This past summer on the evening of July 13th an attempt to assassinate former president Donald J. Trump occurred during his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The assassin, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, thankfully for all concerned, failed in the attempt but did wound Mr. Trump in the right ear.
Crooks – before being killed by Secret Service Agents – did manage to seriously wound two men in the crowd standing behind Trump and kill Corey Comperatore, a husband and father.
Exhaustive investigation following the assassination attempt has revealed – among many other things – that the 8 shots from the assassin’s AR-15-style rifle began at 6:11 pm.
Again, while mindful of the persons seriously wounded that evening and sharing the grief of Mr. Comperatore’s family, thankfully for the country Mr. Trump survived the attempt on his life.
Many Evangelical Christian Nationalists, Trump’s core supporter demographic, were quick to claim that it was God’s direct intervention that saved Mr. Trump’s life. God, in their view, intervened to save Trump because he is believed to be the divinely chosen messiah figure sent to restore America to its Christian roots.
Too bad for shot and killed Mr. Comperatore and the seriously wounded men that evening. I guess that the Evangelical Christian Nationalists think that those three men were theologically and literally collateral damage in God’s effort to save the former president.
In the weeks since the assassination attempt, much has been made by Evangelical Christian Nationalists that the shots were fired and Trump was spared by God at 6:11 pm. They believe that this too is a providential sign that God is at work in Mr. Trump.
In their mind, 6-1-1 is not just an abbreviated telephone dialing number for reporting phone troubles. 6-1-1 is a sign that God is at work not only intervening in the precise 6:11 time of an assassin’s bullet barrage, but also God lifting up a biblical text to illustrate that like his Trump messiah, we too must – in the words of Ephesians 6:11 – “put on the full armor of God so that (we) can take (our) stand against the devil’s schemes.”
Ephesians 6:11, like the rest of Paul’s writing in his letter to the church at Ephesus, is an important text to study. There is inspiration in this ancient writing by Paul to a loosely organized group of Christ followers over 2,000 years ago.
But interpreting this text of Ephesians 6:11 as a sign that Trump was protected by being dressed in God’s full armor and that true believers must also be protected by putting on full armor against the devil rampant in America’s secular time is, like nearly everything self=righteously put forward by Evangelical Christian Nationalists, a horrible misreading and misapplication of an ancient text.
What if God meant for us to think about I Samuel 6:11? It reads, “They placed the Ark of the Lord on a cart and along with it the chest containing the gold rats and the models of the tumors?”
How about Proverbs 6:11 warning that if you get sleepy and spend too much time with folded hands, “poverty will come upon you like a bandit and scarcity like an armed man.” An illegal immigrant?
How about Jeremiah 6:11 where the true believer is “full of the wrath of the Lord and cannot take it in” and therefore needs to take it out on those described as infidel, even little kids?
I could go on and on. But you get the point. Using the Bible in the manner of Evangelical Christian Nationalists, like any use of any scripture by any extremist believers, only results in a sickening self-righteousness leading to all manner of outrageous religious application.
Here is the truth.
The Christian Bible was without any grammatical structure until 1500 years after the first texts in AD 40 – 60 were being collected and shared. Chapter and verse markings were added to the English Christian Bible (the Geneva Bible) in 1560 by Sir Roland Hill. There were many other such chapter and verse divisions with a history of their own as well. But, THEY ALL HAD ONE THING IN COMMON.
The chapter and verse numbering were a man-made intervention on the texts so that readers of the Bible and students of the Bible could all be on the same page and at the same place as the texts were read and studied.
There is much more to this history of how the Christian Bible as we now know it came into both private and community use.
But it is an absolute misreading and misunderstanding which leads to all manner of political, theological, social, ecclesiastical contrivances and conspiracies, to use the Christian Bible or any text to claim divine favor and manipulate the human soul.
And, how about this? Jesus is speaking.
John 13:34-35:
A new command I give to you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all people will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.
Or this:
Galatians 3: 28-29: A Jesus Christ follower, Paul, is speaking.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.
Let’s all get on those pages and live out those chapters and verses.