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.

Article

Comment

Mental Health

Podcasts

14 October 2024

4 min read

What all those BetterHelp ads say about ourselves

Podcasting and therapy alike scratch our itch to be inquisitive about things, even our own inner worlds.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

A podcaster speaks into a mic before a screen.

Soundtrap on Unsplash.

There's one dominion Amazon hasn't conquered. Jeff Bezos famously chose his company's name, in part, because it's the largest river in the world and he wanted to create the world's largest bookstore. And Amazon has flooded the market. But as the world of podcasting is taking over our commutes and leisure time, Amazon isn't taking it over. That top spot belongs to BetterHelp.

Now that I've mentioned it, you probably know what I'm referring to: the ubiquitous ads offering online therapy, often reassuringly read by the podcast hosts themselves. Although Amazon is the second largest ad buyer on podcasts, BetterHelp spends more. A lot more. In the US, BetterHelp spent $22million in the second quarter of this year, followed by Amazon with $13million. . BetterHelp has pretty much been the top spender on podcasts Clearly, BetterHelp thinks the demand for therapy is right up there with the convenience of getting stuff delivered to your door.

The message of online therapy, and the medium of podcasts makes for a neat match. It seems our wants and needs are more and more solo endeavours. Our desire for entertainment and help are becoming something we access alone, behind headphones and closed doors.

Overhearing people talking about their therapist in a metropolitan café is now as as common as the extra-hot flat whites themselves.

I was stunned when I heard recently that Saturday Night Live celebrated fifty years on TV. It was a reminder of an age when families and friends would diarise prime-time weekend entertainment together in front of the glow of the screen. But common experiences are diminishing. Harvard fellow Flynn Coleman highlights that the third spaces where we have customarily congregated, found community, and ourselves, are vanishing.

She is, of course, right. We are just beginning to scratch the surface of the damage our atomised online worlds have created. But where the CDC health report last year tragically detailed the harm social media causes teenage girls, the online space is not without hope. Krish Kandiah writes, 'Instead of demonising new technology as the problem, perhaps we need to find ways to turn it into the solution.'The online world isn't going away, so it must be at least part of the solution. Teletherapy is now available on the NHS, and while there are questions over the affordability and availability of online mental health care, and I cannot vouch for BetterHelp, making therapy more accessible by taking it online plays an important part in winning the battle of declining mental health.

Far from an echo chamber, an online therapist can challenge presumptions at right angles and enable clients to access worlds they previously only dreamed of. And, any good therapist wouldn't encourage you to isolate yourself. We still need community.

Therapy isn't as much a solo endeavour as we might first think. Of course, the therapeutic relationship itself is between two people, however objective one party might be. And just as the old adage goes, 'a problem shared is a problem halved', overhearing people talking about their therapist in a metropolitan café is now as as common as the extra-hot flat whites themselves. Therapy is losing its stigma, and the benefits of it are shared just as we want to share a podcast that's stimulated or amused us.

That elusive arrival at contentment, of happiness, of satisfaction is quite the claim for an online service provider to make.

Some things are sacred, though. James Marriott recently argued in The Times that the burden on those in the public spotlight to overshare isn't always helpful. How, where and with whom we share our inner thoughts matters. The Christian tradition sees that growth happens through relationship, rather than through broadcasting. Spanish mystic St Teresa of Avila wrote almost half a millennia ago about a journey inward, inside of ourselves to a space where only God dwells, if we choose to let him enter. On that journey, she wrote ‘It is a great advantage for us to be able to consult someone who knows us, so that we may learn to know ourselves.’

On that journey of self-knowledge, the online world can enhance our lives, but not replace it. Just as The Rest is History podcast can give you details about ‘greatest monkeys' that your friend can't, specialist help from an online therapist will help you in ways friends won't. But BetterHelp wants to be your friend. The main heading on their website mimics what we've probably all heard from someone we know: 'You deserve to be happy'. They've learnt from the Steve Jobs school of marketing: don't sell the product or service; sell how it will make them feel. That elusive arrival at contentment, of happiness, of satisfaction is quite the claim for an online service provider to make.

Podcasting and therapy alike scratch our itch to be inquisitive about things, even our own inner worlds. Where podcasting has challenged the old powers that sought to control the flow of information, we also do well to listen to external expert help. In this age, the online stream can flow information to us which, like the Amazon, might overwhelm us. It’s worth us asking: is there an external source of even better help available? One that will overwhelm us too – but instead overwhelm with the love we crave in our deepest selves?