Quitting Religion, But Not the Practice of Prayer

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http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/6973/quitting_religion__but_not_the_practice_of_prayer


The religious past, the spiritual present

March 27, 2013
By ELIZABETH DRESCHER
Elizabeth Drescher is the author, with Keith Anderson, of Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible (Morehouse, 2012). She teaches religion and pastoral ministries at Santa Clara University. She is currently at work on Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of Religious Nones, a project funded in part through a grant from the Social Science Research Council’s “New Directions in the Study of Prayer” project through the Templeton Foundation. Her website is www.elizabethdrescher.com

This Easter, two newly-minted Christian leaders, Pope Francis and Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, will be leading millions in prayers that are traced back to the earliest days of the Church. But what, if anything, do such prayers mean to the growing worldwide and American contingents of the religiously unaffiliated—Nones—whom both Francis and Welby were at pains to acknowledge as they assumed their new ministries?

As more and more people pull away from institutional religion, do public expressions of prayer have any real meaning in the wider world? Do they connect in any significant way to private, personal expressions of prayer? Does prayer matter at all?

A majority of Americans still answer ‘yes’ to those questions. Close to 90 percent of those affiliated with religions report praying on a regular basis, and 40 percent of Nones in general say they pray with some frequency. Indeed, a plurality (17%) of those identified as “Atheist/Agnostic” by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life report that they pray. Among those who described their religious affiliation as “nothing in particular,” more than half say they pray regularly.

But do the prayers of Nones have anything in common with the prayers of Pope Francis or Archbishop Welby and their flocks?

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