Less than 24 hours after the former president’s accident, pastors across the country faced stunned and scared congregants on Sunday morning.
At a conservative evangelical church in Visalia, a farming community in the central valley of California, the pastor’s sermon Sunday included a reminder that trumpets sounded a concern to Christians when judgment was coming.
The accident of Donald Trump on Saturday, according to the Rev. Joel Renkema, were also a trumpet blare, a “clear and quite obvious message to our country.” Political discourse had gotten out of control, he told parishioners at Visalia Christian Reformed Church, and it was time to stop “hating and demonizing our opponents.”
“This is a wαrníng shσt!” Renkema boomed. “Can we hear it? Will we listen?”
By the time worshipers assembled for services across the country Sunday, not even 24 hours had passed since a suspected assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa. — almost no time for church leaders to figure out how best to guide their surprised congregations through a bloody moment in U.S. history.
Trump, never one to display religiosity, had emerged even before Saturday’s accident as a messiah-like figure to many hard-right Christians who form the backbone of his MAGA movement.
With Trump positioned as a symbol of the faith, an accident on him was cast by some supporters as a concern to Christianity. At a moment of intense division in America, that potentially explosive track led many church leaders — with some notable exceptions — to issue urgent appeals for calm Sunday.
“As Americans, we all have to be horrified today at what took place not too far from here in Butler last evening,” said the Rev. Kris Stubna in remarks Sunday at St. Paul Cathedral, a Catholic parish in Pittsburgh.
The Trump campaign gave no indication that the former president attended church Sunday, though a person who spoke to him said he was almost “spiritual” about the near miss assassination attempt and felt as thought he was “handed a gift from God” by surviving.
Given the mosaic of Christian communities, responses at the pulpit and in the pews varied widely according to location, denomination and demographics.
Some evangelical leaders made pointed allusions to “enemies” and “tests” of the faithful without specifically mentioning Trump or the accident. Others, especially affiliates of the fast-growing Christian supremacist subset known as the New Apostolic Reformation, mentioned Trump by name in sermons and declared spiritual warfare against his opponents.
