Why God did not save Trump and what we should actually learn from the shooting
What cruel joke of a God would capriciously "save" Trump from a bullet but would let Corey Comperatore, a husband and father of two girls, get killed by a bullet meant for Trump and two others be wounded critically by more bullets?
This is precisely the kind of God many at the Republican National Convention (RNC), including Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon and 2016 presidential candidate, see at work in former President Trump’s narrow escape from death in the assassination attempt against him: “I saw President Trump, a dear friend, escape death by mere inches, and my thoughts immediately turned to the book of Isaiah that says, ‘No weapon formed against you shall prosper.’ … I have no doubt that God lowered a shield of protection over President Trump,” Carson said on the second day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Many Trump followers and religious leaders vying to be Trump’s court prophets see it the same way.
No, Dr. Carson, what saved Trump was not God. It was mere chance.
The delusion of God-playing-favorites-by-rare-miracles in messes we humans create simply distracts from the salient fact that a military-grade AR-15 style rifle (that the shooter had access to because of crazy gun laws in the US) was used in the deadly assassination attempt. Who will save the nearly 50,000 people from being killed by guns in the US every year? Where is Carson's God then?
Similarly, reducing Comperatore to the hero-sacrifices-self-for-family-in-shooting meme adds insult to injury to the family of this innocent victim. While he did the very honorable thing that most caring family members would do in such a situation, surely he did not want to die. Surely he would much rather live with his family than be memed as a hero. And surely his family would rather have him alive than be proud of him as a hero in a totally avoidable shooting if only these kinds of guns were not available to the masses. Reducing Comperatore to a sacrifice skirts the fact that the innocent victims shouldn’t have been put in this situation in the first place.
It is truly frightening how smug politicians and some religious leaders gloss over this horrific event. How quickly they instrumentalize cold-blooded real-life horror to their advantage. They do so by using primarily two theological tricks. The first is to use God to explain something in history or nature, when religion actually is about interpreting, not explaining the world. The second is to use religious garb to turn sadism into masochism, trauma into sacrifice, when what is needed is simple compassion and grief in the face of death and tragedy.
Trump himself actually looked still shell-shocked and somber when he entered the RNC Convention on Monday. Whether he personally believes “God saved me” or thinks he survived “by luck or by God,” his very personal, existential interpretation is to be respected as such. Yet, a personal belief about God in the face of death should not be bandied about by him or his acolytes as an objective religious “explanation” for political purposes about the “Almighty’s” intentions for history, with the implication that those who got killed or injured were not “saved” but are simply collateral damage in a historical divine tragedy show.
We don’t need God to protect us from guns. We need political leaders willing to pass laws that will save people from bullets. Could Trump, if elected, be such a leader? That would be a real miracle.