Hashtag prayers and the War for God

The recent events in Paris showed both the ugliest and the most poignant sides of religion. In the days after the attacks, we witnessed extremist religiosity being countered by an equally strong outpouring of sympathies, understanding and kindness. And outside France, we realized that prayer could no longer be just a prayer… it had to come with that hashtag, #PrayforSomething.

And it’s strange, really, when our prayer lives have been that slow evolution from reciting “Angel of God, my guardian dear…” out loud and in perfect cadence, to saying prayers quietly at night, alone, seated at the bedside. And in our most profound moments, we learned how to pray without even saying a word — and you just feel in conversation with God or a Higher Being.

But this #praying is altogether new and different. After all those years of trying to develop personal spiritualities and attempting to reach higher and higher states of meditation, social media comes along and interrogates another dimension of our lives. Now, social media meddles with our faith, an aspect which we never thought Facebook or Twitter would dare touch. Next thing we know, we might start placing hashtags in our missals for every #Amen, just to get people to participate.

It’s not outright bad, but I am not completely sold. I feel like my worldly self has no qualms about it; #prayer is a neat way to promote a noble cause. On the other hand, my spiritual self — my soul, if you must — is queasy from these hashtagged hopes.

Early signs

We should have seen the signs early on. When a few of us started posting those memes which purported that a “share” was a thumbs-up to Jesus dying for our sins (and a non-share was a thumbs-up to Satan), most of us just shrugged it off as a mere case of Internet wantonness. Back then, it was as pointless as the Chainmail of Death. But after Paris, when everyone started pontificating on who or what to pray for — and more specifically, what hashtags we should use as incense to God — it got slightly out of hand. It made a mockery not just of prayer, but by hashtagging’s own virtue, of empathy as well.

The attacks in Paris showed us that the politics of mourning is no different from other dependency theories: the rich and powerful are bound to have their privileges while the poor are bound to slave, suffer and die. In this case, Paris gets everyone’s sympathies, while others — Baghdad, Shikarpur, Kobani, Fotokol, Sana, Syria, Beirut, and locally, the Lumads, etc. — would have to campaign for it. This caused many to rally online, crying out how unfair it all is that the Western world once more lorded over us. Some pointed the finger at the media for not covering the minorities’ struggles enough. But this is not entirely true because even in social media, where the individual is the foremost enabler, people hardly shared the news about Kenya, Beirut, or even the Lumads. To escape even tougher arguments, the less antagonistic ones simply post the cure-all, #PrayfortheWorld, à la Miss Universe.

Prayer as a marketing tool

At that point, it was obvious that prayer had become a marketing tool. Whether we liked it or not, social media made prayer a medium for arguments and demarcating in-groups and out-groups. It said something about you if you didn’t have #PrayforParis on your profile. At the same time, many people believed that if you were praying only for a specific group of persons, then you were being a pr*ck. But worst of all, its logic represented God as a mere COMELEC of sorts who would tally “votes” and, in the end, act on what most people #prayed for. By exposing people’s empathies, marketing by means of prayer had the effect of making gods of all of us on social media. For a time, we heard what everyone else was praying for. What ensued was a pointless argument of who should pray for what.

It’s true: Paris and the rest of the world need our prayers. And no one — not even the sharpest among us — can know exactly what everyone is going through in their part of the world. So in our limitedness, we pray and hope that someone more capable than us will hear and answer.

Perhaps we pray because we know that these problems are beyond us. And behind the hashtag wars, we see a system at work where terrorists are not just gun-toting fools; where heads of state are not really the wisest decision makers; where religions are not just made by monks and mediums; where wars are not just a matter of who draws the gun faster. I would like to think that we’re using hashtags for we now recognize that the problem is not just for a few individuals to solve. And we pray because we need all the help we can get.

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