On Tuesday, May 31, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) released an article condemning politicians who blamed the Texas school shooting "on atheism, irreligiosity or lack of faith."
The FFRF "is condemning a recent barrage of troubling comments by politicians callously blaming the Texas school shooting on atheism, irreligiosity, or lack of faith," the article said.
FFRF is a nonprofit organization that advocates for atheists, agnostics, nontheists, and theists who support the separation of church and state.
According to FFRF, they sent letters to "ranking public officials who have recently made outrageous remarks about religion and mass shootings." These officials included Sen. Rick Gray, a state senator of Arizona, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Sen. Ron Johnson, the U.S. senator for Wisconsin, and Lt. Gov. Winsome Sear from Virginia.
In 2021, Pew Research Center released a report showing declining support "among Republicans for a ban on assault-style weapons, national gun registry." Even the perception of gun violence as a problem is surprisingly low on the Republican side, Pew Research Center wrote in their report.
In his article in Time, Samuel Perry, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma, said guns are the religion of the right. "Guns are practically an element of worship in the church of white Christian nationalism," Perry wrote in his article.
A study in 2018, co-authored by Perry, also established a strong link between the opposition to stricter gun control and Christian nationalism. The study also showed that most Christian nationalists lean strongly towards the Republican side.
All of these politicians, quite coincidentally, are Republican Christians.
A day after the terrible incident at Uvalde, several Republican legislators in Arizona lamented the tragedy. They also attempted to explain the cause of the shooting, everything except guns and their accessibility.
Sen. Gray blamed godlessness. "We've been teaching our children that there is no God," he said. Sen. Gray also claimed that because there is no god, there is no absolute.
"We live in a post-modern world, so whatever you think is right is right, and if somebody else has a different view, you're still right," he added.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also claimed that the Uvalde shooting, including all mass shootings, was because of a lack of religion. "We have devalued life in this country; we threw God out of school," he said.
In his appearance on Fox News, Lt. Gov. Patrick also claimed that the solution is through prayer. "We're a nation of godly people, and godly people need to pray," he claimed.
Wisconsin's representative, Sen. Ron Johnson, also gave a painfully callous explanation for the shooting. Sen. Johnson blamed "wokeness." "We're indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling some children they're not equal to others, and they're the cause of other people's problems," the senator said
In an interview with a conservative radio show, Senator Johnson extended the blame to the "secularization of society and loss of faith."
Speaking at the National Rifle Association (NRA) conference in Texas, just miles from Uvalde and a few days after the shooting, Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears of Virginia claimed that the shooting was caused by the "lack of prayer in schools."
