Why people are not praying any more

Play video: Why People Are Not Praying: A Spiritual Science Perspective

The usual explanations for the decline of prayer are that people lost their faith or that science replaced it. This video treats both as too blunt, and offers three specific mechanisms instead — each of which explains a different group of people who stopped.

Prayers that appeared to fail

The first reason is the most human one. People prayed, nothing happened, and they drew the obvious conclusion.

But what prayers actually work supplies a different reading of the same experience. The three failure modes are named here again: requests that would violate the structure of things, requests to be spared a difficulty that is doing necessary work, and requests for consequences to be waived.

On that account the prayers did not fail. They were outside the operating conditions — and nobody was ever told what those conditions were, which is the real problem.

Intelligence colliding with doctrine

The second reason is not about prayer but about the framework it arrived wrapped in, and it is the sharpest section.

Three doctrines are identified as ones that stop surviving contact with an analytical mind. A God who must be appeased or who punishes — which describes something less morally developed than the person praying, and is the harder problem the more you think about it. Grace as an override of cause and effect — which, if consequences can simply be cancelled, makes the moral structure arbitrary. And the demand for blind faith, which asks you to disable the faculty you would use to evaluate the claim.

None of those is essential to prayer. But they came bundled with it, and when they became unbelievable the whole package went — the mechanism described in why religion is declining.

The turn to what can be measured

The third reason is the drift toward science, success and tangible progress — things that visibly respond to effort.

The video does not treat this as shallow. It is a rational reallocation of attention toward what demonstrably works. Its limitation is the familiar one: it handles the how well and leaves the deeper questions untouched, so the suffering it cannot address is still there, now without a framework — the case made in materialism, are we missing something.

Why this might be a stage rather than an end

The conclusion is the video's real argument. All three reasons are consequences of consciousness developing rather than of anything going wrong.

Prayer as practised was tied to a concept of God that could not survive analysis, and to expectations about how it worked that nobody had examined. Losing that is not the loss of prayer; it is the loss of one version of it.

What the video suggests is a renewed search on different terms — prayer with a logic to it, aimed at understanding rather than at rearranging events, which is exactly what the rest of the series sets out.

About this article. It summarises the video above from The Eternal World Picture. The writings of Martinus Thomsen are published by the Martinus Institute.