The Perversion of Prayer

For many, Easter arrives in recognisable forms: sombre choirs, folded orders of service, overcooked lamb, and a temporary return of people who have not entered a church since last Christmas but still know roughly when to stand. Elsewhere, the season has acquired a rather different liturgy.

In Washington, Easter has lately become a season in which prayer is asked to do unusually strenuous work: to bless force, dignify grievance, and to lend a theological shape to decisions already made elsewhere. What was once a language for mercy now appears increasingly available for endorsement.

At the Pentagon last month, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth addressed a Christian gathering with a prayer that asked God to “pour out your wrath” on Iran, to grant “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” and to ensure that “every round would find its mark.” It concluded, as these things now do, in the name of Jesus Christ. The phrasing had an almost administrative composure, as though the Book of Psalms had been briefly seconded into weapons authorisation. Prayer here was not hesitation before power, but an accompaniment to it: a final act of spiritual formatting before literal impact.

The old religious difficulty, whether violence can ever be reconciled with Christian language, was quietly bypassed. The prayer proceeded on the assumption that the moral paperwork had already been completed.

A few days later, at a White House Easter event, Paula White-Cain offered a different use of sacred language. Speaking to Donald Trump, she described his legal troubles, public humiliation, and assassination attempt as a form of Passion narrative. “You were betrayed and arrested,” she said. “No one has paid the price like you have paid the price.” Moments like this render commentary almost redundant. The comparison required no satire, it arrived fully furnished.

The difficulty is not merely theological. It is tonal. Christ, in the Christian telling, suffers without self-defence, declines earthly power, and speaks often about the poor. The analogy therefore introduces practical complications. Even inside the White House, the effect appears to have registered. The video was later withdrawn.

Meanwhile, at The Holy See, Pope Leo XIV delivered Easter remarks in a language still recognisably ecclesiastical: concern for “the deaths of thousands of people,” references to hatred, division, and the human debris left by war. It was not dramatic language. It did not need to be. The contrast was noticeable precisely because of its restraint. Where others had enlisted prayer to accompany force or personal mythology, the Pope appeared to be using it in the older sense, as a reminder that suffering belongs first to those beneath policy, not those narrating it. God, in this version, is not imagined in the Situation Room.

Back on the Hinterland, Easter passed in its more familiar civic form: notices about local events, community breakfasts, and the usual seasonal greetings in which “family,” “faith,” and “values” appear together with careful neutrality, like items in a shop window. MP, Ted O'Brien, offered the usual arrangement: family, faith, togetherness, rest, four agreeable nouns placed carefully enough that none need disturb the others. No missiles appeared. No one compared a politician to the crucified Christ. No wrath was requested on foreign capitals. One might be grateful for modest ambitions.

Yet even here the language performs small evasions. “Faith” in public political speech often means something decorative: a word retained for atmosphere, detached from difficult content, available for Easter and Christmas, but rarely for anything more demanding.

The modern advantage of public religion is that it functions across very different purposes. It can accompany a weapons briefing without interrupting the tone of command. It can also sit beside a seasonal message, where “faith” appears between “family” and “values” as a reassuring civic adjective, doing no obvious harm and asking very little of anyone. That was not always the function of prayer.

Traditionally, prayer was a private, faintly awkward act, an admission that one did not fully command events, a request for mercy, forgiveness, restraint, endurance, sometimes simply for help in remaining decent. It belonged, at least in theory, to uncertainty rather than certainty. At the local level, it now appears mostly as punctuation, a word retained because public language still feels obliged to leave a small space for it. At the Pentagon, by contrast, uncertainty seemed entirely removed from the draft. The request was not for wisdom, nor patience, nor justice, but for accuracy. Somewhere between those uses, the older meaning has become difficult to locate.

The New Testament offers a figure who advised against public display, distrusted power, and was notably cautious around empire. He spoke often about mercy, rather less about targets.

At the church hall, the collection plate is for roof repairs, and the noticeboard reminds drivers not to block the hall entrance.

Elsewhere, prayer now arrives attached to strategic vocabulary.

...at least the church hall still treats it as something not entirely under human control.

Postscript

Shortly after this was written, Donald Trump ended a social-media threat against Iranian infrastructure with the phrase “Praise be to Allah.”

Prayer, it seems, has once again been co-opted into service as a seal of inevitability, rather than a request for counsel or mercy.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.