A Review of Ronnie Floyd’s “How to Pray” (20th Anniversary Edition)
The Fundamentalism of Prayer
Even in Christian circles, everything that was old is new again — and Christians are just as susceptible to buying things rereleased and repackaged. Ronnie Floyd’s How to Pray is a book that is 20 years old, and is being given new life in an anniversary edition. According to his own words in the introduction, Floyd says he has rewritten the whole book top to bottom and the 20th anniversary edition, now being released, is a wholly different product than what came out 20 years ago. That statement seems to have been based on the fact that new chapters have been added.
How to Pray is the sort of book where I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised by, and be not as evangelical as I feared based on the author’s credentials. Ronnie Floyd, for those of you who don’t know, was a past president of the Southern Baptist Convention, a group responsible for the religious culture wars in the States and the product of more division and disunity than you can shake a stick at. He’s also a spiritual advisor to none other than the good ol’ adulterer and current U.S. President Donald Trump — though he has gone on record, to his credit, to say that if Hillary Clinton had won the vote, he would have gladly worked for her, too. He’s also been the President of the U.S. National Day of Prayer, and, the same week that this book came out in 2019, stepped down as the pastor of the church he had ministered at for 30 years or so, in order to take a job in the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive council.
While that is quite the colourful résumé, one that might make progressive Christians run away from How to Pray without cracking open the cover, I must say that this book takes a special place in the annals of my reviewing of Christian books. I’ve read worse books in terms of writing style but I don’t think I’ve read a worse book in terms of theology. Floyd is concerned with being a, quote, “prayer warrior” who puts on the armour of God to fight Satan every day of the week. God is painted as a granter of supernatural powers to those who go without food for 40 days, and someone who has a bone of contention to pick with those who are not in right relations with other people. That’s right. In How to Pray, there’s the outrageous assertion that God will not listen to your prayers if your relationship with your younger sister or aging father is strained. Apparently, this statement was in the original version of the book. So much for being a complete rewrite.
In line with his lines about “spiritual warfare” (that is, praying to God to defeat the forces of Satan), the author almost weaponizes God and makes him jingoistic — this is a God that you have to pray to to save America, after all (the subject of an entire chapter). After reading this book, I’m sure that new Christians (Floyd wrote the book for both rookies and veterans of prayer) must think that God is a kind of Rambo figure, ready to go to war throwing fireballs at, well, whomever crosses his path. Clearly, this type of God is not my God.
I’ve always said that so long as an author isn’t looking to harm other people with their brand of religion, it’s generally all good. However, this book is so fundamentalist in its flavourings that I’m actually wondering if it is a put-on — a parody of all things evangelical. It is so extreme to almost be hilarious. The problem is is that this book isn’t hilarious. It’s drop-dead serious. For this reason, and those outlined above, I cannot recommend this book to anyone, even fundamentalists. You need to walk slowly away from How to Pray — 20th anniversary edition or otherwise — should you encounter its shoddy belief system and bad advice. As Floyd himself would pose it (and as a question at that, as he does in the book), “Enough said?”
Ronnie Floyd’s How to Pray: Developing an Intimate Relationship with God (20th Anniversary Edition) was published by Thomas Nelson on April 2, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
