Last week's horrific school shooting in Florida saw the tired trope of 'thoughts and prayers' trending once again.
The supposedly sympathetic phrase is now invoked almost universally satirically: a biting barb at those who offer condolence but little action against inconvenient injustice. Christians might feel hurt that 'thoughts and prayers' are so readily rejected now, sometimes it may seem that prayer is all one can do. But is there a better, deeper response to public tragedy?
Republican leaders came under fire in particular following the Parkland massacre, with several Twitter users condemning sympathetic posts from those who have also received vast financial contributions from the notoriously influential pro-gun lobby, the National Rifle Association.
Attention drew naturally to Trump, who appeared to only slightly alter the 'thoughts and prayers' formula with 'prayers and condolences'. Several found it particularly hypocritical since Trump last year dismantled Obama-era legislation on mental health checks for gun-owners, and the years since the historic tragedy at Sandy Hook have seen, despite countless more school shootings, no real movement on gun reform.
It's not that the religious sentiment of these leaders is opposed, it's that the sentiment is betrayed as shallow when accompanied by political inaction. 'Thoughts and prayers' becomes at best laughable and at worst an insidious cover for evil, one that claims innocent schoolchildren as its most frequent victims. As the now frequently recycled headline from satirical site The Onion summarises the public feeling: '"No Way To Prevent This," Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens'.
As AJ Willingham wrote for CNN, 'thoughts and prayers' has reached peak 'semantic satiation'. It has lost its meaning and become a cynical curse on inaction, a meme of meaningless lament applied to leaders who wish to sympathise without offering real and costly change.
Last year's arcade-style mobile game 'Thoughts and Prayers: The Game' offered a dark, sarcastic satire on the mass shooting epidemic, and as Christian Today's Martin Saunders has suggested, provides a challenge for the Church in the face of profound violence.
In one exceptionally tone-deaf display, Republican Congressman Mike Bost was pictured on Friday delivering a large bag of 'prayer cards' to a grinning President Trump. Though the picture was from April, the posting right in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting was pilloried heavily online, exacerbated of course by the fact that Bost is a staunch defender of second amendment rights and opposes gun restrictions.
It was a sad visual metaphor for the meaning 'thoughts and prayers': no legal changes that might actually protect the innocent, just a crass bag of stage-managed sentiment, snapped with a smile for the cameras.
One doesn't need to wade into the partisan particularities of gun-rights and legislation to see that the benediction of 'thoughts and prayers', or its equivalent, is empty and insensitive when not accompanied by a demonstrable desire for change. It wouldn't be appropriate to even begin to suggest what those political changes should be, and as a British writer I'm well aware of the dangers of speaking into an American issue, but at stake here is a bigger question about what it means to be a human person who longs for the Kingdom of God in a broken world.
What's at risk is something the Old Testament prophets, and Christ himself, called out explicitly: hypocrisy. Empty sacrifices that go through the public ceremony of worship, fasting and 'sacrifice', but in reality ignore the needs of the oppressed: the orphan, the poor, the widow and the stranger: 'Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?' (Isaiah 58:6) Religious, even if well-intentioned, language must never become a cover for apathy at injustice, for not addressing sinful human systems of which we are a part.
Clearly it would be wrong for Christians to give up on prayer or suppose that it posseses no value or capacity for change. For many of us the problem may be that we do not pray enough for the wrongs of the world, so self-consumed as we tend to be. But a biblical vision can't separate prayer and action, it mustn't offer condolence without genuinely seeking change.
Perhaps 'thoughts and prayers' spurt out instinctively because we do not know what to say. Evil, and our seeming inability to stop it, can be overwhelming. Perhaps talking is part of the problem. The UN yesterday released a blank statement on the horrific genocide taking place in Syria's East Ghouta, where the bombing by the Syrian government and its Russian allies have targeted hundreds of civilians, including children and hospitals.
The UN press release was simply quotation marks surrounding blank space, because 'no words will do justice to the children killed, their mothers, their fathers and their loved ones', it said.
It may not seem a complete response, but it is an honest one – perhaps more meaningful than gestures of sentiment that intend no real change to the status quo. Christians believe God promises dramatic, tangible hope and restoration, glimpsed somehow even in the painful present. For a world in need, faith has to mean more than 'thoughts and prayers'.
You can follow @JosephHartropp on Twitter.
