We have become myopic when it comes to prayer

We have scienced the s**t out of how to talk to God

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

A woman stands against a sparse white background looking up.

Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash.

When I was a kid in the eighties, Japan belonged in the realm of science fiction. The Land of the Rising Sun was the land of bullet trains, robotics, the Sony Walkman, the home of Sonic and Mario. British engineers and technicians learned Japanese to avoid being left out when the inevitable Nipponese future arrived.

In recent years the news has been more concerning. One and a half million young Japanese people have become hikikomori, locked in their rooms in extreme isolation. The birthrate has bottomed out. Loneliness is pandemic, with restaurants designed to serve food to diners without needing to meet another person, not even a waiter. Yet Japan remains a place of profound spiritual heritage. Even its cultural exports reflect this. Take Studio Ghibli. There is a word for the moments of quiet contemplation that punctuate their films- ma. It’s the Japanese concept of the interval or space between things. A moment to breathe. If Pixar warms our hearts, then Ghibli heals our souls.

One of the most impressive people I know is Japanese. When asked about his upbringing he is characteristically understated. His parents, he says, were very religious. What he means by this is that they were practicing Buddhists and by the age of three he was meditating with them for hours every day. He now speaks multiple languages, has worked in universities all over the world, and has single-handedly taught more people psychological wellbeing skills than anyone else know. He carries himself with an elegant and compassionate poise that gently permeates any room he enters. He’s very, well… zen.

No doubt my characterisation of Japan is deeply culturally ignorant, unencumbered by any actual awareness of the economics and sociology that have determined the nation’s profile in recent decades. Chief among my many ignorances was the idea that the practice of meditation was widespread in Japan. You couldn’t throw a stick in Kyoto, I assumed, without hitting half a dozen robed monks perched on a rock. But it turns out I’m wrong. When I ask my friend, freshly returned from leading a retreat on Mount Fuji, if his meditative upbringing was typical, he says it wasn’t. It was very unusual. The notion of religious affiliation is not well matched to the complexity of Japanese culture, but more than one commentator has wondered whether the dominant ideology is not Buddhism, nor even Shinto, but Materialism.

Perhaps then it is not a complete surprise that in a recent study of more than 200,000 respondents from 22 countries, Japan is ranked last of those who report praying or meditating daily. According to this analysis, only 10 per cent of the Japanese population pray or meditate each day, just behind Sweden on 11per cent and Germany on17 per cent. Nigeria comes top of the list, with 92 per cent of the population reporting daily prayer or meditation (a result which tempted me to wonder whether the study had measured prayer in decibels rather than percentages. If like me, you’ve been fortunate enough to join Nigerian Christians in prayer, you will know what a joyously raucous occasion that can be). The national data equally represents Nigerian Muslims engaged in daily salat. Even more so the data from Indonesia, ranked second with 84 per cent of the population reporting daily prayer.

Roughly halfway down the table of results there is a sort of break, a statistical chasm if you like. Brazil is listed as 10th on the list with 65per cent of the population praying/meditating each day and then, after a bit of drop, Mexico and the United States come in as the best-of-the-rest at 48per cent and 42per cent respectively. The UK hovers just above the relegation zone, fifth from the bottom at 24per cent. If this was the Premier League, we would be Everton. Not good enough to win, but not great at losing either. I support Everton. They are my team. I pray a lot.

Of course, the major thing the authors had to clarify in their first few sentences was whether they were right to treat prayer and meditation as the same thing. Many people would argue they are different things. Prayer is usually directed towards one or more divine recipients. Meditation may include the quietude and introspection of prayer but does not necessarily require a theistic focus. The authors argue – I think rightly – that while prayer and meditation can be differentiated, they are similar and overlapping practices, which psychologically perform similar functions. They have both been linked with similar outcomes for those who practice them: increased psychological wellbeing, higher gratitude, greater purpose in life, reduced aggression, greater social connectedness, longer life expectancy, and so on. And this research certainly confirms demographic findings across cultures. Those who pray or meditate daily are likely to be elderly, retired, women, homemakers, and regularly attend religious services.

We’ve become myopic. Our technical prowess occupies the foreground, but the infinite mysterious background is chronically out of focus.

The reason this research interests me so much is because prayer and meditation – which are pretty much the same thing for me – are the most important things I do, but probably the ones I talk about least. So when I read that one-in-four people here in Britain are praying or meditating every day, I’m surprised twice. First surprise: so few people pray. Second surprise: more people are praying than I thought.

The first surprise is the realisation that it simply does not occur to many people to pray, even in situations when a bit of prayer would come in quite handy. This hit me most strongly when I watched Matt Damon playing The Martian. Stuck alone 140 million miles from home, he survives by growing potatoes in his own faeces, but at no point in his isolation does it ever occur to him to pray. Faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem he opts (in his words) to “science the sh**t out of it”. Personally, if I were stuck on Mars I would science the sh**t out of it and pray the sh**t out of it - though I suspect overcoming the disgust of wolfing down potatoes smeared in excrement would feature prominently in my daily devotions. But I can’t imagine not praying. I mean, Tom Hanks couldn’t survive two minutes on a desert island without worshipping a volleyball. Hopefully I’d do a bit better than that.

Much of the daily prayer recorded internationally was corporate not solitary: people gathering to pray or meditate, not sneaking off to do so in secret. But there is something about praying alone that captures my imagination, that is both enthralling and intimidating. William James famously defined religion as what we do with our solitude. We are who we are when we are alone with God and no more, claimed C.S. Lewis. And mystics down the millennia have loved to cite the definition of prayer offered by Plotinus, the flight of the alone to the alone. Praying alone ups the stakes. Because if there is no God and we make time to be alone, we are truly alone. If there is no God and we whisper our deepest desires into the darkness with no one to hear them, we are exposed as ridiculous creatures wasting our breath. Not meeting with God, just talking to ourselves.

Praying together is good, but it can be distracting, too susceptible to the mixed motives of impressing, appeasing or opposing others. Jesus was aware of this tension. His advice not to pray publicly for spiritual status, but rather to find a secret space where God could be found in secret, is pretty exacting. He knew that the danger of praying in a group is being satisfied with social rather than spiritual reward. To settle for the impression our prayers make on those around us, rather than surrendering to the impression God would make on us.

So maybe all that worrying about Japan is really just a projection of my own hopes and fears for people closer to home. On the one hand I worry that we have scienced the sh**t out of our ability to pray or meditate. Everything is a problem to be solved. We’ve become myopic. Our technical prowess occupies the foreground, but the infinite mysterious background is chronically out of focus. On the other hand, I find solace in knowing that every fourth person I pass in the street may have some inkling of what it means to connect with a deeper reality in prayer or contemplation. It gives me hope. Hope that wherever we are, whatever we are doing, whenever we wish to, there is always time to take one long deep breath in. And without fanfare or posting to Instagram, exhale our love, our worry, our sadness, our gratitude to the one Jesus called Our Father in secret.

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Article

Art

Belief

Culture

24 July 2025

5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.

Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art.

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it?

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics.

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books?

JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration.

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others.

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns.

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period?

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well.

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such.

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)

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