Before I start, I'm semi-spirtual/religious myself, but my "prayers" are private (if you can call them that... I'd call them comments and conversations to a god I don't even know is listening or cares to listen). I understand prayer. What I don't understand is the need for it be public for some people. Is this type related? Or at least, extroverted?
I dont think it is, I'm, for all my talking about it on this forum and elsewhere, pretty private about my religious practices usually, and definitely so in my prayer. I hated the assemblies and prayer at school, although imprinted with that are fears about standing with people I did not know, humiliation and repeatedly, sometimes scary, beratings from teachers about not being able to prayer correctly, ie as they did.
I remember a head mistress walking up and down shouting at people, pulling people out from the rows they where stood in for not joining their hands as she did, for not crossing their thumbs when they did join their hands, for not pointing thier joined hands upwards. All or much of this was totally new to me at the time, I was fearful enough of assembly (this all occured before I was ten) and never had been taught this at home, neither could I look to the children on my left or right as they did not know either. I had then and now a real anger about being personally subject to wrath from someone about what was something I effectively couldnt help or know about, I didnt feel like I should or must engage in a guessing game either.
On another occasion I was repeatedly asked to stand and kneel in a routine preparing for confirmation, which was a rite that then and now I believe in and believed should be a happy day, celebratory and meaning more than pose, grace and the proper stance. Years later when I read Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do and his philosophy rejecting fixed positions and emphasising flexibility and purposefulness it resonated with me massively, because of this instance and others like it, not always religious alone. I remember a lot of social pressure on that occasion, being told that I would bring shame on myself and others if I couldnt master what was being expected of me but I was being instructed with hostility and couldnt think about anything other than that hostility. Lousy "teachers".
I personally loath public prayer now, in part because I think it provides a great occasion for the stirrings of atheism and atheistic rebellions against it as authoritarian, tainted and something to attack. A lot of the time it does arise in the NI context is in conjunction with protestant evangelism anyway which is principally concerned with condemning catholicism and propagating ideas about being "saved" which I've found many protestants themselves dont wholly understand (I've read much of Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Munster and others and I'm unconvinced they had complete understanding, in the discourse on free will with Erasmus Luther positively appears like a later day internet troll).
Prayer and spirituality are by nature individual, I know that islam has attempted to bind believers in submission as a single heart and mind but I feel that is an error to even attempt such a thing, there needs to be shared things in a religion to allow for the transmission of learning and norms between generations but fundamentally it is an individual thing and there cant be any Borg like unison of people.