By Khalid Rudo Smith
(WIB) – There was a time when every national tragedy was the same.
A press conference. A call for an investigation. An appeal for calm.
Thoughts and prayers.
It was hollow. Always insufficient. Sometimes offensive.
But something changed recently.
No promise of an independent investigation, no remorse, no pretense of the ritual.
The official account of Renee Good’s killing contradicts what everyone can see. We were told:
A soldier who strutted away, hurling epithets? Hospitalized victim.
The mother who greeted him moments before her death? Vicious.
A three-point turn? An act of domestic terrorism.
Power condemned her with total confidence — no promise of an independent investigation, no remorse, no pretense of the ritual. Not even the traditional thoughts and prayers.
And that absence revealed a far more dangerous line has been crossed.
They’ve taken aim at the very idea of thoughts and prayer as a response.
As a Black man approaching 50, my politics have migrated from Martin, to Malcolm, to Marcus, to waiting on the Messiah.
I will never again be lulled into believing our citizenship in this nation is secure — or even our highest aspiration.
The African American community has also been the priesthood holding this nation together.
African Americans have long been the conscience of this country. It was our blood that seeped through the cracks, exposing the Constitution’s contradictory foundations.
But conscience is not the whole story.
The African American community has also been the priesthood holding this nation together for centuries.
We prayed to God the Deliverer when our humanity was stripped from us.
We prayed to God the Advocate when the law failed us.
We prayed to God the Healer when violence became policy.
We prayed to the God of Justice when our labor, land, and legacy were repeatedly stolen.
We prayed to the Lord of Armies as we died in every conflict this nation asked us to fight.
We prayed for mercy when we saw America treat others abroad as it treated us at home.
We believed in America — perhaps naively — but it worked.
Scripture is full of examples of God extending mercy — even to rebellious nations — for the sake of His people within their borders. An honest reading of history would show a praying African American community restraining forces that would have caused America to collapse under its own vices.
But an honest reading would also show that 2025 marked the first time we stepped away.
Not in defeat, but exhaustion.
Betrayed — we chose rest as resistance. We put our boots on the ground and focused on what gave us joy, even as America burned — because they voted for this.
But priests maintain altars. And they don’t get to abandon them when their feelings get hurt. Because altars are not maintained for men.
And when altars are left unattended, far worse alternatives rise to power.
What we are witnessing now is a nation turned over to its appetites.
Militarized force without accountability.
Pardons as patronage.
Protections for predators.
Open contempt for the press, for truth, for even questions.
A religious community more interested in acquiring power than in becoming disciples.
Midterm elections won’t fix this.
Autocrats suppress or count only certain votes, redraw districts, and select voters.
They’ve done it before — but then they had to pretend.
Voting becomes meaningless when the enemy no longer cares who knows.
Which means we too must operate on a higher level.
Properly understood, thoughts and prayers are not the consolation prize of the indifferent. They are among the first and most strategic acts of psychological and spiritual warfare.
Thoughts are the discipline of guarding the mind against a sustained assault of lies.
When officials narrate video evidence in direct contradiction to what our eyes see, the message is simple: surrender your thinking.
Politics — not the pews — taught us that a lie repeated often enough becomes like truth. Those who want you to believe a lie will tell it through news cycles, entertainment, education, opinion pieces, and manufactured correlations.
Because lies are absorbed effortlessly through exposure, the only defense is disciplined thought — the willingness to think and fill your mind with truth despite the discomfort.
What has the last year taught America that Black America has known for generations?
Which alliances are shifting?
Who is newly receptive to truths they once rejected?
Who benefits if I am afraid?
Who wants me to think less — or is telling me what to think?
Thoughts are not passive. They are how you choose the battleground of the conflict.
Even if you’re more Black Panthers than Southern Baptists, prayer is not mystical escapism.
Prayer is the disciplined act of envisioning a better system, believing that system is possible, expecting a strategy to reveal itself, and positioning yourself to respond when it does.
We cannot allow prayer to be caricatured as hocus-pocus.
Prayer turns hope into belief.
Belief into expectancy.
Expectancy into obedience.
And obedience into the resilient conviction that results are inevitable.
Prayer is the art of master-planning for what is not yet possible.
We cannot allow prayer to be caricatured as hocus-pocus — the last refuge of the powerless — rather than what it truly is: a multiplier that layers the supernatural over the natural, allowing ordinary actions to produce extraordinary outcomes.
We also cannot cede the frontier of thought.
If they can tell you what you saw, they don’t have to control your response.
If they can tell you who you are, they never have to worry about what you’ll do.
Thoughts are how you protect what you believe.
Prayer is how you align your power with power beyond your own.
Together, they allow you to see clearly — and act faithfully — even when the task feels impossible.
That might be the only thing that saves us.
A hopelessly divided left and right might agree on only a few things:
America is the greatest nation yet to grace this earth.
And… America is also a historic house of horrors, run by unrepentant demons, built on an Indian burial ground.
Both realities are true.
Which one we live in depends — now as ever — on the thoughts we protect
and the prayers we are willing to pray.
So let us reclaim thought and prayer from rhetorical fluff and lead the way to more Americans being the people — and the instrument — by which God bends history.
Khalid Rudo Smith (@khalidrudo) is a serial social entrepreneur, divorced dad of two, delivered disciple of Christ, and author of the upcoming book “Conscripted”, a raw and revelatory memoir diagnosing the spiritual deception behind America’s collapse of family, faith, and fatherhood.