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What happened to their defensive prayers?
Sadly they may have made things worse.
The problem is, when you open yourself up to spiritual forces anything can come through that door... Including your own paranoia... Which is more often attacking you more than demons are.
There was actually this cult, it's still around today, but is so small time it's virtually extinct, called Christian Science. It was not a league of Scientists who were Christians, it wasn't Science at all, it wasn't even Christian as it had more to do with shit on the level of Chris-Chan's Dimensional Merge than anything in the bible.
(Science was a newish term at the time, before they used to call what we call Science "Natural Philosophy", so calling their Group Christian Science was basically the olde timey version of when your Crazy Hippie Aunt watches New Age "Quantum Enlightenment" nonsense on Gaia)
At one point because the Church was grilling them about being called Christian but having nothing to do with the faith, the leader claimed she was the second coming of Jesus and that the powers Christian Science (doesn't really at all) gives you are the same ones Jesus had.
Later in life when her health started to fail, she stayed in a compound and got progressively worse... Because the fear that her "enemies" were "attacking her with Animal Magnetism!" was making her so paranoid that it was destroying her health.
She had live in members of her cult in constant meditation to shun away the sickness.
It got to the point where she'd claim her food was poisoned by "Evil Vibes", resulting in the Chefs having to cook two versions of the same meal in order to get her to eat. One that looked "eh", for her to say it was poisoned, and another that looked fresher to be "After the food was cleansed with psychic powers", if they didn't do this little LARP session of "psychically cleansing the food" and have the right props, she would not eat.
Basically claiming a defensive stance when there's no real threat is a bad idea in certain cases, because the result is you getting so prepared for an attack that you're tense and believe the attacker is everywhere.
But not being defensive at all leaves you open.
Balance in all things.
Before I go, my favorite funfact about Christian Science is the founder of it was a woman who practiced Homeopathy and Phrenology to understand her own illnesses (Likely just hypochondria if history is to be believed), which at the time were considered legitimate forms of medical practice....
But that's not the funfact
And neither is the fact that Homeopathy was highly praised at the time because REAL Medicine was so poor it actually caused more problems than it solved. So because people didn't know any better, it was believed Homeopathy was "The biggest game in town", even though today we realize Homeopathy literally doesn't do anything at all. (Yes, No Medicine was better than Any Medicine at one opint)
What IS the funfact, is after various alleged religious visions, Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, while treating a patient of hers withheld Homeopathic Medicine in place of sugar pills... and her patient got better anyway.
Instead of coming to the conclusion that Homeopathy is an absolute sham, she believed she had successfully and secretly taught a man to cure himself with magical science....
She was so close to a groundbreaking discovery, just not the one she walked away with. It'd be hilarious if Christian Science wasn't responsible for murdering so many children through intentional neglect.
Even at the time, most people know homeopathy was a crock, even when Hahnemann started the quackery.
And Mary Baker Eddy was so mentally ill that she believed her own bullshit. Just another example of the infinite gullibility of cult followers.
She did, she had a history of lying and hypochondria, and gaslighting herself into believing her own lies because of the hypochondria.
She started suspecting she had powers after she believed she had cured her own paralysis...
The doctor who treated her would review his case files for biographers, and revealed he never believed her to be in critical injury nor even implied that she had any kind of paralysis. What really happened is her own hysteria caused her to blatantly misinterpret everything he said in the worst way possible.
The only reason she had as many followers as she did was because her system actually was helpful. Not because she had powers or anything, but at the time hers was one of the only movements that barred people from smoking, something that people believed was not only harmless, but healthy for you. So people actually were seeing notable improvements in their health and longevity... because they stopped smoking, not because they had magic powers.
There was also the not allowing people to go to the doctor at a time where the doctor was more likely to kill you than your disease.
As Medical Science got better, Christian Science became less helpful and more detrimental.
People really were seeing miracles, Mark Twain even directly stated that Christian Science would one day be bigger than the Roman Empire because of what it was doing for people....
But no one realized it was from abstaining from tobacco
I'm glad you left out, "thoughts" because we all know that was never a factor in this.
Obviously, her witch magic was more powerful. She gets a lot of mana from eating all those cats and dogs.