Matching Tracksuits

Two ideas the evangelical Christian community holds in common are that one can be sure of the presence of God and that God answers prayers. Confirmation of God’s presence comes from what evangelicals call the “interior witness of the Holy Spirit.” God’s answers to prayers can be anything from an unexpectedly available parking place to silence, often phrased as “God isn’t ‘not answering’ your prayer; he just said, ‘No.’” In Tribulation Force, the second book in the Left Behind Series, LaHaye and Jenkins create a group prayer scene that demonstrates these two principles fairly succinctly, and the scenes also manage to highlight the logical inconsistencies in these two views.

Evangelicals often claim that they can somehow feel the presence of God. This most often happens during highly emotionally charged events: it’s one of the reasons music plays such a prominent part in evangelical worship, and it’s why the worship leaders conducting that portion of the church service encourage everyone to stand, to put their hands in the air, and to close their eyes. Tied to direct and indirect calls to move away from analytical logical thinking and a decreased level of self-awareness, It creates a physical and emotional unity tied to the music (itself a very emotive medium), and this will create warm positive emotions that believers later attribute to God’s presence. 

While four of the Tribulation Force characters meet together for a bible study session, they decide to pray together, on their knees. The first thing one character realizes is “he needed to surrender his will to God” which would involve “giving up the logical, the personal, the tightfisted, closely held stuff.” He later has a “fleeting thought of how ridiculous he must look assailed him, but he quickly pushed it aside.” Thus, logical thinking has disengaged and the character has taken a step back from his normal self-awareness. All he needs is a highly-charged emotional cue, which he gets shortly thereafter: 

Bruce had been praying aloud, but he suddenly stopped, and Rayford heard him weeping quietly. A lump formed in his own throat. He missed his family, but he was deeply grateful for Chloe, for his salvation, for these friends. 

This reaction in the context of the novel is understandable. These two characters were left behind while Jesus whisked their families off to heaven. They’re already emotionally fragile. It would take little to bring them to tears.

Of course, in the novel, it’s difficult to deny the existence of this god: he has apparently already made several million people disappear, and given their common fervent Christian ideas and the fact that the church (at least the evangelical church in America) has been preaching the coming rapture for decades, it’s difficult to deny from logic to deny the reality of the rapture and thus of the Christian god. But that’s the reality of the novel. The reality to which the authors hold makes the same claims about their god’s presence without the looming piece of evidence the rapture would represent. With or without the rapture, they would contest that the events of this prayer group constitute proof of their god’s existence. 

It’s at this point in the prayer that the character Rayford feels sure of his god’s presence:

Rayford lost track of the time, knowing only vaguely that minutes passed with no one saying anything. He had never felt so vividly the presence of God. So this was the feeling of dwelling on holy ground, what Moses must have felt when God told him to remove his shoes. Rayford wished he could sink lower into the carpet, could cut a hole in the floor and hide from the purity and infinite power of God.

In our non-rapture reality, this scenario would also count as evidence of some divine presence. Practitioners would have already given up “the logical, the personal, the tightfisted, closely held stuff” and accepted that “[w]hatever God wanted was what he wanted, even if it made no sense from a human standpoint.” Critical thinking has been disengaged and emotion rises. Everyone experiences the same emotion, and so that’s the “inner witness of the Holy Spirit.” Believers attribute it to their god because their pastors, church leaders, and friends have taught them to do so, and since critical thinking has already been bypassed and because they are looking for evidence of their god’s presence, this serves that role perfectly.

The evangelical view of answered prayer might be a tricky were it not for the fact that believers have a curious view of prayer: any coincidental event occurring within any temporal proximity to the prayer can count as an answer to the prayer. Events happening weeks, months, or even years after the prayer can count, and the petitioner might even have forgotten about the prayer until it is, in her view, answered. So anything counts as an answer to the prayer. But what happens when nothing happens that the believers can classify as an answer? It’s simple: their god did answer the prayer; it just said “No.” Thus answered prayer is a heads-I-win tails-you-lose situation: nothing counts against it, for to count something against it would be to doubt the god of Christianity. 

We see this tension in the prayer scene: Rayford, one of the characters who has asked the others to pray about a decision he must make, “wished God would just tell him audibly what to do.” He wants direct, audible help from his god. Of course, he knows that’s not what he’s going to get, but surely his god will answer his prayer somehow.

When the believers are done with their tear-filled prayer session, Buck, another character with an unresolved decision hanging over him, admits that as “wonderful as that prayer time was, I didn’t get any direct leading about what to do.” Rayford admits, “Me either.” A third character, Chloe (Rayford’s daughter and Buck’s love interest), comments:

“You must be the only two.” Bruce glanced at Chloe, and she nodded. “It’s pretty clear to us what you should do. And it’s clear to each of you what the other should do. But no one can make these decisions for you.”

Chloe has been arguing from the beginning how Buck and Rayford should resolve their dilemmas, and her prayer has somehow confirmed this. Her insistence that she was right all along, in turn, serves as an answer to Buck’s and Rayford’s prayer. As they’re leaving, Chloe comments that what they just experienced “was amazing.” We can see, then, that the whole prayer scene consists of little more than self-referential confirmation bias in an emotionally charged environment, yet all the characters attribute this to their god.

Again, in the book, there is substantial evidence for the existence of the evangelical god, which makes mitigates my argument a bit in the context of the novel. However, this scene echoes evangelical prayer sessions happening now.

One final observation about the source of this “inner witness of the Holy Spirit”: when Buck and Chloe are leaving, Buck comments, “I don’t know where I’d be without you people.” People and the emotional support they provide are at the heart of any religious group, an that alone makes evidence for this or that god only secondary. Through their emotional connections and highly emotional services, they themselves are the evidence for their god.