Pray — not just for comfort, but for courage and prudence to frustrate evil where it has taken individuals and institutions captive.
Pray — not just for comfort, but for courage and prudence to frustrate evil where it has taken individuals and institutions captive.
On Wednesday, after an assassin fatally shot conservative organizer Charlie Kirk in the throat while he spoke at a campus event in Utah, the reaction on the left was twofold. Online and in the real world, some celebrated Kirk’s death and said, in so many words, that he had it coming. Others issued statements, mostly vanilla, decrying “political violence” and expressing sympathies for Kirk’s family. A few said they were “praying.” Many conspicuously didn’t, instead blandly saying their “thoughts” were with Kirk and his family.
The compulsory statements ring pretty hollow for a few reasons. For starters, “thoughts” is a meaningless replacement for the act of petitioning God Almighty for comfort and healing. They’re coming from people who regularly vilified Kirk and his allies, using the same kind of inflammatory language Kirk’s killer engraved on the casings of his bullets. But it has also become obvious how much disgust many on the left have for prayer — so it’s weird to watch them play-act at an impotent secularized version of it, let alone the real thing.
Recall just two weeks ago, after a transgender shooter opened fire on Catholic schoolchildren in church, heartbroken Christians offered their prayers for the victims and their families. Prominent leftists excoriated them, mocking the prayers of not just horrified onlookers but the very prayers spoken by the victims before they were shot.
To mock our prayers as insufficient was a convenient way to redirect the conversation about the Minneapolis shooting toward the left’s favorite talking point in times of tragedy, gun control (certainly not the rising crisis of transgender violence). They told us prayer was not enough and that something had to be done to stop such tragedies from happening again.
The past week has proved them wrong and (kind of) right. It’s more obvious than ever how much our prayers are needed. Nothing in the world can comfort Mrs. Charlie Kirk better than her Lord and Savior, as I imagine she’s acutely aware.
