I agree that the point of the verse is likely to say "the purpose of prayer is to pray to God and you shouldn't be doing so to show off to people". At least, that's what I was taught in church.
That being said, I can see precisely two reasons to pray in a public setting:
That being said, I can see precisely two reasons to pray in a public setting:
- To make a public spectacle: this is explicitly forbidden by Jesus, making the Christian prayer ironically non-Christian.
- To ask God for guidance before a meeting: you can argue one way or the other whether or not this counts as a spectacle, but at the end of the day the adherents could all pray silently and remove all doubt, but they don't.
