Analysis: Twenty years after Columbine, online public expressions of faith after mass shootings often strike a discordant note.
On a July afternoon in 2012, Denton Dickerson logged onto Twitter to share his grief after getting notice that a dozen moviegoers had been murdered at a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” — a movie he was planning to see later that day.
Dickerson’s evolution reflects a dramatic change in how Americans use and react to faith-related language in response to mass shootings during a time when the nation has become staunchly polarized on gun policy. The speech was followed by a tweet sent from Obama’s account: “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough — it’s time to take action.”
Now, with nearly every mass shooting, Americans have rekindled a heated national argument about whether the solution is stricter gun laws, or greater access to mental health care, or armed guards at every school, or any one of myriad other options that someone, somewhere thinks and hopes will make people safer.
“Thoughts and prayers” is a particularly popular phrase among white evangelicals, many of whom perceive prayer and faith alone as a kind of action, separate from outward action, said David Domke, a communication professor who specializes in politics at the University of Washington. “The political dynamic when Obama was president was such that any time he kind of got close to a third rail around race or religion, anything that was seen as volatile, the conflagration was substantial,” Domke said.
Obama returned to using “thoughts and prayers” genuinely less than a week later when 14 people were killed at a holiday office party in San Bernardino, Calif., and did so at least two more times in the rest of his presidency. But his remarks in 2015 appear to have left a mark on usage of the phrase.Eric Schultz, a senior adviser to Obama, said this month that the former president believed words alone were an inadequate response to mass shootings.
Marsh, a Democrat from Rochester, N.Y., who supports stricter gun laws, said she publicly sends prayers after tragedies because she believes it can help communities persevere through calamity. “When we don’t have that, when we look at each other across the Grand Canyon of American politics — when those words arrive over to me, they’re freighted with so much distrust and anger and fear that they aren’t taken at face value,” Domke said.
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