Russia’s pounding of Ukraine continues: A barrage of drones and missiles launched on Kyiv early this morning killed at least fifteen people, including four children, and injured forty-five, Ukrainian officials said. Just another day trying to live while in the crosshairs of Vladimir Putin. Happy Thursday.

Shots and Prayers

by Andrew Egger

It was the first midweek chapel service of the school year for the kids of Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The students, as young as 4 years old, had walked from the school to the parish church next door to hear God’s word and worship as another year of learning got underway. It was a year whose scriptural theme was to be Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know full well the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not for your misfortune, plans that will offer you a future filled with hope.”

Then, just minutes into the service, a shooter outside opened fire, and the future was filled instead with unimaginable horror. A hail of bullets shattered the church’s stained-glass windows and rained down on the children and congregation, many of whom dove for cover beneath their pews. By the time the carnage stopped, two kids—one 8 years old, another 10—were dead. Fourteen others were injured, alongside three adults. Two were in critical condition as of yesterday, but police said all are expected to survive. The shooter is dead by their own hand.

Even in a nation where these attacks of terror have become their own sort of horrible routine, this one stood out as unbearable. What do you do with interview footage of a fifth-grade kid talking about the panic of nobody knowing what to do or where to run, because they’d only drilled for an active-shooter scenario at school, not at chapel? How do you bottle the unease you feel hearing how stoic he sounds—how routine it feels—as he describes his friend laying on top of him, shielding him from bullets? Where do you put the helpless rage?

Many Americans these days know how they’d answer that question: They put it online.¹ As the mind reels at yet another display of evil beyond understanding, they cope with it by sublimating it as fodder for the ever-present all-out political war.

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On the Republican side, this sublimation involved paring the shooting down to its most politically inflammatory elements: that the perpetrator seems to have been transgender, that the target was a church, that the apparent video manifesto revealed the shooter had written “KILL DONALD TRUMP” on a magazine.

“MORE DEMOCRAT VIOLENCE!” wrote million-follower influencer Nick Sortor on X, adding: “When are we going to FINALLY admit trans violence is a MASSIVE problem?!”

A fuller reading of the killer’s apparent sloganeering revealed a more complicated picture, of a personality that seemed shaped more by the nihilism of the most degraded parts of the internet than by partisan attachment. In a video apparently uploaded ahead of the attack, the killer lovingly pans the camera over the equipment of death. Scrawled over the magazines and weapons are dozens of slogans obviously intended to offend and shock. The names of other mass shooters. An abundance of racial slurs: “Kick a Sp*c,” “Fart N*gga,” “Extra Thicc Jew Gas.” And throughout, a seething anti-Catholic hatred. “WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?” reads a message on one magazine. “Take this, all of you, and eat!” reads the inscription on a shotgun. In the back of the room stands a target over which the shooter has affixed a picture of Jesus Christ.

But GOP accusations of “Democrat violence” weren’t the only hollow utterances in the shooting’s aftermath. Democrats also got into the act of post-mass shooting sublimation: The now-ritual denunciation of the very idea of praying for the victims and their families. “Prayer is not freaking enough,” wrote former Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki on X. “Prayers [do] not end school shootings. Prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school. Prayer does not bring these kids back. Enough with the thoughts and prayers.”

“Prayers aren’t working,” wrote liberal commentator Brian Krassenstein. “If prayers worked a house of prayer wouldn’t experience this.” Krassenstein didn’t intend it this way, but his remark eerily echoed the shooter’s own gibe: Where is your God now?

Maybe these commentators, and the many online posters who voiced similar sentiments, are right that thoughts and prayers don’t actually do anything to blunt America’s miserable spate of mass shootings.² Certainly one can understand why they don’t want to see only thoughts and prayers—they also want to see our country implement policies to make carrying out such shootings more difficult.

But there’s one thing prayer is undeniably good for at times like these: heaving one back out of the awful, soul-annihilating sludge of yet another round of post-shooting political discourse. It fixes the mind not on one’s ever-present political opponents but on the sufferers, in a discipline of sorrow and solidarity for those whose lives have been shattered by yet another attack. Dashing to social media to fire off hot takes after a tragedy feels good because it feels like doing something. But sometimes suffering with those who suffer is the only real thing you can do.