The Sinner’s Prayer

If you’ve had any contact with American evangelical Christianity at all, you’ve probably encountered the so-called "Four Spiritual Laws." It comes from a tract written fifty years ago by the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ; these days you can even find it online. All derived from an evangelical reading of the Bible, the laws can be summarized like this:

1. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
2. Humanity has sinned and is separated from God, and therefore we cannot know and experience God’s love and plan.
3. Jesus Christ is the only remedy for our sin.
4. We must accept Jesus as our personal savior in order to receive, know, and experience God’s love and plan.

Both the tract and online versions of the Four Spiritual Laws culminate with a prayer that a person is asked to pray in order to accept Christ as savior and thereby be born again. This prayer, and other prayers like it, have come to be known as the "Sinner’s Prayer." It appears in all sorts of tracts, as well as in books, Christian rock CDs, websites, and anywhere else where somebody is trying to squeeze two thousand years of theology into a simple formula.

Here’s a version of the Sinner’s Prayer found at Wikipedia:

Father, I know that I have broken your laws and my sins have separated me from you. I am truly sorry, and now I want to turn away from my past sinful life toward you. Please forgive me, and help me avoid sinning again. I believe that your son, Jesus Christ died for my sins, was resurrected from the dead, is alive, and hears my prayer. I invite Jesus to become the Lord of my life, to rule and reign in my heart from this day forward. Please send your Holy Spirit to help me obey You, and to do Your will for the rest of my life. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.

Readers who have closely followed my disillusionment with Neopaganism and my subsequent return to Christianity will recognize that a chief source of my alienation from the Pagan community had to do with the prominence of spellcraft. A spell, of course, is a ritual enactment by which one focusses and directs magical power. Magical power, as an old friend of mine once put it, is "the force we use to get God (or Goddess, or Nature…take your pick) to do something that He/She/It otherwise might not or will not do."

Now I have always been uncomfortable with the Four Spiritual Laws and the Sinner’s Prayer, not only because my natural theological orientation is much more catholic than evangelical, but also because I think it is misguided to try to shrink the entire thrust of Christian spirituality into such a, well, manageable synopsis. Frankly, I don’t think the glory of Divine grace can be so easily summarized, let alone acted upon. Because, at the end of the day, the Four Spiritual Laws and the Sinner’s Prayer pay lipservice to Divine action, but ultimately keep the spotlight focussed on what we humans do, to "receive" (read: manifest) God’s grace.

And this leads into the insight I had this morning. I’m reading a manuscript of a forthcoming evangelical book, and the author offers his own critique of the Sinner’s Prayer, seeing it as a  human effort to try to control the uncontrollable reality of Divine Grace. And as I read what this author had to say, it hit me — hard, right between the eyes — as to why, ultimately, I’m uncomfortable with this prayer and the theology that lies beneath it.

It’s because it’s a spell.

Never mind that Christianity professes to be a non-magical or even anti-magical religion. Institutions and communities can behave just like individuals: paying lip service to a particular value or viewpoint while acting in contradictory ways. No matter how much evangelical Christians may insist that their religion has nothing to do with magic, when they recite their Sinner’s Prayer as a means of triggering God’s salvation, they are casting a spell. Maybe it’s even the ultimate spell.

Before reciting the Sinner’s Prayer, they were headed for hell.  After reciting it, they’re bound for heaven. The Sinner’s Prayer "spell" worked the "magic" of getting God to permit the sinner in question to spend eternity in heaven. Without that "spell," it would have been hell for the poor soul. Granted, evangelicals will insist that it is not the words of the prayer itself that "work the magic," but rather the condition of the heart of the person doing the praying. But any Wiccan priestess will likewise tell you that a spell is useless without the focussed intent of the person casting the spell.

Evangelicals who read this may howl in protest, in fact, I’d be surprised if they didn’t. But an old saying asserts that if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like one, it is one. And so it is with the Sinner’s Prayer. It functions like a spell, it persuades Divine action like a spell, and therefore it "creates results" like a spell. It is a spell; a Christian spell.

Okay, so obviously I still don’t care for spellcraft, and Christians who indulge in the practice are to my mind just as spiritually misguided as any teenager who reads Silver Ravenwolf and then sets about using candles and chanting to get herself a boyfriend. Meanwhile, I think the theology that underlies the entire evangelical view of salvation as a private/individual experience engineered by the process of "accepting Christ as one’s personal savior" is suspect. So, I disavow this Christian spell both because I disavow spellcraft in any form and because I disavow any Christian theology that tends toward facilitating a Christian practice of spellcasting — in other words, that sees God as a resource to be manipulated for personal gain (even if the "personal gain" is nothing more than eternity in heaven).

 To end this on a more positive note, what then do I affirm in place of the spellishness of the Sinner’s Prayer? Not hard to answer: I affirm the radical, prodigal overflow of God’s grace, and the utter impossibility that we mortals can do anything to change or shape that flow. I affirm the splendid love that flows out of mystical spirituality that is based on mutual self-giving, and is wholly unconcerned with the power dynamics that underlie the will to magic. And I affirm that sacramental spirituality beautifully expresses such a flow of divine grace in a way that magical spirituality (whether Christian or otherwise) can never come close to touching.

Here’s to the amazing, freely-given miracle of God’s lavish, loving grace! No Sinner’s Prayer required.