The killing of Charlie Kirk troubles me greatly, and so I find myself wrestling with scattered thoughts on paper—trying to make sense of senseless acts in a bloody and broken America.

What exactly does the phrase “thoughts and prayers” mean? It has become a reflexive utterance of the right, a hollow ritual performed after each gun death in a nation that refuses to address the very weapons that enable these killings. The irony is staggering—people champion guns while offering prayers for the victims of gun violence. Do they believe, like the misguided religious fanatics who flew planes into the Twin Towers, that their reward awaits them in some heavenly afterlife? Do right-wing Republicans think it doesn’t matter if school children are slaughtered because they’ll go to heaven anyway?

If so, then what about aborted children? Why are they different? Why do they advocate controlling what a woman can and can’t do with her own body while simultaneously championing the right to own instruments of death? The word “thought” implies thinking, but this twisted logic shows no coherent thought at all.

One of Kirk’s most notorious rants, delivered on April 5, 2023, perfectly encapsulates this madness: “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” Worth it to have deaths to protect our God-given rights? How does this make sense in any moral universe? And how do people now send “thoughts and prayers” to honor someone who publicly declared that gun deaths were an acceptable price for political ideology?

One of Gina’s Facebook “friends” posted that “Charlie Kirk is with Jesus now.” Even if there were a heaven and a Jesus—which all these gun murders continue to prove overwhelmingly that there is not—one of the last persons on earth who would be there would be this racist exclusivist, whose words went against the actual teachings attributed to Jesus in the Christian Bible. Thoughts? And prayers? I don’t understand.

Another of Gina’s Facebook friends responded to her post that simply said “No prayers.” It said nothing else, yet one of Gina’s friends who calls herself a Christian replied, “There’s something wrong with you and Randy.” What thought went into that response? It’s just more of the shaming and judgment that traumatized us—the constant stream of condemnation that flows from the mouths of people who call themselves followers of a man who supposedly said “judge not.”

I agree there is something wrong, but it’s not Randy and Gina (although we certainly have our flaws). What’s wrong in this case is America. It has become a bloody and broken country, largely due to the people who reflexively chant “thoughts and prayers” every time another senseless gun death, assassination, or school slaughter occurs.

What Gina’s simple post was trying to say was that prayers are not the answer. Faulty laws and beliefs need to be changed. Not more prayers. That’s what she was trying to communicate. It’s mind-deadening to witness the plummeting demise of a dying America—a nation that has confused weapons with worship, politics with prayer, ideology with actual spiritual practice.

I’m just trying to make sense of these senseless acts by writing actual thoughts. But no prayers from here. I tried those for fifty years, and for me, they were impotent and powerless against the very real violence that our society enables and celebrates.

The phrase “thoughts and prayers” has become the empty ritual of a culture that has lost its way—a people who have forgotten that true spiritual practice demands action, not just words; transformation, not just tradition; love that protects the vulnerable, not ideology that sacrifices humans on the altar of political power. In the words of David A. Graham, “A society that resorts to violence to solve its problems starts to surrender its claim on being a society.”

Kirk’s death is a tragedy. All gun deaths are tragedies. But until we’re willing to examine the beliefs and systems that make such violence inevitable—until we’re willing to choose actual change over hollow prayers—we’ll keep collecting bodies while offering empty words to a god who, if he exists, must be weeping at what we’ve done in his name.

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