Others have been less nuanced. After Wednesday’s shootings, The Huffington Post quickly rounded up a list of tweets from politicians offering their prayers. “In short, basically anyone with a Twitter account shared thoughts and prayers in the immediate aftermath of the latest shooting,” the reporters wrote. “Which is kind of them to do, of course, but probably not enough to stop the next one.”

This cynicism offers a view into just how much religion and politics have changed in the United States. Prayer and political action have a deeply entwined history in America. From civil rights to women’s suffrage, nearly every social-justice movement has had strong supporters from religious communities—U.S. history is littered with images like the one of pastors and rabbis marching on Selma, side by side with political activists.

But now, even in the absence of information about the shooter’s identity and motivations, people have jumped to conclusions like this, from Democratic Senator Chris Murphy:

Your "thoughts" should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your "prayers" should be for forgiveness if you do nothing - again. — Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) December 2, 2015

(On Wednesday evening, Murphy’s communications director wrote in, twice, asking me to note that his “boss’s tweet in particular was not in any way about the normal and thoughtful reaction of people to pray in times of tragedy in grief. It was directed at lawmakers whose only response to preventable attacks is to tweet without following up with action to stop it. He’s made that point many times.” The tweet itself has not been deleted or clarified.)

There are many assumptions packed into these attacks on prayer: that all religious people, and specifically Christians, are gun supporters, and vice versa. That people who care about gun control can’t be religious, and if they are, they should keep quiet in the aftermath of yet another heart-wrenching act of violence. At one time in American history, liberals and conservatives shared a language of God, but that’s clearly no longer the case; any invocation of faith is taken as implicit advocacy of right-wing political beliefs.

The most powerful evidence against this backlash toward prayer comes not from the Twitterverse, but from San Bernardino. “Pray for us,” a woman texted her father from inside the Inland Regional Center, while she and her colleagues hid from the gunfire. Outside the building, evacuated workers bowed their heads and held hands. They prayed.

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