What Conservative Pastors Didn’t Say After El Paso

On Sunday morning, some of America’s pastors made no mention of the horrific mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, that killed at least 31 people and injured dozens more over the weekend. Other Church leaders, however, knew they could not ignore the events.

“Our pulpit is not one that silence works in,” Jason Morriss, the pastor at Austin New Church, a progressive Methodist congregation in Austin, Texas, told me. “My first response as a pastor was that my people are going to need words of comfort. And they’re also going to need a way to channel their anger and frustration.”

Anger and frustration: This is what many Americans have come to feel in a culture of endless mass shootings, and it is also what some Americans have come to feel about Christianity in this country.

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