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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Life & Death

7 August 2024

6 min read

Dying well: what is neglected needs to be put right

How each of us can prepare ourselves and those we leave behind.

Matthew Hutton

Matthew is the author of Your Last Gift – Getting Your Affairs in Order.

A group of grieving friends with their hands on each others backs.

The Good Funeral Guide on Unsplash.

In their November 2023 Theos report Love, Grief and Hope: Emotional responses to death and dying in the UK, Madeline Pennington and Nathan Mladin produce the surprising finding that, over the past year, one quarter of Brits had thought about their own death at least once a week. They go on to consider related emotional responses, chiefly fear. But, however often we think about death (maybe never), what do we do to prepare for the certainty of it, when we are used to making all sorts of preparations for practically everything else in our lives?

First, we can, without being morbid, live our lives in broad terms in the consciousness that we are mortal (and, if you will forgive me as a classicist for delving into Latin, living ‘sub specie aeternitatis’ which means ‘from the standpoint of eternity’). Second, there are things we can do in terms of getting our house in order, both for our own peace of mind and for the benefit of our loved ones and those we leave behind. This is both spiritually and materially, though I would want to argue as a Christian that the whole of life (whether in this world or in the next) combines both aspects.

Having had quite a feisty and competitive brother/sister relationship (with not a little ribbing from her about my own faith), we came to enjoy the warmest possible sibling love for and appreciation of each other.

My dear sister Debbie died aged just 49 in July 2005. She had telephoned me only eight months before to tell me of the grim diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer, saying that there were two things she needed to sort out: her will and her relationship with God. I replied (as a Christian and as a private client lawyer) that we could sort both those out. I referred Debbie to a vicar I knew in a church round the corner from where she lived. She was a bit hesitant, saying that, having kept God at arm’s length for all her life, wasn’t it a bit presumptuous now to be knocking on the vicar’s door? I suggested that she should think of it from his point of view, in terms of job satisfaction: that after all was precisely what he was there to do, telling people about God and helping them to find a personal faith.

So that’s just what she did, coming to that faith herself following time with the vicar, with me and with other friends, in the February. And she died as a self-proclaimed Christian five months later. For me, the most precious thing apart from knowing that she would be with Jesus forever was this: having had quite a feisty and competitive brother/sister relationship (with not a little ribbing from her about my own faith), we came to enjoy the warmest possible sibling love for and appreciation of each other.

Second, my mother, whose ideas of Christianity were never terribly clear, though she was a very faithful listener of my sermons, came to faith (as I saw it) just 12 days before she died in May 2010. It was at a home communion given by one of the local clergy team that, as she received the bread and/or the wine (I forget which), a most powerful voice within my spirit told me that she had received Jesus. And that night, by way of confirmation, my wife Annie had a very clear dream of my mother (it had to be her, wearing her most distinctive pink kaftan) dancing at the foot of the Cross.

We lived just five minutes from Mum and, again, my early evening visits to see her, to chat, to read from the Bible and to pray were somehow transformed. While I am not sure that she had the same clear consciousness of having moved from darkness to light as had Debbie, I was quite clear that she had – and noted in my prayers at her funeral that at the end she had received Jesus.

Third is my very close friend Jim who died aged just 67 in November 2020: I had talked to him about the Christian faith on a number of occasions, but he simply didn’t want to know. Then just one month before he died, in a telephone conversation with him in hospital Jim asked me to explain it, from a position of dire physical need and wanting to hear. I didn’t know how ill he was and, having explained the essence of Christian belief in very simple terms, prayed with him over the telephone.

As it happens, Jim survived another month at home, during which time I was able to visit him four times and (now having been ordained) give him and his Christian wife Judi Home Communion, as well as pointing him to and talking about Mark’s Gospel and praying with him. His new faith led to a new intensity in our friendship. Jim was quite clear about his new relationship with Jesus, seeing himself as the lost sheep, on which I preached at his funeral, before (as a profoundly moving experience) conducting his burial.

None of us of course knows for sure what happens after death. But Christians are by God’s grace given this ‘sure and certain hope’ of an eternity to be spent with Christ in God’s new creation. And it’s the clear Christian message that that eternity starts now, when we come to faith. There’s a new relationship with God in Christ and, which is my experience, with our brothers and sisters in Christ, especially precious when those folk are close to us anyway.

And then of course, perhaps most importantly, what is broken needs to be put right.

That’s the spiritual aspect. What of the material – by which I mean all the practical ‘stuff’: those who are left behind having to sort out our possessions, Inheritance Tax where payable and a whole host of other things? It is a subject touched on in the Bible, perhaps surprisingly. Consider Paul writing to Timothy that a person should provide for their relatives and especially close family), which I take it would include post-death as well as lifetime provision. And then supremely of course Jesus in providing for his dear mother by entrusting her to his beloved disciple John.

In this context, I can do no more than make a few pointers, which with other suggestions I develop in my book.

There are what I call ‘The Three Essentials’: Lasting Powers of Attorney in case of mental incapacity (for both property & financial affairs and health & welfare), Wills (including the all-important choice of executors) and funeral arrangements. Just 44 per cent of UK adults have made a will.

Then there’s a host of other things, including appointing guardians for any minor children, providing for dependent relatives and making arrangements for pets. What about access to digital assets, for example? Let alone dealing with things about the home.

And then of course, perhaps most importantly, what is broken needs to be put right - relationships, where forgiveness could be sought or given. And, more widely, are there people you want to spend more time with, things you want to do or places to visit?

My suggestion is that dying well embraces first of all the peace which comes from the belief that Jesus has died the death my sins deserve and consequently a restored relationship with God our Heavenly Father; and second, making what practical arrangements we can in advance, to ease the stress of those we leave behind in sorting out our affairs.

Matthew Hutton is the author of Your Last Gift – Getting Your Affairs in Order.