The slippery liberties of consumer capitalism.

What is the connection between prayer and politics for Muslims and Christians? Shadi Hamid and Matthew Kaemingk challenge each other with a series of tough questions, and the results are illuminating. Should a life of prayer make us politically bold and zealous? Or should prayer make us humbler and politically submissive? Should prayer connect us to our national authorities and identities—or should it remind us that we identify with a higher authority beyond the nation? While there are deep differences between their prayer practices, Matt and Shadi leave the conversation deeply enriched. You might as well.
Shadi Hamid:
Hey everyone. Welcome to Zealots at the Gate. This is the start of season two, so we’re really excited about that. We have a great episode for you today on a fascinating topic on the politics of prayer, and also, we may even talk about how my friend and co-host Matt Kaemingk has actually made me a better Muslim by making me think differently about prayer. All that to come. Please make sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app.
Feel free to leave us a review. We always like to see that. You can join the conversation and ask Matt and I questions by using the hashtag #zealotspod on Twitter, or feel free to email us at zealotsatcomment.org. As many of you will know, I’m Shadi Hamid. I’m a Muslim. Matt Kaemingk, my friend and co-host, is a Christian. He’s a theologian. I’m a political scientist and I’m excited too because we’re going to talk about a more personal set of topics today, how prayer affects each of us in our respective traditions and also the implications of prayer for politics and for democracy. Matt, what say you. Get us going.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, Shadi, I’ve got a number of questions and things that I’m wrestling with when it comes to the connection between prayer and politics. The first is, is prayer political? Does it have any political or public consequence or is it just some private spiritual practice that is just about our internal feelings and values and personal relationship with God? Is it public? Is it political? The second is, if you bring prayer into the political, what are some of the abusive or bad ways that relationship can go? Another, and this is the one that I really want to jump into right off the bat, is how does the regular practice of prayer as a Muslim or as a Christian, how does it shape us as citizens? How does it change the way we think about the state or our leaders or how we interact with other citizens around us?
I think while there are many important differences between the Muslim practice of prayer and many Muslim practices of prayer and Christian practices of prayer, there are also some important similarities. I think that the first one is that of submission to something to someone greater than yourself. For Muslims, this is a bodily act of submission, but it is this sense that we are submitting and humbling ourselves before a power that is greater than us. When I think about the many things that are challenging American democracy today, and there are many, one is a self-centeredness to American citizens that can make us impervious to good political dialogue and conversation.
This belief that I possess the truth, that I am sufficient in and of myself, and I am not interested in what you have to say because I am the center of the universe. It seems to me that the practice of prayer is a regular recognition that that isn’t true. To pray is to admit that you are not sufficient in and of yourself. To pray is to admit that you don’t know everything about what you ought to do in life, and so that’s the first thing I’m thinking about when I think about democracy and the health of our democracy and the practice of prayer, but I’m just curious from your side of the submissiveness of Muslim prayer, how that hits you?
Shadi Hamid:
You’re calling me submissive, Matthew. Is that where we’re going here?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, what does the word Islam mean?
Shadi Hamid:
Islam does quite literally means submission, so that is accurate. First of all, I don’t really know how this conversation’s going to go because we haven’t talked a whole lot about these issues in the past. That’s one of the reasons I’m excited. Also, it is more personal, as I mentioned earlier, and I’m sure you do remember, but a couple of weeks back, you asked me this question in passing, and I think you stumped me, and I’ve been thinking about it a little bit more. You said something like, “Well, Shadi, you’re very public. You write a lot and you appear in the media, and that is one aspect of you and that has certain implications, but you’re also a believer who prays or at least tries to pray to meet the-”
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, to say it a little stronger, Shadi, I think what I was saying was, Shadi, you often have a little bit of bravado in your public presence. You have a little strength in the takes that you have in your articles and on Twitter. You come out strong, and yet, you also practice this daily practice of prayer in which you humble yourself and you put your head down. That seems like a very humbling posture to take. I was wondering how do you think about the connection between bowing and putting your face down to the ground and also having this powerful public voice where you do speak with some confidence sometimes and you mix it up on Twitter and in debates and things like that. How do you think about that connection between the Muslim practice of prayer, of humility? It’s not a very prideful position to take. Yeah, that’s what I’m wrestling with.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. It’s a great question, and I have to confess that I was stumped because I hadn’t really thought of it in exactly those terms. Part of the issue, to be quite honest, is prayer has become too rote of a ritual. I’m not as conscious as I think I should be when I am in the practice of prayer. It’s something that I’ve made a conscious effort to do more of and to try my best to meet the five prayers a day and so forth, but because it’s seen at least from my perspective as an obligation and a duty, I guess I lost sense of the spiritual power of it, and with your prodding and also just thinking more about these issues in light of my own religious evolution and the fact that when all of you hear this, it’ll be Ramadan, the holy month in Islam of fasting, I do want to put this into practice.
Now, how these two things, how the ego-centered approach of public persona… Because even if we’re not being provocative or contrarian or expressing bravado with strong takes, anyone who is in the public sphere has to engage in some performance where their ego plays a prominent role. There’s just no way to avoid it. I think it’s one of the occupational hazards of our occupation. I will want to turn this to you, Matt, because I think that you’re less interested in the public persona aspect, and I think that’s probably good for your own faith and religion and keeping yourself centered and humble. There might very well be a trade-off here because if you write a lot of articles and you have strong opinions, that is ultimately centering yourself in a discourse that you think that your personal thoughts and struggles…
So let’s say especially if you’re writing in your own personal blog or Substack, that does tend to lead to more personal reflections and sharing with many random people who you don’t know your inner self and your unformed thoughts. You got to have a certain sense of self to feel that your own random thoughts and reflections could be relevant to tens of thousands of people who don’t really know you and you don’t really know them. I think it’s a real challenge. Then going now to the practice of prayer and how we should think about it from an Islamic perspective, listeners will probably have seen, visually, pictures of Muslims praying and the act of prostration of putting your forehead on the ground, and that is part of each of the five daily prayers. Anyone who prays is doing that, and there is something really powerful.
I guess because I haven’t thought as much about Christian prayer or Jewish prayer, and I haven’t been part of those prayers by definition… I have been to church when I was in Boy Scouts as a kid, and we used to go on weekend camping trips. Everyone else was Christian, and so Sunday morning, they would all go to church. I just went in with them and sat. I didn’t participate, and my parents knew about that. I think we were open-minded enough to not feel like that would be a conflict. I just had to know that I was observing and I’m not going to participate, that sort of thing. When I think about prayer, I think about Muslims praying. It didn’t even really occur to me that the act of prostration on the ground is actually really distinctive and really powerful because it does mean that you are saying, and you are acknowledging that you are nothing compared to God.
You’re acknowledging your own smallness and even irrelevance in broader cosmological time and space, because if God is sovereign, if God is the ultimate, if God is the all knowing and all powerful, then we are quite literally nothing compared to that. It has remarkable implications when you start to think of it in that more self-conscious way, and clearly, a lot of people don’t because if you really took the act of prostration seriously, you wouldn’t be a dictator. That’s obviously a big issue in the Middle East and in other Muslim majority context, that how can someone acknowledge their humility in front of God in this way and then act as if they themselves are God and that they can control the life and death for their own citizens by killing them, torturing them, arresting them. There is really a profound disjuncture there, so what’s the-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. That brings up the term hypocrisy, right?
Shadi Hamid:
Yes.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Of having two faces of behaving in one way before God and in another way before human beings, and Christianity and Islam have pretty strong words about that disjuncture between religious performance and political practice.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, exactly. Maybe I’ll just add one more personal thing and then we’ll be curious to hear how you respond. If I start to take prayer more seriously and consciously in this particular way of allowing the physical manifestation of the movements of prayer to translate into a deeper spiritual acknowledgement of my lower place in the broader universe, I wonder if that would change how I interact in the public sphere. Would there be an expectation of some sort of shift? Obviously, the very fact that I’m saying this means that maybe it’s not entirely true, but I think both of us try to take on an intellectual humility in the work that we do, and we try to the best of our ability to acknowledge that we don’t have definitive answers.
That sometimes we make mistakes and get things wrong. Sometimes we may be express too much bravado in the public sphere. That’s something I have to struggle with because I get in various online controversies and sometimes I have to ask myself, is this something that I should be doing? Is this worth it? Is there maybe a way to tone that down a little bit? I do wonder about that and maybe if I start to think more about bowing my head and putting my forehead on the floor, maybe that could actually have an effect in this direction. I don’t know.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Well, I’d love to have another conversation. We’ve talked about this, as Ramadan approaches, about fasting and politics as well. Stay tuned for that conversation. I want to talk about the other side of this. We’ve talked a little bit about how prayer can humble us and remind us that we’re not God and that we’re not self-sufficient, but speaking from the Christian side, there’s also a way in which prayer can lift us up and empower us and embolden us. This recognition that I, Matthew, have the ability to come before the God of the universe. I have access to the sovereign, and there is nothing the state can do to stop me from addressing the sovereign.
There is a part of my soul that the state cannot own, that the state cannot control. Prayer is this place that is this alternative form of communication that is not controlled by Twitter, by the media, by the state, by any other cultural or political force, and there’s something very disruptive and empowering about prayer in that it says that anyone, no matter what the world thinks of you, can access God in a direct way that is… So prayer not only has the ability to humble us, but it also has the ability to make us into, I would say, dangerous citizens. Citizens that might resist what the state is telling us or what leaders are telling us, that-
Shadi Hamid:
Zealots, if you will.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. It can make zealots.
Shadi Hamid:
The good kind of zealot.
Matthew Kaemingk:
That’s a great tie-in, Shadi.
Shadi Hamid:
Wow. Yeah. Wait, because wasn’t Jesus a zealot? Reza Aslan wrote the book Zealot. Anyway, but that’s a little bit of a tangent.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, Jesus certainly got himself into a bit of trouble. He had a zealot within his disciples, but he also had a tax collector who worked for the state, so the interesting thing there is he had a radical and a conservative there within his community of followers and he was able to hold them together, but yes, he was recognized as a danger to the Jewish community and the Roman community.
Shadi Hamid:
Well, maybe before we jump into all that, can you maybe give me and us a little bit more background in how you yourself as a Christian and an evangelical pray? Obviously, a lot of listeners will be familiar, but some may not be. I think that Muslims in particular don’t really have a great sense of how Christians pray. Obviously, people will be aware of going to church on a weekly basis, but maybe beyond the weekly church attendance, what does prayer look like for you?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Absolutely. Yeah, so there’s a variety of different kinds of prayer. There is the communal prayer within the church, and in the church, we will have prayers of confession where we confess our sins to God. We will have prayers of the people where we pray for others within our community, but then we also pray for our city and our nation, and so we might pray for what’s happening in the Ukraine. We might pray for various social or political issues and ask God to help or to work there. Then we have a prayer of blessing and sending that sends us out into the world. There’s a variety of different prayers communally.
Individually, it’s very common for Christians to have prayers around the dinner table. My wife and children and I, we will hold hands around the dinner table and we will pray together. Sometimes we will sing instead of pray, and then individual prayers that can happen often for Christians in the morning. Sometimes Christians like to bookend the day with a morning prayer and an evening prayer, but these aren’t quite as regimented and scheduled as a Muslim practice of prayer might be.
Shadi Hamid:
So then how does a Christian decide how often to pray and how to pray? Or is there just a lot of just freedom of maneuver based on your own personal preferences?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, it depends on the Christian community. Lutherans, Catholics, Pentecostals, reformed, they all have their own unique things, but within the Protestant side of the faith, it is much more a sense of personal need and practice. It tends to be rather individualistic, which is wonderful and hard. It’s wonderful in that it’s hopefully pretty authentic that you come to God when you have a sense of need and a sense of longing for connection with God, but it does put a lot of pressure on the individual to remember and cultivate those practices because no one is going to do it for you and no one’s going to hold you accountable and you don’t have that regimen that you might have.
Shadi Hamid:
I think it also gets at how Islam and Christianity have different incentive structures, which is something that in our own personal conversations with each other, we’ve talked about a lot because the contrast is quite real. So in Islam, prayer as I mentioned earlier, isn’t just something you do when you feel like you want to talk to God or receive from God, but you do it regardless in the sense that it is an obligation. Let’s say it’s a requirement of Islam. It’s one of the so-called five pillars of Islam. Let’s say you pray three times a day instead of five, those other two will mean that you have additional sins.
There is a punitive aspect to the incentive structure, and I’m not saying that pejoratively. I think that’s actually quite useful because it does encourage one to pray because after all, if you’re told… Especially when you’re growing up, and I know some people will think, well, this is what religions are. It’s about constraints, and then parents are the ones who communicate those constraints and consequences and a moral universe of some incentives and some potential consequences is something I believe we all need, but if the idea is that, oh, if you don’t pray five times a day, you’re not as good of a Muslim, and that means that that’s sinful behavior and that you’ll accumulate more sins, it is effective in encouraging you to try your best to meet the five prayers a day.
But I do think that is quite a bit different than the Christian approach because… Maybe we’ll have a whole different conversation one of these days about just how different sin operates, like sin as a concept, but also how sins are accumulated in your record. There is an idea in Islam of good deeds and bad deeds, and it’s not a numerical thing, but there is this sense that you want to have more good deeds and less bad deeds, and they’re in tension with each other, but for a Christian, and this is something that I just have trouble because I’m very much a believer in incentive structures, not just in religion but also in institutions and in politics, but what if a Christian who’s just not feeling… He or she isn’t in the spiritual zone, then might not pray for weeks or months or… I’m just curious. Do you have any reactions to how I laid that all out?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of things. One is first of all, prayer, for the Christian, is meant to be motivated as a response that God has come to us and God has given us this gift. We respond to that gift by reaching out to him in love and joy. We don’t come to him out of a sense of obligation, but out of a sense of gratitude. We’re not coming to him because if we don’t, we’ll be punished, but it’s out of this joy and gratitude of what we’ve been given. Ultimately, prayer is responsiveness that God comes to us first and we respond. Moreover, this sense of having a ledger of good things and bad things that you do, for Christians, there’s this belief that God has cleaned all of that for you.
You have been saved from those bad things that you do. Out of response of joy at that good news, you pray. That said, from time to time, you are right. We don’t come to God in prayer and we slowly drift away. That is where forcing oneself to pray and to practice prayer and to habituate prayer, even when you don’t feel like it, is a way in which you can reform your desires, in a way in which God can draw you back to him. It can really be a gift. Some Christians look longingly, I think, at the Muslim practice of prayer because they know they’re spiritually lazy and that a regular practice of prayer would be good for them.
They know they need this training, but I want to get back to the politics of prayer here in this sense that not only does prayer humble us and remind us that we’re not God, but it makes us politically strong. I’ve become more and more interested in this. One theologian, his name’s Karl Barth, I think he said that, “To clasp your hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” It’s this belief that-
Shadi Hamid:
Amen.
Matthew Kaemingk:
… to pray is to engage yourself in the public mission of God. It is to join and to align yourself in what God is doing in the world. There is this clear sense throughout the Christian tradition, in any denomination, that prayer is powerful, that prayer has public consequences and that we can cry out to God and God can respond. From the Israelites in Egypt, enslaved, they cry out to God and God responds with a mighty hand. Prayer played a massive role in the Black church, in the civil rights movement, this belief that we can pray and God can respond, and so not only does prayer humble us, but it can embolden our political activities as well, and it can drive out our fear, and particularly when you’re praying in a community and you know that you’re not by yourself, that there are others who are praying with you, that has-
Shadi Hamid:
Well, this is great, because-
Matthew Kaemingk:
I’m curious of your reaction to that.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, Islam is pretty strong on this score, so there’s a lot we can talk about. I think I made some reference in a previous episode to a discussion I had with a Christian author about is Islam being a badass religion? I think it’s badass when it comes to communal prayer. Before I dive into that though, because I know my mom will be slightly bothered by how I described prayer a couple of minutes ago, I just want to clarify to all you dear listeners, the fear of punishment is a minimal level, but that is not the ultimate end. You’re supposed to graduate to a higher level of spirituality where there is a relationship of being…
You can even see yourself in a Sufi sense of God as the beloved, and you are having a relationship of love with the divine, and that is an ultimate state that is challenging to get to, but at the very least, you want to feel closer to God, and prayer is supposed to have other effects on how you orient yourself vis-a-vis God, and it increases faith and commitment and all of these other things. Fear of punishment is one part of it, but then there’s all these other spiritual and also worldly benefits that are part of the practice of prayer. Now, the communal prayer is interesting because it has-
Matthew Kaemingk:
You said it’s badass communal prayer. How is it-
Shadi Hamid:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, it gets to what you said earlier, like can the state stop you from praying? The great thing about prayer is that you can do it individually most of the time in an Islamic context in your own home, but you can also do it on the street. Some of you may have seen Muslims in the US just randomly praying at a rest stop or even in a hallway or outside of a restaurant, because there’s specific times that you have to do each of the prayers, so if you’re not at home or there’s not a mosque close to you, you just got to pray wherever you are. Let’s say that you’re on the beach and there’s no… Or we are in a space where doing the physical movements of standing and going down and all of that wouldn’t be appropriate or would be a little bit difficult to do, there’s a version of prayer that you can do while you’re sitting down if that’s the only option that’s available to you, because let’s say you’re at the back of some lecture hall.
It would be weird if you just did the prayer while the speaker is… Anyway, whatever, but I love this idea of the individual choice that drives prayer because that is something an authoritarian state can never take away from the believer. At this fundamental level, the Islam, but also the three Abrahamic faiths more generally are fundamentally individualistic without falling into the ideology of individualism that is part of our modern liberal secular society. The individual matters a lot, and in some ways, the individual is the primary unit of interaction because ultimately, you’re accountable in the eyes of God. I don’t know. Christianity might be slightly different in this way, but you can’t bear the sins of another. Sins and good deeds don’t move from one individual to another. The idea of collective responsibility that sins can be distributed, all of that is-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, one way to say it is that praying Muslims, Jews, and Christians, if they take prayer seriously, they won’t be very effective communists because they will not be able to fully be absorbed into the communist state and imagination because they always have this practice of prayer that is this distinct relationship between them and God. I like the way you said that. It’s essentially that a healthy approach to prayer will uplift the individual without turning them into individualists, if you will.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Now, in the communal prayer, which is, quote unquote, obligatory once a week for… So there’s a Friday prayer as many listeners will be aware of, and it’s at a specific time every Friday, so you’re supposed to go to the mosque and that’s when you join in community, but that said, it’s recommended to go to the mosque whenever you can to be amongst other Muslims, and that’s always seen as preferable if you have the option.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Why? Why is it preferable to be with other Muslims and pray?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, it is a good question. Well, because the communal aspect is really important to Islam. That if it’s a way of life, and there’s this idea of building a community and perhaps even a broader society around shared values, that being with your Muslim brothers and sisters is a very powerful thing. Even if you think about the visual aspects of prayer in Islam, there’ll be a prayer leader who is at the front of the prayer area in the mosque, but then everyone else is in an egalitarian setting. However rich or poor or whatever partisan or ideological affiliation someone might have otherwise, during the act of prayer, there are no distinctions.
It’s actually a very beautiful physical manifestation of equality and egalitarianism among the believers. The prayer leader will say, “Stand shoulder to shoulder,” as you get ready and you assemble yourselves in the lines to pray. Toe to toe, shoulder to shoulder, and the idea there is to remind yourself that you are an individual believer, but you are with other individual believers who make up the ummah, the community of Islam. I think just being in that mode is really important.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Here’s my question for you. As someone who spends a lot of time in Washington DC with non-Muslims and in non-Muslim spaces talking about non-Muslim things, what is that experience like for you to move into the Friday prayers with your Muslim brothers and sisters? To move between those two very different spaces?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, yeah, I’m getting more into it. No, to be more serious about it, I’m just thinking about the last time I did the communal prayer and it was actually not a Friday prayer so it was an optional thing. I happened to be with other Muslims in a prayer space, and the fact that it was optional in some ways made it more powerful that it was more of a conscious decision to be in this particular space at this particular time, but it is really… I wish there was a better way for me to describe it. Well, okay-
Matthew Kaemingk:
I can remember one time being in a church and I wonder how you resonate with this. Being in a church, and we were all asked to stand up and say the Apostles’ Creed, which is this basic belief system of the Christian faith. Centuries old. And the pastor said to us essentially, “Some of you are struggling with doubts, and that’s okay, and for the next minute, we’re going to say this creed together. If you can’t say it, that’s okay. We will say it for you.” There’s this sense of the community is going to carry you into the faith even though you might be weak and faltering. We stand shoulder to shoulder helping one another in the faith. I think that’s important as we think about democracy and populism actually, because so much of populism in political life emerges out of this sense of being isolated and lonely, that I have no power, no one listens to me, no one speaks for me.
I’m isolated, and so I need a populist politician who will speak for me. Individualism and isolation tends to lead to radical political figures and movements because of this sense of being disempowered, and yet, if I’m a part of this communal prayer service and I know that I’m connected to these other people and that I’m a part of them and they’re a part of me, I’m less interested in the rhetoric of populism that no one hears you, no one sees you except for me. I’m the only one who can save you. I’m the only one who can help you. That doesn’t resonate for me because I’m participating in this community.
Shadi Hamid:
To maybe make even a broader point about it, that we’re not meant to be alone a lot of the time or most of the time, and I think our religions have a wisdom and we believe that wisdom comes from God, because if God is all knowing and created these practices for us, then presumably, he’s aware of certain benefits that we’re not aware of, but if we look at the epidemic of despair, depression, loneliness that has been in the news a lot in the US in recent months and years, some of that comes from people who don’t have close friends. They are atomized individuals. I think we all know intuitively that when you’re by yourself for long periods of time, it can be quite nice, but there is also a risk of getting stuck in an unproductive rumination and overthinking and so forth.
Not to get morbid here, but I am actually writing a review essay about a book on suicide as it turns out. I’ve been thinking about this a little bit, but one of the reasons that densely populated countries often have lower suicide rates… I don’t want to oversimplify the causal chain, but one factor is that in certain societies where you’re pretty much always around people, it’s logistically difficult to commit suicide. There are less opportunities and motive. You have to want to commit suicide, and there’s a motive, but opportunity and then means are other aspects, and without the opportunity and without the means, it becomes more difficult, but being around people for a certain proportion of your time is important. One thing I wanted to add before we lose the chain on the badass part of it…
So Friday prayers played a really interesting role during the Arab Spring. Those were actually days of protest that… Not every Friday, but Fridays were the regular day of protest, and they would have different themes for each week. There would be the Friday of justice, the Friday of anger, the Friday of freedom. Whatever. Different themes. Usually, there would be a Friday prayer that was part of it, and people would draw strength from being in the act of communal prayer. As you said, you could actually see in real time how people felt emboldened and empowered to challenge authoritarian regimes. This is why Middle Eastern regimes have been very intent on controlling communal prayer. This is a sight of contestation, so much so that in certain cases, even gathering, having more than five people gathering in a mosque outside the normal time of prayer, would be subject to police action, that the police would actually restrict and keep an eye on who was going to mosque a lot, because they tied that to being Islamist.
Particularly in Tunisia, which was an example of forced secularization, there was a danger of going to the early morning prayer at the mosque because that showed such a high level of dedication. You have to wake up as early as 5:30 AM That means you are into your religion and you are committed. The fear on the part of the regime is that these people had a latent power that could be political and could challenge their authority. It’s just fascinating to see how the mosque becomes this place of mobilization and also a target of counter mobilization by the security forces in these countries. How does prayer embolden us? I think that some of it might be asking God to give you strength, and a believer will naturally think that God is actually doing that. It’s not just a metaphor, but even if God doesn’t necessarily respond directly to prayer in that causal way, there is also the placebo effect of prayer.
You thinking that prayer gives you strength will give you strength. That’s why in any number of traditions, before, let’s say, going to battle, most cultures have had prayers and rituals they do right before they enter battle. Again, is God really going to intervene on their behalf? Well, presumably not all the time, because if there’s two sides and they’re both doing prayer rituals when they go to war, God can’t respond to both of them simultaneously. There is that complication, but it gives you a feeling of strength irrespective of what role God is playing in that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, that is such a powerful example from the Arab Spring of the state wanting to control public prayer because the state recognizes its political power and the way in which it can disrupt the social order. It makes me think of two contradicting critiques of religion and religious practice. The one is of course from Karl Marx, which argues that religion is the opiate of the masses. Religion domesticates us and makes us servants. It numbs us and quiets us down. Yeah, it domesticates us, and the other is that religion turns us into irrational zealots who are dangerous and bold. Can it be both of those things? Does it make us humble and domestic, or does it make us irrational, wild and powerful? That’s really what we talked about.
Shadi Hamid:
I think the answer is both.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, it’s both. It’s both of those things.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. In the Islamic tradition, you actually have these two dueling approaches. You can look at Islamic history and see Islam as a vehicle of rebellion and challenging authoritarian rule and asserting one’s freedom from the yoke of whatever authority, but then you can also look at another part of the Islamic tradition, which is deferential to the ruler because of the fear of chaos and what in Arabic is called fitna, which is a very powerful idea in the Islamic tradition. Best translation is probably civil strife. Sometimes the word fitna’s used to describe times in the early Islamic period when… Very dark times when after the prophet died, companions of the prophet, so these were among the best of Muslims, actually turned against each other in a civil conflict.
Rebellion against injustice, I think is a part of Islam, but also a part of, really, most faith traditions, certainly the Abrahamic traditions, but then there is this competing fear of what happens when there’s too much rebellion and too much disorder, and there has to be a limit. The question is always what is the limit? Because at some basic level, you need some level of order and peace for people to be able to focus on God. If people are in a perpetual state of strife, it brings them away from God.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So Shadi, I want to take this in a slightly different direction. Just this last week, you published an article in The Atlantic called You’re Better Off Not Knowing in which you talk about mental health and political awareness. I have a question for you on that article, but before I jump into it, could you just give our dear listeners a brief summary of what you were getting after in that particular article?
Shadi Hamid:
Wow. I didn’t see that coming, Matt.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, man.
Shadi Hamid:
You threw a little curveball in there. Do you want to just lay out for me so I just have a better sense of where you’re going? Is there a link? I think there are interesting links and maybe that’s what you have in mind, but tell me more about what you’re thinking.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So you’re jumping off in the article about how political awareness and… What you write essentially is like taking a drug. Learning about politics and following the news can become addictive, yet Americans are encouraged to do more of it lest we become uninformed. Unless you have a job that requires you to know these things, it’s unclear what the news, good or bad, actually does for you. Then you go on to talk about how it’s making us unhealthy, it’s making us depressed and anxious, and there seems to be something deeply wrong with our diet following the news. Yeah, could you just share a little bit more about that?
Shadi Hamid:
So I’m glad you brought that up because it actually does tie very well to the question of is Islam a force of correcting injustice or can it be fatalistic? Obviously, I didn’t mention Islam in that piece, and we’ll include a link in the show notes for those of you who want to read on, but I am obviously informed by my view of God and my belief in God and the fact that I am Muslim. That does find a way into my writing, even if it’s not explicit, I suppose. I do say that one of the benefits of not obsessing over the news and to actually have a news diet where you purposely restrict your news intake allows you to focus on the core four, which draws in some other folks, but I pretty much sum it up as family, faith, friends and community.
That the more we’re focusing on things that we can’t control, something as pointless as whether or not Trump gets indicted, pointless in the sense that we have no control over it and we have no way to predict its outcomes, whether it be good for him or bad for him, all the time you’re spending following the ins and outs like a horse race of the indictment process is less time you’re focusing on the core four, but one criticism that’s been lobbed against me is I am encouraging a kind of fatalism, and I think that…
So just to be clear on this, I actually don’t think, in a democracy, rebellion is justified. When I talked earlier about what the Islamic tradition says about battle and rebellion in that sense of going against an unjust ruler, that is only applicable in authoritarian settings. We live in a democracy, so the question of rebellion is out of bounds and off limits. In some sense, we can be activist and protest and try to push for the causes that we believe in, but that’s a lower level of engagement than the ultimate case of putting your life on the line in a literal sense for a cause that you believe in.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Here’s where this article intersects for me with prayer, and it is this sense of… This zero-sum game is either you ignore the news and all the different issues and you invest yourself in faith and family and friends and just become politically apathetic, or you dive in to politics and political news and commentary and you live an anxious, depressed, suicidal life. There’s a sense of you have this dichotomy of either you are apathetic and happy or you’re engaged and you’re miserable. Here’s where prayer comes in, is it seems to me that as a Christian, an important part of the Christian tradition of prayer is being able to lament or cry out to God, having an outlet where if I read a terrible news story about some awful injustice or some terrible abuse, I can take all of that energy and sadness and heartbreak and I can orient it towards God and I can call out to God and I can talk with God about it.
I don’t have to hold all of that inside of myself and I don’t have to resolve it because I’m not God. Prayer offers me an outlet. It offers me a relationship whereby I can hand over these awful things that I read about in the news. I think what some people who are reading your article maybe took from it was that there’s only two options. One option is engage in political news and debate and be miserable or withdraw from it or just take little bits of it, but I think that prayer actually offers us a third way to be engaged in political life, but to do so in a way that we don’t have to solve it all. We don’t have to hold or carry it all, but that there’s actually someone with us who is actually even more informed about the brokenness of the world than we are.
Sometimes I think within the American public life, you have voices who think like, “No one knows the suffering like I know the suffering. No one knows the injustice like I know the injustice,” but in prayer, you’re reminded, actually, no. God knows more about what’s broken with America than even you do, and God’s responsible for this, not you, in this real way. That was my reflection. It was a great article. I thought it was phenomenal and it really did connect with that study that recently came out about particularly young progressive girls, teenage girls, and their mental health around politics and social media. Anyways, that’s just what I was thinking about in terms of the practice of prayer.
Shadi Hamid:
That’s great. Just to emphasize just how striking the crisis is with teenage girls, the CDC report that came out about this recently, this is remarkable to me, and when I first read the numbers, I actually thought I was misreading it, that one out of three teenage girls has contemplated suicide. That’s just remarkable. Okay. This is a healthcare crisis. This is a public policy crisis. It’s not just about individuals being depressed. This does have effects on the broader society in profound ways. Yeah, I want to be clear, it’s not an either or. I myself, by writing that very article, am engaging in a political act. I am trying to change how people look at politics. That’s not fatalistic at all. That suggests that I have the belief, perhaps a naive one, that I can change the way whatever tens of thousands of Americans think about the news and how they consume it.
I just want to bring up climate, because you said God is ultimately responsible when it comes to the brokenness of America, that certain things are out of our hands, and we have to come to terms with that. This is also reflected in how I feel about climate change, or even whether artificial intelligence will destroy the universe, which is actually a real live debate on people who specialize on this, and Scott Alexander who’s a big technology writer did a post recently where he estimated the chance of the world being destroyed as a result of AI advancement… Was only 33%. He was saying this as an optimist. He’s like, “Other people have said over 50%. Actually, you know what? Everyone chill. It’s only 33%.”
I’m like, “These people are crazy.” Anyway, they’re looking at it from a weird, probabilistic framework, but this stuff doesn’t resonate with me because if you believe in God, this idea of thinking that humans… There is something egocentric about thinking that we’re the ones who are going to destroy the world when we decide to destroy it through our own individual acts. That when you put your trust in God, in theory, ideally, it allows you to let go. God is going to have a pretty big say in whether the world ends. You don’t have to ask Ezra Klein… Well, okay, because the one thing I mentioned in the piece, which is bonkers to me, and Ezra Klein wrote a column last year in The New York Times, where he shared with readers the number one question he gets from all of his public engagements across America, so a left-leaning audience, obviously, and this is another thing that I couldn’t really believe when I first read it. The question he gets the most is, “Ezra, should we have kids if climate is ending the world?”
So this is a way where if you consume a lot of catastrophic news and you follow it very closely, it is really literally changing human beings, and in my view, how God intended us to be. I don’t think God intended his creation to stop creating because of a speculative claim about whether the world is going to end at a particular time, so this stuff is… Consuming the news in a certain way, and having this negativity bias can actually change our family structure, how we relate to our kids, whether we even want to have kids. I know it’s a little bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to bring that up.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, and I think what we’re also seeing with teenagers in these studies is that it’s changing their brain chemistry like the wirings of their brains, and so they’re getting sick. I think we’re discovering the health benefits of prayer in very important ways. I had one other thing that I wanted to name, which is, of course, the rise of so-called Christian nationalism and patriotism has been a constant struggle for Christians in America, this marriage of American national identity and Christian faith in some disruptive ways. That shows up in Christian prayer in some ways in which we pray for the nation that we want, which is we want Christian dominance in political life, and we over-identify the mission of God with the mission of America. The one thing I was thinking about… I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this, is actually the Muslim practice of praying towards Mecca in the sense that you do not pray towards Washington DC.
You don’t pray towards the national monument or towards the Capitol. You have a different center of your faith. I think that’s something I would love for my fellow evangelical Christians to recognize a little more, is this other orientation of where we pray to, that the person we pray to is not so identified with America or Washington DC or the President. There’s this disruptive practice of the Muslim praying towards Mecca, and it reminds me of the debate that happened over whether or not John F. Kennedy could be president because he was Catholic, and the concern amongst Protestants was that he was loyal to Rome. He was loyal to the Pope. He wasn’t truly loyal to America. Of course, that’s been the charge towards Muslims as well, is that they’re not truly loyal to America. They’re loyal to Mecca and they’re loyal to the ummah and whatnot. It’s a difficulty within evangelical and Protestant prayer practices to continue to remind ourselves that we not conflate God in America in our prayers, that those are distinct things. I don’t know how all that strikes you-
Shadi Hamid:
I love that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
… but that’s something I’ve been thinking about.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay, so this is one of the reasons I love this podcast and our engagement on these issues. I’m not just saying this because listeners are listening because I’ve said it to you in private. There is something incredible about how having a very in-depth conversation over months and years with someone of another faith is you can see things about Islam that I as a Muslim can’t see. I have never thought about this idea because I’ve always taken it for granted. It never occurred to me that one could pray in a different direction, and it just becomes something that’s part of a routine, and you don’t dwell on it, but the idea that Muslims orient themselves to a geographical area that is far away from the US, I think that’s a genuinely new idea that I haven’t heard before. What the intellectual and political implications of that are…
I’m sure it’s occurred to someone else. I don’t think I’ve seen it written down, so it’s a cool idea, but yeah. So I just wanted to say I feel really grateful, because even on this issue of prayer very specifically, you have quite literally helped me to change my practice of prayer because of the conversations that we’ve had. Not to get sentimental here, but if anyone has doubts about… As we’ve said before, we don’t believe in the gentle, fluffy, interfaith stuff where we all have common ground and we just say the normal things and preach to the converted, but to have two people who have their contrasts, that’s what allows you to realize things that you otherwise wouldn’t have realized. I just wanted to say that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
That’s awesome, man.
Shadi Hamid:
Maybe just as we do wrap up, and maybe that was the ideal place to end, but I do want-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, there we go. I think that’s great. I’m sorry. What were you going to say? Then we’ll wrap it up, man.
Shadi Hamid:
Just a little coda, because I think that… What do you think about the whole thoughts and prayers criticism? You hear this a lot from progressives when they’re criticizing conservative Christians, that when a profound injustice happens, especially when it comes to something like gun violence, for example, it goes back to this idea of how religion can sometimes… If prayer is a third way, and it can almost replace… Not replace, but it can become a focus instead of activism, instead of changing the injustice through protest or through legislation and policy change on something like gun control, for example. People can fall back in this… What can we do? We’ll pray to God. Prayers. I think that can become a very stark flashpoint, so for people who don’t appreciate the power of prayer, they see it as, oh, these people are cynical and they’re using prayer to absolve themselves of responsibility. Since I’m not part of the community that’s targeted with this kind of discourse, I’m curious how you would respond to that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I guess I would say on the positive side, so yes, the progressive critique of conservative Christians is that after a mass shooting, conservative Christians say, “We offer you thoughts and prayers,” and then they don’t do anything politically speaking. The critique is valid in that progressives know that prayer, honest, authentic prayer needs to be connected to action, and we see that throughout Christian scripture that God expects a deep and integrated connection between the way that you behave in the temple and the way that you behave out in the marketplace and in the fields, that if there’s a disjunction, then actually, the marketplace starts to fall apart and the temple starts to fall apart. In fact, that God will not respond to your prayers if they are not in any way connected to your action. In that sense, I think the progressive critique is very much correct.
That said, the progressive critique can often come as a sneering and cynical understanding of what prayer is, essentially setting up a straw man rather than understanding that for centuries, for millennia, prayer has been publicly and politically impactful, as we have talked about multiple times throughout our conversation, that it has had an impact in the Arab Spring for Muslims, and it has had an impact in the civil rights movement for the Black church and for many people throughout their lives. To say that gun violence in America is a purely political issue, I think that’s absolutely wrong. Gun violence is political, but it is also a spiritual struggle, and Americans need to be praying through these kinds of traumas as well. I do not buy into the progressive claim that the only thing to be done after an act of gun violence is political action. I think that communities need to lament, they need to cry, and that is a proper part of political action, and so yeah, spiritual reflection and political action need to be hand in hand. That would be my reflection on that, I suppose.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay. I’m really glad I asked that question because that was an awesome answer, and I wasn’t sure where you would to end up on that, and that’s a great third way. Not that we always seek the middle ground. Just because something’s in the middle doesn’t mean it’s the right path, but in this case, I think it, at least for me, sounds pretty compelling, so thanks, Matt. Okay, this was a great conversation, so I just want to thank you, Matt. Do you want to close us out?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, man, let’s wrap it up. Hey friends, thank you so much for listening to the Zealots at the Gate. If you like what you’ve heard, please check out the podcast’s intellectual seedbed, our home, which is Comment Magazine. You can find them at comment.org. There, you’re going to find awesome, awesome essays on politics, culture, and faith. Friends, you can follow Shadi Hamid and myself, Matthew Kaemingk, on Twitter. Our handles are @shadihamid and @matthewkaemingk. You can connect with us there. You can also write us an email, zealots@comment.org, and we will do our best to get back to you. Our thanks to Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life for sponsoring this podcast and for hosting just this relationship between Shadi and myself. Yeah, we’re just really grateful for all of you for listening in. Please share these episodes if you find them valuable.
Shadi Hamid:
Zealots at the Gate is hosted by Comment Magazine, produced by Allie Crummy, audience strategy by Matt Crummy with editorial direction by Anne Snyder. I’m Shadi Hamid.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And I’m Matthew Kaemingk. We’ll see you next time.
Shadi Hamid is a columnist and editorial board member at The Washington Post and an assistant research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary.
Matthew Kaemingk is the Richard John Mouw Assistant Professor of Faith and Public Life at Fuller Theological Seminary where he also serves as the Director of the Richard John Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life.
Love the show? Help others find it by reviewing it on your favourite podcast app. We also welcome your ideas and feedback. Email us at zealots@comment.org. Thanks for your support.