Was the failed assassination of Donald Trump an act of God?

On the afternoon of 13 July this year Donald Trump held an election rally at the Butler Farm showgrounds in Pennsylvania. During the course of the rally, a 20 year old called Thomas Crooks fired eight shots with a rifle from the roof of a nearby warehouse in an attempt to assassinate Trump. Although Trump’s ear was grazed by one of the bullets, he survived. However, an engineer and volunteer firefighter called Corey Comperatore who was attending the rally was killed by a shot through the head while attempting to shield his family from the gunfire. Two other attendees, James Copenhaver and David Dutch, were critically injured but survived, and a number of others suffered more minor injuries. Crooks himself was shot dead by a secret service sniper.

These facts are indisputable. What I want to do in this article is look at these events from a theological perspective, asking about what we can and cannot say for certain about God’s involvement in them.

As the American political magazine Politico has noted, very soon after the shooting took place both Trump supporters and Trump himself declared that his survival was an act of God.

To quote the Politico article: ‘Allies of the former president are embracing divine intervention — ‘the hand of God’ — to help explain how Donald Trump survived a harrowing assassination attempt during his Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

‘His daughter, Ivanka, said she believed her late mother was watching over Trump during the assassination attempt. Rep. Carlos Antonio Giménez (R-Fla.) told Fox News that Trump survived by “the grace of God,” while Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) said “divine intervention” and the ‘protective hand’ of God kept the former president alive.

‘And, House Speaker Mike Johnson stated it plainly: “GOD protected President Trump yesterday.”‘

Trump himself praised God for saving his life, writing that it was ‘God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.’ Pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. reiterated in a note to supporters that ‘the grace of God’ saved Trump from ‘a coward’s bullet.’

As the Politico article further noted, some Trump supporters even used the term ‘miracle’ to describe God’s action and Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) posted an illustration on X of an angel steering Trump away from the bullet.

‘Yesterday there were miracles, and I think the hand of God was there too,’ House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told Fox & Friends Weekend, adding, ‘You can just see one centimeter over and we’re having a very different conversation.’

In considering these claims that God acted to prevent Donald Trump being assassinated, we must first be clear about what it means to say that something is a miracle. A helpful definition of what the term ‘miracle’ means is provided by CS Lewis in his book Miracles. He writes that a miracle is ‘an interference with Nature by a supernatural power.’ What Lewis means by interference can be illustrated if we imagine the movement of a snooker ball. If there is no outside interference, the operation of the laws of nature means that a snooker ball will move in the direction and for the distance caused by the impact on it of a snooker cue. However, if someone subsequently intervenes by stopping the ball moving, or pushing it in a different direction, then this interference will prevent the original operation of the laws of nature caused by the impact of the cue from happening and will cause something else to happen instead.

In Christian terms a miracle occurs when God performs an act of supernatural power, whether directly or through a human or angelic agent, that similarly causes things to happen which would not normally happen according to the laws of nature. Thus, Jesus’ virgin birth, his feeding of the five thousand, and his resurrection and ascension into heaven, were all miracles because they were acts of God that produced results that the operation of the laws of nature would never have caused to happen.

What this means is that if we want to claim that the failure of Thomas Crooks’ attempt to assassinate Donald Trump was a miracle then what we are claiming is that God interfered with the normal action of the laws of nature to prevent the assassination taking place. Had such interference not taken place then Trump would now be dead.

It seems to me that this is not a claim that we are able to make. This is not because God could not have intervened in this way. As the Psalmist writes: ‘Our God is in the heavens, he does whatever he pleases’ (Psalm 115:3).

It is, instead, because we lack the necessary evidence to show that God did intervene in this way. As anyone who has watched the shooting events at the Olympics will have seen, it is part of the normal course of events that even very highly skilled marksmen will, on occasion, miss their target for some reason, and we do not normally claim that such misses were miracles.

To plausibly claim that a miracle took place on 13 July we would have to be able to say for certain that had God not directly intervened in some way Crook’s bullet would have hit Trump in the head rather than grazing his ear. This would seem impossible to prove since, to my knowledge, we lack any evidence either that the laws of physics were interfered with by God so that the bullet changed its trajectory, or that the movement of Trump’s head that meant the bullet hit his ear has no natural explanation.

What I have just said does not mean that what happened on 13 July was not a miracle. It is, rather, to say, that at the moment we lack the necessary evidence to say that it was. However, this definitely does not mean that what happened was not an act of God. What we can say with absolute confidence is that, to quote Lewis again, ‘there are no accidents’ in the sense of things that just happen by chance, and that consequently everything that happened on 13 July was an act of God in the sense being an event willed by God and happening accordingly.

The reason why, if we are Christians, we can say this is because, as Article I of the Church of England’s Thirty Nine Articles tells us, God is ‘the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.’ The fact that God is the preserver as well as the maker of all things means that he did not just set the world in motion at creation and leave it to run itself. Rather, he continues to uphold and control it in all its aspects.

In the words of the chapter on God’s providence in the Reformed Westminster Confession of 1646:

‘ I. God, the great Creator of all things, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by his most wise and holy providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge and the free and immutable counsel of his own will, to the praise of the glory of his wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy.

‘II. Although in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first cause, all things come to pass immutably and infallibly, yet by the same providence he ordereth them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.’

The point that is made in the second section of this quotation is that although the first cause, or primary reason, why all things are as they are is because God wills that they should be so, nevertheless he also wills that they should be so because of the operation of secondary causes, including both the working of the laws of nature and the free decisions and actions of human beings.

Viewing the events of 13 July from this perspective, we can see that nothing could have happened without God. God formed the history that caused the election rally to happen, God upheld the physical laws that allowed things to take place, and finally God allowed the people involved to exercise their free will, knowing that the outcome of their doing so would fall within the scope of his good purposes.

Most of the time the precise reasons why God exercises his control over nature and human history in the way that he does are unknown to us, and this is also true of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. We simply do not know why God permitted Thomas Crooks to try to kill Donald Trump, why he permitted that the attempt should fail, and why he permitted Corey Comperatore to die protecting his family. All we can say was that he did so. This means, incidentally, that the correct statement that Trump’s survival was an act of God cannot rightly be used to suggest that God favours his re-election in November.

God has not told us who he wants to be the next President of the US. Only time will tell.

In summary, we are not in a position to say that the failed assassination of Donald Trump on 13 July involved a miracle. What we must say, however, is that like all other things it was an act of God. This does not excuse the evil of Thomas Crooks’ actions, or the failure of the authorities to prevent those actions, but it does mean that the evil and failure of that day will not have the last word. God will bring something good out of what happened on that day, even though this side of eternity we shall never fully know what that good was.

The belief that there are ‘no accidents’ which I have set out in relation to the events of 13 July is a hard belief. It is hard to say with Job, ‘Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil’ (Job 2:10). Nevertheless, it is also a liberating belief. It liberates us from the belief that we are in the last resort the subjects of blind fate, the blind operations of the uncaring forces of nature, or the foolish or evil decisions of human beings. Whatever happens to us, we are in the hands of God and those hands are hands of love.

Knowing that we are in the hands of God does not necessarily ease the pain when bad things happen to us, as when our husband or father dies trying to protect us, but it does give us the confidence that pain will not have the last word. As Paul declared on the basis of his belief in divine providence, ‘If God is for us, who is against us?… I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 8:31, 37-38).