Pay To Pray - God For Sale!

“Pay-to-play” is a phrase one hears from time to time around Capitol Hill and it’s usually not as a preface to good news or a compliment. Now comes a study of whether and how much are people willing to pay for prayers.

This is no joke. The study was conducted following Hurricane Florence in September 2018, according to Reasons to Believe, which reported that “Linda Thunström, an economist at the University of Wyoming, [who] teamed up with Shiri Noy, an anthropologist-sociologist at Denison University in Ohio.”

The study was designed as “an incentivized experiment on 482 North Carolinians who suffered some kind of hardship as a result of the hurricane. Thunström and Noy preselected the 482 North Carolinians so that they would fall into one of these two groups:

“(1) People who believed in God and identified themselves as Christians, and (2) people who denied or were unsure of God’s existence and identified themselves as either atheists or agnostics. People who held to other religious beliefs were excluded from the experiment.”

The participants were each paid a standard amount for their time, plus $5 to be used in the study process by exchanging some or all of Mr. Lincoln’s bill for:

• Prayers from a stranger who is a Christian
• Supportive thoughts from a Christian stranger
• Thoughts from a stranger who is an atheist
• Prayers from a priest