Wednesday afternoon, two shooters turned San Bernardino, California, into the site of the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. since the 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School. Even considering the unusual early details—the husband-and-wife attackers, their escape from the scene—there was a grim familiarity to the way Wednesday’s events unfolded. The aerial maps, the police press conference, the worried relatives cleaving one by one into groups of the relieved and the grieving—Americans know these scripts by now.

One element of the post-massacre liturgy is getting fresh attention, however: the politicians who quickly offered their public “thoughts and prayers” to the victims. President Obama pushed back against “thoughts and prayers” in a press conference after the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon in October. “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” Obama said back then. Two months and 57 mass shootings later, the apparent backlash against prayer has metastasized. “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS” blared the New York Daily News’s remarkable front page Thursday morning.

The Daily News editors illustrated their point with tweets from GOP leaders who had quickly turned out near-identical statements. Indeed, several presidential candidates seemed to speak in unison: “Our prayers are with the victims …” (Ted Cruz), “My thoughts and prayers are with the shooting victims …” (Ben Carson), “My thoughts and prayers are with the victims …” (Rand Paul), and so on. An editor at Think Progress retweeted a long series of “thinking and praying” politicians and appended information about their recent campaign donations from the NRA. The Washington editor of the Nation contrasted Republicans’ “thoughts and prayers” with the Democratic candidates’ calls to action:

Both politicians and plebes have been offering “thoughts and prayers” in response to tragedy for ages. It’s a stock phrase in both sympathy cards and verified tweets. So what’s going on with this new resentment? Emma Green, writing in the Atlantic, dubbed it “prayer shaming”: