Amid the chorus of mockery at prayers offered after the Annunciation Catholic School shooting, Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones (D) offered the most theological critique — and the most erroneous. “I want to bring theology into this,” he said on MSNBC, “because you have all these people [who] want to give thoughts and prayers after a shooting. But I was a minister, and that is a form of theological malpractice — when you pray for something you have the power to change.”

“There’s an African proverb that says, ‘When you pray, you move your hands and feet,’” Jones elaborated. “What we’re seeing is a form of idolatry, where we’re willing to worship [sacrifice?] the lives of our children to appease the prophets of the gun industry.”

“I would say to my colleagues who serve in government bodies … ‘Keep your thoughts and prayers, keep your tweets.’ If you want to address gun violence, you don’t need a tweet, what you need is a mirror,” he added. “You have the power to change things. You have the power to take action. Now is the time, until it’s your child, because sooner or later it’s going to hit home, and then it’ll be too late.”

Fundamentally, Jones was trying to argue for gun control legislation. This is no surprise given his history (on March 30, 2023, Jones and fellow legislators commandeered the Tennessee House lectern and shouted gun control slogans with a bullhorn, resulting in his brief expulsion from that legislative body).

To make his point, Jones cited an African saying popularized by the late Congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis, to the effect that prayer should be accompanied by action. This simply applies the biblical teaching that “faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26).

But Jones’s point departed from Lewis’s proverb in a subtle yet significant way. Whereas Lewis criticized actionless prayer for its lack of action, Jones criticized the prayer itself, calling it “theological malpractice” to pray without acting. This remark does indeed offer theological insight, although perhaps not in the direction Jones intended; this remark offers hearers a window into Jones’s own theology, which seems to differ from orthodox Christian teaching.

According to the Bible, prayer is both appropriate and commanded on all occasions (Ephesians 6:18; 1 Thessalonians 5:17). This is because prayer is an appropriate, creaturely response to the one true God, who sovereignly reigns over all creation. Thus, Jesus taught his followers to pray that God would act for his own glory, establish his kingdom on earth, accomplish his will, provide for our daily needs, forgive our sins, and preserve us from evil (Matthew 6:9-13). The act of prayer confesses that these requests are within God’s power to fulfill — and not within our own power.

Jones, by contrast, emphasizes circumstances that human beings — legislators, in particular — have the “power to change,” not what God has the power to change. For example, based on the argument that follows, he apparently believes that legislators have the power to prevent school shootings by passing gun control legislation.

But, while legislators can and should pass laws that protect people made in God’s image, they should also cultivate humility about the limits of their abilities. Again, James exhorts his readers:

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’ — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil” (James 4:14-16).

Human beings lack sovereignty even over activities that appear to be within their power. This means that, even if human beings believe they have the power to change something, they should still pray about it, thereby acknowledging God’s sovereignty.

Thus far, this analysis has, for argument’s sake, reasoned as if Jones is correct to promote gun control as a solution to school shootings, making it theoretically possible for a human legislature to end all school shootings. However, this assumption is highly debatable, and the debate boils down to another theological disagreement over the true nature of the problem.

For Jones and other progressives, the problem is not people but guns. He therefore argues that, for those offering prayers after a shooting, a refusal to legislate against guns and the gun industry constitutes so much idolatry, with children as the innocent, sacrificial victims.

Scripture would counsel us to lay the blame much closer to home. The first murder was committed among the first family, millennia before firearms were invented, because Cain “was of the evil one and murdered his brother … because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous,” wrote John. In fact, he adds, “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer” at heart (1 John 3:12, 15). In theological terms, the root cause of school shootings is mankind’s sin nature.

This theological disagreement works itself out in differing policy prescriptions. The progressive who blames guns sees gun control as an elegant solution. The Christian who blames sin nature denies that gun control or any other legislative measure has the “power to change” the real problem, human sinfulness (according to this reasoning, gun control becomes needlessly oppressive, perhaps even counterproductive).

The varying outcomes of these two different theologies produce different outcomes on many points, not just gun control. Because Jones’s progressive theology adopts a small view of God’s sovereignty, human action plays an outsize role, motivating adherents to otherwise extreme behavior. From 2017-2020, Jones was arrested at least five times for jumping “in front of a moving patrol car,” throwing a drink on the Tennessee House speaker, and walking on a police car during the BLM protests, among other infractions. For all this extreme action, Jones has rarely accomplished the changes he wishes to see.

The biblical alternative to this extreme behavior is prayer, by which believers “entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Peter 4:19). Prayer is not a substitute for action, merely an admission of our limitations. When the task before us is beyond our power, we pray to the all-powerful one and continue to walk in faithfulness.