I am surrounded by prayers. Not my prayers, really. My mom’s and grandma’s prayers. As Pentecostals, they constantly pray. For family, for keeping me safe at protests, for help and for hope, for grace, for their friends, for the sick, for love, for change.
From their constant prayer, I learned that prayer is ritual. Often it is an invocation of the not-yet or the not-immediately-present. It is otherworldly. Because of this, it is often ridiculed by the activist left for being insufficiently political and too easily abused. I can understand why. Amid devastating catastrophes, calls for “thoughts and prayers” are dismissed as inauthentic if left unaccompanied by immediate action. Prayer is assumed to encourage political passivity and moral indifference.
Meanwhile, those on the reactionary right recognize the deeply political dimensions of their faith and consecrate their wars, imperial ambitions, and nationalist fantasies with prayer. How can one pray when public prayer amounts to nothing more than disturbing, meme-like images of J. D. Vance or Pete Hegseth praying for God to bless their vicious deployment of imperial violence?
