Editor’s Note: The caption was updated to explain the background of the misspelling on the uniform jacket shown in the photo.
The attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump Saturday has far-reaching personal and political consequences. Many commentators took it as a worrying indicator of the state of U.S. culture, or at least political culture.
Yet beyond the personal, political and cultural, there were also notable Christian dimensions to that terrible evening in Butler, Pennsylvania. Four are worth noting.
Reading Providence
It is not unusual for any near brush with death to prompt reflections on why a life was spared, often considered to be “miraculously” spared. When prominent people are involved, that reflection is more widespread. And so, after President Trump survived being shot, the question was asked: Did God spare his life?
A very clear answer was given by many of Trump’s supporters: God saved his life. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, addressing the Republican National Convention on Monday, in a speech framed by biblical references, called Trump’s survival a “miracle” when the “devil came to Pennsylvania.”
Providential readings of political violence go back to the first presidential assassination. Abraham Lincoln was shot on Good Friday at Ford’s Theater. Only days earlier, on Palm Sunday, Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. Famed news cartoonist Thomas Nast styled Lincoln as a Christ figure in his drawings for Harper’s Weekly — the triumph of Palm Sunday (Appomattox) coming ahead of Good Friday (the assassination). Lincoln’s death was thus presented as the providential end to a providential life.
Understandably, surviving a shooting is more often considered providential. Being hit by a bullet is always a close call; any hit could have been fatal, if only slightly altered. For Trump, it was a matter of less than an inch; for President Ronald Reagan in 1981, it was a few inches. Reagan interpreted his own survival to Providence.
“Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war,” Reagan wrote in his memoirs. “Perhaps there was a reason I had been spared.”
Author William Inboden writes that, post-shooting, Reagan had “a sense of divine mandate to bring the Cold War to a peaceful end.”
Not long after Reagan had been shot, Pope St. John Paul the Great was shot in St. Peter’s Square. He clearly attributed his survival to God’s providence, saying that while one hand fired the bullet, another hand guided it. The assassin’s bullet had passed through his internal organs without hitting a major artery.
Trump, whose religious beliefs are not clear, was less committal.
“By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here,” Trump said. “I’m supposed to be dead. I’m not supposed to be here.”
Corey Comperatore, Committed Christian
When the shots rang out in Butler, Corey Comperatore, 50, thought immediately of his family. The volunteer fireman was killed and is remembered by his sister as “a hero who shielded his daughters.”
“He was the best dad a girl could ever ask for,” wrote his daughter Allyson on Facebook. “He was a man of God, loved Jesus fiercely, and also looked after our church and our members as family.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro ordered state flags to fly at half-mast to honor Comperatore.
The Democratic governor noted that Comperatore was an “avid Trump supporter” and attended the rally enthusiastically. Calling him the “best of us,” Shapiro spoke of a man who “went to church every Sunday. Corey loved his community. Most especially, Corey loved his family.”
Comperatore was a trustee of Cabot Church, a Methodist congregation.
Shapiro’s gracious words about Comperatore stood in contrast to how Trump supporters are often characterized, including — sometimes especially — Christians who support the former president. Trump supporters are frequently characterized as being not entirely respectable. They are the ones whom three successive presidential candidates spoke of as bitterly “clinging to their guns and religion” (Barack Obama, 2008), as being the “47%” who take more than they make (Mitt Romney, 2012) and most bluntly as “a basket of deplorables” (Hillary Clinton, 2016).
Comperatore was an ordinary man of faith, devoted to his family, church and community. Comperatore’s killing was unintended, but it highlighted that a goodly part of Trump’s constituency is indeed faith-filled Americans who are the “best of us.”
Father Jason Charron
The Trump campaign asked Father Jason Charron, a Ukrainian Catholic priest with a parish in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, to lead an opening prayer at the rally. In the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Father Charron courageously led a daring mission to Ukraine to rescue orphans.
Father Charron said that he didn’t know why he had been asked. Presumably the organizers knew why, and likely got what they were hoping for, as he prayed to “make our nation great again in God’s sight.”
Father Charron related his experience later that evening on the Pints With Aquinas podcast.
It was an example of regrettable partisanship in certain Christian quarters. So fierce that Father Charron indulged in wild predictions of wicked machinations from the “godless” political left.
Father Charron said that he had a chance to speak briefly with Trump beforehand and thanked him for being helpful to Ukraine in 2017. Father Charron was likely disappointed on Monday when Trump selected Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio to be his running mate. It was Vance who said, on the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”
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 intemperate and dark speculation would have surprised many, as it is far outside the norm for Catholic commentary by clerics. Such rhetoric perhaps flows from Father Charron’s conviction that Trump is God’s unlikely instrument, like King Cyrus in Isaiah 45 or Balaam’s ass from the Book of Numbers. 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, perhaps suggesting that the two attempts might be read providentially in the same way.
President Biden Goes to Mass
As for President Biden, he kept up his usual routine of going to Mass for the Lord’s Day. He was at the 5:30 p.m. anticipated Mass at St. Edmond’s parish in Rehoboth Beach when Trump was shot.
He would speak later about his own prayers for “Donald” after the assassination attempt. Biden goes to church regularly, including when traveling abroad. In the various controversies about how Biden’s political positions align with his Catholic faith, it ought to be noted that he is in the minority of Catholics who attend Mass at all.
Controversies aside, it was coincidental — providential? — that one president was at prayer, no doubt praying in part for the country, even as another president was in mortal danger.
Providence is inscrutable, even as we never cease to scrutinize it. But prayer is the proper response to perils, corporal and spiritual, as thus it was suitable that President Biden was at Mass when President Trump was shot.
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 are 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. The rally scene in Butler is still a crime scene. Christians attempt to see where grace was at work there, too.
