#PrayForBoston: Prayer as a Meme

[cbayer]

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/7041/_prayforboston__prayer_as_a_meme/



April 17, 2013
By ELIZABETH DRESCHER
Elizabeth Drescher is the author, with Keith Anderson, of Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible (Morehouse, 2012). She teaches religion and pastoral ministries at Santa Clara University. She is currently at work on Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of Religious Nones, a project funded in part through a grant from the Social Science Research Council’s “New Directions in the Study of Prayer” project through the Templeton Foundation. Her website is www.elizabethdrescher.com

As news broke about the Boston Marathon bombing, updates and photos from the scene immediately began appearing on Twitter and Facebook. At the same time, a hashtag trend developed. The phrase #PrayForBoston was appended to tweets through the day, with the likes of Mary J. Blige, teen rapper TZire, Saint Louis Cardinals infielder David Freese, La Toya Jackson, the US Senate Republicans, and, of course, Justin Bieber joining millions across the world in calling for prayer.

Shortly after the blast, a Twitter profile, (@iPrayForBoston), quickly gathered more than twenty-five-thousand followers.

Likewise, Facebook users began posting “Pray for Boston” icons, changing their profile and cover images to show support, and offering and calling for prayers on their walls. On Facebook, too, a Pray for Boston page was set up, though its reach, with just under a thousand “likes,” has been far more limited. Some visitors to the page—which mostly features gory news photos and aggressive demands that visitors “like” photos (“Like this or you are completely heartless”) and calls for prayer—complained that the page was a craven attempt to gather followers in a time of tragedy.

That may well be. But it also seems that thousands of prayers, calls for prayer, prayer icons, and so on floating around the social media universe—the active meming of prayer, we might say—during times of crisis are a indicator of something sincerely felt in the digital soul.

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