Suddenly, everyone is talking about prayer and theology.
That comes as a surprise to many who, since Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, have assumed that secularization had effectively removed God from serious political consideration. Yet recent controversies have forced the issue back into public view.
The debate surrounding Pete Hegseth’s prayer about U.S. policy in Iran –so reminiscent of Mark Twain’s haunting “War Prayer” has reopened questions many thought settled.
It has even produced the strange spectacle of Donald Trump adopting quasi-messianic language, while J.D. Vance publicly disputes Pope Leo XIV about whose prayers God hears and whose God ignores.
I have addressed those developments elsewhere. Here I want to press further into the deeper issue: What is prayer? What are its political implications? And what does the Bible itself reveal about the competing claims made in God’s name, especially about nonviolence?
What Does Prayer Mean?
To begin with, what exactly is being invoked when Hegseth appeals to the Psalms and asks God to “break the teeth” of enemies, to leave women widowed and children orphaned?
And what does the pope mean when he insists that Jesus rejects such petitions outright and stands unequivocally for nonviolence?
In both cases, the underlying assumption seems the same: a supernatural being “out there,” watching events unfold and selectively intervening on behalf of one side or another.
But can such imagery still be taken seriously?
We live in the age of the James Webb Space Telescope, which reveals a universe so vast that our planet becomes nearly invisible within it. We also live in the age of quantum physics, where matter dissolves into energy and probability. In such a world, the idea of a localized deity monitoring human conflicts and deciding which missiles hit their targets strains credulity.
Is God “up there” listening? Is Jesus literally seated at the Father’s right hand, weighing petitions and choosing sides?
Or are such images relics of an earlier worldview that no longer corresponds to what we know about reality?
And Then There’s the Bible
It is true that the Bible itself often reflects that older worldview. Its language presumes a cosmos structured in ways we now recognize as outdated.
Yet that does not render the Bible irrelevant. On the contrary, its enduring significance lies elsewhere.
As scholars such as Pablo Richard have emphasized, the Bible does not present a single, unified picture of God. Instead, it stages an internal conflict– a “struggle of the gods.”
On one side stands the God of Moses: the liberator of slaves, the defender of the poor, the protector of widows, orphans, and immigrants.
On the other side stands the God claimed by kings and elites, beginning with the royal ideology of David and Solomon, a God invoked to justify wealth, hierarchy, domination, and even genocide.
The prophets– Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah– consistently take the side of the former against the latter.
Jesus clearly stands in that prophetic tradition: a marginal figure, an artisan, an outsider, a victim of imperial violence. His execution by crucifixion– Rome’s punishment for political dissidents– makes unmistakable where he stood.
In this sense, while the Bible does not address modern cosmology, it does address a far more urgent question: Whose side is Ultimate Reality on? Does Dr. King’s long arc of history really bend towards justice for the poor and marginalized?
The Bible refuses to let that question be answered cheaply.
Was Jesus Unequivocally “Nonviolent?”
This brings us to the claim that Jesus was simply “nonviolent.”
Stated without qualification, that claim risks obscuring more than it reveals. It can even function as a form of moral disorientation– especially for those subjected to systemic oppression.
“Violence” is not a single, simple category. It has at least four distinct forms.
First, there is structural violence: embedded in laws, institutions, and social arrangements that quietly destroy lives. Slavery, segregation, economic deprivation, denial of healthcare, and wars of aggression all belong here.
Second, there is defensive violence: the response of those who resist such conditions. When oppressed peoples fight back, their actions are immediately visible and condemned by the powers that be– yet they are widely recognized as legitimate, even under international law.
Third, there is repressive violence: the state’s attempt to crush resistance and restore the original injustice, often under the banner of “law and order.”
And finally, there is terroristic violence: the deliberate use of fear and destruction to achieve political ends– a practice historically employed most devastatingly and frequently by states, even as they label resisters “terrorists.”
In this light, to describe Jesus simply as “nonviolent” is not only inadequate; it risks distorting the reality of both his life and his context. The Roman authorities who executed him certainly did not regard him as harmless.
Conclusion
We are left, then, with the question that has been with us from the beginning: What does prayer mean in the world just described?
Whatever it means, it cannot be what figures like Hegseth, Trump, or even the pope seem to assume. Prayer is not a way of persuading a distant deity to intervene on behalf of our causes, bless our wars, or guarantee our victories.
Nor can the question of God’s allegiance be resolved by lifting isolated biblical texts or by invoking abstract slogans like “nonviolence,” as though such words settled anything at all.
The Bible itself will not allow that kind of evasion. It presents instead a conflict– deep, unresolved, and unavoidable– between competing visions of God, of humanity, and of justice. It exposes how easily “God” becomes the sacred cover for power.
But our problem runs even deeper. In the light of the James Webb Space Telescope and of quantum physics, the very notion of God must be rethought. The old image of a supreme off-planet being ” watching, judging, intervening, is no longer credible.
What we have called “God” must instead be understood as the creative energy of the universe– indeed, of a universe of universes– the living source in which everything participates, including the mysterious energy of consciousness itself. This is not an object among others, but the depth of reality, the Thou we may still address, not because it sits above us, but because it lives within and among us.
In biblical language, it is the Creator. In Paul’s words, it is “the one in whom we live and move and have our being.” Such a reality cannot be captured by any nation, claimed by any empire, or enlisted in any war. It recognizes no borders, no chosen peoples in the exclusionary sense, no privileged civilizations. The earth belongs to all. Its gifts are not the possession of a few, but the common inheritance of everyone– each of us entitled to no more than our one-eight-billionth share.
Seen in this light, prayer changes meaning entirely.
It is no longer a request for favors from above. It is an act of alignment with the deepest currents of reality itself. It is a way of opening ourselves to the creative, life-giving energy that stands against domination, exclusion, and death.
And so the issue returns to us, stripped of illusion.
When we pray, we are not stepping outside history. We are locating ourselves within it. We are aligning ourselves– consciously or not– with one side of an ongoing struggle between the forces that sustain life and those that diminish it.
This is not theology as speculation. It is theology as decision.
To pray is to choose.
And the choice we make– however piously we disguise it– places us either with the flourishing of the whole or with the systems that deny it.
So the question remains, now more demanding than ever:
When you pray, are you aligning yourself with the life of the whole– or with the powers that divide and destroy it?
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