The no-action, prayer-only crowd tries to make 'prayer shaming' a thing
When 14 people were killed and 17 wounded in Wednesday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, elected Republican after elected Republican offered up prayers and thoughts … and nothing else. Apparently, a big chunk of America hit a tipping point with the “thoughts and prayers” routine and began criticizing it harshly, with the New York Daily News even running the front-page headline “God isn’t fixing this.” So naturally Thursday is bringing various condemnations of, get this, “prayer shaming.”
The charge of “prayer shaming” is that people mocking the by-now rote tweets about prayers are saying “don’t pray.” Or that they don't understand what prayer does. Or that they’re just plain evil, as Fox News’s Elizabeth Hasselbeck suggested when she said “I say this, if you want to line up with terrorists and try to take God away, you’re not on the right side. That’s all I’d have to say to those politicians who want to tell you to stop praying. Just don’t.”
The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers helpfully explains prayer (and by “helpfully” I obviously mean “patronizingly”):
Perhaps the No. 1 problem with prayer shaming is that it is misunderstands the purpose of prayer. As any prayerful person will tell you, God isn’t a wish-granting genie. People don’t pray because they expect God to make their lives — or the world — perfect. They make requests, sure, but they understand that God might have different plans. Mostly they pray for God to influence them, not the other way around.
So, it makes little sense to stop praying because the results aren’t always good; that’s not the point.
Guys. No one is seriously saying don’t pray. Pray all you want! But if that is your only response to yet another mass shooting, in an America in which there is more than one mass shooting per day, then you deserve to be criticized and mocked. If praying is a substitute for doing and you are a politician whose job is to do things to make this country better, we have a problem. If, as Borchers says, you are praying for God to influence you and yet you still don’t see room for action, for human beings to move forward and attempt to change the world for the better, then you should maybe pray for some help with your openness to God’s influence. Borchers even kinda sorta has to acknowledge that the real issue here is not prayer but prayer in the absence of anything else:
Now, heavenly prayer without Earthly action is just as illogical as welcoming refugees without thorough vetting. Both situations call for principle and practice. After San Bernardino, many are echoing what President Obama said in October, following a different mass shooting: “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough.”
He’s right, of course. When Noah knew the flood was coming, he didn’t just pray for the rain to stop. He built the ark. In the same way, lawmakers shouldn't hide behind prayer, using it as an excuse to do nothing else.
That’s the issue. That’s what’s being criticized here. But it’s a lot more convenient to pretend that this is about “prayer shaming” and godless types not understanding the true meaning of prayer and so on.
Hasselbeck, of course, is just interested in putting people who would like to see fewer mass shootings in the U.S. on the side of terrorism, because Fox News.