uneasy alliances 295Prayer Works
The idea that one might be able to explain religious faith healings by reference
to the secular power of the placebo effect stands in striking tension to the final
piece of the argument that religion is good for one’s health. In fact, the last
claim stands in tension with all three of the claims I have reviewed so far. This
is because this last claim, a priori, rejects the relevance of all naturalistic ex-
planations for the health benefits of religion. This is what this last claim says:
prayer works.
Prayer works, not just because it provides a sense of social connection, or
reduces stress, or evokes the body’s own endogenous healing capacities
through the psychobiology of the placebo effect. No, prayer itself changes peo-
ple’s health in ways that are independent of all of those other factors—indeed,
in ways that seem to operate independently of all known psychological or psy-
chobiological human mechanisms in general.
How do we know this? We know this because, when seriously ill patients
are randomized into a “prayer group” and a “control group,” there is some
evidence that the sick people who are prayed by for by others (“intercessory
prayer”) improve more quickly or have fewer complications associated with
their recovery than those in the control group. This happens even when the
prayed-for people allegedly do not know whether or not they are in the “active
treatment” group, and even (in at least one study) when they do not know they
are being prayed for at all.
Like the other three claims I have briefly reviewed, there is a larger history
to this one. It goes back to the rise of a vision of statistics as a powerful new
tool in a position to resolve long-standing questions of a policy and social
nature.^25 Specifically, back in the 1870s, Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, rather
cheekily proposed to use statistics to address a theological question: did God
continue to answer prayers in the modern world? Noting that the Anglican
liturgy included formal prayers for the long life of the reigning monarch, Gal-
ton’s basic idea was to compare the longevity of members of the British royal
family to that of other people of privilege, to see whether the outpouring of
prayers to God on behalf of the former actually made a difference to their life
span. What he found was that the royals were “literally the shortest-lived of all
who have the advantage of affluence,” even when deaths by accident or violence
were excluded. Taking his investigations further revealed that, when the life
spans of eminent members of the clergy were compared to those of eminent
lawyers and physicians, the clergy—assumed by him to be the most prayerful
group—also turned out to be “the shortest lived of the three” (see Table 14.1).^26
For Galton and the circle of naturalistic thinkers with which he was as-
sociated, these results were effectively all a good joke. The clergy of the time
objected that one cannot test God in this way, or reduce prayer’s degree of