A personal day of prayer

2012-03-29 00:31:16

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By Wendy Cadge

President Barack Obama's declaration of May 6 as a National Day of Prayer comes in the midst of much national attention to prayer. Growing numbers of scientists in labs are using magnetic resonance imaging to look at the effect of prayer on the brain. Medical experts are debating whether prayer really makes you healthier. And legal scholars are haggling over whether a national day of prayer is even constitutional. Add to that the genesis of this day in 1952 during the height of McCarthyism, and it's clear that prayer can quite neatly fill a multitude of agendas.

For most of the 90 percent of Americans who pray, prayer is not scientific, medical, legal or political. It is personal. While some people pray for national leaders, most pray for their families and loved ones, often combining prayers of petition with prayers of thanks.

My study of the prayers people write in hospital prayer books, for example, shows that about one-third are prayers of thanks, one-third are prayers of petition and one-third combine prayers of thanks and petitions. Almost all focus on personal and familial issues, not public ones.

Americans might gain insight into our fascination with prayer by considering the "prayer gauge" debate that took place in 19th-century England. Scientist John Tyndall sparked this 1872 debate by suggesting, most likely based on the ideas of Sir Henry Thompson, that a hospital be made the focus of prayer. Following a set period of prayer, mortality rates at this hospital and others would be compared to determine if prayer was effective; that is, if fewer people died at this hospital than at others during the time of prayer.

While public prayers for cattle plagues (1865), cholera epidemics (1866), the health of Edward, Prince of Wales (when he contracted typhus in 1871), and for other national crises were common in England at this time, the idea of studying prayer scientifically was not. The debate generated by the suggestion, and the idea that prayer could be studied scientifically, led to its downfall and the experiment never took place.

Wendy Cadge is associate professor of sociology at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., who writes about religion, medicine, immigration and sexuality in contemporary America ( wcadge@brandeis.edu ).
First Published May 3, 2010 12:00 am
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