God's Providence and the Anointing of Donald Trump

“I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?” - President Donald Trump

“Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” - President Donald Trump

“One hand fired and another hand guided the bullet.” - Pope John Paul II

“In the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences.” - Pope John Paul II

History and God's Providence

Based on Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church asserts:

We firmly believe that God is master of the world and of its history. But the ways of his providence are often unknown to us. Only at the end, when our partial knowledge ceases, when we see God "face to face", will we fully know the ways by which - even through the dramas of evil and sin - God has guided his creation to that definitive sabbath rest for which he created heaven and earth.

There are clearly problems with confident assertions about particular events and "providential history." The Holocaust, for example, has prompted both Christians and Jews to ask how God’s plan can encompass the murder of millions of innocents. The Lisbon earthquake provoked Voltaire to ask how God could allow the impersonal evil of nature to deliver such tragic results. Christian theodicy answers these questions about natural and moral evil that may or may not satisfy anguished hearts. However, singular events raise questions we are not equipped to fruitfully answer from are limited perspective in time and space. If an assassin’s bullet went in a certain direction, we must assume that it was because his aim and the laws of physics pushed it in that direction, notwithstanding remarkable coincidences which from our limited perspective, inevitably provoke speculation about God's direct intervention. 

The would-be assassin of Pope St John Paul II, Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Ağca, was 20 feet away from him when he fired his semi-automatic pistol. His aim was true. He hit the pope twice, once in the abdomen and once on the elbow. John Paul had been extraordinarily lucky. Ağca’s bullet missed his abdominal artery, his spinal column, and every major nerve cluster when it passed through his body by a millimetre or two. It was probably deflected from its original course by striking the pope’s finger (which it broke), thus missing the vital organs that it otherwise would have been damaged. The result of the bullet’s diversion was that the pope was not killed on the spot, did not bleed to death in the ambulance, and did not suffer serious paralysis - all of which would have happened if the bullet had taken a slightly different course and probably even its original course. Both the pope’s doctors and his secretary agreed that this was ”miraculous.” 

A young pilgrim in St. Peter’s Square had held up an image of the Virgin Mary, and the pope, leaning forward to see it better just at the moment Ağca fired, may have ensured that the bullet missed the exact point on his body where it was aimed. Ağca launched his attack, moreover, on the anniversary of Our Lady’s appearance in Fatima, Portugal.

Similar claims are now being made concerning Trump's fortunate turning of his head immediately prior to the bullet striking and the anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima appearances. 

It is legitimate, as Pope St John Paul remarked, to conclude - remembering God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent - that coincidence and design are one and the same in God's predestined plan. As Isaiah writes: "I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come." Ultimately, for us, these incidents are shrouded in mystery. As St Paul writes: "How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!"

“Fear not, for I am with you,”

The Deification of Donald Trump

The Republican Party conference this week has been a time of unalloyed happiness. The flags. The chanting. The weeping. The ecstatic joy. The confidence in their destiny ... and the bandaged ears. God Himself intervened to save the former president’s life. That is how the failed assassination attempt has been interpreted by faithful, followers and Trump alike. No one asked: if God did intervene to save Donald Trump, why not Corey Comperatore, the brave, decent, and tragically self–sacrificial volunteer fire fighter who died saving his family? 

Let's be honest, for most of his life Trump has been self-absorbed, self-deluded and wildly self-aggrandising. Never much of a traditional Christian, he grow up in a family that embraced Norman Vincent Peale’s “prosperity gospel” that emphasized the accumulation of personal happiness and wealth. In his adult life, he has aligned himself with churches or ministers touting the same values. 

To his followers, Trump is a modern Cyrus, the embodiment of a Persian king who conquered Babylon and allowed the Jewish people to return to Israel from their captivity abroad. Though Cyrus was not Jewish, God worked through him to deliver the Jewish people. According to the Book of Isaiah, Cyrus was anointed by the God for this task as a biblical messiah; he is the only non-Jewish figure to be revered in this capacity. “America’s going to have a challenge either way,” Lance Wallnau, a prominent Evangelical, said in 2016.“With Trump, I believe we have a Cyrus to navigate through the storm.” The story of Cyrus allowed conservative Christian leaders to develop a ‘vessel theology’ around Donald Trump, one that allows them to reconcile his personal history of womanising and alleged sexual assault with what they see as his Divinely ordained purpose to restore a Christian America.

Maybe .... God often uses flawed individuals and great sinners.

Trump is being portrayed as a biblical figure sent by God. Trump’s Evangelical supporters now speak of spiritual warfare, pitting demonic Trump critics against the former president, who represents the power of God. Nebraska preacher Hank Kunneman described criminal charges against Trump as “a battle between good and evil” and added, “There’s something on President Trump that the enemy fears: It’s called the anointing.”

On display this week was a powerful sense of community, and ceremony, sheer euphoria, and elation. There are moments when political rallies tip over into religion. This is where a proper theological perspective is necessary. To his most committed supporters, he is a miracle, a prophet, a warrior, and God’s hand is on him.

Most disappointing for me as a Catholic, is the intemperate and dark speculations of the Ukrainian Catholic priest Father Charron as he recounted his experiences on the Pints With Aquinas podcast. The Trump campaign had asked Father Charron to lead an opening prayer at the rally. 

Father Charron spoke of the Trump shooting as “just the beginning.” 

“Take special note … the leftists, the godless, those who worship power, raw power, will do anything in order to attain their god, power,” he commented. “Mark my words, they are not going to allow power to leave their hands.”

Seeing more violence ahead, Father Charron offered this stark assessment of the political left:

“I believe this with all my heart, that they are going to find someone to assassinate President Biden, so they can get him off their ticket,” Father Charron said. “[They will] paint that horrible evil act of assassinating Biden against someone that they will claim is a Trump supporter, some angry Christian white male.” 

“The Democrats, the left … they will use this and they will find some way to eliminate Biden through use of violence … for political goals,” the priest said. “Mark my words. This is just the beginning and they have opened a horrible, evil, Satanic can of worms. We are in for the spiritual fight of our lifetime, and it began today.”

Father Charron’s conviction is that Trump is God’s unlikely instrument, like King Cyrus or Balaam’s ass. He noted that July 13 was the anniversary of the third apparition at Fatima, just as John Paul was shot on the anniversary of the first apparition at Fatima, suggesting that the two attempts might be read providentially in the same way.

Conclusion

Providence is inscrutable, even as we never cease to scrutinise it. But prayer is the proper response to perils, corporal and spiritual.

The implications of the assassination attempt will continue, not least in terms of the impact on the presidential race. Yet there will also be a challenge for Christians who attempt to read the "signs of the times." To detect the finger of God in history is always fraught with the temptation to see our priorities traced by Providence.