WHAT’S the difference between Joe Biden’s God and Donald Trump’s? President Biden said recently that he would consider pulling out of the 2024 US presidential race only if “the Lord Almighty came down” and directed him. But, he continued, “the Lord Almighty’s not comin’ down.” Mr Trump appears to have a more interventionist deity. “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” he said after he turned his head so that the gunman’s bullet pierced his ear instead of shattering his skull.
It’s worth scrutinising the theology of this. Mr Biden, whom we know to be a devout weekly churchgoer, appears to have invoked God here as a mere rhetorical device. If that is not quite blasphemous, it’s not exactly taking God seriously.
Mr Trump, whose adherence to Christianity has always been somewhat imprecise, is now far more direct in his embrace of religious terminology. His followers speak of his escape from assassination in terms of divine intervention. “God saved our Republic,” one moderate Republican tweeted. “God spared Donald Trump for a reason. God doesn’t miss,” wrote another.
Mr Trump himself has been happy to co-opt such religiosity, though in characteristically more vague language: “By luck or by God — many people are saying it’s by God — I’m still here.”
All this plays into a longstanding notion, popular among some conservative Evangelicals, that Donald Trump is “the Chosen One”, ordained by God to lead a country that their American exceptionalism sees as morally superior to other nations. They compare him to Cyrus, the Old Testament king who guides the Jews back to Israel. Despite not being perfect (he’s a Gentile), he is still anointed by God.
Trump followers have used words such as “messiah” and “saviour”. They post illustrations of a spectral angel diverting the bullet, or a shadowy Jesus, standing by the Stars and Stripes, placing his hands on the Trumpian shoulders. No room here for counterfactual questions about why an interventionist God allowed an innocent bystander to take the fatal bullet.
Yet it’s the wrong question to ask whether American political theology is messianic, inspirational, or an undergirding of secular values. Rather, it’s about building a mythic story for Mr Trump’s supporters to rally behind. It’s a play with three acts: the rise, the fall, and the return: the Trumpian equivalent of Star Wars, with 2016 as A New Hope, 2020 as The Empire Strikes Back, and 2024 as The Return of the Jedi. In any great story, the hero needs to be put in mortal peril before he survives and returns to save the day.
There is an ancient Chinese archetype, the Mandate of Heaven, which says that, in times of political turmoil, heaven will reveal its Chosen Candidate by blessing them with success, and will punish the False Emperor with failure and natural disaster. Mr Trump’s surviving the assassin’s bullet, by fortuitously turning his head at exactly the right moment, plays into that.
Dressing all this in the flag of Christian nationalism only increases the prospect of more political violence. Americans would do well to heed Abraham Lincoln’s admonition that, instead of assuming that God is on our side, we would all do better to ask “whether we are on God’s side”.