It would seem that many Americans pray about political elections. I’ll share some evidence about that shortly, but for now, let’s take that as a given. They may pray, for instance, that a certain candidate wins the Presidency, or that their political party can sweep the US House of Representatives.
I’m always curious, however, just how they think such a thing might pan out–if God were to comply with their wishes. And what do they expect from God? For instance, do they expect God to make the majority vote for the preferred candidate? This would normally be considered to be coercion. Or would they expect God to let people vote as they please, but to do some monkey business with the ballots, causing them to read in such a way as to give the most votes to the preferred candidate? This would be called election fraud. Or perhaps they expect God to stage a coup, and to place the preferred candidate into office directly?
When I’ve asked, I’ve never gotten back a rational response to the question, “So, just what are you asking God to do here?” This tells me that it is not a rational exercise; else, there would be a response. Rather, it seems to be a mere wish, iterated as a prayer. The best they could hope for would be that God would somehow convince people to vote in a certain way–that he would influence their thoughts. And this makes me wonder, “Why don’t you go convince people yourselves?”
Indeed, I wonder whether this is some of the same crowd who—their churches having failed to influence the society against abortion, homosexual marriage, and narcotics use— turn to the Federal Government in support of laws to prohibit the very things their religion could not persuade people to avoid. On the one hand, they hope for Constitutional amendments, or just plain unconstitutional acts of government, to make people behave, and on the other hand, when it comes to election day, they turn to God either to make people behave, or to make their behavior not count!
Curious, it seems, that so many could care about the outcomes of things, and yet would not work themselves to influence those outcomes. Everybody wishes that a movement would arise, but nobody wants to build that movement! Instead, they turn to the Federal Government, or to God.
Now, the Facts!
I thought I’d take a few minutes at Google to get a feel for just how much discussion there is about praying for politics, and I ended up devoting an entire evening to it, for the results were intriguing. I’m going to share the raw data below, some of which will be only mildly interesting (if at all), and the rest of which is quite something to behold.
First, I wanted to find out how much general discussion there is about praying for elections, so I searched certain phrases, such as “pray that he wins”, putting them in quotation marks to ensure that Google would only give returns for instances in which the phrases appear intact. Secondly, I added an additional term, such as “election”, to be sure that “pray that he wins” was not returned from discussions about sporting events or similarly-unwanted topics. I have hyperlinked each search below to the corresponding Google page and I have listed the number of “hits” at Google after each search. Here are my initial findings:
[“pray that he wins” election] 31,500
[“praying that he wins” election] 9,820
[“pray that she wins” election] 8,510
[“praying that she wins” election] 2,030
The searches above gave high-enough numbers of returns to make me think that I was getting somewhere, so I continued by searching also the word “president”:
[“pray that he wins” president] 40,100
[“praying that he wins” president] 10,700
[“pray that she wins” president] 9,310
[“praying that she wins” president] 2,560
Again, the numbers were noteworthy, but then I thought of a more generic term for getting at the idea:
[“pray that the election”] 6,080,000
[“praying that the election”] 684,000
Bingo! Now we’re getting somewhere. It seems that over 6 million times, somebody has written something about praying “that the election” would something-or-other. So then I wondered whether this idea of praying for elections was in any way partisan. That is, were people praying that their political parties would fare well in the elections? And the answer seems to be a resounding yes!:
[“pray that the party” elections] 5,640,000
[“praying that the party” election] 657,000
Note how the last pair of searches yielded numbers quite similar to the pair just before. I don’t have enough data to make, assume, or even guess at a point to be made about this, but I do think it’s interesting.
And speaking of interesting, I began to wonder about what might be learned when searching specific political parties with similar phrases. I started here:
[“pray that the Republican” election] 3,910,000
[“praying that the Republican” election] 447,000
[“pray for the Republican Party”] 9
[“praying for the Republican Party”] 9
[“praying that the Republican Party”] 215,000
Here I saw that 3.9 million times, [“pray that the Republican” election] came up. Interestingly, whatever number of people in these conversations were doing such praying themselves, they did not seem to be also praying directly “for the Republican Party”. Is this an indication that these folks do not view the process of “party” as one of building and reforming an institution, but merely one of attempting to win elections? I don’t have enough data to draw such a conclusion, however likely it may be, so I’ll just leave my finger there for now, in hopes of coming back to it later.
So moving forward, and noting the very high number of Republican-focused discussions on praying for elections, I searched the same terms for the Democratic Party. Before you read the results, I want you to close your eyes right here and think about your guess as to what they would be. Higher? Lower? About the same? Stop right now and guess.
OK, now keep your guess in mind and read the returns:
[“pray that the Democrat” election] 9
[“praying that the Democrat” election] 3
[“praying that the Democratic Party”] 1
[“praying for the Democratic Party”] 5
[“pray for the Democratic Party”] 3
Holy smokes, Batman! Where a boatload of people seem to be praying in favor of the Republican Party, practically nobody seems to be writing about praying for the Democratic Party! (Please remember that I belong to no political party, and generally shun them all as corrupt and ineffective at getting anything of good substance done.)
I wondered how a minor party that is strongly religious might behave in this regard. I immediately thought of the Constitution Party, who not only want the nation to return to adherence to its own Constitution, but who also seem to be intent on “winning the nation back for Christ”. But I found nothing here:
[“praying that the Constitution Party”] 0
[“praying for the Constitution Party”] 0
Do Constitution Party members not pray for their party? Or do they just not write about those prayers on the Internet? Not enough data.
And just for kicks, I checked the concept by searching on the Libertarian Party:
[“praying for the Libertarian Party”] 0
[“praying that the Libertarian Party”] 0
Then I thought I’d check the unofficial Republican sub-party, also known as the “Tea Party’:
[“praying for the Tea Party”] 977,000
[“praying that the Tea Party”] 124,000
Those numbers reminded me of the numbers I found when searching about the Republican Party. So then, for good measure, I plugged in “Green Party” and found this:
[“pray for the Green Party’] 1
[“praying for the Green Party”] 0
All these searches got me thinking that it would be good to have some sort of “control group” against which to measure all the numbers above, so I thought of a few things for which Americans might be apt to pray. The first that came to mind was this year’s Super Bowl:
[“praying for the giants”] 779,000
[“praying for the patriots”] 437,000
Then the outcome of American Idol:
[“praying for Scotty McCreery”] 1 (American Idol winner for Season 10)
Then for the weather:
[“praying for a white Christmas”] 203,000
[“praying for snow”] 279,000
[“praying that the groundhog”] 3,310
[“praying for rain”] 1,480,000
[“praying for sunshine”] 148,000
[“praying for a sunny day”] 189,000
Then I searched to see who all might be praying about family matters such as these:
[“praying for a husband”] 177,000
[“praying for a wife”] 210,000
[“praying to get pregnant”] 26,100
[“praying not to get pregnant”] 4,700
[“pray I get pregnant”] 25,600
[“pray I don’t get pregnant”] 12,600
And finally, in my search for more control groups, I searched these other prayer terms, most of which yielded returns in significantly-higher numbers.
[“pray for healing”] 1,190,000
[“pray for you”] 39,500,000
[“praying for you”] 30,900,000
[“praying for a miracle”] 9,310,000
[“pray for a miracle”] 567,000
Take “praying for you” (about 31 million hits), for example. That’s about eight times as many hits as I got for the search: [“pray that the Republican” election] 3,910,000. Does this mean, therefore, that for every 8 people who would be likely to “pray for you”, one is also likely to “pray that the Republican” party fares will in an election? Again, more data would be required to support such a conclusion firmly.
Is it mindlessness?
So with all this praying going on, I thought it would be very instructive to see how many people are discussing whether they should be praying. That is, this is all just mindless activity, or are people also thinking about whether prayer is appropriate for this or that? So I began with some general questions, this time excluding the various political terms previously searched. I found that there is an appreciable number of people discussing whether they “should” pray, and approximately a bajillion purporting to give a reason as to why they pray:
[“should I pray”] 538,000
[“do you think I should pray”] 736,000
[“why i pray”] 40,000,000
[“this is why I pray”] 13,000,000
OK, so while I’m generally critical of religious folks for not thinking much about their ways, at least I found a bunch wanting to give their reasons, and even a few asking about what should be happening.
So after all this research, I was finally in a position to ask Google the $64,000.00 question. Since I had determined that some people wonder whether they should pray about this or that, I wanted to know how many people are similarly inquisitive as to whether they should pray for certain political outcomes. And Google said, “Are you kidding?!“:
[“should we pray for elections”] 0
[“should we pray for the elections”] 0
[“should we pray for candidates”] 0
[“should we pray for the candidates”] 0
[“should we pray for a candidate”] 1
[“should not pray for candidates”] 0
[“should not pray for the candidates”] 0
[“should not pray for a candidate”] 0
[“should not pray for a specific candidate”] 3
[“should not pray for an election”] 0
Practically nobody is discussing whether we should pray for elections! And that statistic probably helps to explain these two earlier searches, with their returns in the millions:
[“pray that the party” elections] 5,640,000
[“pray that the Republican” election] 3,910,000
See, when one of these ten bajillion people tells me that they’re praying for an election, and I ask just what they expect God to do, they cannot answer. This shows me that they have not thought about the reasonableness of such prayers. Thus am I now not surprised to see that practically nobody is discussing the “should” of the whole matter.
Does God Take Sides?
On another note, did you notice way up above that millions of Republicans seem to be praying for elections, as compared to about three Democrats discussing the same?
Let us imagine that God is active in politics. Let us also imagine that he wants people to pray about politics. And let us imagine that he will honor the prayers of the majority. If this were the case, then the overwhelming trend shown in this study would dictate that God would make the Republicans win every election.
Is this what we witness in the real world?
No.
We may conclude, therefore, that these millions and millions of political prayers are without direct effect on their intended outcomes.
Now, I can already hear those creative juices flowing, as some of you try to imagine reasons to explain why God, hearing the prayers of millions, would allow the favorite candidates of those who do not pray for elections to win so often. Surely, many of you believe it is to “teach the country a lesson”. I’ve even heard people brazenly boast, without any support whatsoever, that “This country doesn’t deserve to have good leaders”! The presumption, therefore, is that God, hearing the prayers, ignores them altogether and does nothing—not because he doesn’t intervene in politics, mind you, but because he only intervenes when he doesn’t prefer to “teach a lesson” or to punish by not intervening.
All these philosophical gymnastics are too much for me, for I prefer a much more commonsensical approach to common sense, as opposed to this grasping-at-straws approach. I prefer the obvious–that God does not seem to be routinely in the business of intervening in politics–just as he does not seem to be routinely in the business of intervening in church affairs, in science, in society, in culture, in crime, and in corruption. Indeed, if he were, shouldn’t we expect to see a great many corrupt people in each of these fields suddenly disappear from the planet in a puff of smoke–or suddenly drop dead–or be eaten by worms–or be hauled off to prison by mobs of upright-and-adamant citizens? And shouldn’t we expect to see major reforms sweeping our every facet of our generally-corrupt and non-excellent culture?
Yet no such thing goes on here.
I was shouted down once for asserting that God doesn’t seem to be involved in politics. Apparently, it was deemed an evil thought. Never mind how rational and honest a thought it may be.
I suppose there is likely a correlation between the great tide of popular belief that God is going to “save the day” in American politics and the idea that if only our favorite party could win control, everything would be alright. Never mind the fact that all these prayers and all the partisan contributions are achieving nothing of the kind; it is apparently more blessed to believe against the evidence than to search for actual and effective solutions.
Why would God intervene in American politics when Americans watch their own nation decline decade after decade and do not intervene in it themselves?
Just whom do we think we are fooling? God, perhaps?
There is quite an establishment–made of people whose names we mostly likely do not know–and they are thriving off the currently-mindless state of things. Imagine what could change should America begin to think!
Jack
