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Why People Prayed for Boston on Twitter and Facebook, and
Then Stopped
Social networks reveal some long-standing human patterns.
ELEANOR
BARKHORN APR 20 2013, 1:39 PM ET
After the news broke Monday afternoon that two bombs had
exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line, prayer flooded my social media
feeds. "Thoughts and prayers for folks in Boston," a former colleague
posted on Facebook. "Pray for Boston," another friend wrote, echoing
a popular Facebook page, Twitter hashtag, and image meme.
It was jarring. There was the weirdness of seeing so many
references to the divine in spaces normally reserved for vacation photos and
article links and quips about the news. It was tempting to think that all the
social-media-fueled "prayers for Boston" somehow degraded the idea of
prayer. As one Facebook commenter wrote on the Pray for Boston page: "Do
you want me to DEFINE prayer? A solemn request for help or expression of thanks
addressed to God or an object of worship. Prayer is solemn. Not a 'like' on
facebook."
It was also strange to see so many non-religious friends
talking about prayer. The majority of my Facebook friends who wrote about
praying aren't especially observant. Maybe they go to church or synagogue on
holidays, but not regularly—and they certainly don't post about prayer under
normal circumstances.
Odd as the deluge of prayer-related status updates seemed to
me, many of them were just high-tech versions of an ancient phenomenon:
faithful people reminding other faithful to pray. The Bible is obsessed with
prayer. From Genesis to Revelation, variations on the word appear more than 300
times. The Hebrew scriptures describe people praying for strength, for babies,
for deliverance from slavery, for food. In the Gospels, Jesus tells his followers
how to pray (using the simple, straightforward words of the so-called Lord's
Prayer) and how not to pray ("you must not be like the hypocrites").
In Paul's letters, we see the closest analogues to this week's "pray for
Boston" tweets: constant reminders to pray. "Pray without
ceasing," he tells the Thessalonians. "Be constant in prayer,"
he writes to the Romans. To the Ephesians he says, "Pray in the Spirit on
all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests."
Churches have carried on this tradition of encouraging each
other to pray, through prayer letters and prayer phone chains and prayer
breakfasts and prayer groups. With that context in mind, Facebook shouldn't
cheapen prayer any more than the Postal Service or the telephone does.
"Social media platforms are merely a means of
communication," Russell Moore, president-elect of the Southern Baptist
Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and an active Twitter
user, told me. "Asking for prayer via Twitter or Facebook is no different
than calling someone and saying, 'We should really pray for this.'
"Social media can be used for harmful purposes,
obviously. I'd be concerned about rumors spreading quickly over social media.
But social media can be a tremendous force for good in alerting people to
things they can be praying about right away."
But what I saw on Twitter and Facebook in the hours after
the Boston bombings and the Texas explosion wasn't just faithful people
reminding other faithful people to drop
everything and pray. It was also the non-religious invoking prayer in a way
that they wouldn't under normal circumstances.
At first, this kind of prayer also appears to be nothing
new. It seems to confirm the old, disproven "there
are no atheists in foxholes" myth—that when confronted with death and
destruction, even a hardened skeptic is moved to seek God.
"As a Christian, I would see it as an evidence of a
natural human understanding of dependence," Moore said. "People who
live their lives with an illusion of independence and self-sufficiency, when a
crisis happens, are often driven to prayer, or at least to call upon people to
pray...I think that's a natural reaction."
It is a natural reaction for some. I grew up in Manhattan,
and September 11th, 2001 was the second day of my senior year of high school.
Though I didn't believe in God at the time, I found myself saying, "God
bless you" to my friends as we parted ways that day, and in the days that
followed. That faint, involuntary urge to call on God's name soon grew into a
desire to read His word and then a hunger for friendships with people who
believed in Him. Two years later, I said out loud what I knew in my heart was
true: "I am a Christian."
But I'm not sure that's really what's going on here. I don't
think the outpouring of post-Boston social-media prayer was fueled by a bunch
of people who, in the face of tragedy, are suddenly eager to seek God. As
Elizabeth Drescher writes in a well-done piece at Religion
Dispatches, it didn't take long for the "pray for Boston" meme to
die; it was soon replaced by other, more practical sentiments. I noticed that,
too. Here it is in graph form—check out how quickly the phrase "pray for
Boston" surged on Twitter on Monday, and then how quickly it fell:
My friends who wrote of praying on Monday night soon began
thinking about Boston, or standing with Boston, or loving Boston. It's
interesting to see what words besides prayer have emerged as the way to respond
to and process the terrible things that happened, and continued to happen, in
the city.
Drescher believes #PrayforBoston rose and fell so quickly
because the prayers were never really about religion in the first place. They
were more reflections of temporary anxiety and sadness than a lasting call to pursue
belief:
Obviously, we can reasonably conclude, prayer memes shared
in times of crisis do something besides expressing traditional religiosity,
calling us to God, to regular spiritual practice, or to worship. Rather, in an
increasingly secularized America...praying or calling for prayer in times of
tragedy seems to mark a kind of existential angst, sorrow, or confusion for
which other words or gestures seem inadequate.
Though Twitter and Facebook make it easier to witness those
fleeting moments of prayerfulness, they're not all that new, either. A 2002
Gallup report on religious belief in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War,
the first Gulf War, and September 11th concluded,
"Public perceptions of religion's importance in society tend to spike
following crises, but those perceptions are often short-lived, and don't
frequently translate into behavioral changes." As an example, the report
says that religious observance increased the week after September 11th, but by
December it was back to normal levels. The same pattern played out this week,
only much faster.
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