Churches have carried on this tradition of encouraging each other to pray, through prayer letters and prayer phone chains and prayer breakfasts and prayer groups. With that context in mind, Facebook shouldn't cheapen prayer any more than the Postal Service or the telephone does.

"Social media platforms are merely a means of communication," Russell Moore, president-elect of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and an active Twitter user, told me. "Asking for prayer via Twitter or Facebook is no different than calling someone and saying, 'We should really pray for this.'

"Social media can be used for harmful purposes, obviously. I'd be concerned about rumors spreading quickly over social media. But social media can be a tremendous force for good in alerting people to things they can be praying about right away."

But what I saw on Twitter and Facebook in the hours after the Boston bombings and the Texas explosion wasn't just faithful people reminding other faithful people to drop everything and pray. It was also the non-religious invoking prayer in a way that they wouldn't under normal circumstances.

At first, this kind of prayer also appears to be nothing new. It seems to confirm the old, disproven "there are no atheists in foxholes" myth—that when confronted with death and destruction, even a hardened skeptic is moved to seek God.

"As a Christian, I would see it as an evidence of a natural human understanding of dependence," Moore said. "People who live their lives with an illusion of independence and self-sufficiency, when a crisis happens, are often driven to prayer, or at least to call upon people to pray...I think that's a natural reaction."

It is a natural reaction for some. I grew up in Manhattan, and September 11th, 2001 was the second day of my senior year of high school. Though I didn't believe in God at the time, I found myself saying, "God bless you" to my friends as we parted ways that day, and in the days that followed. That faint, involuntary urge to call on God's name soon grew into a desire to read His word and then a hunger for friendships with people who believed in Him. Two years later, I said out loud what I knew in my heart was true: "I am a Christian."

But I'm not sure that's really what's going on here. I don't think the outpouring of post-Boston social-media prayer was fueled by a bunch of people who, in the face of tragedy, are suddenly eager to seek God. As Elizabeth Drescher writes in a well-done piece at Religion Dispatches, it didn't take long for the "pray for Boston" meme to die; it was soon replaced by other, more practical sentiments. I noticed that, too. Here it is in graph form—check out how quickly the phrase "pray for Boston" surged on Twitter on Monday, and then how quickly it fell:

My friends who wrote of praying on Monday night soon began thinking about Boston, or standing with Boston, or loving Boston. It's interesting to see what words besides prayer have emerged as the way to respond to and process the terrible things that happened, and continued to happen, in the city.