heard and answered. The proof is in what my father and his siblings endured growing up in mid-20th century Alabama. They have all prospered. And through the occasional haze of his advancing dementia, my 93-year-old father now gives the opening prayer. His voice is strong, clear, his petition to the Almighty convincing: “No matter what troubles we face today, Heavenly Father, we have been through worse than this, and triumphed. This too shall pass.”
Part of our opinion series The American Middle, this essay casts Americans as a prayerful people, regardless of religious or political differences.
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