For years, surveys have shown that more than 80 percent of Americans pray regularly.
They pray in homes, houses of worship and on the Internet. They pray behind the wheel, while walking the dog, standing in line at banks. They pray alone and with others. And they regularly propel books on prayer onto the best-seller lists, with millions of copies sold.
Why? The answer, scholars of religion say, reflects not just formal theology but the nature and needs of humankind.
Human beings want to communicate with God, says the Rev. Siang-Yang Tan, a professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif.
"Prayer is a powerful means to experience God's presence, God's peace, God's grace and God's wisdom," said Tan, senior pastor of the First Evangelical Church in Glendale, Calif., who is also a practicing clinical psychologist.
Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff, rector at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, says the instinct is part of what makes humans human. "Their prayer may not be liturgically appropriate, and it probably does not come out of thoroughly developed theology, but the instinct to pray is universal and natural for all," Dorff wrote in Knowing God: Jewish Journeys to the Unknowable.
People also pray because faith traditions require it.
Christians are told to "pray without ceasing." With the start of Advent on Dec. 3, they will offer many prayers in preparation for Christmas. Muslims are commanded to pray five times a day, and Jews three times a day.
It is in prayer that people interact with God "most intensely," said Dorff, who is also a philosopher and ethicist.
"The regimen of prayer forces us to stop our normal activities and to take a serious look at life, and that alone may enable us to strengthen our moral resolve," said Dorff. Like a close friendship, an intimate relationship with God also requires constant communication, the rabbi said.
Muslim scholar Muzammil H. Siddiqi, of the Islamic Society of Orange County in Garden Grove, Calif., said, "Prayer is nourishment for the soul."
The meaning of - and desire for - prayer has long intrigued religious figures. Perhaps no one has expressed that longing for the divine, in the Christian context, better than St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), the first philosopher of Christianity and author of The Confessions.
"You awaken us to delight in your praises," he wrote, "for you made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it reposes in you."
