Did God Save Donald Trump's Life?

Divine Action, Death, and the Donald

[This week I’m foregoing the usual post solely for paid subscribers because I thought this was a topic that deserved a wide audience; I hope subscribers will forgive me! The essay is also a bit lengthy, although hopefully well worth the time, so I beg your indulgence. - M.S.]

Donald Trump had a brush with death on July 14 when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks took aim at the former president at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Crooks, using an AR-15 rifle, fired eight shots before being neutralized by Secret Service snipers; one bullet grazed Trump’s ear, while one rally attendee, Cory Comperatore, was killed and two other attendees were critically injured.

Trump was clearly, and understandably, shaken by the event. Only a few days later, he began his speech accepting his nomination as a candidate for the presidency at the Republican National Convention by recounting what had transpired, and then added:

I’m not supposed to be here tonight. Not supposed to be here.

[Crowd chants “Yes, you are.”]

Thank you. But I’m not. And I’ll tell you. I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God.

Earlier in the speech, while praising the quick work of the Secret Service agents who guided him off the rally stage, he said: “There was blood pouring everywhere, and yet in a certain way I felt very safe because I had God on my side. I felt that.”

Earlier convention speakers had been even more provocative in their claims regarding God’s involvement in preserving Trump’s life. Trump’s son Eric stated: “Dad, five days ago, Lara, Luke, Carolina [i.e., Eric’s wife and children] and I held our breath as we saw blood pour across your face. By the grace of God, divine intervention, and your guardian angels above, you survived.” Similarly, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former White House press secretary and the current Governor of Arkansas, said: “Not even an assassin’s bullet could stop him. God Almighty intervened because America is one nation under God, and He is certainly not finished with President Trump.”

Trump and the convention speakers were merely echoing a sentiment that had emerged among Trump supporters on social media and on cable news networks soon after the assassination attempt, that God had protected Trump, a sign of divine favor on Trump’s leadership. The assassin’s near miss only confirmed what many already believed, particularly adherents to certain strands of evangelical and charismatic Christianity: that Trump has been anointed by God to restore America’s Christian roots.

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Others, however, have pushed back on these theological claims. In particular, other Christians have asked why God would protect Trump but not Comperatore, the father and firefighter who was killed by Crooks. For example, theologian Brandon Ambrosino asks:

[W]hen God moved Trump’s head out of the way of the shooter’s bullet, did God know that the bullet would end up striking a firefighter? [M.S.: I’m not sure if we know if the bullet that grazed Trump is the same that hit Comperatore.] Did God have no way to save Trump’s life while also protecting everyone else’s life that day? Did God engage a version of the trolley dilemma and conclude that it was more ethical to save a former president than a rally attendee?

Baptist minister Martin Thielen, making a similar point, provides a pithy answer to these questions:

I’m glad Donald Trump wasn’t killed by an assassin. But I don’t believe God protected him. So why did Donald Trump survive his assassination attempt? Because the shooter missed. I wish he had also missed Corey Comperatore. I bet God feels the same way.

Ambrosino also aptly asks: Even if we admitted God did intervene to save Trump, why should we assume it was meant as a sign of divine favor? Perhaps God saved Trump to give him one last chance to repent of his many sins and retreat from the world for a life of prayer and fasting. Or maybe God intended to spare the country the violent turmoil that may have erupted if he had been killed. Interpreting the divine will can be risky business.

Donald Trump, Phoenix, Arizona, June 6, 2024 (Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)

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These critics are asking good questions, but I can’t help but also think they share something in common with those who see God’s miraculous hand in Trump’s brush with death: Both seem to presuppose that the “normal” state of affairs is a world in which divine activity is absent, and if God does become involved in our affairs, God’s activity comes in the form of an “intervention,” which in its Latin origins means “to come into” or “to interrupt.”

For example, Ambrosino writes that, when we do theology in the light of the cross of Jesus,

No longer is God the one who pulls history’s strings, who causes this nation to rise and that dictator to fall, this bullet to go just a tiny bit that way. God, in fact, is the one who, perhaps with bated breath, watches everything unfold—the good, the bad, the in-between—in the world that God is crazy about and refuses to give up on.

Whether God is a puppeteer managing things from behind the scenes or an observer who watches the world unfold, however, both metaphors suggest a profound distance between God and the world.

The Apostle Paul, though, citing the ancient Greek poet Epimenides, states that, in God “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), a distillation of the biblical worldview expressed in Greek terms for his Athenian audience. It is God’s presence and activity, in the world and yet somehow such that the world is in God, that makes possible the motions, and even the very being, of created things. The Old Testament speaks openly about God causing the events of the natural world. For example:

Whatever the LORD desires
he does in heaven and on earth,
in the seas and all the depths.

It is he who raises storm clouds from the end of the earth,
makes lightning for the rain,
and brings forth wind from his storehouse. (Ps. 135:6-7)

Similarly, God is described as making human activity possible (or futile), as well. For example:

Unless the LORD build the house,
they labor in vain who build.
Unless the LORD guard the city,
in vain does the guard keep watch.

It is vain for you to rise early
and put off your rest at night,
To eat bread earned by hard toil—
all this God gives to his beloved in sleep. (Ps. 127:1-2)

And likewise:

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is God from of old,
creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary,
and his knowledge is beyond scrutiny.

He gives power to the faint,
abundant strength to the weak.

Though young men faint and grow weary,
and youths stagger and fall,

They that hope in the LORD will renew their strength,
they will soar on eagles’ wings;
They will run and not grow weary,
walk and not grow faint. (Is. 40:28-31)

The purpose of passages like these latter two is to discourage pride in our own capabilities and to exhort us to place our trust in God, but they express an underlying metaphysical outlook. Although the imagery in some passages may suggest the notion of God as puppet master criticized by Ambrosino, passages such as these are not denying that there are natural causes for lightning and wind, nor that human beings are responsible for their own actions; rather, they are insisting that, at root, divine activity empowers created things to act in the ways appropriate to them, and absent the divine will, created things have no real power.

The medieval scholastics attempted to make sense of all this in a more philosophical way through the distinction between primary and secondary causality. Created things, including free creatures like human beings, operate according to the capacities of their natures (secondary causality). Yet God is the primary cause of everything that occurs: God is the creator of all things, is the source of the intrinsic capacities of created things, and sustains those created things in existence. Thielen makes a similar point, applying it to the case at hand:

God set up natural laws (like gravity and weather patterns), and God doesn’t violate those laws. God gave human beings the gift of radical freedom, and God doesn’t protect us from people who abuse that freedom, including would-be assassins.

That being said, the distinction between primary and secondary causality is often misunderstood, perhaps because the terms suggest chronological ordering, as if God causes first, then created things cause second. The distinction is often taken to mean merely that God created the world and instilled in it certain natural laws, then set it in motion—essentially the equivalent of Deism. For the great medieval scholastics Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus, anyway, the reality is much deeper. Just as only God is Being itself, and created things simply participate in Being (which is why the great Franciscan theologian Bonaventure considered “poverty,” or dependence, a fundamental characteristic of creaturely existence), similarly, the activity of created things is dependent on God’s activity, or one might say it depends on God as Pure Act. Of course, how this works when we are talking about the actions of creatures with free will, like you and me, gets more complicated, and Aquinas and Scotus, for example, part ways on how they explain it. But regardless, here we have a viewpoint supported by Scripture but very different from both the images of God as a puppet master or God as an observer of creation.

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We’ve wandered quite far from the original question of whether God saved Donald Trump, however, and we’re still left with difficult questions very similar to those asked by Ambrosino and Thielen: If, even taking into consideration the secondary causality of created things, God is the primary cause of everything that happens, does that mean that God caused Crooks to attempt to kill Trump? Did God cause the bullet to strike and kill Comperatore?

In places, the Old Testament does not hesitate to affirm that God not only brings life, but also death:

See now that I, I alone, am he,
and there is no god besides me.
It is I who bring both death and life,
I who inflict wounds and heal them,
and from my hand no one can deliver. (Dt. 32:39)

Similarly:

The LORD puts to death and gives life,
casts down to Sheol and brings up again.

The LORD makes poor and makes rich,
humbles, and also exalts. (1 Sam. 2:7)

By the end of the Old Testament period, however, doubts emerged regarding whether it is appropriate to speak of God causing death. The Wisdom of Solomon, for example, states (in a passage I briefly discussed here):

God did not make death,
nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.
For he fashioned all things that they might have being,
and the creatures of the world are wholesome… (Wis. 1:13-14)

In light of the New Testament, and in particular Paul’s claims regarding original sin in Romans, many later Christian theologians have resolved this tension by arguing that God did not make death, but rather death, or at the very least the death of human beings, was brought into the world as a consequence of sin. Nevertheless, in the present state of the world, God does cause our death in the sense that God, as primary cause, causes all things that result from secondary causation.

For the medieval scholastics, however, the more difficult question was whether God can be said to be the (primary) cause of sinful actions carried out by free creatures—for example, Thomas Matthew Crooks’ attempt to murder Donald Trump. Perhaps surprisingly, given everything that’s been said before, their answer is largely “no,” because God, who is pure goodness, cannot cause something evil. This “no,” however, raises the troubling possibility that the existence of evil somehow compromises God’s sovereignty—it suggests that evildoers are somehow beyond God’s power. The scholastics solve this problem by arguing that, although God does not cause evil actions, God permits them—not in the sense of approving of them, but of leaving with human beings the capacity to make evil decisions, even when they contradict God’s will. So even evildoers don’t escape God’s sovereignty, and evil actions are part of the unfolding of God’s providence, even if they are not directly willed by God.

The notion that God permits evil, however, has led theologians and philosophers to offer reasons why God would do so, which in many cases leads to rationalizations for evil that quickly become problematic. Many modern theologians—for example, Jürgen Moltmann, Dorothee Sölle, and Jon Sobrino, among many others—have turned away from such attempts at theodicy and instead emphasized that the witness of Christ shows us that God accompanies us in our suffering, including suffering at the hands of our fellow humans, and promises us that we will be liberated from it. Ambrosino expresses this viewpoint well:

God’s omnipotence, if we want to put it this way, consists of God’s ability to accept a world going wrong and to respond to the worst of it on God’s own creative terms, which are terms of love and justice and joy. God does not override the bad luck at play in the world. But God also has let the cat out of the bag by promising us that all of this bad luck won’t have the final word on reality.

I don’t think this conclusion contradicts the understanding of divine activity in the world I’ve outlined above, and indeed it’s hard to see how God could credibly promise to have the last word about how things pan out unless God exercised some kind of sovereignty over the world and its affairs.

I think a well-known but little-studied passage from the Gospel of Matthew shows how these viewpoints can be integrated:

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. (Mt. 10:28-31, NAB)

It’s interesting how different translations render the crucial verse 29:

“. . . not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” (NRSV)

“. . . not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.” (NIV)

As with the sparrows, God not only has foreknowledge of our death (“[Y]ou know the number of his months; you have fixed the limit which he cannot pass,” Job 14:5), the Father does not abandon us when we die, but rather continues to hold us in His care. As horrible as it can be, we should not fear death, because Christ has overcome death through the Resurrection.

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Did God save Donald Trump from death? Yes, and indeed Trump is correct that he survived “only by the grace of almighty God.” But this is true in the same sense that we each awaken to a new day by the grace of almighty God. Why did God save Trump? Probably not as a sign of divine favor on Trump’s politics. Surely it’s for the same reasons God does anything in this world, to testify to God’s glory and to provide us the opportunity to come nearer to the Kingdom, through repentance and closer union with God. At the same time, God permitted the death of Cory Comperatore (and Thomas Matthew Crooks, for that matter), although never abandoning him or leaving him outside of divine love.

Are these controversial claims? Certainly. But I stand by them. Let me know what you think in the comments!