Metabolizing Moral Shocks for Social Change: School Shooting, Religion, and Activism

Abstract

“Moral shocks” are unexpected events or pieces of information that so deeply challenge one’s basic values and sense of the world that they profoundly reorient a person’s understanding of life and even self. Yet those who experience significant moral shocks rarely participate in related activism and instead experience grief as highly privatized and apolitical, a reality that serves the status quo and most powerful. This article considers how religious resources can help metabolize private grief into public lament and catalyze political grievance. Analyzing the rise of gun control activism after an elementary school mass shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, I argue religious resources help metabolize moral shocks into social change in five significant ways: (1) cultivating practiced, purposeful pathos, (2) offering collective lament, (3) building networked resiliency materially and theologically, (4) risking new alliances of accompaniment, and (5) storying hope. This case analysis contributes to a broader claim for political theology: Christianity can be understood as a movement based on a moral shock. This framing then animates practices of care to accompany those in moral distress and help disciple grief into a movement of faith that resists death-dealing political and social policy.

They … mostly men … just want us to go home. They want to box us in, but we won’t be. We are moms and survivors of a mass shooting. There is nothing more frightening than your daughter being hunted at her school and seeing friends lying dead … I’ll speak to anyone, anywhere. I lost the privilege to be afraid.1

Mary Joyce, Covenant School Mom

It won’t end until Tennessee lawmakers value the sanctity of children’s holy lives, created in God’s own image, more than they value the weapons of war. A well-regulated militia doesn’t murder children at school.2

Anna Caudill, Friend of Slain Covenant Principal

1. Introduction

None of the Covenant Moms, as they came to be called, had been active in gun control organizations previously. In fact, they had not even been to the Tennessee Capitol before—unless you count a third-grade school trip (Knight 2024a). They identified as Republicans, and many were “committed to the Second Amendment(’s right to bear arms)”. But at 10:11 on the morning of 27 March 2023, everything changed for them … and much of Nashville, but most excruciatingly for them. Semi-automatic gunfire from a former student (now an adult) shattered glass, penetrated hallways and classroom doors, and ended the lives of three 9-year-olds, a substitute teacher, a custodian, and the principal at Covenant Presbyterian School (Mattise et al. 2023).3

The grief was overwhelming and expansive. Nashville is the 20th largest city in the United States, but in the aftermath of the school shooting, it felt like a smaller town. Everyone seemed to know someone affected.4 Black and red ribbons (Covenant’s colors) adorned homes and businesses throughout the city. The startling loss seemed like all anyone could talk and cry about. That evening, after Covenant School leaders asked the city to pray for them, at least seven vigils were held in surrounding churches (Mattise et al. 2023). In the following days, statements about the “tragedy” began to roll out, funerals were held, the victims’ names were recited in spaces across the city, and the President’s wife, Dr. Jill Biden, visited the memorial in front of the school before attending a Metro Government vigil.

Over the next several months, amid all the grief, something else also emerged: new faces of gun control activism, innovative community rituals, acute demands for a special legislative session, and varied forms of public lament that challenged and changed political rules in the Tennessee statehouse. So much so that only three days after the shooting, three elected Tennessee representatives (who eventually became known as the Tennessee Three/TN 3) led chants of “Gun Control Now” through a small bullhorn from the House floor lectern while hundreds of protesters echoed in the balcony, atrium, and outside (Stockard 2023). The TN 3 were immediately subjected to expulsion hearings for violation of decorum, and the two young black male legislators, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, were expelled (Gloria Johnson, the older white woman, was not because she had not spoken into the bullhorn). Pearson and Jones were eventually reelected to the statehouse, but dramatic battles over the limitation of public and elected official speech continued.

Two weeks later, the women who would become leading figures of the Covenant Moms attended a vigil sponsored by Voices for Safer Tennessee (which had formed in the aftermath of the shooting) called “Linking Arms for Change”. Over 10,000 people gathered in red shirts, linking arms for a three-mile human chain from the Monroe Carrell Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, where the child victims were taken, to the steps of the Tennessee State Capitol (Zaleski and Nelles 2023). Covenant Mom Mary Joyce described this event as her political epiphany. She had been “wallowing in grief” since her daughter survived the mass shooting but lost part of her hearing and three of her classmates. Joyce could hardly leave the house when she decided to attend the Linking Arms rally, texting several friends to join. As they linked arms, she recalled, “I looked back and saw thousands of Tennesseans. This is way bigger than I thought. We all care about gun laws. Instead of drowning, I could channel this into action” (Knight 2024a). Within weeks of the shooting, Mary Joyce, Sarah Shoop Neuman, Michelle Alexander, and several other Covenant Parents announced the formation of two organizations to advocate for “common sense” gun control and successfully lobbied that the governor to call a special legislative session on the issue (Masters 2023).

2. Moral Shocks and Mobilizing Religion

“Moral shocks”, in social movement theory, are unexpected events or pieces of information that so deeply challenge one’s core values and vision of the world that they can upend a person’s understanding of life and even self (Jasper 1999). James Jasper, the primary sociological developer of the concept, defines moral shock as “the vertiginous feeling that results when an event or information shows that the world is not what one had expected, which can sometimes lead to articulation or rethinking of moral principles” (Jasper 2011). Unlike a non-moral shock, such as seeing a three-year-old playing Mozart or a meteor falling from the sky, the moral encompasses our deeply held understandings of right and wrong and the ultimate goods we should pursue and embody. When we experience people or institutions who drastically (and often violently) violate those foundational norms, the visceral experience can shake us cognitively, emotionally, and even physically. Philosopher Katie Stockdale emphasizes the intense “bewildering” that constitutes a moral shock, “which involves feeling at a loss for words, understanding, and sense-making in the moment” (Stockdale 2022). As in the Covenant School shooting, moral shocks are most agonizing for those closest to the events, often entailing a sense of incomprehension and of being radically undone.

These experiences certainly “lead to a stepping back, a reassessment of the world, and a questioning” (Larzillière 2024). Yet contrary to popular narratives, moral shocks do not have a strong causal relationship to activism; people rarely “self-mobilize” into movement participation, even after a highly disturbing event.5 As Jasper notes, “most people, in most cases, resign themselves to unpleasant changes, certain that governments or corporations do not bend to citizen protest” (Jasper 1999, p. 109). The dread that accompanies a moral shock often leads to paralysis, isolation, and privatization of grief (Jasper 1999, p. 110). One’s sense of agency is disturbed, disrupted, and often defused. Moreover, as religion scholar Eddie Glaude argues persuasively, “social misery [in the US] is privatized” (Glaude et al. 2020). This is particularly true for structurally vulnerable persons, entailing the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, disability, poverty, and minoritized religion. As I argue elsewhere, the surveillance state surrounding brown and black bodies, especially those of lower income and those who identify as Muslim, often amplifies a privatization of grief lest they risk increased political, economic, and criminal consequences (Snarr 2022b). Yet even when moral shocks seem to have obvious political implications among the less marginalized and surveilled, most people still experience grief as highly privatized and apolitical. We can think here of the devastating number of COVID deaths in the United States that were blamed on pre-existing conditions rather than public health blunders and political choices, with no national rites of mourning emerging during the first Trump White House. This privatization of grief ultimately serves the status quo and the economic and politically powerful (Snarr 2022a). It isolates and constrains emotion, rationality, and communal practices rather than metabolizing public lament into political grievance and moral agency for structural change.

There are, however, cases of post-moral shock “self-mobilization,” similar to many of the new gun control activists after the Covenant School shooting. In this article, I am interested in how previously apolitical folks, like the Covenant Parents, engage religious resources to navigate radical disruption and seek social/political change.6 Through this case analysis, I argue that religious resources can help metabolize moral shocks into agential social change in at least five significant ways: (1) cultivating practiced, purposeful pathos, (2) offering public lament, (3) building networked resiliency materially and theologically, (4) risking new alliances of accompaniment, and (5) storying hope. I argue that religious resources can be vital in navigating the cognitive-emotional processes that “channel” grief, “fear, and anger into righteous indignation or collective political activity” (Marshall 2023, p. 24). In conclusion, I move from direct case analysis to broader theo-ethical reflection with a claim for political theology: Christianity can be understood as a movement based on a moral shock. By claiming this interpretation of the tradition, I hope our collective gatherings and cooperative lament can be discipled into movements of faith that counter death-dealing political and social systems.

2.1. Practiced, Purposeful Pathos

As many caring professionals know, when we deny or foreshorten grieving and other vital emotional processes, we undermine not only the long-term mental health of individuals and their communities but also their agency. Pathos is almost always needed for purpose. Inviting, abiding with, and metabolizing emotions is necessary to animate intentional action. Religious institutions, people of faith, and their liturgies can help channel emotion—cultivating practiced, purposeful pathos—toward tender reconstitutions of life and forms of mission.

In the request for prayer vigils that evening and the myriad forms of public liturgies, hymns, scripture, and actions that followed, grief—along with so many complex emotions—was not just acknowledged but invited. Unimaginable loss, shattered expectations, and bewildering realities were given breath and breathing space. Vigil liturgies sought to hold this space and shape it toward collective, sacred care. At a service the night of the shooting at a local United Methodist Church, the senior pastor gently stated, “We need to step back. We need to breathe. We need to grieve. We need to remember. We need to make space for others who are grieving. We need to hear the cries of our neighbors” (USA Today 2023). Amid song and lit candles, teary participants also joined in a litany: “We pray for … A world that does not take refuge in violence”. “We lift our voices to God.” “A world where our sacred places are our shelter.” “We lift our voices to God.” … “We confess we have not done enough to protect the children.” “We lift our voices to God”. Ritual shaped pathos into collective grief, petition, and confession, moving toward public lament.

Christian ethicist Ellen Ott Marshall notes that these types of vigils “offer an embodied experience that centers those most vulnerable to gun violence. Participating in vigils orients us time and again to a kind of vulnerability that makes a demand on us” (Marshall 2023, p. 24). As she explains, the vulnerability foregrounded in these vigils moves beyond the existential vulnerability that many of us feel to violence. It also contrasts with a virtuous vulnerability many Christian pacifists invite believers to risk in witness to and reliance on God. As Ott Marshall explains, “When participants in the vigil read the names of victims and hear the stories of survivors, we are reminded that gun violence prevention necessitates a distinction between actual vulnerability to gun violence, existential vulnerability as finite creatures in a fragile creation, and a virtuous vulnerability that voluntarily assumes risk as a sign of faith in God” (19) 7. The pathos of the gun violence vigil is particular and purposed as it rightly holds victims, survivors, and those disproportionately vulnerable to gun violence at the “center of concern around which one organizes a moral and political response that approaches vulnerability as a problem to address and not a virtue to commend” (2). Here, the victims and their families are the heartbeats, and other participants are nurtured in emotional connection and subsequent moral demand.

Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, in his Prophetic Imagination, also emphasizes the importance of pathos as he contrasts the pathos of God with the “a-pathy” produced by “royal consciousness” of the oppressive regimes of the day (Brueggemann 1989, p. 42). Drawing on the Hebrew prophets, he argues, “[God], unlike his royal regents, is one whose person is presented as passion and pathos, the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve and then rejoice” (Brueggemann 1989, p. 42). In contrast, “the royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially numbness to death” (46). Royal consciousness takes a “managerial approach” to life, pursuing technocratic governance that maintains the status quo, atomizes relationships, and has little place for emotions, empathy, and other ways of living. Oppressive regimes serve themselves and cannot imagine their end or death. Brueggeman concludes that the “task of prophetic ministry and imagination is to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death…to penetrate despair so that new futures can be believed in and embraced by us” (Brueggemann 1989, p. 111). Robust pastoral care has a prophetic dimension as it faces suffering, offers practices of communal grieving, and connects grief to a critique of the death-dealing policies and behaviors. Through this sharing, we are reminded that we are not isolated from one another or God … and that things could be otherwise.

We see this practiced pathos in the personal recollections of the trauma of the day of the shooting and its aftermath. Many Covenant parents drew on religious frameworks to share and ground their grief within the larger community. Mary Joyce recalled the panic when she found out about the shooting via text message.

[She] jumped in their family truck with her husband. At some point, she screamed at him. ‘Faster, faster!’ Their sole focus was to get to the school, traffic laws be damned. They hit a roadblock … about a mile away from the school … They left the truck in the middle of the road. Purse on the front seat. Doors open. Windows down. She just wanted to get to her child. A police officer stopped her, telling her she needed to go to Woodmont Baptist Church with other parents waiting to be reunited with their children. More running … A stranger in an SUV offered her a ride. They blew through red lights, drove on the wrong side of the road and sped the other direction on Hillsboro Pike. The driver, a woman, held her hand as the woman’s son, in the back seat, read Bible passages. ‘She got us to that church but I don’t even know what her name is,’ Joyce said months later. ‘I’m forever grateful that she got me there’.

(Gluck 2023)

Others shared the long afterlife of such a trauma, where children are regularly checking exits, having escape plans, and suffering nightmares. Covenant School’s chaplain describes how he continues to provide space in daily morning chapel and bible study groups for the grief and questions from students, some coming in simple questions like “do you think Will is playing baseball in heaven?” (Loller 2024) He is the last one to walk in from the parking lot every day, as inevitably, a child will be struggling to face going back to school. He also noted that during the first year after the shooting, some parents, especially several fathers, regularly sat in the back of the morning chapel to spend more time with their kids and hold sacred care for the community and themselves.

Katy Dieckhaus, the mother of one of the nine-year-old victims, shared the following reflection five months later:

Evelyn had a really deep faith. The day Evelyn’s belongings were brought to us from school was another day my knees felt like they were going to buckle out from under me. Why is this happening God? This can’t … this can’t be real. My husband and I were about to have our first meeting with lawmakers. We are both in healthcare … he does ophthalmology, I’m an occupational therapist and work with children, so this was a new world we were taking on. I grabbed Evelyn’s Saved By Grace bible verse book from her school, and this was the first thing I turned to. Here’s her little book. ‘Finally, all of you have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.’ (I Peter 3:8) I could stand … stand up again and I thought ‘let’s go Evelyn’ I want to work together. She wants people to work together.

(Safer Tennessee 2023a)

While these may seem like mundane practices of religious entanglement with grief, their ritualization and public sharing enabled a space-making that fed into explicitly political action. Before the launch of the legislative Special Session on gun control, Covenant families met for forty days on the Capitol steps for prayer (echoing the biblical time in the wilderness). Moms, dads, and supporters prayed through their grief for courage and “wisdom on the best way forward” for the legislature (Illers 2023). Each day, for 17 min, from 10:10 to 10:27—the time the shooter entered the school until their death—they prayed for specific legislators and recited the Lord’s prayer. As Kramer Schmidt noted, “As a follower of Jesus, I have a primary duty to make sure my children and, indeed, all children are made safe at school. We didn’t ask for this moment, but we know the special session can bring about much-needed change as we head into another school year” (Illers 2023) They closed their prayer time and most of their public events joining their voices to sing the benediction that closed every Covenant chapel service: “Go now in peace. Go now in peace. Let the love of God surround you. Everywhere, everywhere, you may go”, ending with a resounding shout of “Have a Good Day!” Once again, a familiar religious resource held communal space, even on the steps of the Capitol, for the pathos that grounded their purpose.

2.2. Public Lament

Closely related to this practiced, purposeful pathos is a second religious resource, public lament, that takes grief into more expansive civic and political space and moves it toward political grievance and collective agency. One of the profound gifts of Christian liturgies of grief is making seemingly private mourning public for corporate embrace and even redress by the body of Christ and God. Public lament can also counter privatization, which often serves the most powerful. As Christian ethicist Emilie Townes explains,

lament can be a gateway into hope…

lament, earnest and soul-deep searching, can hold us when we begin again and again

to step out of the folds of old wounds

and live anew as we refuse to let the howling specters of displacement and trauma keep us

from reaching into ourselves as we stretch our arms in welcome (Townes 2019).

Drawing on the structure of Joel, Townes argues that lament entails a detailed recounting of a people’s suffering, in which the community cries out for healing from God and makes suffering bearable by not hiding it but carrying it together publicly and passionately with God (24).

In Nashville, public lament took many forms, from smaller vigils to large-scale events, from ongoing witness in legislative balconies to testimonies in committee rooms. The Linking Arms events certainly were the largest gatherings as thousands of people, with their kids in tow, formed a three-mile human chain from the Children’s Hospital to the State Capitol. The sponsoring organization, Voices for Safer Tennessee, explicitly stated, “This is NOT a protest. This is a family-friendly demonstration of unity—a visual representation of people of all backgrounds and beliefs coming together in support of stronger gun safety laws and a safer Tennessee” (Safer Tennessee 2023b). One could, however, see the dimensions of lament and cries for political change embedded in the event. Dressed in the red of the Covenant school and also to support new “red flag” laws, many watched the live feed of religious and political leaders speaking of how society had not protected our children and calling for “common sense” gun control. While children chalked “No Guns” or “Kids > Guns” on sidewalks and others held signs “Arms are for Hugging” and “I WANT TO GROW UP,” Christian ministers, the President of an Islamic center, and a Jewish rabbi prayed on the Capitol steps ending with a collective prayer of “God of all faiths, strengthen us to protect our children. Use our voices to create a safer Tennessee. We believe change is coming! Amen” (Adams et al. 2023). The singing of “This Little Light of Mine” to unify voices over three miles echoed not merely a unifying children’s song but its history as a civil rights anthem, transformed in part in Tennessee. Popularized by Fannie Lee Hamer and Zilphia Horton, the spiritual was adapted and taught as a “freedom song” at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where many civil rights leaders gathered and trained, including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Bevel (Deggans 2018). The song became a statement of sacred agency and nonviolent power used in protests and gatherings around the world.

“This Little Light of Mine” echoed again at a prayer vigil on the opening day of the Special Session. As hundreds of red shirts dotted the crowd and some medical professionals wore their scrubs, several clergy led a time of contemplation and preparation on the Capitol steps. “Remember from whom you came,” an Episcopal priest noted, grounding the gathered in their connections to the victims and survivors of gun violence (Adams et al. 2023). A United Church of Christ chaplain continued noting how guns had killed members of the community “too often and too long” while a United Methodist pastor declared, “We will not let ignorance prevail” (Adams et al. 2023). The organizer of the vigil, a United Methodist clergy woman, eventually gathered folks into the atrium of the Capitol; they formed a linked circle as she reminded them of a prayer at a previous Moral Monday March led by Rev. William Barber II. As each person prayed silently or aloud, they ended by squeezing the hand of the next person to pass on the prayer, thus sending the prayer “throughout the chain like an electric current” (Adams et al. 2023). In their lament, they remembered the suffering of their community in detail, brought it before God and their community to change and heal, and built their collective moral agency—their electric current—for courage in the Special Session.

As I argue elsewhere, mourning is vital for politics because it clarifies our deep attachments by simultaneously acknowledging who/what has been vital to us and who/what we hope our community will be in the future (Snarr 2022a). Political theorists analyze what they term the “democratic arts of mourning” whereby “citizens can craft creative collective rejoinders to experiences of loss … and reclaim and inhabit their birthright as political beings” (Alexander and McIvor 2019, p. xx; McIvor et al. 2021). These theorists contend we need to cultivate the arts of mourning in our civic institutions and practices in order to nurture the “public, intersubjective” navigation of “social traumas” (Hirsch and McIvor 2016). The democratic arts of mourning require episodic yet ongoing agonistic work where we are undone, reconstituted, and re-membered in our body politics.

Political theologians, like Luke Bretherton, also underscore the importance of this agonistic work for democracy as they analyze the theo-political structuring of grief (Bretherton 2015). In his analysis of institution-based community organizing (IBCO) networks, like the Industrial Areas Foundation and Gamaliel, Bretherton points to training documents that argue “anger comes from the old Norse word ‘Angr, which means grief. Grief implies there is a vision—a vision of a good life that was or that could have been” (Bretherton 2015, p. 124). Sometimes referred to as “making pain go public”, IBCO networks understand that they must “convert private lament into a broader process of public action” by forming grief and disciplining anger, underscoring the pathos as crucial to democratic politics (Bretherton 2015, p. 132).

While the local Gamaliel network did not take the lead in Nashville, religiously informed advocates and activists, including the newly mobilized Covenant parents and supporters, carefully made their pain go public to fund a broader process of public action. At a press conference in the legislative building, Anna Caudill, a close friend of the slain Covenant Principal, joined gun violence survivors to decry distressing special session bills (such as arming teachers) and tried to focus public lament toward political grievance:

I am really concerned about this special session. Punishing our children for guns being the number one killer of children is not the right answer. It won’t end until Tennessee lawmakers value the sanctity of children’s holy lives, created in God’s own image, more than they value weapons of war. A well-regulated militia doesn’t murder children at school.

(Masters 2023)

Covenant Moms, particularly Joyce, Alexander, and Neuman, also began showing up at hearings and press conferences in coordinated soccer-style scarves with the victims’ names in white at the black ends and “LOVE IS OUR PROTEST.” across the red center (Beyeler 2023).8 As the special session launched, they were in the gallery holding signs stating, “Covenant Mom [or Dad] for Firearm Safety”, with matching shirts that said, “Get used to seeing these faces”. Their presence, their public lament, and their political grievances endured despite multiple political disappointments and re-traumatizations.

2.3. Networked Religious Resources

In addition to metabolizing grief through rituals and public lament, religious organizations also offer material and relational networks that can be crucial for moving people toward political action. Sociologically, congregations are places that regularly bring folks together across job fields, expertise, and hyper-local geographic locations to engage one another intentionally. A medical professional is in the same pew or small group as a business owner, a teacher, and an IT worker, and there are pooled material and practical resources within the community. Thus, when there is a turn to creating new organizations and resourcing their activities with money, people, and skills, there is a diverse ecology of gifts present. We can also see this in religiously affiliated schools where educational and religious identities intertwine through regular interactions while expanding hyper-specific geographic and occupational silos. When the Covenant Families announced the founding of two organizations a month after the shooting, their leadership included nurses, corporate leaders, lawyers, and non-profit professionals. Sarah Shoop Neuman, a pediatric nurse and co-founder of the groups, stated, “my hope is that their educational and legislative advocacy … I can bring up from these ashes in honor of the lives we so deeply mourn” (Beyeler 2023). Establishing a non-profit and an advocacy arm so quickly relied on extensive networks of support and funding, many of which tracked the relational networks of faith-based connections.

Denominational networks also became important for getting TN’s governor to call for a special legislative session. Covenant Presbyterian Church is a member of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA). The governor’s wife taught at a different PCA school for fourteen years with both Koonce, the slain principal, and Peak, the murdered substitute teacher. Moreover, a network of Nashville PCA (and former PCA) women also drew on their relational networks to secure key meetings with the governor and legislative officials. Other faith networks in town, such as the Southern Christian Coalition and Nashvillians Organized for Hope and Action (NOAH), were also activated to help put pressure on legislators, but tight religious relational histories through congregations, schools, and denominations meant much in shaping the Governor’s willingness to call the special session. The clear articulation throughout advocacy was that this was an issue that people of faith cared about … and in fact, it was an issue of faith.

Undeniably, the Covenant Parents and many newer faces in the organizing were also drawing on racial and class privilege through these networks. This moral shock was catalyzing, in part, because many of the survivors and allies thought they were largely unaffected by these issues, which were not in “their communities” (Knight 2024a). They had access to private government meetings and elite social capital that minority parents of mass shooting victims did not, such as the 2018 racist Nashville Waffle House shooting that murdered four young adults of color (Sutton 2022). As I discuss more below, many long-standing activists in Nashville were generous in walking toward the Covenant Parents’ grief rather than chiefly judging their privilege and previous apathy. Yet, we should never ignore how racial and economic privilege functions in determining which communities get heard and when. The privatization of grief is not a psychological inevitability but is rather socially constructed. For the communities of black and brown victims of previous mass shootings in middle Tennessee, their marginalization based on social and political inequality amplified the privatization of their grief and constrained its forms. Their loved ones’ lives were constructed as less grievable (Butler 2010), and their voices less agential and more irrational in the conservative white power structures of the State Capitol. While this important point deserves more attention, I concurrently want to emphasize how religious spaces, which are largely independent of government and corporate control, can be vital in accompanying moral shocks and helping people organize for flourishing, whether in privileged or more marginalized communities. While beyond the scope of this article, the role of religious spaces in recent anti-police brutality activism in Memphis, Tennessee, points to the vital role of religious networks in helping metabolize moral shocks in minoritized communities as well (Menny 2023; Ross 2023).

Again, this account of the social and financial capital within the religious communities is relatively standard, but I want to add a less common dimension concerning moral shocks: the importance of communities being networked theologically. This relational connection could just be in terms of people’s shared faith, which allows for easier interpretive connections and motivation: “As a Christian, I join you in this action because it is what Jesus would do”. But theological networks are also vital in ways that help people interpret, hold disbelief, and reconstitute theologically as they live into their new realities. A shared theological network, here of Christian faith, can offer pathways for accompanying theological deconstruction and reconstruction in ways survivors and supporters may find necessary after a moral shock. The religious relational web means that other believers can sustain and reshape one’s religious worldview within and beyond one’s upbringing and current views. Fellow parishioners may come alongside to offer other interpretations; siblings in Christ may offer alternate spiritual pathways. Thus, religious networks offer resources for theological resiliency that can fund increased moral agency.

For example, while I do not wish to overgeneralize, more reformed traditions such as the PCA tend to emphasize God’s omnipotence, which can lead survivors of tragedy or moral shock to hear from others that “this was God’s will” or “God needed another angel”. This particular strain and misunderstanding of the doctrine of predestination can be paralyzing for some, both in relation to their grief and their moral and political agency. If it is in God’s plan and will, what is there to challenge in social practices or political legislation? Eight months after the shooting, Abby McLean, who had three children at the school that day, stated, “We’re still living this trauma day in and day out. It is something that can be so all-encompassing of all our lives. Kids, even 9 or 10, will ask, ‘Why did this occur?’ Especially with families of strong faith, or through the lens of faith, will ask why weren’t they protected that day” (Gluck 2023). Houston Phillips, also a Covenant parent, said he is one of the dads who sits in the back of the school chapel regularly. Before the shooting, he was not as invested in making new friends through the school, but after the shooting, he connected to other parents who could understand what he was going through. He needed it spiritually, “having people who are also men and women of God and believe in the same things we do, it’s kind of like the perfect storm of trying to heal” (2024). Chaplain Sullivan noted that “an incredible cementing of community“ happened in the year following the shooting, “prayer groups formed of moms, then dads, and these people—that’s now their weekly routine without fail. Like, they can’t miss it. They don’t want to miss it” (Loller 2024). Melissa Alexander, one of the most prominent Covenant Moms, spoke of the 60 parents involved in the 40 days of prayer at the Capitol and their continued advocacy, “There are people I work with at the legislature who I never knew before, and now some of them are my best friends. We confide in one another. We lean on one another. We support one another because we know what it’s like to be in this spot” (2024). They are connected not only by the moral shock but also by the meaning-making networks and practices of their religious faith that have helped them navigate the moral shock.

2.4. Compassionate Alliances

These religious networks of identity can also break open new relationships and compassionate alliances that cross seeming political divides. While the language and theology may differ, a family resemblance may enable a missional crossing of socially constructed political divides. Although not without tensions, disagreements, and frustrations, religious identities, languages, and rituals can point to a body of Christ that will not be torn apart by secular partisanship. There may be different roles and appearances in this Body, but “my faith sees yours” in this time of moral shock, and we will not be torn asunder.

The most visible examples of this dynamic are relationships that grew among the Covenant Parents (who primarily identify as Republicans) and Tennessee Democrats, especially the TN Three. Rep. Justin Jones is a person of deep faith, theologically educated, and mentored by historical and contemporary civil rights leaders such as Rev. James Lawson and Rev. William Benjamin Barber. Rep. Justin Pierson regularly preaches and is the son of a Disciples of Christ pastor who raised him on a “continuous diet of Black Liberation Theology” (Boorstein 2023). Rep. Johnson often uses faith language to explain her own motivations and critiques of other legislators. Their political work is a calling, and they have prayed with, held vigil, and offered forms of pastoral care to gun control advocates. Pictures with the TN Three legislators regularly appear on Joyce, Alexander, and Neumann’s social media. Just two weeks after the shooting, Neumann posted a pencil drawing of her with Pierson with a quote from him: “Never give up. I won’t give up. We can’t lose if we never quit. Noah [her son’s name], that’s a good biblical name. God put up the rainbow for Noah as a promise. That’s a promise that God is still with us” (Shoop Neuman 2023a). Her post went on to reflect on this new connection as she began to navigate as a neophyte in political waters:

I’ll be honest, the world of politics is not my favorite. I don’t fit in to any party and it often seems like a hopeless game no one can win. I’m thankful @justinpearson is trying to break the politician mold. You don’t have to agree with every one of his views but I hope everyone can see he’s a real human with compassion, not a bought and paid politician. He has a true desire to better our state and create a safer world for our children. Thank you Mr. Pearson for taking time to speak to me. Your words gave me hope and will stick with me forever. It’s been two weeks and I’ve yet to heard back from @repandyogles the representative over Covenant’s district. @tngop the silence is painful, if you want our votes give people who respond and who are present for their district.

(Shoop Neuman 2023a)

Two days later, as the parents walked the entirety of the school for the first time since the shooting and wrote scriptures on its walls, Chaplain Sullivan told them—right before the start of chapel service—to stop and look outside at what had just appeared: a giant rainbow arcing over the grounds. Neuman shared it immediately with the verse, “Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on earth (Genesis 9:16)” (Shoop Neuman 2023b).

Neuman continues to speak of the new connections and alliances she formed through her advocacy. She cites watching the expulsion hearings on the “Justins” as another one of her catalyzing political moments. Neuman had decided to sit in the balcony to understand more of what was happening and support Pierson. She then saw how the two black men in their twenties were spoken to by older white Republican legislatures as if they were boys who did not know their place: “I kept thinking of the signs ‘I AM A MAN’” (Knight 2024b). This observation of racism and her ongoing relationship with other activists led her to connect to other local gun activists and notice who did not get support. She went back to watch footage of Shaundell Brooks’, mom of one of the Waffle House shooting victims, testimony before the legislature. “[Covenant parents] were surrounded by people. We knew we were supported and loved. She sat alone, and as she is sharing the horrific story of her son’s death, the committee chair interrupts to say, ‘your three minutes is up’” (Knight 2024b). During and particularly after the special session, Neuman committed to helping more local victims be heard and even knocking on doors for Brooks in her successful campaign for the legislature.

Journeys like Neumann’s resonate with the changes Christian ethicist Michael Grigoni observed in relational webs and democratic practices surrounding gun violence vigils in Durham, North Carolina. Based on an ethnographic case study, Grigoni argues that ongoing vigil participation “invites its participants into a new form of life, reconfiguring relationships of church and kin, bridging communities of difference in order to foster a genuinely common life” (Grigoni 2024). As vigils are linked and observed for multiple victims and incidences of gun violence, this vigil keeping can also break open a social analysis, as it has with Neumann, that begins to see the disproportionate, racialized nature of gun violence in the United States.

Neumann uses religious terms when she describes the “grace” other seasoned, predominantly minority activists showed toward the newly engaged Covenant parents. The Equity Alliance, run by black women, and Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition met weekly with the parents after the shooting through the special session, teaching them how Capitol lobbying and advocacy worked. “They could have said, you’re the problem. Which, in many ways, I was. I already feel that. I voted for those people. But they were so gracious … We can still disagree but also look at each other as neighbors, not just party lines” (see note 8). Even her use of neighbor seems to imply a “love of neighbor” that transcends partisan lines and has transformed her racial and political analysis.

In this spirit of unexpected alliances, Melissa Alexander posted a video clip of Rep. Justin Jones’s answer to a Democracy Now host’s question about where he was finding hope. Jones answered:

I see so much hope as I’m sitting here. I’m thinking of Melissa, who is one of the Covenant mothers who came up yesterday and pinned a ribbon that they had made with the school colors and said, ‘I … you know, I’m a Republican, but you fought for our children. You fought for us and that means the difference. We’re seeing breakthroughs and fault lines breaking here. Their narratives and facades of power, breaking. And it is really showing us that we can build a state that is multiracial, that is—transcends this issue of left and right but talks about right and wrong. We’re building a new coalition to transform Tennessee and I believe it can be done and be a model for the nation.

(Alexander 2023a)

There have certainly been tensions and “rough conversations” with other activists and advocates (Knight 2024b). But faith and grace built bridges of connection and compassionate cross-racial and political alliances that helped Covenant parents metabolize their moral shock into political action.

2.5. Storying Hope

Finally, for those who engage in social change work, we know frustration is woven into political engagement. There was plenty of disappointment that unfolded in the special session and first year of organizing after the Covenant Shooting. In this process, a fifth resource offered by religious traditions, heard in Rep. Pierson’s citation of Noah’s rainbow to Ms. Neuman, is the narrative structuring of hope even in the midst of discouragement and oppression. The activists would certainly need this sustenance through the special session and their continued activism.

Alongside other new and more seasoned organizations, the Covenant Parents collaborated to put intense pressure on the TN legislature during the special session. So much so that the Republican supermajority passed new rules that limited public access and speech in committee meetings and chambers (Masters and Beyeler 2023). The Republicans began by passing new rules of conduct that would allow them to silence any member deemed repeatedly speaking “off-topic”. They also banned signs, which they had already limited to an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. This led some activists to write messages of protest on their arms and hands or hold their phones up with flashing phrases. When a bill loosening firearms restrictions at public schools was delayed, some attendees applauded. The entire audience was summarily ejected from the room by state troopers. A few Covenant parents, some in tears, were the only ones eventually readmitted and allowed to testify on pending legislation (Mintzer and Posey 2023). When the measure eventually failed by a tie vote, the Covenant parents present linked arms to once again sing “Go in Peace”, their chapel song, even as their frustration grew.

Neuman talked about how hard it was to be at the Capitol during this time: “Being here is general is rough. I don’t think these people get what this means. We are here for six people who were killed in our school … It’s hard to be here. It’s overwhelming … to walk past the Proud Boys [a white supremacist group]. I’m sitting with the [Tennessee Firearms Association] in front of me” (Mintzer and Posey 2023). Joyce also noted how many families felt dismissed by lawmakers, “To have someone in that elected position look at you with a smirk—it feels so disrespectful because I don’t want to be talking to this person. I don’t want to be talking in front of all of these people. But I am because I feel like it’s my obligation now to speak up for the children who were killed and our friends that were killed. This happens all the time and has to stop” (Gluck 2023). Covenant Families for Brighter Tomorrows and other organizations had great hopes for the special session. They had advocated for what they saw as common-sense steps forward, such as temporarily allowing firearms to be confiscated from those deemed by a court to be a threat to themselves or others or “red flag” laws. But after just six days, the legislature voted to recess with no significant new legislation and much of the activist’s efforts being spent stopping even looser gun control laws, including giving immunity to gun manufacturers from being sued for school shootings. As Joyce said at a closing press conference:

Today, we will go home and we’ll look at our children in the eyes—many of whom were sheltered from gunfire that tragic day on March 27—they will ask what our leaders have done over the past week and a half to protect them. As a mother, I’m going to have to look at my nine-year-old in the eye and tell her: nothing (Latham 2023).

Melissa Alexander shared later how she shifted over the course of the session. Responsible for daily press conferences, she started with carefully worded, calm statements until she got to the end of the session and finally said, “This is BS, ripped [the statement] up and went out and said, ‘a shooter came after our own children, but you are stabbing us in the back right now’” (Knight 2024b). Frustration, re-traumatization, anger, and disillusionment were rife among gun control activists at the close of the special session.

How does one sustain activism in the face of such resistance? As the House chamber doors closed behind them, several Covenant mothers broke down in tears yet turned to congregate with Rep. Pearson and other Democrats to pray … “for strength and for love” (Cochrane 2023). Eventually, Covenant Families for Brighter Tomorrow’s released a statement:

We will not lose hope, this is just the start. We have seen the power of our voices and the impact they have, despite being raw in trauma. We are continuing to work with both state and federal legislators to drive change. We believe we can cultivate an environment of respect and responsibility to act within the legislature while upholding the Constitution. We look forward to January when many bills will be brought back in session.

(Covenant Families 2023)

Voices for Safer Tennessee (which started three days after the shooting and sponsored the Linking Arms events) has largely taken over the primary work of gun control advocacy for Middle Tennessee, regularly collaborating with Covenant Parents. They coordinate direct lobbying of the Tennessee state legislature, support candidates for office, and have expanded education, with a special focus on faith communities. In 2023–2024, Safer Tennessee hosted a half dozen “Faith, Firearms, and Safer Communities” panel discussions at churches around Middle Tennessee, beginning with the Disciples of Christ church where the family of one child victim, Evelyn Dieckhaus, belonged. These meetings have included pastors, surgeons, survivors, and even former Republican U.S. Senator Bill Frist. In Chattanooga, the host Lutheran priest noted, “It is important to me to have sacred conversations in a sacred place. This is a sacred space, and I want this to be a container for us to talk about really holy and important things, which is taking care of those we love” (Safer Tennessee 2023a). Katy Dieckhaus, Evelyn’s mother, speaking at the same post-special session event, noted,

We will never be able to fully explain the pain and sadness we are experiencing, but we also can’t explain the amount of love and support we have felt from our family, our friends, communities, this organization, and beyond. In such times of darkness, we do see and experience glimmers of hope and light that give us strength to move forward together.

Religious traditions offer a narrative structuring of hope amid discouragement and oppression. Particularly in the Christian tradition, we do not leave grief and death behind but rather narrate them—or story hope—through the cycles of the lectionary and liturgical calendar. As Alexander shared in a comment on her Instagram “Yesterday was tough. Waking this morning to this reminder,” with the word photo “’Holy Saturday. The best reminder that the silence of God doesn’t equal the absence of God’ Tullian Tchividjian” (Alexander 2023b). Christians retell the stories of seeming abandonment, hopelessness, and even death on a weekly and yearly basis. We will not forget. And we also tell the stories, small and big, of love, restoration, and even resurrection.

The Christian story does not have a simple, straight-line sense of history and accomplishment. It is a narrative of ongoing sacred struggles where the Divine abides with us in the shadow of the valley of death while also promising a taste of the kin-dom of God. This is the realness needed for organizing. This is the honesty necessary for the cyclical nature of grief, disappointment, love, and hope. At their best, religious narratives and ritual practices help structure this communal holding of the complexity of life that is vital for civic engagement.

3. Conclusion: Moral Shock as Constitutive of Christianity

As a final point of reflection, I move from direct case analysis to a broader theo-ethical claim for political theology: Christianity can be understood as a movement based on a moral shock. This reflection arose during my participation in public lament on the first anniversary of the Covenant School shooting. The second Linking Arms event fell on Wednesday of the Christian Holy Week. As I stood singing “This Little Light of Mine”, I felt the weight of an ancient liturgical context. I was reminded that as a strain of Judaism operating under the Roman Empire, Jesus’ followers witnessed the crucifixion of the One they thought would usher in a messianic age. Some disciples denied and betrayed him; Roman soldiers stripped, spat on, and mocked him as the “King of the Jews”; and Jesus cries out during his execution, “God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27, CEB). This was a disorienting moral shock for his religious community.

Moreover, the women in the narrative experience continued in moral shock when they arrived at the tomb to find the stone rolled away with an angel (or two) present. The variations in the gospels include descriptions: “they were terrified” and angelic greetings of “do not be alarmed” or “do not be afraid,” followed by descriptions of “they fled the tomb with terror and amazement” (Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24). The women, not the most obvious moral agents in their society, were the ones who had returned to dress and anoint the body of the crucified Christ (see note 8). I imagine them at home preparing their spices and oils, talking to each other through tears, trying to make sense of what they believed about Jesus’s death and what this meant about their faith. And it was these women, who walked so tenderly and closely through Good Friday and Holy Saturday, who were charged to tell the other disciples of the greatest hope: that death is not the last word.9

As followers of that “Christ/Messiah,” our Holy Week liturgical traditions are grounded in this moral shock, and we are invited not to run too quickly to Easter. Resonating with the quote posted by Melissa Alexander and building on theologian Shelley Rambo’s analysis in Spirit and Trauma, I argue that Christian political traditions can deepen their resilience and care for the demos, or the people as a political unit, when they attend to the shock of Good Friday and the grief/disorientation of Holy Saturday, rather than eliding them in the “resurrection event” (Rambo 2010, p. 13). Rambo argues redemption should be “birthed from the middle” (Holy Saturday) as it “speaks to the perplexing space of survival” (8), where “forms of life must now emerge with death as a shaping force” (162). As we have seen for Covenant families and other gun violence survivors, there is no returning to before or easy discernment of life after a mass shooting. An in-betweenness intermingles death and life, upends their understanding of the world, and can easily isolate or silence if not accompanied well. In light of this reality, Rambo, with her focus on trauma-informed theology and pastoral care, warns against centering redemption wholly on the resurrection event:

The narrative of triumphant resurrection can often operate in such a way as to promise a radically new beginning to those who have experienced a devastating event. A linear reading of cross and resurrection places death and life in a continuum; death is behind and life is ahead; life emerges victoriously from death. This way of reading can, at its best, provide a sense of hope and promise for the future. But it can also gloss over the realities of pain and loss, glorify suffering, and justify violence (143).

While I do not assume that every moral shock is a trauma, I think there is much to be learned when we see redemption emerging not from the erasure of death but in the places where death is not forgotten, life is understood as fundamentally changed, and yet the Spirit helps us tenderly see where love and life emerge in new forms—even as the specter of death remains. As Rambo states beautifully, “Life, for many, does not triumph over death. Instead, life persists in the midst of death and death in the midst of life” (165). Rambo calls for a “witnessing” to this remainder in two ways: “tracking the undertow and sensing life. These movements of Spirit attend to suffering that remains long after an event is over. They also witness to forms of life that appear tenuous and fragile” (160). Rather than eliding through a triumphant focus on resurrection, redemption from the middle “calls for a Spirit to testify to love making its way through death” (144).

I think this approach, holding the whole of the Triduum together and, particularly, centering in the experiences of Holy Saturday, helps us take seriously world-disrupting shocks and tenderly and realistically accompany the ongoing search for love and life in new forms amid the compromises and disappointments of social change. Narratives of linear progress and triumphant healing rush and misunderstand grieving and trauma processes and should be seen as more American than Christian. Embracing the liturgical formations of Good Friday and Holy Saturday’s practiced, purposeful pathos may help private pain go public in ways that support public lament and political grievance while grounding the work of organizing in the tender, resilient work of witnessing love finding its way in death. I think of this theological grounding from the middle as symbolized in scarves enwrapping the Covenant mothers bearing the names of the dead on each with “Love is our protest” in bold across the middle.

As we live our political theologies, how might our discipleship embody the Spirit’s witness and accompaniment of moral shocks and distress? How might our lives and congregations help metabolize private grief into public lament and political grievance to challenge the Empire’s last word on who’s lives count and in what ways? Certainly, private mourning is essential (and to be deeply respected), but so are collective gatherings and cooperative lament that can be discipled into movements of faith that resist death-dealing political and social systems. As Jesus himself said: “go and tell the others … And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28: pp. 19–20). We need to tell these stories of moral shock to one another in our organizing and pastoral care work in congregations, organizations, and communities to accompany one another as a demos. Ultimately, I hope we can become more open and capable of identifying moral distress, respecting and walking with it, and shifting grief from a path of privatization that serves the powerful to a public grief and political grievance that moves toward the flourishing of the whole and the Spirit’s redemption from the middle.