The former president credits God for saving him from assassination, claiming, “God was on my side.”
I actually agree, in part, and I am thankful that he was not killed that day.
No, I have not had a sudden conversion to the MAGA cause. Rather, I believe his assassination would have been worse for democracy than his election and likely the beginning of a wave of political violence. (Think of all those assault-style weapons in the hands of less than reasonable people.)
Rather, I believe God was on his side in that moment, just as God was also on the side of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Gabby Giffords and every other victim of an assassination attempt. Reagan, Giffords and now Trump fortunately survived. In what theological universe does it make sense that God protected the latter and not the other three?
It is an entirely different thing to claim God is on the side of a victim of violence than to claim that God saved someone from that violence. To suggest that God physically altered the path of a high-velocity bullet to protect Trump and apparently did not alter the path of the bullet that killed his supporter, former fire chief Corey Comperatore, is absurd. I do not know how anyone could believe in a God who chooses one over the other, as if this life is worth saving but that one is not. In seminary the theological term I learned for such thinking is “scatology,” more commonly known as “bullsh**.”
For anyone paying attention to history and especially for people of faith, the notion that God intervenes physically to save people from violence died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. This realization came to me when I was at Auschwitz 35 years after those chambers of death were destroyed. Sitting with a group of 60 German young adults seeking to come to terms with the Holocaust, a group leader read the story told by Elie Wiesel in the concentration camp.
Three inmates had been caught trying to escape. To make an example of them, the Nazis hung them in the camp square and forced everyone to watch. Two died quickly, but the third was a young boy. Not being as heavy as the others, his neck did not break when he was hung and he struggled for what seemed an eternity as the horrified crowd watched. Someone cried out, “Where, oh where, is God?” A voice inside of Wiesel responded, “God is there, hanging from the gallows.”
In 1998, my mother was stabbed to death by her deranged nephew. Some tried to comfort me by saying it must have been God’s will. I was not comforted. Rather it was Wiesel’s story and the story told to me by the sheriff at the scene that night of the pesky little dog guarding Mom’s body that gave me comfort.
The dog was a Lhasa apso and his name was Wicket. After spending time with my newborn daughter several years before, Mom felt the need for something to cuddle. Wicket was the answer and Mom loved the little bugger dearly. When I learned about Wicket, covered in Mom’s blood, I knew that God had not abandoned her in that horrible moment, but was there, by her side.
So yes, I have no difficulty believing that God was at Trump’s side in that moment through those who came to his aid and in those rendering aid to Comperatore and the other victims of the shooting.
But ask me to believe that God chose to save former President Trump’s life and not Mr. Comperatore’s, let alone the lives of the Holocaust victims and other genocides, the 1,143 victims of the Hamas raid in Israel, the 30,000-plus victims of the war in Gaza — or the life of my mother — is to ask me to either hate God or to believe theological nonsense.
Credit the officer who caused the shooter to hurry his shot, or maybe the rifle team that did not allow him to improve his skill, but to credit God for saving Trump is to make a mockery of all the innocent not saved by God throughout history, creating a false image of a partisan God who listens only to prayers of one particular group.
Thank God for good fortune, sing “God Bless America,” but please do not make claims for God that many good believers and non-believers alike find offensive or heretical. Or as I call it, scatology.