Dear MAGA: We Have School Shootings Because God Hates Your Cult.

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Dear MAGA: We Have School Shootings Because God Hates Your Cult.​

From golden calf to AR-15: the theology behind America’s ritual child sacrifice​

Dear MAGA: We Have School Shootings Because God Hates Your Cult.

From golden calf to AR-15: the theology behind America’s ritual child sacrifice

jillybeanmonet.substack.com

A school bell rings and the corridor breathes, then falls still. A custodian props a mop against chipped paint and studies a small dark hole in the plaster, as if answers might speak from it. The chaplain’s voice eases into the air because there is nothing else to do in that moment but hold back the tide for a heartbeat. Parents arrive with white knuckles and eyes that will never again learn how to forget. Candles extinguish in the wind and leave a sour trace of smoke. The chairs are stacked. The gym is swept. The desks remain empty, and the town learns a new silence that will not leave its throat. I begin here because grief is the only honest key to the door.

Yet grief alone is not the whole room. America keeps choosing a world in which children die preventable deaths, then asks God to foot the bill with thoughts and prayers. Scripture does not bless that bargain. Prayer without repentance is noise. Idolatry breeds consequences that need no thunder to be real. In the pages ahead I will set out the case as plainly as love for children demands. First, the rise of a personality-cult since 2015 and the old sin of false gods, read against the Bible’s own record of what follows such worship. Next, the Bible Belt’s budgetary cruelty, where schools are starved, social welfare is shaved to the bone, and health care is throttled, even as federal transfers keep the lights on, all of it in open defiance of the teachings of Jesus about the least of these. Then, the hard arithmetic of school shootings since 2015. The thread is simple and severe. A people that refuse protection for their young will eventually find heaven quiet.

Give anger the floor, for politeness has purchased coffins and says it's always too fucking soon to talk about how to move forward in rememberance of the dead children they only cared about when they were a fetus in their mother's womb. A nation that treats children as collateral for a gun-culture identity has no right to whisper pieties over fresh graves. Enough of the theatre, enough of the podium prayers, enough of the hand-on-heart cowardice that will not pass a single law to match its grief. We will name the idol so many have kissed since 2015 and tally the blood-price it exacts. We will read the prophets who say God hates worship that tramples the poor, and the Christ who sets a child in the centre and warns that to harm such a one is a millstone offence. And we will close where the evidence leaves us, with the only honest answer to why the prayers fail. God hates America as it currently is, and unless the country repents in laws, budgets, and brave, costly choices, that hatred will continue to sound like silence while the sirens scream.

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I. Why God Is Done Answering Prayers To Prevent Mass Shootings​

Begin with the hard distinction most politicians blur on purpose. Private prayer that keeps a bereaved parent breathing is holy. Public prayer that replaces action is theatre. One heals the soul for a night. The other launders a conscience and sends everyone home. If you want to know why heaven feels silent when America prays about school shootings, start there. God is not a stagehand hired to tidy up after cowardice.

Scripture never sells prayer as a magic override. Prayer is petition, yes. Prayer is also confession. Prayer is alignment. In the Bible, people cry out and then change. They fast and then repair what they broke. They weep and then feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the stranger. If you will not do the second half, the prophets say the first half sounds like noise. Isaiah calls the music detestable when the poor are crushed. Amos says keep your songs; let justice roll down. Micah says God has already told you what is good. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly. None of that is mysterious. None of that is optional. If a nation refuses, prayer becomes incense in a locked room. Fragrant, then gone. The fire keeps burning.

Why the silence. Because actions have consequences in the eyes of God and God often speaks by letting consequence run its course. The text is full of it. The people demand a king who will make them feel safe. The prophet warns that a king will take their sons and their fields and their future. They insist. They get what they asked for and the bill that follows. The wilderness crowd begs for meat and despises the responsibility of freedom. The quail come. So do the graves. The idolaters want a god that matches their appetites. The party is loud. The morning is hell. Judgment in these stories is not always a lightning strike. It is often God stepping back. It is the moral order left to operate without rescue.

Apply that logic to America’s school shootings. A people who will not pass the most basic, evidence-based protections are choosing the next obituary. Safe storage. Universal checks that actually check. Licensing that treats the weapon as a serious responsibility. Red-flag tools that remove guns from a man who is spiralling. These are not miracles. These are simple, boring, life-saving steps that every other rich democracy figured out while we were arguing on television. When a country says no to those and yes to a gun-culture identity, it is not praying. It is performing. God does not bless performances that put children in coffins. God lets the consequences speak.

There is also the small matter of idolatry, which is not small at all. Prayer that props up an idol is blasphemy in a suit. When leaders wrap failure in piety, they are misusing the divine name to sanctify negligence. That is the third commandment in plain clothes. Do not take the name of the Lord in vain. It does not mean avoid swearing in traffic. It means do not strap God to your politics to excuse harm. If you tweet a Bible verse while voting against the least of these, you are using God as a brand. The prophets had a word for that. God hates it.

Why else the silence. Because the prayers are dishonest about agency. People ask God to stop bullets while defending policies that make bullets easy to buy and effortless to fire in the places children gather. They ask for protection but demand permitless carry. They ask for safety but fight safe-storage laws as if locks were chains on freedom. They ask for help while cutting school counsellors, school nurses, and the very human nets that catch a falling kid before he hits a hard floor. Prayer is not a voucher for divine babysitting while you sharpen the knives. It is a summons to repent with your hands and your vote.

The New Testament sharpens the edge. Jesus places a child in the centre and says the kingdom belongs to such as these. He describes a millstone for those who cause little ones to stumble. He walks into a temple and flips the tables of people who turned devotion into a racket. He tells a parable where a priest and a Levite pass a bleeding man on the road while a despised outsider stops, pays, and makes sure the man will live. If you want to know where God stands in a hallway full of shell casings, read the story again. God is with the Samaritan who pays the bill. God is not with the pious men who pass by and whisper a prayer on the way home.

But what about free will. What about human evil that God does not simply erase. Yes, the texts honour human agency. They do not allow it as an alibi for systems that feed violence. The Bible speaks of personal sin and also of principalities and powers. Patterns that grind the weak. Arrangements that reward cruelty. In that world, prayer without structural repentance is the sin of omission wearing a choir robe. You know the good you ought to do. You will not do it. You ask God to let you off the hook. The answer is no.

Let us name the pastoral truth that still matters. God is near to the brokenhearted. God listens when a mother sobs in a hospital chapel. That does not clash with the argument here. It deepens it. Comfort for the broken heart is not the same thing as prevention for the next family. God’s nearness in grief does not grant absolution to lawmakers who prefer a press conference to a vote. Compassion and judgment are not rivals. They are partners. Mercy visits the vigil. Justice rewrites the law.

So why does the phrase thoughts and prayers curdle in the mouth now. Because everyone knows the script. Politicians treat it like a magic spell that erases their duty. The press conference happens at dusk. The same lines are read. The flags are at half-mast. The lobbyists sleep well. The families do not. When prayer becomes a public-relations strategy, God is not in the room. God is with the people who refuse to play along.

You want a reason that is not spiritual. Fine. Prayer that substitutes for action keeps the cycle intact because it lowers the perceived urgency. It offers the speaker a hit of moral relief without paying a political cost. It encourages the base to treat policy as betrayal. It puts reform in the category of blasphemy and keeps the donor stream pure. That is how rituals work. They train the body to feel clean while it stays dirty. The result is inertia with a halo.

You want a reason that is spiritual. Here. The world runs on causes and effects that God authored. Sow violence and you reap grief. Sow greed and you reap scarcity. Sow indifference and you reap emptiness. The miracle most often on offer is not a divine hand stopping a bullet midair. It is the quiet work of a people who repent and change the terms of their life together. Laws that shrink risk are not less holy than a hymn. They may be the holiest thing on the page.

When does God answer. The witness of the text is blunt. When a people return. When they tear down the idol and repair the breach. Nineveh puts on sackcloth and the disaster is stayed. Zacchaeus meets Jesus and pays back what he stole with interest. The early church sells property to meet needs. None of these stories is gentle about the cost. All of them say the same word. Repent. Over and over. Repent in public. Repent with your purse. Repent with your power. Pray while you do it. Not instead of doing it.

So the why is not a mystery. God is done answering the ritualised prayers of a nation that refuses repentance. Not because God enjoys silence. Because consequence is the grammar of judgment and America keeps writing the same sentence in blood. Pray at your vigil. God is there. Pray at your desk and draft the bill. God will be there too. Keep praying at microphones while you protect the idol and starve the least. Expect the same reply you have been getting. A silence that sounds like sirens and a hallway that smells like gunpowder.

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II. The Ten-Commandments yardstick, held up to the man they would make into a shrine​

If the Bible Belt means to pin God’s law above whiteboards, let the same stone judge the figure they have draped in sanctity. Read the tablets slowly, like a catechism for adults, and set beside each commandment the public record that any child with a library card can find. I do not need to sneer. I only need to remember.

Begin where the law begins. No other gods. Not nation. Not tribe. Not a man with a slogan. The first commandment is jealous on purpose because it knows what idolatry does to a people. The rallies felt like liturgy. The slogans behaved like creeds. Error was treated as heresy, loyalty as salvation. Then came the Bible held aloft in front of St. John’s, a holy book turned into a stage prop minutes after Lafayette Square was cleared by force and chemical irritants, while senior officials choreographed the path. Even the government’s own inspectors have now sifted that day, the sequencing, the dispersal, the fencing plan, the collisions between piety and power. Call it optics if you wish. The tablet calls it misuse of the sacred as political incense. Prayers spoken in that theatre do not rise. They hang in the air like tear-gas and drift away on the evening wind.

Do not carve an image. We imagine a calf of hammered gold. We forget that modern idols are minted in pixels and sold retail. Flags with one man’s name, devotion branded and monetised, sanctuaries re-dressed as campaign sets, a leader enthroned not only in office but in imagination. It is the old sin in new clothes, the same hunger to see and touch a god you can own. The second commandment forbids it because images always demand a sacrifice. In our case the bill is paid by truth, by neighbour-love, by children who inherit the violence that follows when a people worship an image and call it patriotism. The church itself warned against that photo-op pageant. Editors warned. Clergy warned. The idol still toured.

Do not take the Lord’s name in vain. This is not a scold about language. It is a ban on dragging God’s name over schemes and cruelty as cover. Hold up a Bible while officers push citizens from a park. Cut the ribbon on a policy suite that leaves the least unguarded, then baptise it with a verse. Turn prayer into a press strategy in place of law. That is vanity in the oldest sense, God-talk emptied of God. Heaven does not answer fraud with blessing. It answers with silence and consequence, which are the same sermon in a moral universe.

Remember the sabbath. The sabbath is more than a calendar square. It is the law’s refusal to let economies grind the poor to powder. It commands margin, restoration, room to breathe. Any politics that prizes guns-everywhere bravado while starving schools, shredding welfare, and throttling health care is civic sabbath-breaking. It sings on Sunday and cuts on Monday. It wrings families out and calls it virtue. The tablet stands in witness, and the country answers with burnout and graves.

Honour father and mother. Honour is duty, not sentiment. It pays its bills. It protects elders and carers and the people who raised the nation when no one was watching. A movement that treats loyalty as a one-way street and discards the faithful the moment they cease to be useful does not honour. It consumes. Scripture recognises the type and promises the ending. Lampstands are removed. Kingdoms pass to other hands.

You shall not murder. No court has charged him with that crime. Yet the commandment’s spirit reaches further than a single act. The prophets condemn blood-guilt that travels by policy and indifference. Christ names contempt and dehumanising speech as the seed that grows into violence. If your rhetoric warms menace, if your programme multiplies weapons in public while resisting basic, life-saving safeguards, if your posture shrugs at predictable child funerals and calls it freedom, then you are not protecting life. You are writing its eulogy. God is not tricked by slogans. God can count.

You shall not commit adultery. Here the record speaks without my adjectives. There are affairs conceded, hush-money arrangements admitted by participants, and a criminal jury’s verdict that falsified records hid an election-season payoff to bury damaging stories. There is sworn testimony about catch-and-kill, a publisher under a federal agreement acknowledging a six-figure payment to suppress allegations to influence the vote. This is not gossip carried by wind. It is the paper trail of cheques, invoices, and courtroom orders. The child who has been told to memorise the seventh commandment can read those dockets and ask her teacher why the law on the wall does not bind the man on the stage. I do not have a gentle answer for her.

You shall not steal. Theft wears suits. It opens universities that a judge later calls fraud and pays twenty-five million dollars to the people it misled. It runs a charitable foundation like a family wallet, is sued by the state, is dissolved under court supervision, and pays two million dollars in damages for illegal self-dealing that turned a charity into a campaign accessory. It inflates asset values when convenient, deflates them when taxed, and then meets a bench that says in black letters that fraud occurred even if a later panel strikes an eye-watering penalty as excessive. The eighth commandment does not need flourishes. It only needs the docket number and the signature at the bottom.

You shall not bear false witness. This is the commandment that makes the stage lights blow. Fact-checkers tallied more than thirty thousand false or misleading claims in four years. Courts from Arizona to Pennsylvania to the federal benches rejected fantasies presented as pleadings after the 2020 election. Juries have found defamation, once for five million dollars and again for eighty-three point three million, and appellate courts have let the core verdicts stand while bonds were posted. False witness was not a stumble here. It was a method of rule. Put that habit beside the ninth commandment tacked over a classroom clock and tell a student what truth means. She will not believe you until the adults act like it matters.

You shall not covet. The law finally descends to the root. The restless appetite for praise, for bodies, for money, for revenge. The need to possess and parade. You cannot indict a motive, but you can watch the wake it leaves. It is there in the décor, in the speeches, in the needless humiliations, in the lawsuits that spring from a hunger that never sleeps. The tenth commandment forbids the weather inside a man because it knows what storms it sends across a nation.

Now ask the question in the voice of a child who has been told the tablets are holy. Why would believers revere such a sinner. Because power feels like forgiveness when repentance is too costly. Because victory feels like righteousness when you have mistaken God for your side. Because idolatry is always easier than confession. It asks for applause, not change. It demands enemies, not neighbours. It baptises grievance, then calls the baptised clean. But the Bible has no patience for that counterfeit. When a people trade truth for a lie, when they bless fraud, adultery, and false witness because it serves their tribe, the divine response is almost never thunder. It is the slow unhooking of protection, the quiet step-back that lets consequences preach. Courts write findings. Hospitals fill. Schools practise active-shooter drills. Vigils multiply. Prayers rise, and rise, and seem to vanish into the rafters.

If the Bible Belt will deify such a man while pinning the commandments above a whiteboard, it is not honouring God. It is erecting a shrine to a false idol and training children to bow. Of course God turns away from that. Not from the grieving, who will always find mercy. From the counterfeit worship that dares to mouth the law while breaking it in daylight, then asks heaven to clean the blood from the floor. Scripture calls the verdict by its plain name. Given over. And the sound of being given over, in a nation that refuses to protect its young, is sirens in the corridor and a chair at a kitchen table that no one will sit in again.

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III. Plagues in a moral universe: COVID-19 and the canon’s pattern​

If you read Scripture on its own terms, plagues are not random weather. They are moral events. Exodus tells the story with terrifying clarity. Pride hardens. Warnings come. The ruler refuses to yield. Then the world itself seems to revolt. The Nile turns foul. Frogs swarm the beds of the powerful. Gnats and flies. Livestock die. Boils rise on skin. Hail shatters what arrogance thought secure. Locusts eat what is left. Darkness thick as cloth. At last the households feel the cost in their bones. In the background runs a refrain that should haunt any nation tempted by idolatry. God is not mocked. A people cannot clutch power with one hand and bless cruelty with the other without consequence leaking into the groundwater of their common life.

Read the canon across its pages and the pattern holds. When leaders make a spectacle of sacred things, something breaks in the nation’s body. When false gods are enthroned, the land itself seems to sag. When the poor are crushed, pestilence walks in by the front door. Numbers speaks of a plague after the golden calf hangover of craving. Second Samuel tells of pestilence after a king’s swollen vanity. The prophets name famine and disease as the mirror of a people’s choices, not because God relishes pain, but because consequence is the only teacher a hard heart will hear. Again and again the text refuses the fantasy that prayer will wipe clean a ledger still being written in injustice.

Through that lens, COVID-19 was not just a virus under a microscope. It was a plague in the biblical sense. Not because microbes have motives, but because a plague in Scripture is any scourge that exposes the moral order a nation has chosen. COVID-19 held up a mirror to our idols and made them visible at fatal scale. We worshipped grievance over truth and watched lies outpace ambulances. We deified a personality and found that the cult’s first doctrine is denial. We prized personal licence over neighbour-love and turned pandemic precautions into loyalty tests. We bled our public health systems for years and then acted surprised when hospitals bent and snapped. We told the poor to pray harder while they served the rest of us in person, without hazard pay, without sick leave, without clinics nearby. If you insist on a theological line, here it is in the language Exodus taught us. Pride hardened. Warnings came. We would not yield. Pestilence did the preaching.

The country prayed in public, and I will not mock the honest sorrow of those prayers. God is near to the brokenhearted. But prayers that substitute for repentance are incense in a locked room. Fragrant, then gone. During the worst months, the ritual phrases rose while policy indulged the idol. The idol craved applause more than masks. The idol craved rallies more than care. The idol craved its reflection on television more than the common good. If a people choose an idol, Scripture does not promise a lightning bolt to change their mind. It promises that God steps back and lets the idol rule. The wages of that rule are counted in hospital hallways and the back rooms of nursing homes.

Now look at school shootings in the same frame. Another plague. The word fits in the biblical register because the phenomenon punishes a people for the gods they refuse to renounce. A culture worships the gun as totem. A politics baptises menace as freedom. Legislatures loosen what should be tightened and mock the very tools that would save lives. Then children pay. Again and again, children pay. If Exodus taught anything, it is that when rulers cling to their idols, the price is finally demanded in households, not palaces. You can staple the Ten Commandments above a whiteboard and still fail the command that matters most to a civilisation. You shall not shed innocent blood. You shall not turn away from the cry of the small. You shall not trade the safety of the least for the vanity of the strong.

COVID-19 revealed how quickly counterfeit faith will sacrifice neighbours for narrative. School shootings reveal how thoroughly counterfeit faith will sacrifice children for identity. In both cases the script is the same. Thoughts and prayers in lieu of repentance. Postures in place of policy. Theologies that pretend God will suspend cause and effect for a tribe that refuses to grow up. The Bible calls that presumption. The prophets call it abomination. Jesus calls it hypocrisy when a community tithes on piety and neglects the weightier matters of the law, which are justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

So the conclusion you asked me to say out loud lands without melodrama. COVID-19 was a plague in the Exodus sense, a moral indictment made visible in bodies. The continuing ritual of school shootings is another. Not because God sits in the clouds with a ledger and a lever, but because this is how judgment reads when a people enthrone false gods and bless cruelty with liturgy. Providence loosens its grip. Consequences teach what sermons could not. The classrooms grow quiet and the vigils grow loud.

And the question that should sting every Bible Belt conscience follows in a whisper that sounds like thunder. How do those who claim to love the Bible not understand this. How do you preach Exodus and miss the lesson when pestilence arrives. How do you memorise the plagues as children and fail to see the pattern as adults. How do you quote the prophets and then sneer at the acts of mercy and justice they demanded. The answer, if we are honest, is that idolatry is subtle until it is cruel, and we have loved our idols more than our children. Until we hate those idols, and repent with laws and budgets and choices that protect the least, we should expect the biblical response we have earned. Silence where we wanted rescue. Plagues where we demanded exceptions. A mirror where we begged for a miracle.
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IV. Bible-Belt governance, held to the red-letter test​

Budgets are gospels in numbers. You can chant doctrine until your throat goes raw, but the ledger tells God what you actually believe. Jesus gave us the rule for reading any public witness. “By their fruits you will know them” and “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.” If we apply those lines to Bible-Belt governments, the fruit is bitter and the treasure is elsewhere. The rhetoric is holy. The outcomes are not. And the gap between the two is not a mystery. It is policy. It is choice. It is a theology that loves to preach the Beatitudes and then governs as if the poor are a personal failing that needs a lecture.

Start with schools, because Jesus did. He put a child in the centre and warned that anyone who harms “one of these little ones” invites a millstone verdict. He said, “Let the children come to me,” not keep them in crumbling buildings, not strip their districts to the bone, not replace counsellors and nurses with nothing and call it grit. When states low-ball teachers, raid school funds for culture-war stunts, and refuse the boring, proven investments that catch a kid before he breaks, they are not conservative in any Christian sense. They are reckless. They are breaking covenant with the young and then asking heaven to bless the carnage. That is not piety. That is polished hypocrisy, and children pay for it with futures that get smaller every year. Enough of the gentle euphemisms. It is cruel policy dressed in Sunday clothes, and it stinks.

Move to the safety net the Gospels require. Jesus did not hedge. “Give to the one who asks.” “Blessed are you who are poor.” “Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me.” Those are not mood quotes. They are governing imperatives. Yet across the Bible Belt we see the same damned reflex. Shave direct cash aid until the line-items are thin as paper. Tie help to humiliating hoops. Rebrand starvation as moral clarity. If you starve assistance while bragging about virtue, you are not defending work ethic. You are declaring, with a straight face, that your politics cannot bear to treat a struggling family as neighbours. Then you want Jesus to nod along. He will not. He already told you which side of that line he stands on.

Health care next, because Christ made a point of it. “I was sick and you visited me.” The early church organised care before it organised anything else. The Sabbath itself was given so people could rest and be restored. Yet in state after state, leaders block the simplest expansions of care that would keep rural hospitals open and keep working families out of the body-count statistics. Clinics close. Maternity wards vanish. Mothers die who should be holding babies. And we get a lecture about personal responsibility while the state shrugs at the logistics that kill. Spare us the sanctimony. If your governance yields wards shut, ambulances rerouted, and pharmacies two counties away, your gospel is just noise. Jesus already answered the excuse with a parable. A priest and a Levite walked by the bleeding man with beautiful liturgy and clean hands. The Samaritan paid the bill. God sided with the one who paid.

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Guns and public peace are not separate from this moral anatomy. Christ’s line to a hot-blooded disciple was unambiguous. “Put your sword back in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” That does not abolish legitimate self-defence, but it annihilates the catechism that worships the weapon as a civic sacrament. Bible-Belt governments have pushed permitless-carry, fought safe-storage, mocked universal checks, and dared anyone to question whether more metal in more hands makes the children safer. Meanwhile classrooms learn lockdown drills like a second language and chaplains practise the prayer they hate to say. Thought and prayer are noble in grief. As policy, without safeguards, they are a cop-out. Jesus blessed peacemakers, not marketers of menace. He never confused freedom with the licence to end a neighbour’s life in a heartbeat. He never told a legislature to replace mercy with merchandising and call it faith.

Justice and prisons. Luke’s Jesus reads Isaiah and claims it as his mission. “He has sent me to proclaim good news to the poor… liberty to the captives.” Yet how often do these states swell their carceral budgets while cutting the systems that would have kept the vulnerable from falling in the first place. If your instinct is punishment first, second, and always, you have missed the Rabboni’s first sermon. It is not soft to build schools, clinics, and housing so that police do not have to carry what politics refuses to lift. It is Christian. It is smart. And it is a hell of a lot cheaper than building more cages and calling it order.

Immigrants and strangers, because Jesus refused to let us pretend the word neighbour stops at a county line. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” The command is not ambiguously phrased. Yet we see governors christen cruelty at the border and the bus station, staging human beings as props for television. We see churches trapped in the photo-op, smiling at a podium while their own book says the test on Judgment Day will be whether you fed, clothed, and welcomed the stranger. If you will not, at least stop quoting Matthew 25. It condemns you in your own voice.

Then the ledger’s deepest tell. “You tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.” That is Jesus on the difference between performance and obedience. The Bible Belt has perfected the tithe of mint. The performative bill on school prayer. The performative tablet on a classroom wall. The performative resolution about decency. Meanwhile the weightier matters are neglected like an afterthought. Justice shrinks. Mercy is rationed. Faithfulness is redefined as constant rage at convenient targets. Enough of the theatre. The Nazarene is not fooled. He never was. He knows how to read a budget, and he will not bless a ledger that fattens the strong and tells the weak to pray harder.

We should also tell the unglamorous fiscal truth that sits like a stone at the centre. Many of these same states rail against federal support while relying on it to balance their books. They call help tyranny while cashing the cheque. They punch above their weight in moral fury and under their weight in contribution to the pool that keeps them afloat. Jesus had a word for that reflex. “First take the log out of your own eye.” It is not an insult. It is a diagnostic. Fix your hypocrisy before you try to fix someone else’s sin.

And because some leaders will reach for a pious exit, let us head it off. “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” was not a hall pass to abandon the poor. It was a refusal to let empire set the moral ceiling. The ceiling is set by the kingdom he announced. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick. Visit the prisoner. Welcome the stranger. Protect the child. If your governance cannot clear that bar, your cross-lapel pin is costume jewellery.

I am not arguing for a theocracy. I am arguing that if you brand yourself with Christ’s name, you should at least try to govern in something like his direction. That means budgets that bend toward children, clinics, and the poor. That means laws that reduce risk, not pander to grievance. That means telling the truth when it is expensive. It means admitting that prayer without repentance is theatre and repentance without policy is a lie. Anything else is sanctified bullshit, and the Nazarene called it before I ever could.

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So let us return to his simplest test. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me.” If the least in your state cannot see a doctor, cannot afford a flat, cannot send their child to a safe, staffed school, cannot rely on the simple dignity of food on a steady table, then Christ’s verdict is already written on your books. Do not hang the Ten Commandments above a whiteboard and claim God’s favour while your numbers preach neglect. Do not send thoughts and prayers while you vote against the tools that would spare the next family from horror. If the Bible Belt wants God close, it needs to choose the fruit Jesus asked for. Until then, the silence you hear is not Heaven sleeping. It is Heaven refusing to bless a performance that abandons the people Christ put first.
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V. The turn since 2015, the idol, and the schools​

History does not always announce itself with trumpets. Sometimes it begins as a chant at a rally and ends as a ritual at a vigil. In 2015 a celebrity-candidate offered grievance as gospel and a movement decided that loyalty would replace truth. The rallies felt like liturgy. The slogans behaved like creeds. The brand swallowed the party whole. From that point forward guns were not tools to be regulated for the common good, they were identity totems to be defended at any cost. Statehouses obeyed. Permitless-carry spread through the map while evidence-based safeguards were mocked as heresy. By mid-2025, roughly twenty-nine states let adults carry concealed handguns without a permit. The catechism hardened. The funerals multiplied.

Keep two clocks in your head. One ticks through the politics, the other through the schools. Since 2018 Education Week has tracked school shootings with injuries or deaths as a narrow, conservative count, and the curve climbs after the mid-2010s: 24 in 2018, 24 in 2019, 10 in the pandemic-suppressed 2020 year, then 35 in 2021, 51 in 2022, 38 in 2023, 39 in 2024. In 2025 the tally began early again. That is not a mood. That is a ledger of children’s blood.

Zoom the lens. The Washington Post’s broader database shows the exposure burden, not just the headline deaths. More than 300,000 students have experienced gun violence at school during school hours since Columbine, and the newsroom’s update on 27 August 2025 confirms a record high count in 2022 and a sustained tempo since. These are not activist numbers. They are a sober accounting of kids who heard shots in hallways where they were meant to learn.

Public health does not flinch either. Firearms remain the leading cause of death for American children and teens. No other rich democracy tolerates this as normal. When adults choose politics that loosen safeguards and saturate public spaces, children die more often. That is the whole unsentimental sentence.

Now draw the line between devotion to the idol and the rise in school killings. The idol demands purity. Any deviation from more-guns-more-places is treated as betrayal. Leaders race to prove faith by loosening carry, blocking licensing, ridiculing safe-storage, and burying red-flag tools that remove guns from people who are spiralling. The idol trains its followers to call prevention tyranny and to call ritual grief strength. The idol always asks for sacrifice, and it never pays its own bill. The bill is paid in cafeterias, corridors, and church gyms with folding chairs.

Policy choices explain the mechanics, but Scripture explains the mood. The Bible’s language for this is judgment by consequence. You worship a false god and God gives you over to your choice. In moral physics, that is wrath. Not always thunder. Often the silence in which cause and effect do the preaching. Romans names it. The prophets stage it. Exodus dramatises it with plagues that expose a ruler’s pride. America chose to enthrone a man and a gun-culture. It chose the photo-op Bible over the Beatitudes and the press-conference prayer over repentance. It chose grievance over truth and performance over protection. Then it asked God to fix what it refused to change. Heaven stepped back.

You can watch the liturgy. A shooting, the rush of thoughts and prayers, a press avail, then the old talking points. Meanwhile statehouses keep feeding the idol. Permitless-carry map grows. Gunfire on school grounds maps fill in, whether you use the narrow Education Week bar or the wider K-12 School Shooting Database. The trend line since the mid-2010s does not lie. We built a shrine and called it freedom. The shrine called for children. We obliged.

If you want Christ’s red-letter gloss on this, he already gave it. “By their fruits you will know them.” “Whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for him to have a millstone.” “Put your sword back in its place.” “Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me.” None of that authorises a politics that treats a child’s body as collateral for an identity cult. None of that blesses a state budget that funds performative piety and starves the tools that actually keep kids alive. The Nazarene does not sit on a stage beside the idol and clap. He walks into the temple and flips the tables.

So yes, the parallels are not academic. The embrace of Trump as a near-sacred figure coincides with a policy posture that treats guns as sacraments and regulation as sin, and the years since have been marked by more school gunfire, more drills, more vigils, more names read under stadium lights. Whether you prefer the language of epidemiology or the language of prophets, the conclusion converges. Deify a false idol and you provoke the wrath of God. In this age that wrath reads like being given over to what you worship. Our choice was grievance and the gun. Our harvest is children who do not come home.

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VI. Why God would turn their back on a people who let children die​

The Bible does not picture God as a cosmic switch that flips when you say a prayer. It shows a God who listens, then looks at what you do next. Cry out, yes. Then return. Feed, heal, shelter, protect. If repentance does not follow, the text calls the song empty. Isaiah says take away the noise. Amos says let justice roll. James says faith without works is dead on arrival. Prayer without a changed public life is theatre, and God is not the audience for that show.

There is a grammar to judgment that runs through the canon. Call it moral gravity. You throw yourself from the roof and no angel interrupts the fall. You enthrone a false god and God gives you over to the god you have chosen. Paul uses that exact phrase. Given over. The prophets act it out. Israel chases idols and the rain stays away. Kings turn worship into optics and the glory leaves the temple step by step until the city stands alone. That withdrawal is the most terrifying line in Scripture. Not thunder. Absence. The presence on which a people quietly depended goes silent, and cause and effect finish the sermon.

If you want the red letters, they are not complicated. Jesus places a child in the middle and says the kingdom belongs to such as these. He warns that anyone who makes a little one stumble would be better off with a millstone round the neck and the sea for a grave. He blesses peacemakers. He heals the sick. He tells a story in which the religious pass a bleeding man while the despised outsider stops, pays, and keeps paying until the man can live. He promises that Judgment Day will sound like a list of concrete acts. Food given. Water offered. Clothes shared. Strangers welcomed. Prisoners visited. He never once suggests that ritual piety covers for cruelty. He never once hints that thoughts and prayers excuse a vote that endangers the least.

So why would God turn their back. Because Scripture treats a nation’s treatment of the vulnerable as the proof of its worship. Harm the small and you desecrate the sanctuary. That is the blunt logic of the millstone line. You cannot baptise a gun-culture identity, loosen safeguards that any honest doctor would endorse, starve schools of nurses and counsellors, close clinics, and then ask heaven to stop bullets midair. That is not faith. That is presumption. It is asking God to bless the very arrangement that kills children. The Nazarene called that kind of behaviour hypocrisy. The prophets gave it harsher names. I will use the modern one. It is sanctified bullshit.

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[鬼百合]

God’s turning away in these stories is not petty. It is precise. You worship a false idol and the idol rules you. You call grievance truth and you are governed by grievance. You call cruelty strength and cruelty begins to feel normal. You ask why the prayers echo in gym rafters while the sirens drown the hymns. The answer is not hidden. God has stepped back and let the harvest grow. Swords stay in hands that refuse to put them away. Doors fail in schools that were not funded to be safe. Boys in pain find weapons easier than therapy. Ambulances arrive on time and too late. Silence on the divine line is not indifference. It is judgment delivered in the language of consequence.

Look again at the patterns we have chosen. We deified a brand. We taught a catechism in which regulation is sin and the gun is sacrament. We voted for permitless carry and then prayed for miracles. We refused safe-storage and then held candlelight vigils. We cut Medicaid and then asked why fragile families collapse under the weight of grief and bills. We diverted welfare from direct help and then wondered why children fall into the cracks. We told ourselves that prayer would do what budgets and laws should have done. That is not devotion. That is a wager against the moral order, and the house has been winning every time.

Some will say this makes God sound cruel. It does not. It makes God sound consistent. A teacher who stops taking your homework when you keep copying from the cheat sheet is not cruel. A parent who lets the foolish son face the cost of his choices is not cruel. The parable that ends with a feast begins with a famine that brings the boy to himself. Mercy waits at the door. Mercy does not underwrite the self-destruction that made mercy necessary. In Bible language the discipline is severe and the welcome is real. Both are love. Both are holy.

There is mercy even now, but it will not look like what the podium promises. Mercy is the vote for laws that match your grief. Mercy is the budget that lifts the poor without humiliating them. Mercy is the clinic kept open and the counsellor hired and the storage lock that saves a child. Mercy is the red flag honoured before a funeral. Mercy is the truth told even when donors snarl. Pray while you do those things. Pray with tears if you need to. God will be near. Keep praying instead of doing them and expect the same reply you have been getting. Silence that tastes like ash.

I can hear the last, tired objection. Bad men will do bad things anyway. True. The Bible never denies human evil. It builds law around it. It builds communities that restrain it. It insists that love is not naïve about danger. It calls rulers to punish what harms and to protect the small. It never shrugs and calls funerals the price of freedom. The Sermon on the Mount is not suicide. It is a plan for public peace built on mercy and truth and courage. None of that blesses a culture that arms grievance and calls it noble.

If you insist on asking where God is while the candles burn down to puddles of wax, here is the answer Scripture keeps giving. God is with the mother in the hospital chapel. God is with the teacher who pulled a child behind a cabinet and kept them breathing. God is with the nurse who worked a double and the medic who cannot unclench his jaw. God is with the student who cannot sleep. God is with the pastor who will not accept the lie that nothing can change. God is not on the stage with the idol. God is not in the press release that quotes a verse while voting against the least. God is not the talisman that cancels cause and effect for a tribe that will not grow up.

The door back is open, but it is narrow and costly. Tear down the idol. Tell the damned truth. Pass the dull, effective laws that every serious public-health worker has been begging you to pass. Fund the human beings who keep children alive and thriving. Treat a gun like a machine that can end a life, not like a personality test. Put the commandments under the powerful before you hang them over a whiteboard. Repent in budgets and bills. Then pray, and watch what happens when prayer rises from a people who finally mean it.

Until then, do not ask why God has turned their back. The Bible already told you. By your fruits. By your treasure. By the little ones at the centre. By the justice you refused. By the mercy you rationed. By the truth you buried. You taught heaven how to answer you. Silence while the sirens scream.

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VII. What actually ends this​

Begin with the plain truth that tastes like medicine. We are not waiting on miracles. We are waiting on grown-ups who will do the work in front of them.

A safe country starts in the simplest room. Lock every gun that is not in a hand. In homes and cars. Unloaded, with ammunition kept apart, with penalties that bite and free locks in every school, clinic, and precinct. That one habit saves toddlers from drawers and adolescents from a terrible hour that should have passed.

Honesty about purchase comes next. Background checks must be universal or they are theatre. No private-sale escape hatches. No gun-show carve-outs. No default-proceed when the clock runs out. If you buy a machine that can end a life, you clear the same vetting every time, as a matter of civic hygiene.

Licensing is not heresy. It is adulthood. Permit-to-purchase for handguns and semi-auto rifles. Fingerprints, real training, a short cooling-off period. Objective standards, no petty discretion, and renewals that mean something. If you cannot pass the class or keep the paperwork clean, you do not carry. Rights have forms because lives have value.

When danger is visible, the law should be able to reach it. Red-flag orders that move quickly, with clear evidence rules, prompt hearings, and paths to return when the storm has passed. Domestic-violence surrender that is immediate and traceable, so a protective order actually protects. Love that sees a cliff does not ask for proof after the fall. It builds a fence at the edge and checks the posts.

There are places where the answer is no. Schools, polling places, courthouses, public offices, and crowded transport. Call them sensitive because they are. Post the sign and give it teeth. We secure what we cherish.

Some tools are small, and still they matter. Modest magazine limits that slow the worst minutes. Short waiting periods that cool a hot impulse. Mandatory lost-and-stolen reporting that helps trace the traffic. Real prosecution for straw buying, and modern e-trace so the data follows the gun that should never have been there.

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[鬼百合]

And because violence is not only an object but a life in pain, fund people rather than stages. More school counsellors and nurses. More relationship-violence prevention where teenagers actually gather. Hospital-based and community teams that interrupt the revenge cycle. Quiet work with loud results.

For those who want a constitutional spine, it is already written. Justice Scalia said in Heller that the Second Amendment is not unlimited. Not any weapon, in any manner, for anyone. He named lawful limits. He named sensitive places, including schools, and he blessed conditions on commercial sales. Use his words. They are the map many pretend not to see.

Bruen did not smash the tools. It ended squishy may-issue games, then upheld shall-issue licensing built on neutral rules. It did not erase sensitive-place bans. Treat Bruen as drafting guidance. Write clean statutes and defend them like children’s lives depend on them, because they do.

Rahimi drew the bright line that should have been obvious. The state can disarm people a court finds dangerous to others. Let that sentence become habit. It is a blueprint for red-flags, for domestic-violence surrender, for targeted, due-process safeguards that meet risk with restraint.

And if J. D. Vance can say with a straight face that Justice Scalia was wrong about the legality of burning flags, then he can also ask whether Scalia’s reading of gun rights was wrong, or at least admit the limits Scalia himself wrote. You cannot dismiss Scalia on Monday and canonise him on Tuesday. Either precedent can be questioned, or we follow Scalia’s own carve-outs and pass the laws every honest clinician and cop has been begging for.

For the pews and the pulpits, the test is older than any court. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be. If your budgets starve schools and clinics while your speeches praise the sanctity of life, Scripture reads the ledger and renders a verdict. Prayer is holy in grief. Prayer that replaces action is a lie.

So write the bill. Lock the guns. Vet the sales. License the carrier. Pull weapons when danger is plain. Keep guns out of places that should be safe by definition. Dry up the illegal market. Fund the humans who keep children alive.

Quote Heller’s limits when the argument turns smug. Quote Bruen’s concessions when the chest-thumping starts. Quote Rahimi when someone pretends danger must stay armed. And when a senator who just trashed Scalia on flag-burning suddenly treats Heller like scripture, call the bluff and vote.

None of this is culture-war magic. It is governance. It honours the Constitution and the Sermon on the Mount at the same time. It will not save every life. It will save enough to prove we meant our prayers.

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VIII. Conclusion: the idol, the silence, the bill​

There is a backpack on a folding chair in a church gym. The cat-in-a-spacesuit sticker is half-peeled. A mother grips the straps like they might pulse. The air tastes of candle smoke and disinfectant. Paper cups of water sweat on a trestle table no one touches. This is the country we built. Not by accident. By choice. By worship. By cowardice dressed up as prayer.

Enough polite throat-clearing. Children are dead because a man turned grievance into gospel and a party turned itself into a bloody church. He held up a Bible like a trophy. He made a gun into a personality test. He taught a crowd to chant instead of think, to kneel to a brand instead of protect a child. That man is Donald Trump. That congregation is MAGA. The result is not tragic mystery. It is arithmetic with a body count. You fed an idol and the idol demanded blood. It always does.

We walked the tablets you want bolted above whiteboards and found a rap sheet, not a catechism. No other gods, broken. No graven images, broken. Do not take the Lord’s name in vain, broken on live television. Do not steal, broken in court. Do not lie, broken daily. Do not trample vows, broken and buried with hush money. Then came the Ten Commandments bill for classrooms you will not make safe. That is not faith. That is blasphemy in a suit, and it stinks to high heaven.

Scripture’s pattern is not subtle. Idolatry, warning, stubbornness, consequence. Sometimes fire. More often silence while the mess you insisted on eats your house from the inside. COVID was a plague in that sense, a mirror we smashed. School shootings are another, a drumbeat we pretend is thunder. You pray on camera, then defund the answer. You sign the easy bill, then veto the one that saves a life. You polish the idol and call it courage. It is not courage. It is ritualised bullshit.

Budgets preach louder than sermons. Where your treasure is, there your heart is. Bible-Belt states starve schools, shave welfare to ribbons, and throttle health care while cashing cheques from the very places they sneer at. Then they pose with the Beatitudes like a prop. Christ did not bless this theatre. He promised a millstone for those who harm the little ones and he meant it. If the Nazarene walked your corridors he would not ask for a selfie. He would flip tables and ask why the hell you keep choosing coffins over locks, vigils over laws, slogans over mercy.

Since 2015 the catechism has been guns-as-sacrament, regulation-as-sin, evidence-as-treachery. Statehouses obeyed. Permitless carry spread. Safe storage was mocked. Red-flag tools were derided as tyranny. And the curve did exactly what grown-ups said it would do. More gunfire in schools. More drills. More vigils. More tiny caskets. Spare us the shocked faces. You lit the fuse and sold the fireworks.

We even handed you the dull, holy medicine. Lock the guns. Vet the sales. License and train like adults. Pull weapons when danger is plain. Keep guns out of places that are supposed to be safe by definition. Cap the worst damage. Trace the illegal flow. Fund counsellors, nurses, and community teams who catch a falling kid before the fall becomes a spray of bullets. The Constitution is not the excuse. Scalia wrote the limits. Bruen left the scaffolding. Rahimi drew the line on danger. The obstacle is not law. It is worship. Your idol does not want solutions. It wants a crowd and a camera.

So here is the verdict, without euphemism. The blame sits where it belongs. On Donald Trump, who built a cult from grievance and taught a nation to kiss the ring. On MAGA, which keeps the shrine polished and calls children’s coffins the price of liberty. On officials who can quote Micah at breakfast and vote against the least of these by lunch. On every adult who found comfort in a brand while a mother hugged a backpack instead of a child. If that sounds cruel, measure it against a morgue tag. If it sounds angry, good. Anger is the only honest register left.

Tear down the idol or keep the sirens. Pass the boring, life-saving bills or keep rehearsing eulogies. Choose the child or choose the cult. If you choose the cult again, stop asking why God is quiet. God has not abandoned faith. God has abandoned your counterfeit worship that loves power in public and lets children die in private. God hates America as it currently is because America, under Trump and under MAGA, chose the image over the child and the chant over the truth. The sound at dusk is not mystery. It is judgment with a siren attached. Now either do the work or get out of the way.

Now, of course, we mourn for the lost children of the day. The way we do on too many similar days. In mourning burns the hope for change so the next family doesn't join the circle of pain. Mourning without the desire for change is not even performance, it is mockery of dead children.

For those of you who can watch this on repeat like a toddler with a favorite show and not demand change because it is your God-given right to have a gun, I say these final twenty words…

The God you pray to on Sunday hates your existence. As does every other being with the capacity for compassion.

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[Earl]

ZZZ

 

[Yakuda]

ZZZ

We might be reading about this manifesto some day

 

[鬼百合]

We might be reading about this manifesto some day

Yours? Guessing it would mirror the trans guy.

 

[Stone]

The ramblings of a lonely nutter like Naked Hunter.....

 

[鬼百合]

oh that's right magats can't read. My bad

 

[Uncensored2008]

Dear MAGA: We Have School Shootings Because God Hates Your Cult.​

From golden calf to AR-15: the theology behind America’s ritual child sacrifice​

Dear MAGA: We Have School Shootings Because God Hates Your Cult.

From golden calf to AR-15: the theology behind America’s ritual child sacrifice

jillybeanmonet.substack.com

A school bell rings and the corridor breathes, then falls still. A custodian props a mop against chipped paint and studies a small dark hole in the plaster, as if answers might speak from it. The chaplain’s voice eases into the air because there is nothing else to do in that moment but hold back the tide for a heartbeat. Parents arrive with white knuckles and eyes that will never again learn how to forget. Candles extinguish in the wind and leave a sour trace of smoke. The chairs are stacked. The gym is swept. The desks remain empty, and the town learns a new silence that will not leave its throat. I begin here because grief is the only honest key to the door.

Yet grief alone is not the whole room. America keeps choosing a world in which children die preventable deaths, then asks God to foot the bill with thoughts and prayers. Scripture does not bless that bargain. Prayer without repentance is noise. Idolatry breeds consequences that need no thunder to be real. In the pages ahead I will set out the case as plainly as love for children demands. First, the rise of a personality-cult since 2015 and the old sin of false gods, read against the Bible’s own record of what follows such worship. Next, the Bible Belt’s budgetary cruelty, where schools are starved, social welfare is shaved to the bone, and health care is throttled, even as federal transfers keep the lights on, all of it in open defiance of the teachings of Jesus about the least of these. Then, the hard arithmetic of school shootings since 2015. The thread is simple and severe. A people that refuse protection for their young will eventually find heaven quiet.

Give anger the floor, for politeness has purchased coffins and says it's always too fucking soon to talk about how to move forward in rememberance of the dead children they only cared about when they were a fetus in their mother's womb. A nation that treats children as collateral for a gun-culture identity has no right to whisper pieties over fresh graves. Enough of the theatre, enough of the podium prayers, enough of the hand-on-heart cowardice that will not pass a single law to match its grief. We will name the idol so many have kissed since 2015 and tally the blood-price it exacts. We will read the prophets who say God hates worship that tramples the poor, and the Christ who sets a child in the centre and warns that to harm such a one is a millstone offence. And we will close where the evidence leaves us, with the only honest answer to why the prayers fail. God hates America as it currently is, and unless the country repents in laws, budgets, and brave, costly choices, that hatred will continue to sound like silence while the sirens scream.

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I. Why God Is Done Answering Prayers To Prevent Mass Shootings​

Begin with the hard distinction most politicians blur on purpose. Private prayer that keeps a bereaved parent breathing is holy. Public prayer that replaces action is theatre. One heals the soul for a night. The other launders a conscience and sends everyone home. If you want to know why heaven feels silent when America prays about school shootings, start there. God is not a stagehand hired to tidy up after cowardice.

Scripture never sells prayer as a magic override. Prayer is petition, yes. Prayer is also confession. Prayer is alignment. In the Bible, people cry out and then change. They fast and then repair what they broke. They weep and then feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the stranger. If you will not do the second half, the prophets say the first half sounds like noise. Isaiah calls the music detestable when the poor are crushed. Amos says keep your songs; let justice roll down. Micah says God has already told you what is good. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly. None of that is mysterious. None of that is optional. If a nation refuses, prayer becomes incense in a locked room. Fragrant, then gone. The fire keeps burning.

Why the silence. Because actions have consequences in the eyes of God and God often speaks by letting consequence run its course. The text is full of it. The people demand a king who will make them feel safe. The prophet warns that a king will take their sons and their fields and their future. They insist. They get what they asked for and the bill that follows. The wilderness crowd begs for meat and despises the responsibility of freedom. The quail come. So do the graves. The idolaters want a god that matches their appetites. The party is loud. The morning is hell. Judgment in these stories is not always a lightning strike. It is often God stepping back. It is the moral order left to operate without rescue.

Apply that logic to America’s school shootings. A people who will not pass the most basic, evidence-based protections are choosing the next obituary. Safe storage. Universal checks that actually check. Licensing that treats the weapon as a serious responsibility. Red-flag tools that remove guns from a man who is spiralling. These are not miracles. These are simple, boring, life-saving steps that every other rich democracy figured out while we were arguing on television. When a country says no to those and yes to a gun-culture identity, it is not praying. It is performing. God does not bless performances that put children in coffins. God lets the consequences speak.

There is also the small matter of idolatry, which is not small at all. Prayer that props up an idol is blasphemy in a suit. When leaders wrap failure in piety, they are misusing the divine name to sanctify negligence. That is the third commandment in plain clothes. Do not take the name of the Lord in vain. It does not mean avoid swearing in traffic. It means do not strap God to your politics to excuse harm. If you tweet a Bible verse while voting against the least of these, you are using God as a brand. The prophets had a word for that. God hates it.

Why else the silence. Because the prayers are dishonest about agency. People ask God to stop bullets while defending policies that make bullets easy to buy and effortless to fire in the places children gather. They ask for protection but demand permitless carry. They ask for safety but fight safe-storage laws as if locks were chains on freedom. They ask for help while cutting school counsellors, school nurses, and the very human nets that catch a falling kid before he hits a hard floor. Prayer is not a voucher for divine babysitting while you sharpen the knives. It is a summons to repent with your hands and your vote.

The New Testament sharpens the edge. Jesus places a child in the centre and says the kingdom belongs to such as these. He describes a millstone for those who cause little ones to stumble. He walks into a temple and flips the tables of people who turned devotion into a racket. He tells a parable where a priest and a Levite pass a bleeding man on the road while a despised outsider stops, pays, and makes sure the man will live. If you want to know where God stands in a hallway full of shell casings, read the story again. God is with the Samaritan who pays the bill. God is not with the pious men who pass by and whisper a prayer on the way home.

But what about free will. What about human evil that God does not simply erase. Yes, the texts honour human agency. They do not allow it as an alibi for systems that feed violence. The Bible speaks of personal sin and also of principalities and powers. Patterns that grind the weak. Arrangements that reward cruelty. In that world, prayer without structural repentance is the sin of omission wearing a choir robe. You know the good you ought to do. You will not do it. You ask God to let you off the hook. The answer is no.

Let us name the pastoral truth that still matters. God is near to the brokenhearted. God listens when a mother sobs in a hospital chapel. That does not clash with the argument here. It deepens it. Comfort for the broken heart is not the same thing as prevention for the next family. God’s nearness in grief does not grant absolution to lawmakers who prefer a press conference to a vote. Compassion and judgment are not rivals. They are partners. Mercy visits the vigil. Justice rewrites the law.

So why does the phrase thoughts and prayers curdle in the mouth now. Because everyone knows the script. Politicians treat it like a magic spell that erases their duty. The press conference happens at dusk. The same lines are read. The flags are at half-mast. The lobbyists sleep well. The families do not. When prayer becomes a public-relations strategy, God is not in the room. God is with the people who refuse to play along.

You want a reason that is not spiritual. Fine. Prayer that substitutes for action keeps the cycle intact because it lowers the perceived urgency. It offers the speaker a hit of moral relief without paying a political cost. It encourages the base to treat policy as betrayal. It puts reform in the category of blasphemy and keeps the donor stream pure. That is how rituals work. They train the body to feel clean while it stays dirty. The result is inertia with a halo.

You want a reason that is spiritual. Here. The world runs on causes and effects that God authored. Sow violence and you reap grief. Sow greed and you reap scarcity. Sow indifference and you reap emptiness. The miracle most often on offer is not a divine hand stopping a bullet midair. It is the quiet work of a people who repent and change the terms of their life together. Laws that shrink risk are not less holy than a hymn. They may be the holiest thing on the page.

When does God answer. The witness of the text is blunt. When a people return. When they tear down the idol and repair the breach. Nineveh puts on sackcloth and the disaster is stayed. Zacchaeus meets Jesus and pays back what he stole with interest. The early church sells property to meet needs. None of these stories is gentle about the cost. All of them say the same word. Repent. Over and over. Repent in public. Repent with your purse. Repent with your power. Pray while you do it. Not instead of doing it.

So the why is not a mystery. God is done answering the ritualised prayers of a nation that refuses repentance. Not because God enjoys silence. Because consequence is the grammar of judgment and America keeps writing the same sentence in blood. Pray at your vigil. God is there. Pray at your desk and draft the bill. God will be there too. Keep praying at microphones while you protect the idol and starve the least. Expect the same reply you have been getting. A silence that sounds like sirens and a hallway that smells like gunpowder.

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We have school shootings because democrats have promoted severe mental illness in children.

And all of America knows it - you are fully to blame for this.

Trannies shoot up schools - it's what they do. They were groomed by leftist teachers, and now they act out.

 

[鬼百合]

We have school shootings because democrats have promoted severe mental illness in children.

And all of America knows it - you are fully to blame for this.

Trannies shoot up schools - it's what they do. They were groomed by leftist teachers, and now they act out.

Look at this delusional dumbass. Thanks for the laugh

 

[Damocles]

Genius.

Short version of OP: God makes school shootings happen and it's your fault!

 

[Uncensored2008]

Look at this delusional dumbass. Thanks for the laugh

5 school shootings - 5 done by trannies.

The public school groomers trained killers. This is the prize we get for allowing leftists to pervert our schools.

 

[鬼百合]

5 school shootings - 5 done by trannies.

The public school groomers trained killers. This is the prize we get for allowing leftists to pervert our schools.

99% of all shootings are straight white males. Who is the problem asshole?

 

[Uncensored2008]

99% of all shootings are straight white males. Who is the problem asshole?

Lying won't change reality, 12b Maggot.

In the last decade, the overwhelming majority of mass shootings have been perpetrated by those who identify as LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ+1@34

Your party, with the grooming agenda and the extreme Christophobic bigotry is fully to blame for this.

 

[Stone]

Weird how many of them happened before Trump was POTUS. Also weird that they happened while Obama was POTUS, including the most known instance. Are you saying that God hates homosexual radical Islam extremists sympathizers like Obama and his cult?

 

[鬼百合]

Lying won't change reality, 12b Maggot.

In the last decade, the overwhelming majority of mass shootings have been perpetrated by those who identify as LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ+1@34

Your party, with the grooming agenda and the extreme Christophobic bigotry is fully to blame for this.

You 12B are always wrong. Oh well