People Who Pray, More or Less

A sad bit of fake news from the NCReg:

Prayers will be offered on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. But fewer will be praying than previously, as there are fewer people who pray at all.

There are other problems with Father Raymond J. de Souza’s commentary. But leaving those aside, the truth is that the world’s Catholic population has increased at just about the rate of growth of the planet’s population this century. Overall, there are more than 600 million Christians today than twenty years ago.

That doesn’t include people of non-Christian faiths–I didn’t research those completely, but we do know that the world’s Muslim population has increased by nearly twenty percent in this millennium. Do their prayers count?

Perhaps we can say that fewer US people are praying, but I’m not sure we can prove that. Maybe fewer white Christians in the US are praying, but I’d want to see some hard numbers even on that one. We know people are exiting organized religion in a lot of the First World, but how do we know these folks haven’t given up on the institution, and not God?

Lots of questions. But keep praying.