On Gunshots and Rhetoric

A Christian Response to the Attempted Assasination of Donald Trump (with a dare at the end)

Photo by danilo.alvesd on Unsplash

Last Saturday, the sound of bullets ricochetted around the world, possibly changing the course of American politics forever.

A powerful image of a defiant Trump emerged shortly after, bloodied but not defeated, his fist held high in the air, and the American flag waving in the background.

I actually first saw this on Instagram rather than my usual news app.  It came up because a famous Christian (whom I happen to admire) was condemning the act. For a split second, I was taken aback.

I was so used to seeing people ‘on my side’ condemn Trump using aggressive and inflammatory rhetoric, I didn’t know how to process seeing a British Christian (whom I know is politically on the Left) defend him. Of course, he was not defending Trump’s policies but rather his right to free speech and the right to run for office without fear of being assassinated.

He was right, of course. No matter your politics - and trust me, I really do not like Trump’s politics - if you are a reasonable human being, you have to stop and think about what just happened.

A former President was nearly assassinated, and an innocent bystander was instantly killed. This is a dark moment for the most powerful nation in the world.

It turns out, our words have consequences.

The BBC correspondent, Gary O'Donoghue, was present throughout the event. He writes on the mood shortly after,

One man approached me and simply said: “They shot first. This is [expletive] war.”

Another just yelled “civil war” as he passed behind me.

And a few minutes later a huge electronic billboard appeared on the side of a truck – Donald Trump’s face framed in a target – the words simply read “Democrats attempted assassination - President Trump.”

It sent a shiver right up my spine – and the horror of the potential consequences of this act started to sink in.

Since this event, both sides have had to reflect on how their increasingly violent rhetoric may have fueled this heinous act. Biden immediately took down most of his ad campaigns and spoke to the nation from the Oval Office:

Biden states,

The political record in this country has become very heated. It’s time to cool it down.

This event seems to have woken up the West to realise that this is where our language naturally takes us. If we rhetorically persecute each other for long enough, someone will eventually bring a bullet to the conversation.

What interests me about this event is how backwards it all seems. An attempt to assassinate a world leader? Really? It’s almost like we’ve never tried it before and seen the consequences.

Only eleven days prior to the event, Niall Ferguson wrote,

There was a reason why Rome of Julius Caesar and Florence of the Medici were such dangerous places. Assassination was a feature, not a bug, of republican political systems. However, modern American medicine and the overblown security provided to presidents and former presidents together make it quite likely that both candidates will make it to November 5.

Since then, he has clarified that the second half of this paragraph needs to be corrected; it is no longer a given that each candidate would necessarily make it to election day.

Is America now starting to look like an Empire once again? Has she retracted back to her Roman roots and forgotten the influence of Christianity on modern democracy?

Throughout this newsletter, I have written extensively in favour of Tom Holland’s thesis, which claims that when Jesus of Nazareth entered the world stage, he did so in direct confrontation with the social and ethical norms of Rome. I argue that we are continuing to live in the reverberations of this disruption today.

A helpful way to frame this might be to understand the history of the church as an ongoing narrative where, over each generation, she has to choose between resisting or co-habiting with the empire of the day. Each generation is thus challenged to acknowledge “Jesus is Lord” over and above its respective Caesar.

Some generations have lived this out successfully, while others have not.

Subesequently, the West in general now lives with a peculiar intermingling between the moral values that were handed down by Jesus and his early followers, and the moral values handed down by Rome. Despite being vehenemently opposed to one another, we now see a mix of the two in both church and politics.

If we are indeed called to resist the values of Empire and uphold the values of the Kingdom, how then should Christians respond to the attempted assassination of Donald J Trump?

A helpful trajectory might be to examine how the early Christians responded to and resisted the Roman empire in the first three centuries.

In his award-winning book, Destroyer of the gods, Larry W. Hurtado notes that there were five ways that the early Christians were distinctively different from their Roman pagan counterparts:

1. They were multi-racial and multi-ethnic

2. Their community included people across the socio-economic divide (rich and poor worshipped and ate together)

3. They advocated against infanticide and abortion

4. They had a clear vision of marriage (being between one man and one woman)

5. They practised non-violence

All five of these points were considered to be radically counter-cultural in the ancient world.

John Mark Comer and Tim Keller note that if you map these points across the American political divide, the first two sound like they’re from the Left, the second two sound like they’re from the Right, and the last one sounds “un-American.”

So, how do we move forward in light of recent events? Well, I have three thoughts on offer: