Another school shooting. Another cycle of grief. Another round of politicians and celebrities offering “thoughts and prayers.” And another round of cynics mocking those words as meaningless. Ho hum.
Both responses miss the truth. Prayer is not a hollow gesture. Prayer matters. But prayer does not erase human free will. Cain murdered Abel not for lack of prayer, but because of sin — in fact, because Abel prayed so much. Nearly every apostle of Christ was martyred, despite their closeness to God. Prayer sustains us, but it does not abolish evil.
Scripture tells us that “faith without works is dead.” Or in this case, “death.” Because to pray without reforming the culture that produces these massacres is to mouth pieties while ignoring our complicity.
Prayer is essential, but so is honesty about the deeper problem. We are living through a time of wickedness born from decades of cultural decay: violence glorified in movies and video games, violence even against the unborn, homes fractured, families broken, substance abuse normalized. Ours is a culture that once valued modesty, temperance, restraint, and solidarity, and now lives only in the fading afterglow of those virtues.
Ten years ago, in 2015, I wrote an essay titled “America’s Failing Culture Is to Blame For School Shootings.” I warned that these horrors were not random explosions of violence but symptoms of a deeper rot — the natural result of a society that had traded everything that was right and good and holy for everything that is wrong and evil and depraved. We traded faith for secularism. Families for broken homes. Sobriety for drugs. Modesty for promiscuity. Wholesome entertainment for violent and pornographic media. Solidarity for grievances. Love for sex. Children for abortion. That was ten years ago, and everything I feared has only worsened.
The past decade has only confirmed the diagnosis. School shootings are so common as to be cliché. A single shooting used to occupy news networks for weeks. Now they’re hardly news at all. Youth mental health has collapsed. Social media has poisoned childhood with loneliness, envy, and rage. Drug overdoses have broken record after record. Pornography has become the dominant teacher of sexuality. Hollywood and the gaming industry churn out endless violence as entertainment. Families continue to disintegrate, and children continue to pay the price.
The only things that have really changed since I first wrote that essay has been the reimagining of mental health challenges as normal (it’s you who have the problem, not them), and political violence becoming mainstream. Opponents are no longer seen merely as misguided, but as evil. Political leaders openly demonize one another, mobs rage online, and actual violence against political opponents is no longer unthinkable. The sickness that once infected our homes and our entertainment has now poisoned our politics. What a surprise.
We pretend culture is neutral, as though we can pump endless violence, lust, and nihilism into our veins without consequence, and then we feign shock when children, conditioned to see others not as neighbors but as enemies, almost a foreign species sent to torment them, turn to violence. The problem isn’t merely guns. It isn’t even just school shootings. Those are symptoms. The real problem is the comprehensive cultural collapse we’ve tolerated, excused, and in many cases celebrated.
So yes, we must pray. But we must also act. Prayer without reform is empty. Reform without prayer is powerless. The way forward is not complicated, though it will be difficult: restore families, reinforce modesty, temperance, and restraint, hold media and entertainment accountable for glorifying depravity (just stop giving them your money!), stop treating unborn children as disposable, raise your kids, choose partners wisely and treat them well, and rebuild solidarity, discipline, and faith in God. Set good examples and call out bad ones.
We cannot legislate our way out of a moral collapse. We must live our way out of it. Because every time we consume violent entertainment, every time we indulge in pornography, every time we turn away from virtue, we contribute to the culture of violence we now lament. We are not just victims of this crisis; we are, too often, its authors.
When I wrote the earlier essay, I warned that if we refused to address our cultural decay, we would face both continued bloodshed and the eventual erosion of our liberties. That warning went unheeded. Today the bloodshed continues, and the calls for liberty-curtailing solutions grow louder. “Thoughts and prayers” are not useless. They are indispensable. But they are not an excuse to do nothing. Prayer is a call — to repentance, to renewal, to cultural reform. Until we answer that call, we will continue to weep for the victims of the next tragedy, and the next, and the next.
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