Our Backstory

To provide you with some background on the Pray for Democracy/Act for Democracy Campaign, I need to begin by giving you a bit of my story. I grew up a Lutheran and even went to my last two years of high school and first two years of college at a Lutheran prep school studying to be a minister. That didn’t work out and I went on to be something of a leader in the Student Movement in the 1960s/1970s and, at the same time, studied philosophy.

Since then, in addition to playing a role in the Impact Investment and Business Movement, I have continued to do philosophy. By now, I’ve formulated a philosophy, which I call Spiritual Realism, that has what I believe are some important things to say about prayer.

Faster-Than-Light. For me, philosophically, everything clicked together when I encountered the work of Stanford Professor William A. Tiller. His core insight was that the speed-of-light is not the boundary beyond which nothing exists. Rather, the speed-of-light is just the boundary beyond which matter cannot exist. (One of the implications of E=MC2 is that mass increases to infinity at the speed of light.)[RB1.1][RB1.2] Whole realms of non-physical spiritual reality exist vibrating faster-than-light.

Professor Tiller posited that we make connections between the Spiritual Realm (vibrating faster-than-light) and the Physical Realm (vibrating slower-than-light) through human intention. He characterized this as the “coupled state.” He undertook a whole variety of scientifically rigorous double-blind experiments that validated his insight that, when the coupled state was established, human intention could change physical reality at significant distances.

Morphic Fields. British Botanist and Embryologist Rupert Sheldrake provides one of the other main influences in the formulation of Spiritual Realism. One school of embryological thought suggests that embryos develop too rapidly to be accounted for by their DNA structure alone. Rather, this school suggests that embryos are the seed forms that give rise to non-material energy scaffolding called “Morphogenic Fields” that guide the formation of the embryo.

Sheldrake generalized this insight from embryology to propound that what he calls “Morphic Fields” guide the emergence of many forms of physical reality. These Morphic Fields can be strengthened over time by “Morphic Resonance”. Acupuncture meridians can be seen as an instance of Morphic fields manifesting Morphic Resonance. According to this way of thinking, the hunting, rain, and planting rituals of traditional cultures are examples of creating and strengthening Morphic Fields in order to bring about success in a hunt, or the occurrence of rain, or a bountiful harvest.

Putting the work of Tiller and Sheldrake together, Spiritual Realism proposes that Morphic Fields structure reality in the faster-than-light Spiritual Realm. If we manifest the coupled state by acting in sync with these Morphic Fields we can produce a force to accomplish our aims that is more powerful than acting in the slower-than-light physical realm alone.

The Power of Prayer. Sincere, strongly felt prayer is the simplest way to establish the coupled state and constitute or strengthen a Morphic Field that can provide us with significant assistance in accomplishing whatever it is that we are praying for.

For those with a religious orientation, we can say that when Morphic Fields, created or strengthened by prayer, resonate with God’s Will they can receive an outpouring of God’s Grace, contributing additional impetus to the possibility that the prayers are answered positively. (As the saying popularized by Ben Franklin goes, ‘God helps those who help themselves.’)

Spiritual Realism’s understanding of the way prayer works has helped me make sense of the power of prayer, which so many of us have experienced, and it provides a positive explanation for the importance of launching a Pray for Democracy/Act for Democracy Campaign.

Countering the Christian Nationalists is the negative reason for launching this campaign. The Christian Nationalists pray a lot for Trump and for their own empowerment, which means they are praying against Democracy. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth even went so far as to exhort people to get down on their knees and pray to a capricious, vengeful God for victory in the Iran War through "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy."

Sadly, those of us on the other side of this spiritual divide pray significantly less and in a less organized fashion, which leaves us with a big Prayer Gap. And, if we accept that prayer impacts the physical world (and certainly the political world), a big Prayer Gap is a very bad thing.

The Campaign. We can help close the Prayer Gap and mobilize the spiritual forces that support Democracy with a Pray for Democracy/Act for Democracy Campaign. The numbers of those who are religious and/or spiritual but not Christian Nationalists far outweigh the Christian Nationalists.

A Pray for Democracy/Act for Democracy Campaign can engage all of us who feel spiritually disenfranchised from the political process, helping us connect our spiritual faith with our faith in Democracy in ways that could make an impact all across our country on November 3, 2026 and beyond.

Agreeing to Pray. All Prayers for Democracy help build the Democratic Morphic Field and strengthen the Spirit of Democracy (one way to name the Democratic Morphic Field). It’s something we can do anytime, anywhere. It costs us nothing, contains no calories and, according to the logic presented in this essay, the payoff can be substantial.

Perhaps some of us can agree to Pray for Democracy together in our families, in our communities, and in our Houses of Worship. Let’s call forth the power of the Spirit of Democracy and spiritual force of love and justice that is manifest at the heart of Buddhism and Christianity and Hinduism and Islam and Judaism and Taoism and the Faiths of Traditional Peoples to help us overcome the threats that Democracy is facing right now.

For those of us who are spiritual but not religious, praying for Democracy can be a way to affirm and engage our spirituality to help accomplish a purpose in the world.

Clearly, we can agree that Praying for Democracy is no substitute for the political work of organizing and campaigning and making donations and voting. For a Morphic Field to manifest in the physical world, it requires physical actions through which it can manifest.

We don’t need to overmatch the number of prayers prayed by the Christian Nationalists. We just need to build a powerful enough Morphic Field to engage completely, through Morphic Resonance, with the Spirit of Democracy and the other Pro-Democracy spiritual forces to bring them through to full manifestation in the Physical realm.

If we are blessed with success in overcoming the threats to Democracy, we can even continue to pray and to build the Morphic Field that is the Spirit of Democracy as a force for helping us manifest the peace and the justice and the health and the well-being and the prosperity and the climate security inherent in the promise of a fully realized Democracy here in the United States and around the world.

Let us pray.