Right after the Paris attack it seemed like most Christians were posting #prayforparis on social media. And it was a beautiful thing, supposedly –even a lot of atheists were saying that we should take a small break from criticizing religion. #Prayforparis, they said, showed that Christians had a heart and that they were grieving; we should leave it alone.

Among these atheists who said #prayforparis should be left alone by atheists has been Hemant Mehta, my fellow blogger over at The Friendly Atheist. He had a few choice words for any atheist who dared criticize the hashtag:

The hashtags people were using in the wake of the massacre included PrayForParis and PrayForPeace. Now, I’m assuming I agree with most of you that prayer doesn’t fix anything here. It’s not going to solve terrorism, it’s not going to bring anyone back to life. So when someone on Facebook or Twitter uses it, we get angry. You just want to yell at the screen, religion played a role in the massacre; religion sure as hell isn’t gonna fix it. But I have a hard time when atheists tell other people how they should grieve. For a lot of religious people, praying for Paris is literally all they can do. It’s the only thing they know how to do in a time of crisis. It’s helping them process the carnage and disaster. And that’s the thing. It’s about them. It helps them. Yeah, it doesn’t help the people in Paris, but there’s not much your relatives in the U.S. can do about it. So they resort to prayer. So when we respond by telling them “Your prayers aren’t helping” or something of that nature, it’s insensitive and it’s probably gonna backfire, because instead of focusing on the victims, now you’re making it all about you.

I don’t quite take that stance. It doesn’t mean I don’t understand grief. It means that I think that it’s healthy, even in the face of grief, to be skeptical, and to think about how the ways we deal with grief may have longer-term consequences.

And indeed, it turns out that the empathy of #prayforparis didn’t necessarily…seem to go very far. Indeed, many of these Christians, in the wake of the #prayforparis frenzy, were considerably cruel — enough Christians are opposed to accepting refugees from war-torn Syria that the House of Representatives, due to enormous pressure from its constituency, has a veto-proof majority regarding restrictions on immigrants that would effectively bring the number of Syrian refugees down to zero, according the the director of the FBI. As CNN puts it:

FBI Director James Carney has expressed deep concerns about the bill, two U.S. officials tell CNN. Comey has told administration and congressional officials that the legislation would make it impossible to allow any refugees into the U.S., and could even affect the ability of travelers from about three dozen countries that are allowed easier travel to the U.S. under the visa waiver program, the officials say.

These are refugees from war-torn areas, remember. Many of them came into Paris to escape persecution. How heartless do you have to be to turn them away?

What happened to the beautiful spirit of #prayforparis? Isn’t this a beacon of empathy that we should respect? How could that same empathy be so shortchanged when it came to looking at things here, in the United States?

And most of the Republican candidates — Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal (who recently dropped out), John Kasich, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, and Donald Trump — are against letting refugees in altogether. This is due, largely, to the pressure of those on the religious right. How strange. Weren’t these the nice, kind people who were praying for Paris? The generous people with the hashtag and the changed profile pictures and the flowers and the outreach and support?

A clue is found in the more “liberal” side of the viewpoint among the Christian right. The only two Republican candidates who will allow any Syrian refugees in. Unsurprisingly, Jeb Bush and, more surprisingly (until you find out the terms) Ted Cruz. On one condition.

We filter them to find out whether they’re Christian.

You’d almost think that #prayforparis is, at least for some people, a drive to return back to a stronger, better insulated Christianity in a time of crisis…provoking exclusionary responses like this (an observation that, it seems, would be cordoned off as unhealthy by influential atheists like Hemant Mehta).

To illustrate this in a more everyday example…I dunno if you’ve ever experienced this, but it’s happened to me repeatedly. You’re in a conversation with a Christian, and eventually you make a point that’s not so easy to refute. They think for a second, and then they say something that seems like care, like that they hope God touches your heart, or that you’ll stop rebelling against God, or that they hope you’ll one day know the love to be found in Christ before it’s too late. And if it’s in person, they may lean in, touch your hand or shoulder, and say something like, “I’ll pray for you” before they leave the conversation.

Now, a lot of them, like the Christians with #prayforparis, may not actually pray. But those that do…what are they praying? Usually — and I know this from being a Christian for a few years — it’s something along the lines of, “Jesus, please touch Peter’s heart so that he’ll come to you. Help him see the error of his ways, Lord God. I just love him and care about him and I want him to see your glory and your love before it’s too late, dear God. The beauty of your sacrifice and your holiness. Cleanse his heart from hatred and animosity, and open it up to your wisdom and truth please, Lord. In the name of your Son, I pray, Amen.”

Or something like that. The wording may vary depending on your denomination — Christians who read this can quibble about the “proper” wording in the comments. But from my perspective it’s basically the Christian talking to themselves, saying that they’re right, I’m wrong, and God’s attitude underlines how important it is for me to realize it.

In other words, prayer is the best tool many Christians have in their arsenal to highlight the importance of Christianity above all other concerns and contexts. For these Christians, prayer takes secular situations and gives a more Christianity-centered view of them. What this means is that many Christians can take something as disturbing as death and, by putting that death in a Christ-centered scheme, they can be reassured that God is making everything OK. One of the things that comforted me as a Christian was the realization, for example, that God was on His throne and completely in control of situations, no matter how traumatic what happened was. And He loved me. Here was the most powerful force in the universe, and He was going to make it alright. Christianity became most prominent in my life when I was struggling.

But this also has a downside, oftentimes. As many Christians become closer to this God through prayer, they naturally distance themselves from those who don’t believe or oppose their God, making these other people part of a kind of outgroup. When they’re praying for the outgroup, they’re comforting themselves with the knowledge that God is supreme, and they may want them to come to Christ — but they assume that coming to Christ is the greatest good. Where before there may have been a friendship in which they could discuss, rationally, the existence or nonexistence of God, prayer now separates them from the outgroup, to an extent, even as it binds them closer to Christianity and increases their yearning that the outgroup would join them.

Because of this outgroup-creating property, prayer often insulates and exalts a Christian view of events. When a prayer addresses a situation that involves the outgroup of the church, it often has the effect of underlining the fact that the outgroup is the outgroup, creating further separation. Sure, the rhetoric may be loving, caring, etc. in Christianeze. And it may be tear-jerkingly heartfelt. But it is also, more often than not, a way to insert Christian bias (and thus partisanship) into situations that no other sacrament in Christianity can rival.

And that is how #prayforparis, in the minds of many Christians, is completely compatible with “don’t let any non-Christian refugees in.” In a way analogous to how a Christian crusader’s prayer for a predominantly Christian city that had just been attacked by Muslim forces prompted more — not less — animosity towards Muslims, so #prayforparis, for many Christians on the right, seems to inspire an anti-Muslim sentiment or sense of vengeance — a too-often militant Christian response to what is falsely seen as a representative Muslim attack on Western soil.

This is why I think that the rhetoric of #prayforparis, heartfelt as it may be, may also be somewhat dangerous for the Christians among us with a crusader-like mentality. I wish that more Christians realized that this incident does not need to be bathed in exclusively Christian sentiment. Rather, there needs to be an openness in attitude, a sense that more than a prayer that is held captive by a strongly, often militantly, Christian worldview, situations like Paris need empathy for all involved — for the Muslim as much as for the Christian.

Muslims don’t believe as Christians do (or as I do, for that matter). What we need to do is look past the prayer that insulates the Christian tradition to the clear fact that we are all part of one humanity — what matters fundamentally is friendship with the other human beings we are with. I cannot help thinking, when looking at the Christian right, that if there was more of a focus on empathy for all, regardless of nationality, more than a focus on insulating Paris with a Christian-crusader type of attitude with prayer, there would be more support for refugees.

There is something valuable in the motif of #prayforparis — a sense of empathy that we as atheists, as Hemant mentions, would do well to respect and, in turn, empathize with. But we shouldn’t so strongly cordon off criticism of such prayer that we fail to encourage the realization that this empathy needs to break beyond the barriers of many Christian traditions. It needs to be associated with people regardless of their creed, without any problematic limitations from the prejudices of an imaginary God. In these sensitive times, if we want to avoid yet another manifestation of the crusader’s spirit, we need to realize that refugees need our love more than they need our religion, that they need our respect more than they need our demonization, and that they need our friendship more than they need our prayers.

Thank you for reading.