After the Trump assassination attempt at Butler, I’m having an unexpected crisis of faith. What’s unusual is…I’m an atheist. Not just an atheist, but you know, the insufferable kind, the kind that insists on being sworn in without that “so help me God” nonsense.
From a young age, I wanted things to make sense with reason my guiding principle. The idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing being whose address—Heaven—doesn’t even come up on Google Maps seemed more preposterous than Santa. At least we knew we could find Santa at the North Pole.
Look, I searched for answers, but they were always the same: “You have to have faith.” Yeah, right. Believing things without evidence because you want to believe is anathema to reason and downright dangerous if you’re trying to build a bridge.
Yet, experience has a nasty habit of throwing a curveball when you expect a slider. And in this case, reason doesn’t always explain things, no matter how hard we atheists wish it would.
One soldier recalled:
I expected every moment to see him fall. Nothing but the superintending care of Providence could have saved him.
Washington himself was in disbelief:
By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, although death was leveling my companions on every side.
Years later, Washington returned to the site of the battle where the Shawnee Chief, who had led his tribe at the Battle of the Monongahela reminisced:
It was on the day when the white man’s blood mixed with the streams of our forests that I first beheld this chief. I called to my young men and said, mark yon tall and daring warrior…let your aim be certain and he dies. Our rifles were leveled…all in vain, a power mightier far than we shielded you… I had seventeen fair fires at him [none] could bring him to the ground! Seeing you were under the special guardianship of the Great Spirit… The Great Spirit protects that man and guides his destinies — he will become the chief of nations, and a people yet unborn will hail him as the founder of a mighty empire. I am come to pay homage to the man who is the particular favorite of Heaven, and who can never die in battle.
Providence? Perhaps for a superstitious 18th-century Indian chief, but for men of the 21st century, secure in their reason, logic, and technology, hardly. It was just plain luck. Doesn’t someone win Powerball every week? Same thing, right?
Sure, except over the next 30 years, just as improbably, Washington would somehow survive battle after battle against the world’s superpower. At the Battle of Princeton, he rode out into a maelstrom of musket fire, disappearing into a cloud of gunpowder, thought dead, only to reappear minutes later to continue the fight. At the Battle of Long Island, Washington and his Continental Army were penned in, vastly outnumbered, all but lost, until miraculously, a heavy fog rolled in to cover their escape.
That is not luck. The same person doesn’t win Powerball every week, and he doesn’t go on to found a “mighty empire.” Washington’s life simply defies reason.
Even so, despite this evidence that there’s more out there than reason can account for, I could still cling to my faithless rational world without crisis—until Butler. In what universe does an assassin’s bullet, from just 100m away, merely graze the ear of the most controversial, most vilified, and ironically, for many, the most beloved president in history, drawing just enough blood to give it authenticity, rather than the story-ending horror of a direct hit, while being live-streamed to the world? Answer: none.
There is no universe where this can happen. Whether it was Zeus himself who guided that bullet or God who had Trump turn his head, it seems undeniable that there are forces at work we don’t understand. These forces have plans for Trump, just as they had plans for Washington.
Should he do the impossible and win this November, well, I will have found a new faith.
Huck Davenport is a pseudonym.
