After every mass shooting, America succumbs to recycling the same old tropes, a process that inevitably devolves into social media attacks, public shouting matches, vitriol and polarization. The subject, regardless of which side of the debate you’re on, always ends up revolving around guns because even those who believe there are evil outside forces at work when mass shooters commit their carnage are faced with dispelling the shortsighted and erroneous notion propagated by the Left — namely, that the culprit is guns.

To be fair, Democrats occasionally concede that cultural depravity is partially to blame. Even Barack Obama admitted that the lack of fatherhood and family structure affects cultural norms. For example, in June 2010, he declared, “I can’t legislate fatherhood — I can’t force anybody to love a child. But what we can do is send a clear message to our fathers that there is no excuse for failing to meet their obligations.” And in May 2013, during his commencement address at Morehouse College, he observed, “Everything else is unfulfilled if we fail at family, if we fail at that responsibility.”

But that’s about as far as most Democrats are willing to go. And most are certainly not willing to even touch on any spiritual angle, though in some ways, the opposite is true — naysayers have increasingly berated conservatives for invoking God. To put it another way, while leftists will admit that fatherhood is important, they don’t want to acknowledge that every human needs a father figure in the form of Christ. What used to be a bipartisan call for “thoughts and prayers” upon news of a shooting is now extreme anger and agitation toward people who yearn for providential peace and healing.

Just consider the invective Keith Olbermann spewed at Paul Ryan after the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas: “Speaker Ryan, bluntly: shove your prayers up your a— AND DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR LIFE BESIDES PLATITUDES AND POWER GRABS.” Or the mockery from Neil deGrasse Tyson after last week’s shooting: “Evidence collected over many years, obtained from many locations, indicates that the power of Prayer is insufficient to stop bullets from killing school children.”

The Left’s plea for gun control stems largely from its refusal to acknowledge the connection between cultural depravity and America’s throwing away Christianity. The reason organizations like the Freedom From Religious Foundation are so successful is because too many Americans share the view that God is either nonexistent or is ill-suited to fulfill our idea of what faith demands.

Pornography has been mainstream for decades now, and the consequence is that women are utterly objectified, not respected, and the hostility it creates toward them is burgeoning. But that doesn’t mean the industry is going anywhere — the demand for it is too strong. Moreover, much as guns are blamed for mass shootings, “toxic masculinity” is blamed for the objectification of women.

Both America’s long relationship with guns and “toxic masculinity” are scapegoats the Left uses because it objects to moral changes. On the issue of gun control, for all the talk of how conservatives don’t offer ideas to curb violence, the truth is that we do; they’re just meaningful and religious-oriented ones leftists reject.

The Second Amendment, like other rights codified in our Constitution, is inalienable. And that’s another problem leftists have with it. They hate the idea of a “God-given right.” They believe the government is god and, therefore, should have the authority to dictate our rights. To do otherwise exhibits certitude toward a higher authority.

If America wants to see an end to mass shootings, it’s literally impossible to do so without a return to the moral standard set forth through Christianity. Most leftists believe in a lot of coincidences — the big bang, for example — and their argument against guns implies that the lack of mass shootings before God was stripped from schools is also coincidental. In reality, it’s the unavoidable outcome of engendering a godless society. Our national discussion must take on and rebut the secular approach to stop the bloodshed. Otherwise, our rights will continue to be undermined with absolutely nothing to show for it.