Thoughts and Prayers, Bullets and Guns: The Empty Religion of the Weapon-Loving Right

by | Sep 1, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Thoughts and Prayers, Bullets and Guns: The Empty Religion of the Weapon-Loving Right

by | Sep 1, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Thoughts and prayers won't take weapons from the hands of terrorists and prior offenders and the mentally ill. They won't make a single street safer.

Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz

Well, another week here in the Land of the Free. That means another mass shooting and another round of funerals for healthy human beings violently taken in the middle of radiant, beautiful lives.

And once again, all Republican professed Christians can offer shell-shocked, mourning families are three words to compound their pain; three words certain to bring little to comfort them, three words to all-but ensure more families will soon be grieving unfathomable loss.

Three hollow, empty, useless words: Thoughts and prayers.

It’s the go-to performative social media stance by people attempting to appear moved without actually moving, people who want to feel good about feeling bad without any real response: a showy, self-aggrandizing platitude that feigns empathy.

Let’s be really clear, these politicians, pastors, and “Come and Take It” gun lovers, don’t extend gestures like this to comfort victims’ families or express true grief; they do it to publicly relieve themselves of culpability. They do it because that’s a hell of a lot easier than doing just about anything else. They do it because that’s all they think they’re required to do.

Republicans offer “thoughts and prayers” after a mass murder, as if that has been their only option all along, as if they can offer nothing else, now.

They offer “thoughts and prayers” as if God is somehow responsible for:

  • easy access to military-grade weapons,
  • for the NRA perpetuating a Wild West, cowboy gun culture,
  • for churches, preachers, and presidents still incubating fear of and disdain for gay people and Muslims and immigrants and people of color,
  • for a deep-pocketed gun lobby that has fully infiltrated our political process.
  • for a supposedly “Christian nation” that spends ten times more to arm its military than to teach its children.

Apparently, these things are all outside of their influence or alteration. Nothing to change or dig deeper into or talk about or even pray about. They just throw up their hands and pass the bloodied buck to God while feeling exonerated from any blame and exempt from any further action.

And to make matters far worse, people like JD Vance have the stratospheric gall to paint themselves as the victims of the Left, who they claim are ridiculing prayer or mocking religion. That’s grade A horseshit, and they know, but their gun-lusting rank-and-file don’t care.

The rest of us know the truth: they’re the ones mocking religion.

“Thoughts and prayers” from a party whose members traffic in gun porn for their family Christmas cards and base-baiting social media posts is the height of hypocrisy.

“Thoughts and prayers” from lawmakers who obstruct any new gun control legislation is an insult to those who’ve been murdered.

”Thoughts and prayers” from members of Congress wearing AR-15 pins is a strident middle finger to families of the dead.

“Thoughts and prayers” from politicians who accept NRA contributions is a putrid, stinking farce.

“Thoughts and prayers” from pastors who continue to preach a God and Guns heresy is a flat-out sin.

Thinking about people is all well and good, and prayer certainly won’t hurt them, but these things aren’t particularly helpful either if you do nothing else.

They won’t take weapons from the hands of terrorists and prior offenders and the mentally ill.

They won’t make a single street safer.

They certainly won’t raise the dead.

They won’t give the families of those murdered with guns more birthdays and Christmases and graduations.

They won’t prevent the next mass shooting either.

But JD, Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, and all you Republicans clutching your pearls in supposed sorrow, do you know what might help instead of just “thoughts and prayers”?

Getting off your rear end and doing something to make guns less plentiful and less easy to acquire.

Telling the NRA that they are not only part of this violence, but they are also manufacturing and profiting from it, and rejecting their contributions.

Condemning the hateful rhetoric of preachers and evangelists who use mass murders as a soapbox to stand upon to dispense further damnation upon the trans, Muslim, immigrant, and black communities.

Funding mental healthcare and making it more difficult for those with a history of illness to access firearms.

Denouncing a sneering “eye for an eye” Christianity that makes violence seem noble or admirable or holy.

But somehow, almost miraculously, your thoughts and prayers never yield such things. In fact, the only thing they yield is silence until the next mass assassinations using the guns you are so fixated on, enamored with, and beholden to.

If all you’re going to offer in the face of this kind of repeated carnage are “thoughts and prayers”, people will continue to die, and you will continue to be an accessory. Your thoughts and prayers may as well be bullets for the next mass shooting.

You can think and pray all you want, but until you actually move, you’ll be part of this.

Don’t just leave this in the hands of God. God has given you hands, too.

God has given you life and agency in this place and time, and maybe God is asking you to do something to affirm life right now, and that means opposing this unthinkable bloodshed instead of partnering with it.

Maybe God wants you to be the answer to the prayer.

Think and pray about that.

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.

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