“Let me start by giving thanks to God Almighty for protecting President Trump, and for turning his head on Saturday as the shot was fired.”
This sentiment, expressed by Senator Ted Cruz at the recent Republican National Convention, is anything but an anomaly. In the aftermath of the tragic assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on July 13, several prominent voices joined a chorus of right-wing loyalists who seem convinced that God’s hand directly intervened to save Donald Trump’s life.
Mike Johnson believes God protected the former president in the same way he protected George Washington from an ambush 270 years ago. Charlie Kirk thinks a gust of divinely-blown wind pushed the bullet slightly off its course. And Donald Trump himself has gone on record to say that it was “God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.”
The problem, of course, is that God didn’t prevent the unthinkable from happening – at least not for Corey Comperatore and all those who loved him. The retired fire chief, husband, and father was one of many supporters in the crowd that day who were happy to be cheering on their presidential candidate of choice. But unlike the rest of them, Comperatore won’t have the chance to cast a vote in November’s election. Nor will he have another chance to hug his children or kiss his wife. As the shots began to ring out at the Butler Farm Show grounds, this valiant individual instinctively used his body to shield his others from harm, fatally absorbing one of the sniper’s bullets in the process.
Trump may say that God prevented the unthinkable from happening. But an innocent bystander killed on the bleachers of a political rally sounds pretty unthinkable to me. And it raises a problematic question for anyone eager to invoke God’s special providence as the reason for Trump’s survival: Why couldn’t God have saved Comperatore as well?
It’s not an unreasonable question. The religious rhetoric of Cruz and company presupposes that God is capable of shifting winds and maneuvering bodies at just the right moment to avoid a fatal encounter with a projectile traveling at several hundred meters per second. But why would that power be reserved only for the man at the microphone? Couldn’t the Most High have sent just a little extra wind to spare the life of the spectator in the stands?
Let’s press the issue even further. If there is indeed a God powerful enough to intervene with such precision and dexterity, why couldn’t he have simply caused the gunman to slip and fall off the roof? Or made his weapon jam and fail to fire? Or given him a freak seizure right before he pulled the trigger? If the objective was to save the former president, surely God could have done so by preventing any bullets from flying in the first place. Why didn’t he? Was it somehow necessary for an innocent bystander to pay the ultimate price for someone else’s survival? And if so, what kind of divine providence leaves behind such seemingly reckless collateral damage in its wake?
These questions are in no way meant to minimize the value of Donald Trump’s safety and well-being. Any decent human being – regardless of political affiliation – can be grateful that he survived. Trump might be a terrible politician. He might even be a terrible person. But no civilized society should embrace murder as a solution for its less-than-ideal leaders.
That being said, it’s entirely possible for someone to be grateful our former president was not killed in cold blood without proceeding to claim that God must have personally altered atmospheric forces and the movement of sternocleidomastoid muscles to protect the person he has divinely chosen to lead our nation. No mortal could possibly know what God was – or wasn’t – doing on July 13. So why pretend otherwise?
Whether it’s within the partisan discourse of contemporary politics or any other sphere of human experience, the tendency to attribute one’s own good fortune to divine intervention is not only a completely unfounded speculation; it’s also a self-centered and dehumanizing way to interpret the universe’s inscrutable mysteries.
That may seem like an audacious statement, but a simple thought experiment will help to illustrate this point.
Imagine owning a fancy beach home that just so happens to be directly in the path of a ferocious hurricane. Each day, the forecast gets more and more dire – devastating winds, catastrophic flooding, the whole nine yards. But just before the hurricane is about to make landfall, it makes an unexpected and inexplicable turn, eventually slamming into some random island in the Caribbean instead.
Here’s the question: Is this seemingly miraculous turn of events an instance of God protecting you and the home you’ve worked so hard to buy? And before you answer, consider this follow-up question: Does it affect your interpretation to know that thousands of island-dwellers you’ll never meet in a country you’ll never visit have just had their own homes and livelihoods blown to pieces and washed out to sea by the very hurricane that you managed to escape?
It’s easy for people to pontificate about God’s favor when they feel like they’ve been miraculously spared from something dangerous or unpleasant. But when one person’s welfare comes at the expense of someone else’s demise, these spiritualized interpretations reveal a pernicious form of theological narcissism that recklessly conflates the divine will with one’s own self-interest.
This kind of thing happens every day, although usually on a much smaller scale than assassination attempts and hurricanes.
Like at the grocery store: “Oh, look! The Lord opened this front row parking spot just for me!” – while an elderly grandmother shuffles slowly from the back of the lot because nothing closer was available.
Or at the airport: “I overslept this morning, but God delayed my flight!” – while several other passengers who will now miss their connections scramble frantically to change travel plans.
And at work: “Praise God, he spared me from the company-wide layoffs!” – while a coworker you don’t know is packing up her desk wondering how she’ll provide for her three kids at home.
In our more unreflective moments, we all fancy ourselves as the center of the universe. It’s part of being human. When you only see the world through one set of eyes, your sense of reality can’t help but be colored by a bit of ego.
But to bake that self-absorption into our religious language is to commit a form of theological malpractice that marginalizes the metaphorical man in the stands – the one who takes the full brunt of the bullets that merely graze our ears. Is he less favored by God? Less loved? Less important? Less worthy of divine protection? Few will say it explicitly, but isn’t that what such words imply?
A few months ago, I had the distinct pleasure of introducing my children to the absurdly over-the-top disaster film “2012” – the one starring a desperate John Cusack trying to escape total global destruction. Thanks to a ridiculous plot and some cringe-inducing dialogue, I’d say its 39% rating on Rotten Tomatoes is well-earned. But despite its many weaknesses, “2012” successfully accomplishes the one thing that every end-of-the-world movie absolutely must do: it forges such a strong emotional connection with the main characters that the viewer becomes almost indifferent to the plights of the masses in the background.
One particular scene stands out in this regard. While the city of Los Angeles is literally collapsing into the earth, Cusack’s character maniacally drives his family (in a limousine no less!) through the crumbling streets and falling buildings in an attempt to reach safety. As the viewer, you can’t help but find yourself on the edge of your seat, rooting for them to defy the odds and find salvation from the hellscape around them. But what you’ll probably not give much emotional energy to is the millions of people who are dying unimaginable deaths all around them as the city is destroyed. Why is that? Why does this one stupid limousine matter so much to you when an entire metropolis is being swallowed alive by the very ground on which it was built?
The answer is simple. Our emotional proximity to the people in that limousine has given us an unreasonably inflated sense of their importance. Never mind the fact that everyone around them has their own stories, their own struggles, their own dreams, their own relationships, their own reasons to survive. As long as we don’t know them, we can afford not to care.
In real life, however, there are no John Cusacks, no main characters who get to pull rank on everyone else. All human life is equally valuable. It doesn’t matter if you’re a presidential candidate in the public spotlight or a retired fire chief whose name few people will ever know. You’re life isn’t worth saving more than mine, nor is mine worth saving more than yours.
Therein lies the problem with claiming to speak for God and assuming he’s orchestrating every turn of events that happens to benefit us and serve our narrative. When we do so, we take our own subjective hierarchy of importance and we project it on a cosmic scale, manufacturing a myopic deity whose actions are constrained by our own prejudiced priorities.
Sure, there are moments of magic and serendipity that leave us feeling like there must be someone out there taking special care of us. And maybe that’s true. But we can’t overlook the fact that in the background of those moments is often someone else who feels alone and abandoned, wondering why nobody was there to help in their time of need.
In a world as complicated and confusing as ours, I believe it serves us well to remain a little bit agnostic. Try as we might, we can’t decode the algorithm behind all of this chaos. Nor do we need to. It’s okay to simply be grateful when good things happen, and keep our mouths shut about the rest.
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Drew Thomas Humphrey 