Politics increasingly entered the pulpit at the demand of congregants, and pastors indulged those demands for fear of losing members, according to the journalist Tim Alberta in his 2024 book The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory. Last Monday, the Trump administration said a federal prohibition on campaigning by non-profit organisations did not apply to houses of worship, implementing a long-standing campaign promise to let churches make more explicit political endorsements.
Trump is helped into a car after the shooting.Credit: AP
Trump has never been known for his personal piety, but he has long enjoyed the overwhelming support of evangelicals. His own reaction to the Butler shooting was initially, “I’m not supposed to be here” – meaning he was not supposed to be alive – according to a new book about the campaign, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. (The book is co-written by the author of this article.)
His top adviser, Susie Wiles, told him, “You do know this is God,” the book says. After that, Trump began saying: “If anyone ever doubted there was a God, that proved there was.”
Image posted to the Facebook on July 16, 2024, with the caption: “This was the flag that was flying during President Trump’s rally before he spoke. If you take a closer look, you’ll see that it’s not the effort of man, this is the effort of nature…” Credit: @MikeKellyPA / Facebook
In Butler the day after the shooting, county GOP chair Jim Hulings recalled trying to return to the crime scene and being unable to get near it across the police tape. But he did notice that all the church car park spaces were full.
“We cling to our guns and our Bibles,” Hulings said, reappropriating an infamous remark about small-town Pennsylvania that Barack Obama made at a San Francisco fundraiser in 2008.
That morning at the Church of God at Connoquenessing, Karns preached about the fragility of life, quoting Psalm 90 likening man’s time on Earth to the grass that grows and withers.
His own son, daughters-in-law and grandchildren were at the rally, seated in the bleachers behind the stage. They became friendly with a kind man seated in front of them, Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old local volunteer firefighter who was there with his family. Before Trump arrived, Comperatore had helped Karns’ 12-year-old granddaughter, Alexa, recover her dropped phone after it fell through the bleachers, and he passed out water bottles to help those around him stay hydrated in the heat.
When the gunman opened fire from a nearby factory roof, Comperatore was struck and killed trying to protect his family.
“It’s one of those things where you feel like you’re in this place at a certain time, and there’s a reason for it,” Lisa Karns, Alexa’s mother and the pastor’s daughter-in-law, said. “I felt like, ‘God, why take him? You could have taken me.’”
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That night the Karns family met the pastor and showed him the photos of the twisted flag. He decided to put the image on a sign for the church, as a message of comfort, to thank God for keeping them safe and to honour Comperatore. “It wasn’t necessarily a political statement,” he said.
On the way home, Alexa told Lisa Karns that she had prayed for Trump before the rally, asking God to protect him. Lisa Karns suggested she write Trump a card telling him.
Supporters arrive before Trump spoke at a campaign event at the Butler Farm Show last October.Credit: nnamiriah.davis
“Dear President Trump,” the 12-year-old wrote in green pen, under a sketch of an American flag, “I was on the same bleachers of the man who died. … Before the rally I had prayed that you wouldn’t get shot because it sounded like something that might happen. God answered my prayers. … I will still pray for you. I hope you win the election!”
A T-shirt referencing the shooting.Credit: AP
He wrote back a few weeks later. “For you and all those in attendance on that fateful day, we remain resolved to fight for our great country,” Trump and his wife, Melania, said. “May God bless you and keep you safe, little one.” Lisa Karns framed the letter and hung it on a wall in their home.
The Republican National Convention that immediately followed the shooting brought talk of God’s hand from private rumblings to the prime-time stage.
“That was a transformation,” Tucker Carlson said on the final night in Milwaukee. “This was no longer a man.”
“Divine intervention,” a man shouted from the floor.
“I think it was,” Carlson agreed. He went on: “I think even people who don’t believe in God are beginning to think, ‘Maybe there’s something to this, actually.’”
Trump’s son Eric embraced the sentiment in his speech introducing his father: “By the grace of God, divine intervention and your guardian angels above, you survived.”
Trump hats on sale at a campaign rally in March last year.Credit: AP
The candidate himself attested: “I felt very safe because I had God on my side.”
By the time Trump returned to Butler for a second rally in October, a man dragged a wooden cross up and down the road to the fairgrounds. At a prayer circle the night before, Susan Sevy from East Liverpool, Ohio, who had also attended the July rally, said the time when Trump was shot, 6.11pm, corresponded to a verse of Ephesians about putting on the armour of God.
On the rally stage, speakers recalled seeing signs or hearing a heavenly voice.
“That flag right there displayed like a crucifix or an angel on it,” Butler township commissioner Sam Zurzolo said. “I know everybody has seen that, and I think that was a warning,”
“I heard a voice – loud, clear, rich and reassuring,” said James Sweetland, a retired emergency department doctor who tended to Comperatore. “It spoke to me. It said, ‘Go. Go they need your help’… I’m telling you right now that was a voice of God.”
The Trump campaign worked to bring back attendees from the first rally, and the Karns family returned to sit in the rows of chairs below the bleachers. At one point during the early speeches, the sound system glitched, and someone shouted for a medic. The pastor’s other daughter-in-law, Christie Karns, felt her anxiety spike. She wondered why she had come back and put herself through this, she said.
At that moment, the giant flag overhead flipped on itself again, resuming the Y shape that reminded her of an angel. Then it gracefully flipped back to normal.
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“We just all looked at each other and we were like, ‘Oh my word’,” Christie Karns said. “No one could have done that. It could have only been God. And it just gave us that peace.”
In church last Sunday, Pastor Karns returned to the theme of fragility, again referencing the metaphor of grass that grows and withers. “It’s here one minute, and the next minute it’s gone,” he said. In his sermon he asked worshippers to reflect on the past year, considering the trials they faced and the strength God gave them.
“It took a very strong man who could help right our country back to being God’s country,” Lisa Karns said. “I do feel like God protected him to help our country.”
Washington Post
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