What's the reason behind people folding their hands when they pray?

Answer 1

== == Many Christians still think of kneeling

with folded hands as the appropriate posture for prayer, but few

now know why; and the few who do know cannot, even if they choose,

mean the same thing by it as was meant by those to whom the posture

was part of an ideology still real in everyday social life. The social relations

that once gave explicit meaning to that ritual gesture of the

vassal's subordination to his lord are now as dead as a mackerel, and

so, therefore, is the ideological vocabulary-including the posture of

prayer-in which those social relations once lived.

this is from Barbara Fields article "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the

United States of America"