When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Luhrmann 2012; ch 9

Of course, there are ways to judge prayer as effective even when the red car does not come through, the same ways people find evidence for the accuracy of horoscopes and lucky charms.4...And yet at the Vineyard I was startled by just how much congregants risked by praying so very specifically-a red car, not a blue one-and, as a result, just how often they were forced to confront prayer's apparent failure. In mainstream churches, one has the sense that to pray so specifically is not only unseemly but unwise: that to do so is to tempt fate.5 (A version of this that one does hear at the Vineyard is the assertion that you must not test God. Bruce and Stan's Pocket Guide to Talking with God has a sidebar box in which they say that God is not a lab rat.) That people take such risks even when the outcome upsets them and makes them mad suggests that prayer failure is doing something useful in this spirituality.
Indeed. At the Vineyard, when everyday prayer seems to fail-prayer in which someone's life does not hang in the balance-people explain that the failure is part of God's plan to build a better relationship with the person praying. God gives evidence of his existence to those who need it, they say, but he wants his more mature followers to turn to him for the sake of a relationship and not for his stuff. In this developmental trajectory, God always answers your prayers specifically only if you are new to belief. He gives you concrete signs of his supernatural reality because you need to know that he is really there. Then, people say, he leads you into a relationship in which you do not need these trinkets, as if answering prayer directly were like getting a gift bag at a wedding: nice, but not the point.
...People called this "spiritual maturity." They contrasted the giggly euphoria of being a new Christian with the sober demands of being there for the long haul. They spoke of the first stage as "falling in love" with Jesus. Everybody agreed that this was a fabulous period in your life. God always seemed to be there and to indulge every whim, to care for you in ways you hadn't expected, to create-as one woman put it-"a relationship with the man of my dreams." You developed spiritual maturity when you loved God even when he didn't act like a sugar daddy. People used the word "walk" to frame their experience of God as a journey, speaking casually about where they were on their "walk with God." The journey begins with falling in love and develops as the love ripens and becomes mundane, love in the context of diapers and mortgage payments. When small prayers weren't answered, or when in hindsight it was clear that God's choice had been a good one (you really liked Colorado State), people would say that God knew better than you what you needed. But when bigger prayers went wrong-and especially, it seemed, when the unanswered prayers concerned money-people often said that God gave them the hard times because he wanted them to depend upon him alone.

Elaine still didn't know exactly what she would do. Her plan was to go get some basic medical training at this woman's mission school and then head to Africa. She didn't have a particular destination, although she was praying for one. She needed, she thought, $10,000 a year, and she made up a letter asking people to donate. (When I expressed surprise about this to another member of the church, he told me that it was pretty cheap. Sending a family to Africa, he said, could cost $80,000 a year.)

Many scholars these days-as I have earlier pointed out-argue that there is something evolutionarily hardwired about a belief in God. They argue that because our minds evolved to help us survive the assault of predators, human or otherwise, we are quick to infer the presence of agents, even when we cannot see them, or to see human faces in clouds and machines. They are undoubtedly correct. But the problem of faith is not finding the idea of God plausible but sustaining that belief in the face of disconfirmation. Elaine's problem was not that she could not believe in God; her problem was that she did believe, and she had acted on her belief, and her belief-as she had understood it ("he will give if you ask")-crashed into real-world fact. She had prayed repeatedly, insistently, and determinedly for God to give her a job, and every one of the prayers, before each of those interviews, had failed. Yet Elaine wasn't ready to give up on God, so instead she learned how to experience God so that his being real to her became the point of her prayer-not the job she had prayed for. That is the way prayer disconfirmation can paradoxically strengthen spiritual commitment.

In a study of the relationship between prayer and mental illness, when God was experienced as remote or not loving, there was a direct relationship between prayer and psychopathology; but that when God was experienced as close and intimate, the more someone prayed, the less ill they were. In another study of caregivers, prayer was associated with fewer health problems and better quality of life. In a study of people with devastating medical conditions-cancer, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, and the like-belief in a loving higher power and a positive worldview were associated with better health. In a private Christian college in southern California, the quality of someone's attachment to God significantly decreased perceived stress and did so more effectively than the quality of that person's relationships with other people. A secure attachment to God (compared to an insecure attachment) protects college women against eating disorders and college men against excessive drinking and drugs.21 [21. This work is reported in a series of scientific articles: Woods et al. 1999; Banthia et al. 2007; Bradshaw, Ellison, and Flannelly 2008; Campbell, Yoon, and Johnstone 2010; Reiner et al. 2010; Horton et al. 2010; Homan and Boyatzis 2010. The sociologist Christopher Ellison has been involved in a variety of these studies and continues to work on the relationship between religion and health.]
And in general, consciously reflecting on the importance of God seems to make people more relaxed. In one recent study, psychologists gave a hard task to a group of subjects, some of whom were religious and some of whom were not. Those who were religious and encouraged to think about their religion (by writing a paragraph about what religion meant to them) were less distressed physiologically when they made errors than either the atheists or the religious subjects who wrote about their favorite season. That is, whereas the "control" subjects felt agitated when they made a mistake (inevitably, given that the task was deliberately frustrating), those who had been thinking about God were less bothered, and the calmness showed up in their brain scans.22 Indeed, a relationship with God makes people happy. White Protestant evangelicals-for whom a personal relationship with Jesus is the route to salvation, whether or not they are charismatic-are more likely to report that they are very happy than white mainstream Protestants. In fact (as John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge report in an eye-opening book entitled God Is Back), going to church weekly, as compared to not going at all, has the same effect on reported happiness as moving from the bottom quartile of the income distribution to the top quartile.23 That's a jump.

The way this evangelical Christianity handles the classic logical puzzle of how a powerful and loving God permits suffering makes it very clear that for these Christians, religion is not about explaining reality but about transforming it: making it possible to trust that the world is good, despite ample evidence to the contrary, and to hope, despite loneliness and despair. Anthropologists have come to realize that this is true of all faiths. It was the "armchair" anthropologists like Sir James George Frazer, so called because they theorized on the basis of travelers' tales and missionary reports read in upholstered comfort, who presumed that religion emerged primarily as an explanation of reality, the science of prescientific people. Once anthropologists began to do fieldwork and to live among the people they sought to understand, they recognized that while religion did make sense of the world for its people, it was far more a way to manage fear and disappointment. The British ethnographer Godfrey Lienhardt captured this insight in a moment in his fieldwork among a nomadic cattle-owning people in southern Sudan. He was with a Dinka man hurrying back to his family in the late afternoon when the man stopped to tie a knot in the grass to prevent the sun from going down. Lienhardt realized that the man didn't think that the knot would hold the sun up, as if it were a string to tie a ball. Tying the knot was a way of making his hope more real for him.
Yet while faith is generally more about managing pain than explaining it, the straightforward rejection of God-as-explanation in experiential evangelical Christianity is really rather striking. I think it results from a social world where, in some quite fundamental way, modern believers don't need religion to explain anything at all. They have plenty of scientific accounts for why the world is as it is and why some bodies rather than others fall ill. What they want from faith is to feel better than they did without faith. They want a sense of purpose; they want to know that what they do is not meaningless; they want trust and love and resilience when things go badly. In short, they want help when their dreams fall short. This can be confusing to nonreligious observers, because the evangelical talk around God is all about God's power and God's ability to deliver. But when you look at what people actually do in the religion, you see that they want a God who helps them to cope when the going gets tough.