The Lord works in mysterious ways—mysterious, at least, to those who are not certain of their own hopeful interpretations of world events as divine providence. Most of us are doomed to stumble blindly through the morass of modern life, stringing our feeble human narratives together for some measure of comfort. But in the world of politics, it pays to know the mind of God.
On Saturday, at a rally in Pennsylvania, a gunman on a rooftop shot at former president Donald Trump, grazing his right ear. He killed one spectator in the crowd and critically injured two others. Shortly thereafter, the Secret Service, in the words of one witness, “blew his head off.” Trump raised a defiant fist in the air, blood running down the side of his face. Many Texas Republican leaders shared an image of his gesture in the aftermath as evidence of the former president’s preternatural toughness. More than that, they used Trump’s survivorship as proof that he had been ordained by God to lead our country.
Governor Greg Abbott posted to X: “Had it been less than a half inch to the right, he would not have survived. Trump is truly blessed.” Dustin Burrows, a state representative from Lubbock, declared Trump “our next president” before saying he was “thankful to God for protecting him.”
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick explicated further. Quoting a text he had sent to Trump, he marveled that God spared the former president’s life “by the slightest turn of your head in a mere microsecond or the shield of a teleprompter.” He declared that “God has had his hand on you since you first ran for President” and “no man could survive all you have been through without the Grace of God upon you.” Patrick then compared Trump to the Biblical heroine Esther, a Jewish woman married off to the King of Persia who risked her life to prevent the genocide of her people: “The Bible verse ‘And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?’ appears in the book of Esther 4:14. Praise God your life was spared ‘For such a time as this.’” The comparison was reiterated by Tony Tinderholt, a state representative from Arlington.
These are sentiments that go beyond gratitude for a person’s safety. They represent the enshrinement of a theology revolving around Trump that has spread beyond the rallies of acolytes and into the halls of power. Many rightwing Christians–particularly rightwing evangelicals–believe that Trump, despite his moral failings, was chosen by God to lead our nation. (Abbott, notably, is Catholic.) Rick Perry called Trump God’s “chosen one,” in a 2019 interview with Fox News. The former governor of Texas, then Trump’s outgoing energy secretary, said he’d given his boss some reading material on Old Testament kings known for their hedonistic, idolatrous, and murderous natures, who were nevertheless chosen as vessels for a divine plan. “God’s used imperfect people all through history. King David wasn’t perfect, Saul wasn’t perfect, Solomon wasn’t perfect.” From his place in Trump’s cabinet, Perry was giving voice to the belief that allowed so many evangelicals to excuse behavior they would find abhorrent in, say, Bill Clinton. (Polling, in fact, indicates that, by 2016, white, Christian, Republican voters, who as recently as five years before had cared very much about the personal morality of politicians, cared very little).
The belief that God can use anyone to fulfill his plan can be infinitely flexible in accommodating the sins of the chosen, which have become not only incidental to the prophecy but foundational to it. King Saul called for David’s death in an attempt to cling to his throne. King David, so overcome by lust at the sight of Bathsheba bathing on the roof, ordered the killing of her husband. Solomon, a man of vast appetites with hundreds of wives and concubines to fulfill them, turned to the worship of idols. It should come as no surprise that Trump sending a hefty hush money payment to a porn star would fail to scandalize the faithful who see him as part of this lineage. Dozens of accusations of sexual misconduct, from rape to harassment, have not made a dent in his popularity.
Through this prism of belief, a bullet graze is not just a missed shot—it’s divine intervention. (It is less clear what these leaders believe God’s divine plan was for the rally attendee who is now dead.) It also fuels the narrative that Trump’s struggle for power is an epic spiritual battle of good versus evil. Through this prism, any opposition becomes religious persecution. Though very little is known about the shooter, and what has been reported gives no insight into his political allegiance, much less his motives—he was a registered Republican who once donated $15 to a liberal group—many on the far right have already declared, without evidence, the attack the work of the political left. “Today, they tried to kill Donald Trump,” said Don Huffines, a former state senator from Dallas who is active in grassroots politics, above a video in which “they” is identified as a sprawling network that includes “leftists,” “Marxists,” and “globalists.”
Many Christians on the far right speak of public faith in America in terms of a declension narrative: once, we were culturally supreme, but now we are beset by wicked forces that look to exterminate us, to take God out of government and schools and leave us in the dark. Far-right groups such as the True Texas Project see themselves as soldiers in the war for the heart of America and speak in apocalyptic terms because they believe the stakes are apocalyptic; they champion Christian Nationalism and lambast “multiculturalism,” believing it is Western Christianity’s last stand. (“Secular liberalism rejected America’s traditional underpinning of law and culture, Christianity, and this vacuum was rapidly filled with leftist progressivism,” reads the agenda for TTP’s recent 15th anniversary celebration.)
Trump is not the first American president to accept the torch of “divine providence,” what Ronald Reagan declared in 1980 to be the reason for our country’s inception. Calling his campaign a “crusade,” Reagan positioned himself as the godly candidate against Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter. Upon receiving his party’s nomination, Reagan requested a moment of silent prayer; he handily won the evangelical vote. Some evangelical supporters expressed a belief that God had placed George W. Bush in the White House; some who knew him recall a Messianic bent to his vision of his own presidency.
Many evangelical supporters and far-right Christian leaders now have come to see Trump as their ordained champion in the fight for the country they believe is rightfully theirs. Any resistance—a legal challenge, an electoral loss, a bullet of still-mysterious origin, caught in the early stages of investigation—only further sanctifies the cause and its vessel. God’s ways are not mysterious to them. His ways, they believe, are their own.
