Following the assassination attempt on Trump, Nick Spencer comments on the subsequent religious rhetoric and behaviour. Is politics tipping over into religion? 19/07/2024

The flags. The chanting. The weeping. The ecstatic joy. The confidence in their destiny. And the bandaged ears. Where is Émile Durkheim when you need him? 

The Republican Party conference this week has been, by all accounts, a time of unalloyed happiness. And who can blame them? Joe Biden rambled and stumbled his way through the presidential debate, confused Zelenskyy with Putin and Harris with Trump in a press conference, and then caught Covid. All the while, a Florida judge dismissed the case against Trump for allegedly illegally keeping classified documents after leaving office, the Supreme Court ruled that he had broad immunity from prosecution, and then God himself intervened to save the former president’s life. Who wouldn’t have a bit of a spring their stride? 

That, at least, is how the failed assassination attempt has been interpreted by faithful, followers and Trump alike. It’s not an interpretation I have much sympathy with, and not simply because I dislike Trump’s character and rhetoric. If God did intervene to save Donald Trump, why not Corey Comperatore, the by–all–accounts brave, decent, and tragically self–sacrificial volunteer fire fighter who died saving his family? Or if the Almighty was so determined to protect Mr Trump, why not nudge assassin Thomas Crooks off the sloping roof on which he was pitched before he even fired a shot? (It was, after all, too sloping for the secret service to put someone up there). I’ve never been a fan of the “God stopped the bullet” line of argument, and this week hasn’t inclined me that way. 

That’d be me though. For delegates on the floor, Mr Trump’s “miraculous” survival – the word can be used in more than one way – confirms the divine favour many had previously intuited. And so, they were happy, very happy, some even wearing fake bandages on an ear, in sympathy with and imitation of their hero. 

As more than one person remarked, this is conspicuously “mimetic” behaviour, of the kind central to all ritual, not least religious. As many Christians meditate on and sometimes emulate the sufferings of Christ, these Trump devotees imagine and imitate their way into his wound, into his suffering. I don’t share your beliefs but I admire your faith, as the old saying goes. 

“A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” So wrote Émile Durkheim in his book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Sacred objects, a set of beliefs and practices, and the existence of a moral community: I wonder what the great sociologist of religion would have made of the GOP conference this week. And not only its powerful sense of community, and ceremony, and mimesis, but its sheer euphoria and elation. “So it is in the midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this effervescence itself that the religious idea seems to be born,” Durkheim wrote later in the same book. There are moments when political rallies tip over into religion. I think we got close this week. 

And this is where a theological perspective is, I think, helpful. Because one of the most important gifts Christianity has given the modern world is the relativisation and secularisation of earthly power. That may seem like a strange thing to say hardly a year after the Archbishop of Canterbury anointed King Charles III with holy oil in Westminster Abbey, and it is fair to say that different Christian traditions have adopted different position on the whole sacred–secular power thing.  

But it is nonetheless undeniable that the Torah places the kings of Israel under the law, that the Old Testament has a generally ambivalent attitude to the nation’s kings, that Jesus displayed a highly qualified respect to earthly powers, and that his followers proclaimed the resurrected Messiah as the king of all earthly kings. In spite of the various ways in which Christians of the past have found a way to sacralise earthly powers – whether emperors, kings, peoples, or ideas – they are not, and never will be, divine. To paraphrase another great Republican president, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “Welcome to the club. God is on our side.” 

It’d be churlish to begrudge the Republican faithful their moment of “collective effervescence”. From being convicted on all accounts in his hush money trial a couple of months ago, Providence seems to have rolled out a red carpet for Trump. Moreover, I honestly commend his sensitive and calming rhetoric since the assassination attempt. It would have been very easy (and heretofore typical) of Trump to have come out swinging, blaming the Democrats directly, and subtly inciting more violence. Indeed, given the rhetoric of some of his critics – such as our new Foreign Secretary, who has called him a Neo–Nazi sympathising sociopath, among other things – he might even have been justified in doing so. 

Not only has he not, but he has adopted a wholly ameliorative approach, promising that he wants to heal the agonising divides that are pulling America apart. Given his own role in creating those divides, one may judge these promises somewhat unlikely. But near–death moments, and experiences of God, do strange things to people. If four years hence have given us a balanced, pacifying, statesmanlike presidency I will gladly revisit some of the presuppositions of this piece. 

But in the meantime, we have a political leader who, according to recent legal judgement, is no longer fully constrained by the law, and an effervescent political movement, drawing on feelings of martyrdom and messianism, confident in divine favour, and feeling euphoric and triumphant. That is not a happy combination. 

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