As the citywide vigil for victims of Monday’s school shooting wound down, a woman approached Mary Sposito. She could “feel the presence of the Lord” in her, she said. Could she pray on her?

As the stranger wrapped her arms around Sposito and whispered a prayer in her ear, Sposito’s eyes grew watery. “That’s normal here,” Sposito, 23, said afterward. “I did not grow up a big devout Christian, but moving here, you can feel it. Its undeniable.”

Nashville is known as the “buckle of the Bible Belt,” a city with a church on every corner. The Southern Baptist Convention is based here, along with a slew of religious publications. Country musicians, with their strong ties to Christian culture, consider Nashville their unofficial capital. After a mass shooter killed six people Monday at Covenant School, a small Christian academy, the community faced a controversial question: What’s the Christian thing to do about guns?

Some Christian leaders in the city have argued that massacres like this one require prayers, not politics. But others say their religion is being twisted to distract from calls for mental health checks and other gun restrictions. Sometimes, they say, the call for prayer is used as a silencer.

“In Nashville, White, Christian culture and gun culture are practically synonymous,” said David Dark, professor of religion at Nashville’s Belmont University, who says he is an “aspiring follower of Jesus Christ.”

“Marketed Christianity is everywhere,” he added. “And not everything that is successfully marketed as Christianity is moral. Not everything that is marketed as Christianity reaches basic standards of public safety.”

‘All we can do is pray’

After the tragedy, mourners huddled in prayer circles around makeshift memorials. Audience members and local leaders called out to God at the citywide vigil. And residents rushed to impromptu church services for comfort from the pain, lighting candles in victims’ memories.

Tennessee is listed as the third-most-religious state in the nation after Alabama and Mississippi, according to a Pew Research survey, which takes into account frequency of prayer, church attendance and belief in God. More than half of the state’s respondents said they attend church weekly — the second-highest rate in the country — and 78 percent said they “believe in God with absolute certainty.”

Tennessee is 81 percent Christian, the majority of them (52 percent) evangelical Protestant, which includes evangelical Presbyterians, according to Pew.

“Nashville churches are the hub of the Bible Belt. They tend to share a lot of members, ministries,” said David Cassidy, who was a pastor in the Presbyterian church circuit in Nashville for over two decades. “I know from talking to pastors everywhere, [the tragedy] is just a wrecking ball.”

Faith has also been one of the most helpful tools for coping, Cassidy and others said.

“The culture here, it all points back to Christianity and the Lord. And I do think Nashville is an amazing city because the presence of the Lord is so strong here,” said Sposito. “That’s why I think it’s incredibly difficult to see that this happened to a Christian school. But know that it is a strong faith community and we will get through this because our faith is so strong.”

Faith was the first thing Amy Weiland turned to when she visited the Covenant memorial this week, huddling in prayer with her husband and two others to “try to give up our hurt to God.”

She said the fact that the shooting was at a Christian school “makes it even more scary. … You hope the people around here have the faith not to do something like that, that they cope better.”

In the aftermath of the violence, some public leaders have also urged prayer rather than debate. In an address Tuesday, Gov. Bill Lee (R) blamed the tragedy on “evil,” saying it was not the time for political debate.

“This is not a time for hate or rage. That will not resolve or heal,” said Lee, whose children attended a sister school to Covenant and whose wife was close friends with two of the women killed. “The battle is not against flesh and blood, it’s not against people. The struggle is against evil itself. … We must work to find ways to protect against evil.”

Kerry Osborn, a friend of Sposito’s, put it bluntly: “We’re being forced to turn a tragedy into a political agenda.” Osborn said if it hadn’t been a gun, the suspect probably would have used another weapon.

Emily Ryan said she came to the school’s memorial with her children to model the correct way to be part of a community faced with a tragedy.

“We believe deeply in sin. We believe deeply in evil forces that we can’t see. All we can do is pray. Taking away guns is not the answer. You can’t legislate morality,” she said.

“We adore this church. There is a reason it happened here,” she added, almost whispering. “The Lord does beautiful work here and Satan wants to stop it.”

‘Now we need to act’

But not all Christians here think that prayer is the answer — or at least, the only one.

At a rally at the Capitol where hundreds of people showed up demanding stricter gun laws, a young man stood out: the son of Matthew Sullivan, the chaplain at Covenant School, whose family was enmeshed in Nashville’s Presbyterian community. He was spotted carrying a sign reading “This Has to Stop.”

Tennessee allows people to own semiautomatic and automatic weapons, although automatic weapons are harder to buy and require a license from the federal government. The state does not ban high-capacity magazines, and it doesn’t require people obtain a permit to carry a loaded handgun.

Dillon Estes, a law student, went to the Capitol on Tuesday to rally for stronger gun-control laws. Estes said he believes in God but doesn’t identify as a Christian.

The day of the shooting, he said, “was sad. It was a time for crying and reflection. But today is a time for anger. There has been too much complacency. Now we need to act.”

Some visiting the school memorials expressed similar viewpoints. Lisa Spain and her niece Haley Dyer visited it last week and said they have relied on their faith to get through the tragedy, but more than prayer is needed.

“When stuff like this happens, it makes me question” Tennessee law, Dyer said. “They should definitely do mental checks,” a proposed regulation known as a red-flag law that prevents someone who has a mental illness from purchasing a gun.

Anna Caudill, a special education advocate, agrees. She worked for years at Christ Presbyterian Academy, sister of Covenant School, and attended services at its church until a few years ago when she and her husband decided to move to a church that they thought was more inclusive. Caudill said she felt like the governor was using Christianity to abdicate responsibility — and engaged in an example of what she calls “prayer theater.”

“I don’t know that I’m willing to play along with [Gov. Lee’s] desire to posit himself as a pastoral figure for a grieving state, which neatly pushes the responsibility off on God for the decisions that he has made,” Caudill said.

Cassidy also expressed concern over Lee’s words: “The problem for the governor is his language is appropriate in a prayer meeting. If something is demonic, what’s a governor to do? There is this line of hypocrisy. It’s dangerous for an elected official to dismiss to the realm of the spiritual what he’s been elected to deal with civilly.”