In a speech three years ago, North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson blamed school shootings on the lack of Christian prayer in schools, saying that shootings would not happen “if you had told those students Jesus Christ is the way and the light and only through him can you receive salvation.”
Robinson’s comments came during the September 2021 Salt & Light Conference, held by the North Carolina Faith & Freedom Coalition. The organization is a state affiliate of the Faith & Freedom Coalition — a national evangelical Christian advocacy group founded in 2009 by Ralph Reed, a political operative and former executive director of the Christian Coalition. Reed earlier this year detailed plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on evangelical Christian turnout for presidential candidate Donald Trump and other Republicans.
Speaking about school shootings and the lack of prayer in schools, Robinson told the Salt & Light Conference, “Soon as there’s trouble, here you come: ‘We’re going to have a prayer vigil down at the school because we had a shooting.’”
He continued: “You know, it seems quite easy to me, sir, if you had had that prayer vigil before that shooting, if you had let God come in that building before that shooting, if you had told those students Jesus Christ is the way and the light and only through him can you receive salvation, [there] wouldn’t have been no school shooting. It’s too late now. Your little half-hearted attempts at soothing Jesus Christ, it’s not going to work. You done kicked God out of your schools.”
A few moments later, Robinson mocked reporters who might take issue with his comments. “You say what you want to say — you can get in line behind all the people that don’t like me,” he said. “I don’t mind that; they didn’t like Jesus either, so — still don’t like him — so I’m in good company.”
Robinson’s campaign didn’t immediately return HuffPost’s request for comment about the remarks Thursday.
Jason Williams, the executive director of the NC Faith & Freedom Coalition, told HuffPost in an email, “It should come as no surprise when a culture devalues life, and teaches we have no accountability to a sovereign God, these tragedies will continue.”
Williams added, “We can’t chase God from the public square then have a prayer vigil afterwards wondering where He was.”
This isn’t the only time Robinson has linked school shootings to a lack of school prayer. He similarly said in December 2021 that if schools were “giving God some praises and introducing his word back into that school, his wisdom back into those schools, maybe them schools wouldn’t be getting shot up to begin with,” as The New Republic reported.
Robinson, North Carolina’s current lieutenant governor and the Republican nominee for governor in this November’s election, has a history of inflammatoryremarks on a number of topics, includingreferring to homosexuality and “transgenderism” as “filth.” He also recently said that “some folks need killing.” (Robinson’s campaign argued that he was referring to Nazi and Japanese soldiers during World War II, but he referred in those same remarks to “wicked people doing wicked things, torturing and murdering and raping.”)
In the race for governor, Robinson is running against North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, who is endorsed by outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper (D) and easily secured the Democratic Party’s nomination in March. The North Carolina gubernatorial contest is among the most expensive in the country this year.
Among other contentious policy positions — including his call for tightening abortion restrictions, which his campaign has tried to walk back — Robinson has made a name for himself by speaking out against firearm regulations.
A viral speech he gave on gun rights at a Greensboro City Council meeting in 2018 — which was credited with earning him the lieutenant governorship — included the lines: “It seems like every time we have one of these shootings, nobody wants to put the blame where it goes, which is at the shooter’s feet. You want to put it at my feet. You want to turn around and restrict my right, constitutional right that’s spelled out in black and white, you want to restrict my right to buy a firearm and protect myself.” Last year, as a gubernatorial candidate, Robinson raffled off guns at a fundraiser.
And in May 2021, the same year Robinson made his school shooting remarks, the National Rifle Association released an advertisement featuring the lieutenant governor.
Weeks before his city council speech, Robinson called the survivors of a 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, “spoiled, angry, know it all CHILDREN,” “stupid” and “media prosti-tots.”
The year prior, in 2017, he said on social media that he was “SERIOUSLY skeptical of EVERYTHING I see and have seen on television. From the murder of JFK to 9/11 to Las Vegas.” The post came a few weeks after a shooter killed 60 people at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
