Recently I found myself watching a documentary about Shawn Mendes, a Canadian pop singer/song-writer. During the documentary we learn about Shawn’s ambition to not just play at but to sell out a stadium in Toronto called the Rogers Center. Part of the film showing us this journey is seeing a journal where Shawn has written the same thing again and again: ‘I will sell out the Rogers Center’. What was he doing, and why was he doing it?

Apparently, this is something called manifesting, which has recently been given a boost thanks to the pandemic and the Tiktokification of information. Manifesting has become a very broad term and means different things to people. On one hand you have the concept of “if you believe in it enough it will happen”, the “law of attraction” and books like The Secret. But more recently the definition of manifesting has expanded to include such things as CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), planning, visualising, and positive thinking. For this reason I think a better term for the pernicious type of manifesting is “magical thinking“.

Given this, where does Shawn Mendes writing the same thing again & again sit on the manifesting spectrum? I’m not sure to be honest, probably somewhere in the middle. Pretty harmless but best not indulged too seriously. Because as others have written, magical thinking has a risky downward spiral built into it which is: if your dreams don’t happen for you, maybe you didn’t want them/believe in them enough. But at the same time, Shawn Mendes combines his manifesting with action, and in the film does end up selling out the Rogers Center. Good for him I suppose.

When I was a Christian there was a thing called a “testimony”, this was your story of “how you became a Christian” and was often used in recruitment, trying to get other people to become Christians. Part of my testimony when I was a Christian was how on my very first day when I started working for the Church of England we had a guy called John Mumford speak at staff meeting and he prayed for the entire staff. And while he was doing that he said “now some of you your hands or your top lip will be tingling right now” and if that was you you were to come forward to get prayed for. Now my top lip was tingling which I thought was amazing, and later on I used to tell this story as part of my testimony & highlight how God had got my attention by causing my top lip to tingle. Then one day a Christian friend heard that story and said “oh the tingling lip thing, yeah John’s been doing that for years”. And it turns out getting pins and needles or tingling sensations in your body, especially during moments of high emotion is not uncommon. And I remember feeling like a sucker, and later on when I deconverted realising that this guy had just been using normal body reactions but putting a Christian veneer over them.

Really, with a sufficient understanding of confirmation bias most secular people would understand that prayer is just magical thinking with a different name. There is a specific type of groupthink that goes on that allows prayer (the kind of prayer that the Christian God supposedly answers) to persist. I’m stealing this from a very good YouTube video that I haven’t been able to find, but it goes like this: if you pray to God, and he answers your prayer, God is real and good; if you pray to God, and he doesn’t answer your prayer, then either God is real and there is a good reason he hasn’t answered your prayer, or God is real and you need to Wait and there is a good reason you need to wait. So you see if you submit to this idea of prayer God is real and he never fails.

I don’t know how many Christians know that they have tested empirically whether prayer works and the results were incredibly underwhelming. But then I suppose Christians would argue that the Bible says “do not test the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 6:16), which is convenient. But then the Bible also says to “test everything” (1 Thessalonians 5:21) so who knows.

In the world I see one day we will be post-religion and we will use the phrase “I’m thinking of you” instead of “I’m praying for you”. And we will back up our words with caring action when we can, instead of petitioning a deity we have created in our minds.