Did God save Donald Trump?

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, Graham Tomlin asks whether or not we can see the hand of God in it

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Red hat with the words Make America Great Again

Given the polarised nature of American politics and the venomous nature of the debates, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was not entirely a surprise, even if a massive shock to the system. It was both tragic for those who were killed and yet a relief for everyone that Trump survived, not least for the unimaginable consequences across the country if he had not.

It doesn’t take a very deep dive into the maelstrom that is Twitter/X these days, to discover a common theme among Trump supporters - that God shielded him from a certain death. “God protected President Trump,” Senator Marco Rubio posted. “God saved the life of Donald Trump” say a million others, confident that the seemingly miraculous slight head tilt at the moment of the shot that ensured the bullet hit his ear, not going through the back of his temple, was a moment of divine intervention.

Yet look elsewhere on X and you can find vast numbers of people equally certain that this is complete nonsense. God did not save Donald Trump, either because there is no God to save anyone, or because if there is a God, either he doesn’t intervene at all, or even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t want to save the likes of Donald Trump.

If God saved Trump, they say, why did he not save the life of Corey Comperatore, the volunteer fireman who was killed by bullets fired from the gun that was used in the attack? Trump supporters respond with the claim that Trump has a special calling, justifying divine intervention, to ‘restore the Judaeo-Christian heritage to America’ as one tweet put it.

So, which is it?

Christian thinkers have normally held to the possibility that God can and does, at decisive moments, interrupt the normal flow of history.

Christian thinkers have normally held to the possibility that God can and does, at decisive moments, interrupt the normal flow of history. After all, the central Christian claim is that he did this in remarkable acts of deliverance such as the Exodus, at key moments in the history of Israel and most importantly in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And, they claim, he does it in less prominent ways, as testimonies to prayers answered and apparently miraculous occurrences suggest.

Yet divine interventions like this are by definition rare. In one of Douglas Coupland’s novels, one of the characters ponders a Christian group that expects constant miracles: “They’re always asking for miracles and finding them everywhere. In as much as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that he created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding him with requests for miracles, we are also asking that he unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.” He has a point.

Yet a world without any interventions at all would be a world which God had seemed to abandon to its fate. The idea that God set up his world to run like clockwork with no further intervention is Deism, not Christianity, a theology popular in the C17th and C18th, still found today, but leaves God watching us from a safe and uninvolved distance. It would lead to the conclusion that God did not really care that much about the world, leaving it to its own devices, especially when evil runs riot and nothing seems to prevent it. Such interventions are best seen as signs, special indications that do not ‘unravel the fabric of the world’, yet are tangible reminders that even though it is broken, God has not given up on this world, and will one day redeem it.

Yet if God can and does step in at certain moments to divert the course of history in a fallen and broken world, that doesn’t mean that every claim to divine intervention is genuine. So how can you tell? Who do we believe?

If God can and does step in at certain moments to divert the course of history in a fallen and broken world, that doesn’t mean that every claim to divine intervention is genuine. So how can you tell? Who do we believe?

At several points in the Old Testament, writers wonder how you can tell the true prophet from the false. One of them answers like this: “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken.”

To be honest, this doesn’t appear to help much. You can tell if a person has got it right if their prediction comes true, but at the time, you have no idea whether it will come true or not, so it still leaves you in the dark as to who to believe.

Yet it does suggest an important insight. You can only tell God’s intervention retrospectively. You can only say with a degree of confidence that God has ‘intervened’ when looking back on events and seeing how they turn out.

If Donald Trump is elected, and somehow brings about harmony and flourishing for as many people in the USA as possible, stabilises the economy, enabling all people to live a decent life, not just the rich and powerful, restores a sense of civility and generosity to public life, resists the forces of harm and evil in the nation and in the world, and brings freedom for Christians and others to practice and promote their faith, then maybe we might look back in future years and say that God did step in on July 14^th 2024 to frustrate the purposes of evil in the world.

Yet if none of that happens, and what results from his survival is instead a deeper fracturing of social cohesion, a coarsening of public debate, a siege mentality that divides the world between ‘us’ and ‘them’, an increasing divide between the rich and the poor, the elites and ordinary people, then we might in future say it was mere chance, one of those random things that happen in this created yet fallen world with its mysterious blend of order and chaos.

Which will it be? Time will tell. Until then, we’d better be cautious about claims of divine intervention. Not because God never does it, but because we’re not very good at telling when it happens.

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Freedom of Belief

16 August 2024

5 min read

Iran: defender of minorities?

Making such claims is part of a carefully managed facade.

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

A toddler is held by her father while he stands next to her mother.

Lydia and her adoptive family.

It might surprise you to learn that the Islamic Republic of Iran likes to present itself as a defender of minorities.

It’s certainly not the sort of title you might associate with a country with such a grim human-rights record, amounting to “crimes against humanity” according to the findings of an independent fact-finding mission.

But akin to the template of the Russians and other rogue regimes, Iran knows well that when it comes to the international arena, appearances can often take the spotlight away from ghastly realities.

And so, when the fact-finding mission releases a report, as it did last week, outlining violations against minorities with the title They have dehumanised us, while it may achieve little in terms of change on the ground, it has the potential to at least damage the Islamic Republic’s carefully managed facade on the international stage.

In the five years I’ve been working for Iranian Christian charity Article18, I've grown extremely familiar with the way in which the Islamic Republic brings representatives of its recognised religious minorities - Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians - to the United Nations in an attempt to prove its inter-religious tolerance.

The latest example of this was in October, when the Armenian MP - one of five minority representatives in the Iranian parliament (as the Islamic Republic likes to remind us) - was rolled out before the UN Human Rights Committee to list the number of churches, synagogues and temples in Iran.

The point? That if there are so many places where minorities can worship - for the record, he referenced 380 churches, 16 synagogues and 78 temples - then how can anyone claim minorities are persecuted?

What the MP failed to mention was that those 380 churches, for example, are only open to those considered to have been born as Christians, which in Iran means Armenians or Assyrians.

Meanwhile, the door remains firmly closed to anyone who may wish to convert to Christianity or even simply visit a church to find out more.

Article 18 enshrines the freedoms to change one's faith and to share it with others. Both are denied to Iranians of all faiths and none.

This hasn’t always been the case. There were once a large and growing number of churches that welcomed converts, but over the past 15 years they were either forced to close or to change the language in which they operate. These days, churches can only preach in Assyrian or Armenian.

Last year marked the 10th anniversary of the forced closure of the largest Persian-speaking church in Iran, the Central Assemblies of God Church in Tehran, whose popularity ended up being its death knell.

Just four Persian-speaking churches remain in the whole of Iran, all Anglican, and these can only welcome those who can prove they were Christian before the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. They are not allowed to admit new members, and even these have not been permitted to reopen since their forced closure during the Covid-19 pandemic.

So, while churches in the West are often derided for their ageing populations, for Iran’s last remaining Persian-language churches, that future is entirely inevitable.

And while the Armenian MP talks about Iran’s hundreds of churches, he fails to mention that converts have nowhere to worship, as was highlighted in our #Place2Worship campaign, which was inspired by an open letter written by three converts serving long prison sentences for their membership of house-churches.

The three wanted to know where they might worship, free from the fear of being re-arrested.

Because that is why Christians are imprisoned in Iran - simply for meeting together in what we in the West call “house groups”, and what in Iran are known as “house-churches”, or, in the words of the Iranian authorities, “enemy groups”.

But it isn't only the converts who suffer. Armenians and Assyrians have themselves received long prison sentences for their decision to share their faith, a right that is enshrined in international covenants that Iran has signed, including Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, from which my organisation derives its name.

Article 18 enshrines the freedoms to change one's faith and to share it with others. Both are denied to Iranians of all faiths and none.

But they aren't quite so fond of scrutiny, such as a 17,000-word report by a credible international team of experts.

In this context, I find it both baffling and even slightly amusing whenever I see the Islamic Republic of Iran presenting itself as the defender of minorities.

Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, littered his "election" campaign with references to the “dignity” of Iran’s minorities; it’s common to see propaganda highlighting Iran's alleged defence of Christians in the region against ISIS, for example; and they love to talk about the number of churches and minority MPs that they have.

But they aren't quite so fond of scrutiny, such as a 17,000-word report by a credible international team of experts.

According to the experts, minorities in Iran face “ongoing institutionalised discrimination and marginalisation”, the “root causes” or “enablers” of which are the “gross human-rights violations against them”.

The fact-finding mission highlight the example of a couple whose adopted daughter was ruled should be taken away from them because they had become Christians and she was considered to have been born a Muslim.

I remember the story of little Lydia very well - certainly one of the most heart-wrenching of my time working with Article18.

It also produced one of the strongest reactions, with 120 lawyers and activists signing a joint letter to the head of the judiciary at the time - one Ebrahim Raisi - calling for the decision to be overturned.

It wasn’t.

And while the Islamic Republic will no doubt seek to laugh or shrug off the “politically motivated” report, as they have countless others, it is to be hoped that at least some who may have been taken in by the regime's propaganda in the past will see reason to think twice the next time around.