Did God Save Donald Trump?
On the invocation of "providence" over the events in Pennsylvania last Saturday.
In 1981 a bullet narrowly missed the heart of a certain Karol Józef Wojtyła when an aggrieved Turk shot him in the Vatican City. Wojtyła, whose professional title was “Pope John Paul II” later forgave his would-be assassin, who managed to penetrate the Bishop of Rome with two bullet holes, leading to significant blood loss, but failed to kill him.
This occurring on the 64th anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary at Fátima, she was, specifically, later invoked as the Pope’s protector that day, him saying that a “motherly hand” had guided the bullets to miss his vital organs. I am not the first to wonder why Our Lady of Fatima could not have guided the bullets to miss him altogether.
We have seen a similarly religious response from a similarly religious political milieu following the attempt on Donald Trump’s life last week. Given how close he came to martyrdom in Pennsylvania—turning his head slightly at the exact moment of impact, which was therefore taken by his earlobe rather than his occipital lobe—it has been suggested by a number of political commentators that God had a hand in saving the former president at the last moment. One wonders (as one may do of the secret service that day) why he had to wait until then.
Trump himself appears to be similarly convinced that heaven intervened last week, telling the Republican National Convention that “I stand before you in this Arena only by the grace of almighty God”.
It’s unclear what the mechanism of God’s grace was that day. Perhaps he suspended his famously stringent policy on interfering with human free will, briefly taking control of Trump’s brain to turn his head just far enough to avoid fatality, but not quite far enough, for some reason, to avoid impact.1 Or maybe he took hold of the shooter’s hands, and nudged them just slightly off-target.
This doesn't sit right with me. Whenever I bring up the long-held atheist objection of the problem of evil, I am consistently told that human evil exists because God so values free will that he cannot take control of a person's actions and override their free decision to commit an act of evil.2 Thus his folded arms during the holocaust, for example. For Donald Trump, though, he simply had to make an exception!
Unlikely. Perhaps, then, God used the wind, or otherwise moved the bullets so as to protect Trump from harm. Set aside that this is merely a second-order intrusion on the free will of the shooter: considerably more problematic is the uneasy fact that God's protective grace seemingly did not extend to those unimportant enough to warrant his safekeeping in Pennsylvania. Those celebrating heavenly providence over the events of July 13th should remember that Trump’s blood was not the only that was spilled. Whilst the assailant missed his target, he still became a killer that day.
Megyn Kelly this week provided a useful case study of the religious fervour that some Americans direct towards their former president: reminding her viewers that Trump was shot at 6:11PM, she reads a passage from the New Testament: “Put on the full armour of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes.” The citation? Ephesians 6:11.3
“I’m almost emotional reading it,” she says. “It’s just what happened to him and our country this weekend is extremely grave and extremely important, and we are all so lucky it wasn’t worse than it was.”
It would take a utilitarian theology of incomprehensible proportions, however, to convince the family of Corey Comperatore, who did catch a bullet that day, that our providential father was controlling its trajectory. How lucky his daughters should feel that the Lord—or perhaps Our Lady of Fatima again?—protected Donald Trump by redirecting those bullets into their dad.
Such is the unthinking theological sloppiness of those who think that God was guiding those bullets. Those who insist that Trump is God’s chosen president. The same Trump who when asked to name a single Bible verse that he liked, could only say, “The Bible means a lot to me but I don’t want to get into specifics”. At least he won’t struggle to pick a favourite now.
Maybe he was going for dramatic effect. If so, it worked.
To freely love, we are told, we must have the choice to freely hate. A good action is no good at all if coerced and unfree.
In other news, there are three persons in the trinity, and this is the third time Trump has run for president. Coincidence? Who can really say?
In 1983, I was flying my hang glider over a 1000 metre mountain in the Snowy Mountains. I was hit by turbulence so strong that it broke the keel of my hang glider in two places. The wings went vertical and although still attached to the remnants, I was falling like a dart. I threw my emergency parachute, but as it opened, I smashed against a ledge, breaking my shoulder and then bounced down two ledges, taking out some ribs. I spent a week in hospital, but recovered completely and started flying again. My friends told me I had fallen the height of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which is normally fatal. My very devout Catholic mother told me that God had saved me on his mountain. I wanted to say it, but didn’t: Then why did he break up my hang glider? Or at least if he wanted to break it up, to wait until I was far enough away from the mountain to allow me to float down safely in my emergency parachute. Malcolm Muggeridge, before his conversion to Catholicism, tells the story about being caught in a traffic jamb and so missed his plane to India. A standby passenger took his place when he did not turn up. The plane crashed and all were killed. Religious people said God had saved him, and while he liked the idea, the wrote: but what did the standby passenger think as the plane was going down?
Good read. I think one of the most awesome things about the human family is that we can see patterns in anything. And I think one of the most awful things about the human family is that we can see patterns in everything. If believing that makes someone feel better about the world then that's awesome but at the same time the heathen in me is screaming "WHAT. DO. YOU. MEAN!"
P.S. that title was so click-baitey it hurt my face