“Let everyone submit to the governing authorities, since there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are instituted by God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We don’t know what’s coming next. We can’t. Technically speaking, everything that happens is a surprise. Some of it is less surprising than others; some falls more in line with our predictions, but none of it we can say we knew with absolute certainty because, again, we don’t know what’s coming next. The result of this is that sometimes a moment occurs that changes everything. Sometimes a moment occurs that, rather than passing unremarkably by us like so many other moments do, will instantly become fixed in our minds such that we will always know where we were when it happened. The country experienced such a moment this past Saturday, and we were millimeters away from its being an even more transformative moment than it was. Somebody took a shot at former President, Donald Trump, and managed to graze his ear. In doing so, we experienced a moment that likely and perhaps permanently impacted the outcome of the presidential race, the next four years of history, and possibly much more than that. Let’s reflect on what we experienced, what some of the reactions have been, and what all of this might mean for followers of Jesus.

Let’s start with what should perhaps be the most obvious reaction to the events of last weekend even though some of the more committed partisans in our culture have already expressed their disagreement with this sentiment: we should be grateful that Donald Trump was not assassinated on Saturday evening. No matter how strong (and, more specifically, strongly negative) your feelings about Trump are, the assassination of a former President and current presidential candidate would have been a national tragedy of the highest order. It would have been a moment we have not experienced in more than half a century. Lord willing, we won’t experience anything like that ever again. The assassination of prominent political leaders is not something any modern, stable nation should have to endure.

The second most obvious reaction to the events of last Saturday should be a period of national mourning for the loss of Corey Comperatore. His death may have been a collateral accident to the attempt on Trump’s life, but it should not be treated as collateral and it certainly was not received as collateral by his family. When the shooting began, this former fire chief did just what a lifetime’s worth of instinct had taught him to do. He put others first, most notably his family members. He immediately put himself between oncoming harm and the people he could most directly protect. His sacrificial service became the most noble and ultimate sacrifice when a stray bullet struck and killed him.

As a nation we should not only mourn his loss alongside his family, we should honor the courage and character he showed in that moment. As a culture that is experiencing a genuine crisis in masculinity, in which men are not doing well, the virtues he put on display in that moment should be highlighted and celebrated as the best of what a healthy, noble, biblical masculinity should be. He demonstrated courage. Courage like that doesn’t come out of nowhere in an unexpected moment. It is a virtue developed over the course of many years. He thought of others before himself. This kind of selflessness is something boys and men in our nation are not often encouraged to embrace anymore. He showed a deep and abiding commitment to his family. A nation will only ever be as strong as its families are. Yes, people can rise above difficult family circumstances, but when families are broken on a massive scale, that kind of thing becomes increasingly rare. Most importantly, and by all accounts I have seen, Corey was a committed follower of Jesus. Following Jesus makes men better men than not following Him does. We should celebrate this a great deal more than we do.

The fact remains, though, that this was an assassination attempt on a public figure who was under the protection of the Secret Service. As details continue to drip out about just what happened last Saturday, what is forming is a picture of a near total and complete failure of security on the part of the nation’s highest and most celebrated security organization. I won’t say much more here save one thing as my background is not at all in security. A failure this profound on the core mission of an organization whose most publicly known function is to keep this kind of thing from happening demands accountability. As a nation, we are experiencing a dramatic reduction in the amount of trust we have in the institutions and organizations that are primarily tasked with running our nation. A lack of accountability here will only further this deficit, and in ways that will be difficult to recover from in the future. What’s more, this accountability needs to be at the highest levels of the organization. Tossing a few “expendable” personnel to the wolves won’t satisfy this public demand. The leadership at the highest level of the organization needs to have the integrity to acknowledge and own this failure with more than mere words.

Because we live in an increasingly partisan society that is steadily retreating to a kind of tribalism that has been common across human history but which has never contributed much in terms of a healthy, stable national culture, not everybody reacted to this event with the appropriate shock and horror. Trump’s status as a deeply polarizing figure thanks to his brash, often intentionally offensive personal style with those who disagree with him hasn’t helped much with this. At least one widely retweeted sentiment has been to express disappointment that the shooter missed. It was a narrow miss by someone who was obviously competent with the weapon he was using, but it was a miss all the same. This sentiment is problematic on political grounds, of course, but it is simply repulsive on moral grounds. Had the shooter not missed, a second family would be grieving the loss of their husband and father and grandfather. One is more than enough. More than that, an entire nation would be grieving. What’s more, generally speaking, wishing for the successful murder of someone you disagree with on political or even more generally personal grounds reflects a kind of moral depravity to your thinking that should be a wake up call to a moral problem that needs to be addressed.

A second common partisan reaction to Saturday’s assassination attempt has gone something along the lines of this: How sad that you express more outrage about the near killing of one man than you did about the successful murder of a whole classroom of children. This is an obvious reference to the Sandy Hook tragedy of 2012. While this particular political sentiment is more understandable than the last, it is problematic on several grounds. Perhaps most notably, it confuses outrage over a national tragedy with disagreement over a social and political position that only a minority of the country embraces as a potential solution to preventing future such tragedies. Furthermore, it advocates for a particular political solution (banning gun ownership generally or at least of certain types of guns) to a social and cultural problem (the idea of committing suicide by going out in a blaze of infamy) that suffers from a rather dramatic oversimplification of the attendant issues. More basically than this, though, this kind of a sentiment is pointless beyond needless and unhelpful antagonism of one’s political and ideological opponents. The only attaboys this kind of a statement gets are from people who already agree with you, and it only has the effect of hardening the opposition of the people who don’t. This one should probably go in the category of if-you-don’t-have-anything-nice-to-say-you-should-probably-stay-off-of-social-media.

On the other side of the political aisle, Trump supporters, and especially those of a religious bent (and I use the word “religious” there instead of “Christian” on purpose), have jumped all over the idea that not only was his survival an obvious sign of God’s favor, but also of the fact that he is some kind of an anointed leader of prophecy. This reaction may be more disturbing to me than the previous two. Although these folks claim some sort of a Christian mantle, many of them have shifted their devotion from the God revealed in the pages of Scripture to some kind of Americanized version of Him that is a false idol of the most insidious nature. Its insidiousness lies in just how deeply deceiving it is. This Americanized god is draped in all kinds of biblical language, but it is a choose-your-own-adventure biblical language that only ever seems to serve a particular side of the political aisle.

The fact is that Trump is not some kind of a God-ordained, anointed leader of prophecy. At all. Neither is Joe Biden. As former, current, and potential future Presidents of the nation, they do get their authority from God as all authority comes from God. They wouldn’t have access to this position unless God had allowed it, but to portray Trump as some sort of a God-appointed leader to advance a particular vision of Christendom is to rather wildly overstate his significance. For starters, and in spite of many assurances from faith leaders to the contrary, Trump has never publicly demonstrated any sort of a commitment to Christ. Much to the contrary, he has regularly demonstrated that something like an embrace of the character of Christ has never been much of a concern to him except where it suits him in a given moment. More broadly than that, while God absolutely does raise up national leaders and uses them to advance His purposes, and while followers of Jesus are right to offer appropriate submission to those in authority over us (a submission that is always subordinated to our larger and prior submission to God in Christ), this does not by any means indicate that every leader is a reflection of God’s own character or someone Jesus followers should look to as a positive example to mimic in their own lifestyles.

While it is perfectly right and proper to acknowledge that God prevented Trump’s murder on Saturday, speculating as to the reason for that should come only with a great deal of trepidation. We can be grateful for it without reading too much into it in either political direction. Republicans are growing more and more optimistic about the election’s outcome in November while the Democrats are growing more and more panicked about the prospect that Biden won’t voluntarily step down from at least the nomination if not the office entirely. The reasons for both of these positions are rather obvious in the current political moment. But it’s a long time between now and November and, as we said before, we don’t know what’s coming next. Let’s content ourselves with thanking God that the loss of life from Saturday was as limited as it was, and try not to go much further than that.

Our best bet is to keep our devotion fully and intentionally pointed in the direction of Jesus and Jesus alone. We submit to and pray for those who are in authority over us. But we do this whether we agree with them politically or not. We don’t agree with all of them. More than that, we don’t agree on which ones we should agree with in the first place. There are people who are fully devoted to Jesus who will comfortably and gladly vote for Trump in November. There are some who are equally devoted to Jesus who will vote for Biden (assuming for the moment that he’s still on the ticket by then). There are yet others who share this devotion to Jesus and who can’t even fathom voting for either candidate. All of these will justify their vote on biblical grounds. Does this mean one of these is secretly not as devoted as the others? Nope. It only means they weigh different nonessential issues differently than their counterparts do in terms of their significance in determining which candidate gets their vote. That’s okay. As long as Jesus is first, they can have vigorous, convicted, and charitable conversations about their positions, and in the end, glorify God and work to advance His kingdom by making disciples everywhere they go together. That’s how the church is supposed to work. And when it does, the whole country is better for it.