Republican presidential candidates are struggling to characterize the motivation behind the tragic mass shooting in Charleston, S.C., with only Ben Carson speaking quickly and forcefully about the role of race in the killing of nine people in a historically black church this week.

“If we don’t pay close attention to the hatred and division in our nation, it is just a harbinger of what we can expect,” said Carson, who stands apart from the rest of the GOP field as a rare African-American conservative.


The Faith and Freedom Coalition, at which many of the Republican contenders are appearing this week, showed the party’s overall discomfort with talking about race and guns.

While the Justice Department quickly opened up a hate crime investigation into the killings, carried out by a 21-year-old white man, and Hillary Clinton argued the tragedy should force America to focus on “hard truths” about race, guns, violence, and divisions, Republicans were initially reluctant to attribute the murders to racism.

Some of the earliest reactions argued that the shooting at the A.M.E. Church in Charleston was really an attack on religious liberty and a matter of good versus evil. But by Friday afternoon much of the field suggested that the shooting was (at the very least) related to race.

“The idea that anyone would walk into a church and pray with the people he intended to murder is depraved,” said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who spoke Friday morning. “It’s unthinkable.”

Early on in the conference, several Republican candidates who touched on the Charleston shooting here — only Marco Rubio, who spoke Thursday, completely ignored it — chose to focus on the fact that it happened inside “a House of God.”

Though he spoke about race when urging Republicans to become a “party of minority rights,” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, ascribed the killings to “people straying away” from faith.

“There’s a sickness in our country,” he said. “There’s something terribly wrong but it isn’t going to be fixed by your government … It’s people not understanding where salvation comes from.”

That same day, former senator Rick Santorum described the shooting as a “crime of hate” and pegged it as a “assault on religious liberty.”

Jeb Bush, who emphasized his conservative bona fides at the conference, was cautious when asked whether he thought the shooting was racially motivated.

“Looks like it to me it was, but we’ll find out all the information,” Bush said Friday at the conference during a hallway interview, according to spokesman Tim Miller . “It’s clear it was an act of raw hatred, for sure. Nine people lost their lives, and they were African American. You can judge what it is.”

During his remarks just before from the stage, however, the former Florida governor told the crowd that he didn’t know “what was on the mind or heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes.

“I do know —I do know what was in the heart of the victims. They were meeting in brotherhood and sisterhood in that church.”

The candidates’ hedges and wobbles are at odds with the facts that have emerged about the alleged killer, Dylann Storm Roof. His own Facebook page, his statements to law enforcement officers and media reports quoting those who know him show strong connections to white supremacy beliefs.

Bush’s initial avoidance of that reality mirrored that of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who acknowledged the obvious racial aspect of the shooting only after being asked by reporters after his speech.

“What I noticed is that the entire country is now standing shoulder to shoulder with the minority community, the African American community in South Carolina, and God bless them,” he said. Asked whether the shooting was a hate crime, Kasich replied, “There’s nine people dead…you read what they say about the guy, it sure appears that way.”

Speaking to the crowd of several hundred religious conservatives, Bush, Christie and others called for prayer and little else.

“Laws can’t change this,” he said. “Only the good will and love of the American people can let folks know that an act like this is unacceptable.”

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal opened his remarks by himself leading a long prayer, expressing grief for the victims, their families and the Charleston community; he prayed that God brings comfort to children asking their parents “about the realities of evil.”

Bush, while acknowledging that the shooting “has had a big effect on me”, encouraged the audience to turn inward for solace in the shooting’s aftermath.

“We must continue to bear witness to the truth that God acts through us; and that, even in crisis, even in desperate times, we can always walk upright as brothers and sisters and look to the havens and know that we’re children of God,” Bush said.

“Let’s hope it never happens again.”

Kyle Cheney and Katie Glueck contributed to this report