“I’ll Pray For You”

Honestly, is there anything more condescending?

“What? No! That’s not how I mean it!” you might protest if you’ve uttered this phrase. Listen, I understand what you might be going for (“I care about you”) but that’s rarely how it comes across to the people that you feel the need to say it to. Tell me, did they ask you for prayer before you told them you’d be doing so?

“I’ll pray for you” is Christianese for, “I think that you are not following God’s plan, and I’m judging you so hard for it that I’m going to spend my time asking God to make you start doing what I think you should be doing with your life to win back God’s favor along with mine.”

It’s one of the many ways that the church has given Christians permission to openly judge another person for living their life; while I hate it, I also understand it because I once belonged to this kind of community.

Imagine this: you’re born into a community that staunchly believes they have found the rule book for life and instructions on how to live forever. On its own, growing up being told that you are right and everyone else in the world is wrong (punishable by eternal torture) is very problematic and instills entitlement on AT LEAST a subconscious level. Add to it that the rule book you have lays out all the ways you must live in order to be worthy, and you now have a life template against which to compare everyone you know, and spiritual permission to decide if people are doing it right or not.

Like…of course judgmental Christians are the result of that upbringing. I certainly was.

But it gets even more complicated. Christians are also told they have this superpower called Prayer, which they can use to communicate with God to ask for the things they want. Sometimes the things people pray for are noble, like World Peace.

Sometimes they’re political–“Dear God, please help this candidate win the election instead of the other.”

Sometimes they are deeply personal: “Please don’t let dad die.” “Please help me get this job so my kids and I don’t end up on the street.”

Sometimes they’re petty: “Jesus, please let me find a parking spot close to the mall entrance–oh look, there’s one! Thank you, Lord!”

Sometimes prayer is nosy: “God, I heard that Leona lost her faith and I worry about her marriage being unequally-yolked with her Christian husband. Please let Leona find her way back to you, and please, please, please don’t allow her to pull her husband away from you while she is lost.”

Sometimes, prayer becomes gossip, disguised as a “prayer request” in a conversation that doesn’t include the person being prayed for. “Did you hear that Leona doesn’t believe in God anymore? Do you think she and Brennon with get a divorce? I can’t imagine how distressed he must be over his wife falling away from their faith… Last time I saw them they did seem a bit disconnected from each other. Maybe someone should talk to his parents about it–you know, for extra prayer power… Speaking of prayer requests, please pray for my boyfriend because I feel like God is telling me to break up with him…”

It’s taught that prayer isn’t a one-way conversation, that God sometimes communicates with Christians too, but not in the same way that we talk to him. While we send verbal prayer up his way, God is more mysterious, and we’re told he will communicate with us personally, sometimes so subtly that you can miss it, and certainly not so obviously that it’s verifiable by anyone else. In fact, I’ve been told by other people that God told them to tell me something about me and my life that I didn’t even know about! (“God told me that you have an eating disorder.”) You’d think if anyone would know about that, it would be me, right? The person who told me this didn’t know me personally at all, and when I cast doubt on her claim, she told me that I was in denial, being deceived by Satan, and also, woah, who was I to question God?

That is the problem. Pulling the “God told me” card is a power move that anyone can try to pull without any way for anyone to verify whether this is remotely the case. Christianity allows God to work so mysteriously that people can say they’ve heard from God and it’s technically not disprovable. It’s hard to argue with.

This doesn’t mean that people believe everything that everyone says about God–hence why we see so many established Christian denominations. Of course, every Christian thinks that their interpretation of the Bible and their personal spiritual insights are THE ones that will get them to heaven, but if their theology differs from their church, they’ll just split and start a new one. Maybe they’ll take half of their old congregation with them (but it’s not poaching if it’s in the name of saving their souls and taking their tithe money).

I feel about hearing from God how I feel about social media. On social media, you can take a picture and crop it and edit it and add a filter and caption it however you want, and posting it makes it the truth as far as other people can tell. Maybe I look at your picture and compare it to the ones in my phone and think about how much better your life appears to be.

When I was a Christian people talked all the time about hearing from God; finding “Rhemmas” in the Bible–personal insights God revealed to you in scripture–was a common thing in my social circles, and it was fully expected that if you were a real Christian you would find them too. If you were facing a fork in the road of your life and you didn’t know which way to go, it was expected that you’d pray about it and God would show you the way. Sometimes other people would pray about it too and tell you what God revealed to them. Especially if it was your parents who felt compelled by God to make a certain decision for your life, you as a kid had no recourse, and if you disagreed and refused, not only were you disobeying your parents, but you were rebelling against God’s Will for your life (a family crisis!)

All of those potential issues aside–what if you didn’t hear from God? What if praying felt like talking to a wall? Were you sane amongst a group of crazy people, or were you broken? Did God just not want to talk to you? How come nobody else was talking about all the silence? It must be just you. If you didn’t want to be questioned or made fun of, it was in your best interests to just play along and make stuff up. Crop, edit, filter, post. “God told me to tell you…”

There were many parts of my upbringing that caused me to develop anxiety as a kid. But anxiety wasn’t the word I would have used then–it was “convicted.” My conscience was extremely sensitive, built from years of self-doubt (“I’m a sinner incapable of doing good on my own”) and fear of being tricked by Satan (“he is so sneaky and wants to keep us from God”). I had no confidence in my own judgment, and I was taught from an early age that my feelings weren’t to be trusted–just an unfortunate side-affect of my humanity. The only thing I could trust was God’s direction…if only I could find it, hear it, see it.

Any time that any person suggested that I do something–apologize, evangelize, donate, volunteer, speak up–I felt obligated, and if I felt fear, anxiety, or any of those other feelings that sit in your gut and make you generally uncomfortable, I interpreted that as conviction from God that this is what I should do. Any bad feelings seemed to prompt conviction, and my fear of God overcame my fear of any of the things I thought I was being led to do. This included public speaking at my church in front of hundreds of people multiple times between the ages of eight and eleven. I never wanted to do it, but I didn’t believe that my feelings mattered. The worse I felt about it, the more convicted I thought I was. My parents never forced me to do anything, but years of spiritual teaching and manipulation in the midst of my brain development certainly made me easy to coerce into doing whatever I thought God (and by extension my parents) might want from me.

My interpretations of what God wanted from me bordered on superstition. While it often came down to “I have a bad feeling, so it’s probably God,” sometimes I’d tell God to give me a sign as yes or no for whatever it was I wanted direction for. Maybe there would be a bright break in the clouds after church and I’d look up and wonder, “God, is that you shining down on me telling me it’s okay to stay friends with Brett, even though he is a boy, and even though mom doesn’t like me talking to him?”

Interpretive art was a Christian activity I participated in several times. You were given art supplies and told to close your eyes, pray to God, and paint whatever you felt led to. People around me painted beautiful scenes, while I often painted obscure shapes, then would look at them from every direction and suppose hopefully, “maybe this stack of blocks represent my friends, and maybe this lone triangle is me, and God’s trying to tell me it’s okay to lean on my friends for support, even though mom says that’s codependence.” (If you can’t tell, my main issues as a kid focused around my parents disliking my friends and continually trying to isolate me from them.)

There’s lots of room for superstition within Christianity. God’s very mysterious nature requires creative interpretation through any medium God might choose–you never know where you’ll run into him. A sudden breeze could be confirmation of something big, like, “yes, let your kid go to the college they got accepted into,” and seeing a shooting star has absolutely represented, “Yes, Chris/Josh/Hunter is your future husband” to many, many girls. A flat tire is probably a “no” to whatever has been on your mind, and if you start to experience a lot of hardships, it’s a fifty-fifty toss-up whether that is a sign that God has cursed you and you’re in serious spiritual trouble, or that Satan is attacking you because you have so much spiritual potential (see the book of Job).

Figuring out what God wants for your life is often a very mysterious puzzle that God definitely could have made clearer signs for; but that’s why God gave Christians community to help keep you on the right path. Living a Christian life as part of a church makes your church members privy to your personal choices, and their ability to hear from God is permission enough to insert themselves and their holy messages into your business.

This all feels so…stifling, doesn’t it? Ooh yeah. And when you get tired of it, that’s when you start getting the “I’ll pray for you”‘s from concerned brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s how they get the last word even when you try to draw a boundary.

This weekend Brennon got a call from a friend expressing concerns over the state of his spiritual life, after attending Easter Sunday service at our church with us, which he walked out of halfway through–his way of silent protest. (Maybe it was the female pastor; maybe it was gay flag hanging above the church door; perhaps the last straw was our pastor saying “non-binary siblings in Christ”…) He just couldn’t handle how open-minded our church was, I guess, and felt compelled to tell Brennon that he was concerned about him and would be praying for him.

When Brennon told me, he couldn’t figure out what he was feeling. Convicted, maybe? How about intruded upon? My therapist explained it perfectly by using the analogy of someone in a house with the door closed but unlocked, which someone opens and enters without knocking. Even though the door was unlocked, the person inside has every right to feel trespassed upon.

Telling someone you’re concerned about their life choices and that they are praying for you is just as rude and uncalled for as giving any other unsolicited feedback or advice. Christians feel that they have the spiritual right to do this to each other, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still being judgmental assholes.

You can relabel “gossip” as a “prayer request” all you want to make you feel justified. You can say that you “love the sinner but hate the sin” in order to explain away why it’s okay to abandon your friend because they came out as queer. You can say that God told you to tell someone that they’re not following God’s path for their life and feel righteous while doing so. You can rationalize whatever it is you’re doing or saying in the name of God and wash your hands of it coming across as rude or judgmental or nosy or intrusive because, again, God…BUT what you are doing is still toxic, disrespectful, manipulative, and uncalled for.

And especially if no one asked for your opinion or for your prayer, please ask God for the self-control to keep it to yourself.