Sunday services portray Trump as the divine-selected individual

Pastors at megachurches across the country on Sunday credited God with sparing the life of former President Donald Trump.

Pastor Jack Hibbs, who leads a congregation of more than 10,000, wore a colonial preachers’ robe that usually hangs on a rack in the church with a placard that reads: “Use in case of acts of TYRANNY.”

“My question is why is Donald Trump alive?” Hibbs said to his congregants at the Calvary Chapel in Chino Hills, California, less than 24 hours after the attempted assassination of Trump.

Hibbs, who replayed Fox News footage of Saturday’s Pennsylvania shooting, suggested God saw from heaven that Trump was “Israel’s best friend.”

“It wasn’t the man,” Hibbs said. “It was the decision he made regarding the blessing of Israel.”

Hibbs is part of a chorus of Christian leaders giving various degrees of credit to God for Trump’s survival. Their Sunday sermons, prayers and reactions on social media paint Trump as a political leader with the protection and backing of God. The message could further his historically overwhelming support among many conservative, Evangelical Christians.

Trump had a similar message, posting on social media that “it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” Other Republican leaders shared the sentiment. Some — like New York Rep. Brandon Williams — correlated the survival of Trump with the survival of the Republic.

Pastor Jentezen Franklin of Free Chapel in Georgia referenced Old Testament prophecies about the healing of Israel and asked God to make Trump “a man on a mission,” to keep America “strong and powerful.”

“You preserved [Trump’s] life, and you don’t preserve anything you don’t have a purpose for,” Franklin said in a prerecorded prayer that was shared during service Sunday morning.

Mark Burns, a pastor at the Harvest Praise & Worship Center in South Carolina who is close to Trump, said the former president is now “stronger than ever” and called for supporters to exercise restraint in coming days.

“We will not take to the streets to retaliate, but we will operate in the heavenly realms, the spiritual realms,” Burns said.

While the belief that God intervenes in the world is common among Evangelicals, the political impact of this moment will vary among different sects, said Andrew Walker, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

“Providence is best understood in the rearview mirror,” he cautioned.

The belief that Trump is God’s chosen one is entrenched more deeply among fundamentalist, revivalist and pentecostal sects, Walker says. Hibbs’ Calvary Chapel denomination, for example, originates in pentecostalism. Among those groups, God’s protection of Trump is likely to strengthen their belief that Trump is meant to be president.

“That is not representative of how all evangelical christians think about this,” Walker added.

Dino Rizzo, an associate pastor at Church of the Highlands in Alabama, tied this weekend’s shooting to previous decades of tumult in the country.

“What we saw in the ’60s and ’70s with President Kennedy and, of course, Dr. King, that tragedy and that pain and the Vietnam War, and what happened?” Rizzo said. “People began to pray and out of that came a Jesus revolution and here we are all these years later and it’s still impacting our world today because we decided to pray.”

The way Trump turned his head right before being grazed by the bullet is now a key point in the divine intervention argument. Harvest Christian Fellowship pastor Greg Laurie and Christian musician and speaker Sean Feucht both called the timing miraculous, and Hibbs also discussed it.

“The way Trump turns his head at the very last second in this angle is WILD,” Feuchts posted on X with prayer and dove emojis. (Doves are often symbols of God’s faithfulness to humanity.)

Less than an hour from Hibbs, another Los Angeles pastor presented an alternate interpretation. Doug Andersen at The Church on the Way urged his congregation to push past politics.

“We need to recognize and respect the fact that other people around us — that may have views different than we might have — are not wrong, but probably listening to God just as well as you are,” Anderson said, before calling on his congregation to join hands and pray for peace.

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