Did God save Donald Trump?

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, Graham Tomlin asks whether or not we can see the hand of God in it

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Red hat with the words Make America Great Again

Given the polarised nature of American politics and the venomous nature of the debates, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was not entirely a surprise, even if a massive shock to the system. It was both tragic for those who were killed and yet a relief for everyone that Trump survived, not least for the unimaginable consequences across the country if he had not.

It doesn’t take a very deep dive into the maelstrom that is Twitter/X these days, to discover a common theme among Trump supporters - that God shielded him from a certain death. “God protected President Trump,” Senator Marco Rubio posted. “God saved the life of Donald Trump” say a million others, confident that the seemingly miraculous slight head tilt at the moment of the shot that ensured the bullet hit his ear, not going through the back of his temple, was a moment of divine intervention.

Yet look elsewhere on X and you can find vast numbers of people equally certain that this is complete nonsense. God did not save Donald Trump, either because there is no God to save anyone, or because if there is a God, either he doesn’t intervene at all, or even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t want to save the likes of Donald Trump.

If God saved Trump, they say, why did he not save the life of Corey Comperatore, the volunteer fireman who was killed by bullets fired from the gun that was used in the attack? Trump supporters respond with the claim that Trump has a special calling, justifying divine intervention, to ‘restore the Judaeo-Christian heritage to America’ as one tweet put it.

So, which is it?

Christian thinkers have normally held to the possibility that God can and does, at decisive moments, interrupt the normal flow of history.

Christian thinkers have normally held to the possibility that God can and does, at decisive moments, interrupt the normal flow of history. After all, the central Christian claim is that he did this in remarkable acts of deliverance such as the Exodus, at key moments in the history of Israel and most importantly in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And, they claim, he does it in less prominent ways, as testimonies to prayers answered and apparently miraculous occurrences suggest.

Yet divine interventions like this are by definition rare. In one of Douglas Coupland’s novels, one of the characters ponders a Christian group that expects constant miracles: “They’re always asking for miracles and finding them everywhere. In as much as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that he created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding him with requests for miracles, we are also asking that he unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.” He has a point.

Yet a world without any interventions at all would be a world which God had seemed to abandon to its fate. The idea that God set up his world to run like clockwork with no further intervention is Deism, not Christianity, a theology popular in the C17th and C18th, still found today, but leaves God watching us from a safe and uninvolved distance. It would lead to the conclusion that God did not really care that much about the world, leaving it to its own devices, especially when evil runs riot and nothing seems to prevent it. Such interventions are best seen as signs, special indications that do not ‘unravel the fabric of the world’, yet are tangible reminders that even though it is broken, God has not given up on this world, and will one day redeem it.

Yet if God can and does step in at certain moments to divert the course of history in a fallen and broken world, that doesn’t mean that every claim to divine intervention is genuine. So how can you tell? Who do we believe?

If God can and does step in at certain moments to divert the course of history in a fallen and broken world, that doesn’t mean that every claim to divine intervention is genuine. So how can you tell? Who do we believe?

At several points in the Old Testament, writers wonder how you can tell the true prophet from the false. One of them answers like this: “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken.”

To be honest, this doesn’t appear to help much. You can tell if a person has got it right if their prediction comes true, but at the time, you have no idea whether it will come true or not, so it still leaves you in the dark as to who to believe.

Yet it does suggest an important insight. You can only tell God’s intervention retrospectively. You can only say with a degree of confidence that God has ‘intervened’ when looking back on events and seeing how they turn out.

If Donald Trump is elected, and somehow brings about harmony and flourishing for as many people in the USA as possible, stabilises the economy, enabling all people to live a decent life, not just the rich and powerful, restores a sense of civility and generosity to public life, resists the forces of harm and evil in the nation and in the world, and brings freedom for Christians and others to practice and promote their faith, then maybe we might look back in future years and say that God did step in on July 14^th 2024 to frustrate the purposes of evil in the world.

Yet if none of that happens, and what results from his survival is instead a deeper fracturing of social cohesion, a coarsening of public debate, a siege mentality that divides the world between ‘us’ and ‘them’, an increasing divide between the rich and the poor, the elites and ordinary people, then we might in future say it was mere chance, one of those random things that happen in this created yet fallen world with its mysterious blend of order and chaos.

Which will it be? Time will tell. Until then, we’d better be cautious about claims of divine intervention. Not because God never does it, but because we’re not very good at telling when it happens.

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7 May 2025

4 min read

Why does the Pope matter today?

The personal, vivid link to the origins of the movement that changed the world.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An Anglican bishop wearing purple shakes hands with the Pope.

The author meeting the late Pope, 2024.

There is something about the way popes are elected that captures the imagination. Whoever dreamt up the idea of black smoke for ‘no decision’, and white smoke for ‘habemus papam’ – ‘we have a new pope’ - was a genius at marketing. So much better than a press release or a tweet from the Vatican X account.

The conclave was brought to our imagination so vividly by the recent film with Ralph Fiennes. We love the idea of secret debates, intrigue, people locked away from the world until they come to a decision with arcane ancient rituals and an uncertain outcome. Was there ever a film whose release was better timed?

There are also the sheer numbers involved. There are approximately 1.4 billion Catholics in the world today – roughly the same as the population of India and China, the world most populous nations. Yet the identity of the new pope is of matters to the rest of us too. The leader of China of India is of interest especially to people living in China or India, but maybe less so for those of us who don’t. The new pope is the head of churches round the corner from where you live, or of people with whom you work, or, if you are Catholic yourself, your own spiritual leader. This appointment matters.

Yet it’s not just the optics, the drama, the numbers. And it’s not just for Catholics either. I am an Anglican, and since the Reformation of the sixteenth century, we have had in our own 39 Articles the statement: “The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.” That might seem to settle the matter that it’s of no interest to English Protestants. But that would be wrong.

I met Pope Francis once. It was at a gathering of Anglican Archbishops in Rome last year. We all were led through magnificent Vatican corridors into an imposing state room, adorned with fantastic frescoes, where the white-robed Holy Father was brought in on his wheelchair to deliver a brief 20-minute homily to us all.

It was a good talk, thoughtful, well-constructed, but in many ways unremarkable. It didn’t say anything much that I hadn’t heard from other sources. Yet somehow this was different. His words carried a weight, a gravity that went beyond the content of the lecture itself. It was as if, when he entered that room, he carried with him two thousand years of church history.

The line of Bishops of Rome goes back to St Peter, the gruff, unschooled fisherman who Jesus called from his mundane life to become an apostle, and who then on, was so captured by the person of Jesus that he gave his life in the cause. I left that room conscious of the weight of the office of the papacy, even if I don’t recognise him as my direct spiritual father.

Listening to this successor of St Peter felt like you were listening to one of the friends of Jesus – and this was not just the personal quality of the man himself, but something about the office he occupied. It was a personal, vivid link to the origins of the Christian movement, the first stirrings of the revolution.

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past.

Of course, there have been some pretty terrible occupants of the papal see, whose personal lives showed scant evidence of any knowledge of, or relationship with Jesus. The sixteenth century Roderigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) comes to mind, who despite the rule on clerical celibacy, had several children from various mistresses, won the Papacy by bribing cardinals, and made his favourite son bishop of several lucrative sees at the age of eighteen, and a cardinal at nineteen. So, there is nothing automatic about this – which is why the Protestant Reformers denied the idea of any blanket automatic papal authority.

Yet when a person of evident holiness is combined with this notion of the weight of the office, the papacy becomes a gift to all of us, linking us back to the earliest followers of Jesus – even to Jesus himself.

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past. Monarchies do something similar – linking us to the past through the long line of kings and queens of England, Denmark, Spain or wherever, yet more often than not, the events they lead us back to, the process by which those families took power, reveal murky politics, bribery and bloody battles.

This is a line in history that links us to the event that, if Tom Holland’s Dominion is to be believed, has had more impact in shaping western culture than any other – the remarkable life, death and resurrection of Jesus – a radical life full of love, self-giving and transformative power – for both individuals and whole civilisations. And for that, whether we are Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or even, perhaps, unbeliever, we might raise a prayer - or a glass - of thanksgiving.