David Williams's Blog, page 10

On Living in an Oligarchy

Two days after Donald J. Trump won the 2024 election, I was reminded of the limitations of social media.
Those reminders have been present throughout this election season.  In 2016 and in 2020, posts containing my reflections on the state of the election were places of extended conversation.  They were shared, and shared often.  
This year?  Crickets.  Part of me got to thinking, you know, perhaps it's just that I'm boring.  And, honestly, it also felt a little repetitious.  A little dull.  Why just say things over and over and over?  I stuck to pictures of my garden, and limited my posting to my blog and the twelve people who read it.
But it wasn't just that.  Meta has changed.  Facebook was once all about friends, about leveraging the human pleasure of interacting with familiar faces.  That was their whole business model.  I'd scroll, and it'd be people I knew from every phase of my life, intermingled with the occasional ad.  That was the point.  
Now, it's not about faces.  It's primarily content pages and advertising.  The shift has been slow, but it's a completely different landscape today.
In the Meta media ecosystem...Instagram, FaceBook, and Threads...we also know that political posts have this season been suppressed by redesigned algorithms.  For major influencers, with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, that following's baked in, but for normies like myself with just a few hundred souls tagging along, the potential for a post to go viral has been muted.  This is by design.
Among my friends and colleagues who skew progressive, there were increasing reports of community standard violations, for infractions that seemed picayune or absurd.  Posts about the climate crisis.  Posts critical of far right-wing foolishness, entirely legitimate as political discourse.  Posts about nothing political at all.  Posts that would once have been utterly par for the course.  All of it, suddenly taken down.
At the same time, in the weeks before the election, my FaceBook feed was suddenly dominated by posts from a single person pitching Trumpy talking points.  He wasn't someone I know, or am close to, or have ever meaningfully interacted with, just a fraternity brother who'd graduated a few years before I entered undergrad.  He was all Trump, all the time, and if you'd read my feed, you'd have thought he was my best friend in the whole wide world.  He was delighting in being a troll, in being provocative.
It was odd.
Then, yesterday, I was hit with my first Facebook community standard violation.  
Six months ago, I'd created a FaceBook page for a work of satire I self pubbed back in 2022.  TRUMP ANTICHRIST, it's called, because what else are you going to say about a politician who has most of the American church in his thrall, while at the same time being precisely and in every way the opposite of Jesus?  To make it clear that it was satire, the book is written in the voice of Satan himself, and it calls out both the decadence and falsehood of Trumpism and...at the same time...challenges Christians who allow hatred for Trump and his followers to consume their souls.  Love your enemies, as a command, isn't contingent on your enemies being the ones that are easy to love, eh?
I'd posted on that page for most of last year, dropping relevant writings from theologians and commentators.  And then yesterday, two days after the election, the page was suddenly suspended.  Why?  It was in violation of newly revised community standards, for "impersonating another person."  
So...you write a book that is clearly satire, and clearly mark your media as a page promoting a book written IN THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL HIMSELF...and you're "impersonating another person?"  What, people might think I'm actually Satan?  I mean, ok, fine, some might, but...what and the what?
I asked that the decision be reviewed, a process that required checking one of four prewritten replies, each of which was written to subtly suggest I might be in the wrong.  The response came seconds later.  Denied, all content removed, all by an "admin," which clearly it wasn't.  This was a machine at work.  The corporate algorithms had spoken.
Here, were I ignorant, I suppose I'd whinge about First Amendment rights.  Mah Rights!  Mah Rights!  
But I wasn't speaking in America.  I was on Facebook, and Facebook isn't America.  
Meta pages or groups or profiles reside in a corporate media ecosystem.  They're not our property, nor are they the public sphere.  We are in a space controlled and managed by a global conglomerate, run by and for profit, one whose interests are engagement and eyeballs for the purposes of selling our data and advertising to us.  That's the whole business model.  Freedom of speech isn't relevant.  If, like X, Meta wants to suppress political or religious discourse that they feel does not benefit them, they can.
Constitutional protections do not apply in oligarchic systems.  I have no right to a Facebook page, or a Facebook profile.  None of us do.  There are no freedoms when our every interaction is owned by corporations.
It's something we need to remember.

The Tail of the Night

The last couple of years, I've had trouble adapting to the time change.  Not Springing Forward, which one would think would be more difficult as we anguish over a lost hour.  But Falling Back, where you get that whole extra hour of sweet morning sleep.  I haven't been falling back well.
I'm not quite sure why this is.  Perhaps a middle age thing.  Or perhaps because I don't rely on an alarm to wake me most days.  I just get up when I get up, which...as the days shorten...tends to be right before the crack of dawn.
These last few mornings, I've been fully awake at 5 AM, which...not too long ago...was 6 AM.  This is well before the sun lights the morning sky.   I'll lie there for a bit, which typically involves morning prayers and reflections on the necessities of the coming day.  Then I'll slip out of bed as quietly as I can, endeavoring not to disturb my sleeping wife.  The dog will stir, eager for pets and breakfast and a morning walk.   
Once I've got the coffee on, that is.  After he's eaten, together we step out under a sky dark and speckled with stars, and into a neighborhood still unroused from sleep.  The birds aren't yet singing.  No cars whisk off to work or school.  All is quieter.  Not just the neighborhood, but the city itself, the omnipresent hum of gigatons of wheels on asphalt barely a tiptoe.  Foxes scamper about, occasionally stopping to glare at the silly human and his dog, so rudely intruding on their pre-dawn hunt.
It doesn't feel quite like morning, but like catching the tail of the night.
I rather like getting up early.

The Dull Grey of Morning

Yesterday for the first time in my adult life, I paid only passing attention to the election.  I'd already voted, weeks before, because early voting is a thing that we can just do now.  In part, that's because my wife works as an election officer, and votes early herself.

But there was no obsessive checking of final polling, or reading final prognostications, or doomscrolling.  

Instead, I read scripture in preparation for my sermon.  I did yard work.  I had a helpful call with a Presbytery staffer.  I took Mom shopping, and we went to lunch.

When evening came, again for the first time in my adult life, I didn't track the proceedings.  There was no evening spent with laptop open to granular county-level results, as talking heads chattered on the big screen. Instead, I read a novel.   

There didn't seem a point. It seemed clear, as the last few weeks had progressed, how the election was going.  One never knows, of course, but the metapolling trendlines seemed to be going a very certain way. 

I didn't want to endure that, to track along frantically scrabbling for handholds as the paths narrowed to nothing.  It was possible that I was wrong, but...improbable.  So at a little after 10 PM, having finished the book, I went to bed.  Rache was so worn with the stress and work of her day that she soon joined me.

When I woke, I took my time, and did what I always do.  There was no rush to a screen.  What had happened had happened.  

So I prayed.  Got out of bed.  Fed the dog.  Started the coffee.  Walked the dog.  These things must happen.  As our pup trotted down our driveway, the paper wasn't there yet, but that was no surprise.  It's often late when there are late-breaking headlines.

Above me, the sky was grey and featureless, a dull haze obscuring the deep blue of morning.  Perhaps just mist.  

Or perhaps the windblown smoke from wildfires now burning in Pennsylvania.

Merciless Nature

This last week, I began the process of finally putting my garden to bed for the winter.  As we enter November, the cold days have begun to slip in, here and there, although peculiar warmth has been sticking around more of late.  Still and all, the trend line has been cooler, and my summer garden is now gone.  

I'd tried okra this year for the first time, and pulled the last of the plants from the soil a few days ago.  That included seedsaving from the dried-out pods, which is one of the easiest and most satisfying things imaginable.  The pods even kinda sorta open up for you, each chamber splitting neatly, hinting at the seedstock within.  It just requires a little twist of a blade, and...pop!  Out tumble a dozen or so dun brown spheres, looking for all the world like misshapen ball-bearings.  Then you move on to the next chamber, and the next, until from a single pod you've received fifty or sixty potential future plants.  I dedicated three beds to my okra experiment this season, two four-by-eight and one four by four, and just one pod gives enough seed to do that three times over.  The ten pods I used for my seedstock gave me enough seed to turn the entirety of my property into an okra patch.  I'd have to cut down all of our trees, and level our house, so that's not going to happen.  Still, it's such an impossible potential abundance.

Life is like that, because life has to be like that.  If it wasn't, if it didn't produce wildly and wantonly, it would die, because nature is utterly without mercy.  Ten of my twenty okra plants never produced a single seed, as they were devoured by deer, every leaf consumed, the stalks left standing stark and denuded in the soil after two straight weeks of rain flushed my repellent spray from the leaves. Though okra is heat and drought tolerant, we also had another record setting hot-spell this summer, which stalled growth, and several more of my plants just never went to seed at all.

Elsewhere in my garden, other plants also struggled.  My bush beans, usually prolific, were stunted by the heat.  My butternut squash, devoured by chipmunks as soon as the first sprouts rose from the soil.  The squash, I replanted, and replanted, and replanted, but chipmunk hunger drives them around even the most carefully constructed barriers and netting.  I only saw a yield of three modest squash, about one-fifth of what had been normal.  My sunflowers, which have graced a corner of my garden for years?  All but a single seed-head were devoured by squirrels. Still, I have seed for next year, and am plotting and planning necessary adaptations.

The only way living things survive is to spam themselves into the world, producing and adapting and producing and adapting until finally something sticks.  

Before the modern era, we humans were like that, too.  

I was reminded of that recently, as I prepared a sermon on that little passage about Jesus blessing the children.  It's a sweet little passage...right up until you think about the why of it.  

Kids used to be, well, they weren't the gravitic center of adult life the way they are now.  They just didn't last long enough.  We had babies, and they died, and had babies, and they died.  You could be healthy, and well fed, the offspring of wealth and privilege, but still, children died.  Just ask Mary Todd Lincoln about that one, eh?  Or ask my ancestors, literate souls, who recorded the losses of their beloved children in their diaries with a stoic acquiescence.  Most human beings who came into the world didn't make it to ten years of age.  We tried everything we could, until we found modern medicine and penicillin and pasteurization.  

Absent functioning antibiotics, unspoiled food, and effective vaccines, life was consistently, relentlessly short. 

For the last few Sundays now, I've also been leading a group through a thought-provoking book about forgiveness, and about the central place of mercy and grace in Christian faith.  As we discussed the notable absence of forgiveness in Western pagan culture, the thought came to me: well, I mean, forgiveness isn't particularly natural, either.  Nature doesn't let us make errors.  Choose wrongly, and it "corrects" our mistakes by removing us from existence. 

We've forgotten this, clearly, as the voices of our ancestors are drowned out by the cacophany of our short-attention-span consumerism and the synthetic realities of social media influencer culture.  Nature still exists, and we've forgotten that nature, once provoked, gives no quarter.  It is utterly unforgiving, ruthlessly exterminating the weak, the unproductive, the foolish, and the forgetful.

Death is, after all, a natural remedy.

What We Have to Offer

 It was a familiar moment.

With our worship service finished, I'd stepped out of the doors of my sanctuary, where I greet each of the congregants as they depart.  It's a pleasant enough thing, one of those rituals of church life.

As I stepped over the threshold, I saw a man standing at the edge of our parking lot.  White, middle-aged, and a tiny bit worn, he'd clearly been waiting for the service to conclude.  The moment he saw me step from the church, he bustled forward eagerly, making a beeline for the dude in liturgical garb. 

He introduced himself, earnest, eager, and intimate, shaking my hand.  "Can you help me out today, pastor?" He leaned in close to ask if we could talk in private.  I agreed, and when the line of parishioners had concluded, I stepped aside to hear him out.  In this case, it was that he had cancer, that he'd lost his job, that he was three months behind on rent, but needed only one month right now so that he could stave off eviction.   

As it so happens, my little church (along with the other churches in our town) works with a local nonprofit that can handle emergency financial requests.  Housing assistance, utility assistance, emergency food, all the needs a person in crisis might have.  They pay the utility or landlord directly, and provide connection to other service providers for longer term support, including emergency medical and dental helps.

I said, "Sure! We work with this organization to help folks out, one that might be just what you need."  I started to describe it, and how it works.

I was halfway through my third sentence when all the expression left his face.  I mean, it was like flipping a switch.  The smile and the eager light in his eyes just went Click.  He grunted out something that I didn't quite catch, turned on his heel, and walked away briskly without another word.  Beelined back to the parking lot, back to his car, and drove away.

That was that.

I was offering to help him get exactly what he said he needed, but...well.  That wasn't what he wanted.

It got me to wondering, as I reflected on his abrupt departure, what it is that we Jesus folk have to offer those who arrive on our doorsteps seeking something.

There's no question that my visitor had real and material need.  Perhaps not the need he was articulating, but this was a soul who unquestionably wasn't doing well in life.  But was food...or housing...all he needed?  Is that the heart of his struggle, or does that go deeper, to something more essential in his nature?

Does he have a sense of purpose in his life?  A community in which he feels belonging?  A vision of how valuable he is as a person, leavened with the truth of what a mess we all are, and a path to move from one to the other?

That's kind of what we do, the heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

But again, that's probably not what he was looking for.  

The Truth about Your Enemies

I am not Kenneth Copeland's biggest fan.

He is and has been representative of a form of faith that betrays, to the best of my discernment, the essence of the Gospel.  It's brassy and loud and materialistic, celebrating and centering wealth and power in a way that is utterly alien to Christ's teachings.  It puts pastors on gilded pedestals to be adored and showered with lucre, and as such is indistinguishable from hucksterism.  It's an Elmer Gantry cosplay, far as I can see it.

But in pitching out a post noting Copeland's newly found political focus, I bumped into an oddity.

Right after the mess of the last election, videos circulated of Copeland laughing maniacally at the notion that Biden had actually won.  It was, as presented, more than a little insane, as he and his congregants howled and hooted.  I mean, here.  Watch this:

It's...well...demonic.  Like the cacophony of the possessed, creepy as hell in the most literal of ways.  
As I dug about for a version to pitch into my last post, though, I came across this, from the Independent, a British news outlet.  It's from the same event, only with a tiny and important snippet of context added.  Copeland leads in to the cacophony by noting a Johns Hopkins study that suggests laughter alleviates pain.  Watch this:


It's still politics from the pulpit.  It's still validating a false narrative.  It still gets...weird.  
But it makes what we're looking at seem less like demonic possession or insanity.  It's more like a masterful act of rhetorical manipulation.  First, there's a clear on-ramp for his right-wing listeners, something to gain rational assent.  It's a Hopkins Study!  Laughter, even faked laughter, alleviates pain!  He's set the stage, offering an appeal to authority, and any reservations or rational objections are lessened.
Then he's faking laughter, being intentionally obvious about it, so that it's clear to his audience what he's doing.  He's not possessed.  He's clearly in control, and being silly.  They laugh at that, of course, both in on the joke and caught up in the joke.  He's got them.  The endorphins and the crowd dynamics kick in, and they're utterly, willingly, in the palm of his hand.
Is Kenneth Copeland a charlatan?  Of course.  But he's good at it.  Smart about it, even.  It's a talent, a craft, a skill, one shared by hucksters and demagogues alike.
One must give credit where credit is due, eh?

What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

I have developed, over time, a mental frame-set for understanding the fabric of American Christianity, and the place of most Christian public figures in that frame-set.  There are progressives and conservatives, public theologians and writers, activists and mystics, fundamentalists and liberals.  There are a wild array of denominations and theological perspectives.  On top of that, there's a healthy dollop of send-me-your-money charlatans, name-it-and-claim-it hucksters who live lavish lives fleecing their flocks.
That latter group is well known to me, particularly the leadership of the "Word of Faith" movement.  These are the pastors with the Gulfstreams and the Bentleys, the massive sprawling mansions and...in some cases...their own international airports, built on the dime of their church, tax-free, of course.  Those folk have gotten called out in my sermons on the regular, because their warped version of Christian faith is...well, it's an abomination.
I know these pastors.  And I know the most influential leader of that movement.  
Which is why it was a little odd reading an article about the rise of right-wing Christian nationalism and finding...Kenneth Copeland? 
In today's print version of the Washington Post (which you might have missed if you cancelled your subscription), I read the following, describing a pro-Trump rally at a Louisiana megachurch:

"We have every right there is to tell the Devil: 'You take your hands off this nation!'" roared televangelist Kenneth Copeland, who put on a U.S. flag jacket and red MAGA hat when he took the stage.
The scene could have come from any of the hard-right Christian road shows now barnstorming the country, with a focus on swing states in a razor-close election.  Extremism analysts say the tours serve as both a get-out-the-vote juggernaut and power flex for a Christian supremacist movement that aims to transform the church the same way MAGA did the GOP: by forcing out moderates.
Ministers like Copeland preach that Christianity is the bedrock of American identity and should influence all aspects of society, ideas central to Christian nationalism."

This is a new game for Kenneth, and in focusing on the political extremism, the Post did kinda miss that angle.  Copeland has, for decades, been most notable for both his wildly flamboyant preaching and the brazenness of his grift.  "Christian hard-liner?"  Hardly.   He's the capo dei capi of the Word of Faith Prosperity Gospel movement, owner of that international airport, possessor of multiple jets, and lives in an estate that sprawls even by Texas standards.  Because, again, private jets need room to land, baby!  He is the worldliest of the worldly, the alpha wolf of that pack of wolves.  Politics?  Nationalism?  Those were the realm of the actual fundamentalists, the Jerry Falwells of the world, whose battle was against modernity and liberalism.  Copeland was...and is...in a wholly different business.  There was a time when conservatives had issue with the Word of Faith movement, when they called it out as heretical, unbiblical, and a blatant con.  There was a time when a Republican Senator led an investigation into Copeland, concerned that he was just a scammer hiding behind a Jesus mask.
Now, though, it's Kenneth Copeland we find front and center as the face of right wing Christianity, wrapped in the stars and stripes and wearing a MAGA hat.  Like the rest of the Prosperity Gospel movement, he's been all in with Trump from day one...birds of a feather, and whatnot...but that's got nothing to do with Christian Nationalism, or a country governed by Christian virtues.
He's in it for the same reason that Elon's in it: there's money to be made.  Because freedom of religion means freedom to believe anything you want, eh?  What right does anyone have to say that getting rich off of the Gospel is a bad thing?
It's pure predatory Mammonism from a high priest of AmeriChrist, Inc., being packaged in the flag, injected straight into the veins of the gullible and the desperate, and bears precisely zero resemblance to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Post Gets Cancelled

I have subscribed to the Washington Post forever.  As long as I can recall.  
My Dad, being a journalist, always got the paper, and when we were stateside and home in DC, that meant the Post.  Overseas, it'd be a carefully selected assortment of local papers, plus the International Herald Tribune, which was, at the time, a joint venture between the Post and the New York Times.  
When my friend with a paper route went on vacation, I'd fill in for him delivering the paper, back when a Post arrived on the doorstep of every other house.  I'd trundle about in the dark of the morning, pulling a cart full of newsprint, grateful that I wasn't going to be doing this every day.
The arrival of the morning paper has remained a part of my life, and it's been a welcome respite from the chattering distraction of online media.  It's a dying thing, fading away like so much of twentieth century culture, its place usurped by the cuckoo hullabaloo that passes for news on tha socialz.  
The Post's recent decision not to endorse a candidate for the first time since Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford were contending has caused an avalanche of subscription cancellations.  My social feeds are full of outraged progressive friends publicly declaring their disgust, which is their right, even if it's a wee bit on the nose.  It's also the tiniest bit ironic.
I mean, what are progressives going to read now?  The New York Times?  I mean, the Times endorsed Harris, straight up.  But Progressives loathe the Times, because the Times is...I don't know...too DavidBrooksy.  The Times is, without question, less progressive than the Post, a distinction that has deepened in the years of the Post's ownership by The Jeff.  In fact, under Bezos, the Post has become notably more intersectional, as a younger leaner newsroom focuses on all of The Issues.  There are times where more-conservative-I will roll my eyes at yet another representation article or thinkpiece centering the margins, not so much because that's offensive, but because it can get a tick monomaniacal.
This is the paper y'all are cancelling?  Do the substantive coverage and the clearly progressive slant of the editorial board not matter?  Do you think that a newspaper editorial board endorsement in 2024 is changing a single vote?  That both of the Trumpists who still read the Post will be, oh, golly, I'd not factored the Post endorsement into the equation?  Of course it's an exercise in capitalism realpolitik by the corporate master of the Post, for whom AWS is a waaaaay more lucrative venture.  Of course Trump is a catastrophic mistake, and a marker of the perilous decay of the Republic.  And sure, it's hard being so pointedly reminded that Democracy Dies in Darkness is a nice slogan, so long as it doesn't threaten the profit margins of our All-Powerful Oligarchs. 
But even as it chafes under the leash of The Jeff, the Post still tries for journalistic integrity, still attempts to shine a light that isn't partisan, but seeks that elusive objectivity so necessary for the functioning of liberal democracy.  There's value there, one that shouldn't be cast aside lightly or impulsively.  
I think back to my father, the journalist.  Dad was also a lifelong Republican.  The sort of Republican who, back when he was young, worked for the party by standing on the street corners in Queens with a bullhorn.  Dad would swear, up and down, that the best president of the 20th Century was...um...Richard Milhous Nixon.  The EPA!  Got us out of Vietnam!  Rapprochement with China!  It was a familiar refrain, and not exactly a thing we ever agreed upon.
But Dad still subscribed to the Post.  
If a Nixon supporter could still subscribe to the Post, well, yeah.

Staying Away from My Crazy X

I've been on The-Platform-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter for over a decade, and I think I'm finally done.

I wasn't ever particularly fond of Twitter as a medium.  It was always too shallow, too reactive, too fragmenting of mind and focus.  I mean, "microblogging?"  It was always going to be the sort of thing that rewarded the hot-take, the provocation, the knee-jerk reaction.  Whenever I'd spend any significant time with it, I'd feel...dumber.  Angrier.  More trivial.

There were ways around that, though.  Tweetdeck worked nicely to focus in on the content that had value.  Artists and musicians.  Science feeds.  Thoughtful, faithful voices and reliable commentators.  Those feeds were delightful.

But now, that's a privilege I'd have to pay for, from a platform that's starting to do real damage.  It's a seething hell-pit of lies and umbrage, and the monstrous falseness of bad-actors there is now nearly impossible to avoid.  "Truth" is completely obscured, and where truth and falsehood are on a level, the pernicious and the absurd tear a soul apart.

Like, say, in the recent and lingering insanity around Hurricane Helene.  When a platform is actively promoting accounts that spread lies, gossip, misinformation and conspiracy theories, and that promotion is sabotaging relief efforts?  It's actively harmful.  That was, for me, the threshold event, the line too far.  I've got enough rightwingers in my feed that I saw the falseness being shared, saw the sudden centering of pure weather-control delusion.  

I also don't appreciate being forced to follow Johnny Ketamine, having him arrive in my feed whether I wish to encounter him or not.  It feels too much like I'm reading the Corporate Approved Newsthoughts, and is too reminiscent of something I read in Mussolini's autobiography.  The key to fascist success, Benito argued, lay not simply in projecting force on the streets, as parades of flag bearing blackshirts performed their dominance display.  It required having your own radio stations and newspapers, creating a media ecosystem that you controlled completely.  Truth Social flailed around trying to become what X already is: an implement of social control right out of Fahrenheit 451.

X had become, preposterously, the "media of record," with "tweets" being taken as quasi-official public statements.  If you're traditional media, and you want a controversial hot-take from some rando, it'll serve that up in a heartbeat. If you're an agitator or professional gadfly, you can burp out a hundred characters and stir an ephemeral controversy.

I didn't want to put in the time there, to constantly react and tend and feed the beast.

It's not necessary for my life.  It's a crap medium for conversation and relationship building.  It fragments our thinking and disrupts communities.  It's a threat to the Republic, and a threat to the integrity of Christian faith.

So I'm done.  

When We Forget How to Pray

Praying in the right way makes a difference.
This statement, to me, is a no-brainer.  Of course it makes a difference.
To others, it might come across as absurd, preposterous, utterly meaningless.  Prayer, or so our secular culture asserts, does nothing.  It's the lazy response of people unwilling to do the work, a willful distraction from dealing with an issue that requires effort on our part.  Offer up a thought or a prayer in the face of a crisis or a tragedy, and you're going to catch some shade.
I've pushed back a little bit on this, and will continue to do so.  Our thoughts guide our actions, eh?  Unless we're thoughtless, mindless automatons, who just do whatever the algorithms targeting us tell us to do.  Prayer, done rightly, grounds us in something greater.  It is thought, sacralized.  It calls for change where the capacity for change lies beyond us.  It orients us towards a deeper purpose.  As taught by Jesus of Nazareth, that deeper purpose is a radical compassion towards neighbor and enemy alike, and a casting aside of the temptations and brokenness of the world.  
Praying, for Christians, is in its most essential nature expressed in the Lord's Prayer, a short, simple call for right relationship with our Creator and a reorienting of our priorities.  Do we pray for wealth?  No.  Just our daily bread.  Do we pray for power over our enemies?  Nope.  We pray for forgiveness and justice.  I explore all of this in THE PRAYER OF UNWANTING, my upcoming devotional.  The Lord's Prayer is not a prayer meant to get us what we want, but a prayer meant to change how we want, and who we are.  
If, that is, we are paying attention to the meaning of those words, and haven't forgotten who taught us to use them, and why.  Because even that most fundamental prayer can be nothing more than self-absorbed chattering if our hearts are unchanged by it, or we've lied to ourselves about what Jesus demands of us.  We can pray it absently, oblivious of the demands it places upon us.  We remain unchanged.  We can utter the words, but they can become just a shell of their intention.
Or we can attempt to bend the prayer to our will.  Take, for instance, the invocation of that prayer by the crowd that gathered on the sixth of January in 2021.  Before marching on the Capitol in an effort to violently overthrow the results of an election, a pastor led those gathered in the Lord's Prayer.  It was an affirmation of group identity, a public display of piety, an effort to bless what was to follow with the imprimatur of Jesus.  What was to follow, as it turned out, was violence in the service of a lie.  It was, quite pointedly and in the most accurate use of the term, blasphemous.
The words were invoked, but the content of their character had been torn away.  On that day, those who prayed succumbed to temptation, to the self-serving lie of a brazen demagogue, and gave themselves over to the brokenness that comes when the desire for power rules.
Because it is so easy to forget the most essential nature of prayer.