How America prays

So he put into action his idea of a nonpartisan Presidential Prayer Team. A website was set up (www.presidentialprayerteam.org), and Americans were invited to sign up to pray daily for the president and other US officials and their families. The goal is to mobilize at least 2.8 million citizens. The staff researches official schedules for the coming week and posts requests for prayer, including suggestions of which officials to support daily. "Early on, we had 25,000 Americans a day signing up," Hunter says. So far, they have gained 1.2 million members.

"Most important, President Bush has said many times that he feels those prayers," says Evelyn Christenson, founder of United Prayer Ministry, who is on the team. Long active in the evangelical prayer movement, she has written prayer guides used around the world, and has traveled on five continents. When she travels, Ms. Christenson says, a thousand people are on a prayer chain supporting her 24 hours a day.

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But if last September's events united a wide variety of people in prayer, it also spotlighted the dark historical truth that religion plays a role in conflict as well as in human progress. Many Americans have joined interfaith prayer services to help foster understanding and protect the nation's pluralistic unity. The TIPP poll shows that 26 percent of Americans who pray are more interested than before in praying with people of different faiths.

"I have felt a more intense desire than ever in my life to connect with people of other religions, to sit with them and study their sacred texts and hear the prayers they offer – and to share my own," says Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, vice president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

Consequently, the center has convened gatherings across traditions. "It's probably the first time an imam offered a prayer in a Kosher steak house!" he adds.

Yet tensions have also increased as some religious and media voices have taken a stridently antagonistic stance toward Islam. For a decade, there has been a worldwide evangelical prayer movement to convert those seen as being under the influence of Satan. The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, issues guides for how to pray to convert Muslims, Jews, and others. But now, inflammatory language from Franklin Graham and others, includingcolumnists and talk-show hosts, is portraying Islam as violent and evil – and is being disseminated with little opposition.

Both Christians and Muslims emphasize the importance of spreading the faith. But what concerns some observers is the increasingly ideological thrust of certain groups.

They say America's future depends on finding an "authentictoleration." "In a world ruled by ideologies – whether secular or religious, whether Protestant Fundamentalism or Islamicism – there is no room for listening, only struggle and conflict," warns theologian A.J. Conyers in a recent op-ed column.

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Over the course of the year, Americans' priorities for prayer have shifted with developments. Jeff Kaster, a college teacher in St. Cloud, Minn., is concerned about a possible war against Iraq: "My prayers are for peace and wisdom in finding nonviolent solutions to these issues."

David Weiss, a real-estate agent in Phoenix, says he prays "for guidance for senators and Bush and Colin Powell so they have insight for a peaceful resolution in the Middle East."

Along with prayers to free people from anxiety and confusion, Phyllis Tickle, contributing religious editor for Publishers Weekly, seeks an answer to what she sees as a bellicose US response. "My deep concern is that we've responded with 1950s rhetoric that is out of sync with where we are as people of the globe today," she says.

With stakes so much higher now, some say they are praying more humbly. "One answer to prayer was that if I'm doing what God directs me to do – faithfully and with courage – He will take care of the whole," Ms. Gaylord says. "But if I don't do my part ... or [if I] leave the world to take care of itself, how can we expect to see the completeness of the whole?"

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