Since its birth, providentialism—the belief that God actively governs human events according to his design and purposes—has been in America’s DNA. The Puritans understood Massachusetts Bay Colony to be under the hand of divine protection and blessing, on the covenantal condition of their holiness and obedience to his precepts, as Roger Winthrop famously articulated in his sermon “A Model of Christian Charity.” The settlement at Jamestown was no different in this respect. The first precept of the “Articles, Lawes, and Orders, Divine, Politique, and Martiall for the Colony of Virginia,” laid down by Sir Thomas Gates and expanded under subsequent governors, affirmed that “we must alone expect our successe from him, who is only the blesser of all good attempts, the King of kings, the commander of commaunders, and the Lord of Hostes.”
The sectarian fervor of the Puritans would cool over the subsequent generations as the American religious population grew more pluralistic. Anabaptists like Roger Williams revived ancient, patristic ideas, arguing that religious freedom was a fundamental moral and Christian principle, and in subsequent generations, Americans increasingly tolerated religious difference. Still, providentialist theism remained a basic assumption of the American mind at the time of the founding. As the signers of the Declaration of Independence expressed it, the American revolutionary cause invoked “reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” And during and after the Revolutionary War, providentialist interpretation of events was a trope in public letters.
American providentialism was apparent again at the first pivotal moment of the new nation, the Constitutional Convention. For the first several weeks, the convention was deeply divided between small and large states on the fundamental question of representation. Some delegates feared a failure of the convention would lead to a breakup of the Union. Sensing the moment, Benjamin Franklin rose to speak. The world-famous journalist, scientist, and ambassador was now eighty-two years old and commanded respect as the eldest statesman in the room. After recounting their lack of progress, he continued,
In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine Protection. — Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance?
I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that “except the Lord build they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel.
And days later, a critical vote to break the impasse between the states to make way for the Connecticut Compromise was held under most fortuitous circumstances and the path to compromise held open by the narrowest possible of margins, an event that the providentialist readily saw as an answer to Franklin’s prayer.
Who can know God’s secret providential will for the United States?
On July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, the fiftieth anniversary of American Independence. It was immediately interpreted as providential. One paper declared that Adams and Jefferson
were the humble instruments in the hand of God . . . in effectuating the heaven-directed work of emancipating a people from the oppressor’s wrong . . . [and the] occasion [of their deaths on the nation’s bicentennial] is momentous, as it most signally and unspeakably manifests, the superintendence and protection of an outstretched Almighty hand over this favored region. . . . God permitted them in his generous Providence to realize and enjoy for half a century, the inestimable result of their toils. . . . Our countrymen departed on the great and glorious day of the nation’s jubilee; when every heart bounded with joy ineffable, and full of gratitude for the continued smiles and favors of Divine Providence.
Jefferson himself was probably the most optimistic providentialist among the founders in his faith in progress and enlightenment. But even he foreboded God’s future judgment of America’s sin of slavery, a commerce of “unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” Jefferson wrote, “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
When the nation was existentially threatened by secession and civil war—itself driven in part by the question of whether slavery should be extended or extinguished—the erstwhile skeptic Abraham Lincoln, who didn’t mention God or providence at all in his first inaugural address, felt the weight of the hand of divine providence on the conscience of the nation after four years of bloody conflict. He interpreted the war as having been doled out to America as a punishment for its sins:
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
The tradition of presidential invocation of the Almighty’s blessing upon American endeavors has continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the largest amphibious assault in human history, Operation Overlord or “D-Day” on June 6, 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the nation in a prayer asking God to bless the invasion, “a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.”
And, after the deadliest attack on American soil by a foreign adversary since Pearl Harbor, September 11, 2001, George W. Bush concluded his address to the nation with a prayer for all those grieving: “I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me’.” And he concluded his address to Congress in which he declared war on Al Qaeda and terrorism more broadly by invoking God’s favor: “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.”
Hence, violence and war have often been the occasion of providentialist presidential rhetoric, which ranges from the more profound, like Lincoln’s excursus in theodicy, to the more perfunctory, like Biden’s favored invocation for God to “protect our troops.”
So when multiple assassin’s bullets whizzed by former President Donald Trump’s head on that fateful July 13 afternoon, it wasn’t particularly surprising that theistic commentators, and Trump himself, saw the hand of God’s providence in the event. But is the judgment warranted?
We have seen that, as a matter of historical-political fact, providentialism has been in the DNA of the American polity from its very beginnings and that it is especially common in presidential rhetoric. But now let us adopt a critical, Catholic, and, more specifically, Augustinian theological perspective. For while history and politics have a certain integrity of their own, they aren’t competent to judge God’s will in political history, and they are subordinate to higher sciences. The Bible teaches that the “spiritual man judgeth all things,” and he judges rightly by the principles of sacred doctrine, which are the articles of the faith set forth by divine revelation (1 Cor. 2:15).
The Nicene Creed that Catholics profess every Sunday begins “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” The first characteristic identified of God, his unity, is followed by his power. The denial of polytheism is also a denial of a world in which various deities governed their limited jurisdictions and fought with one another over their domains. There is only one God, he is omnipotent, he (therefore) can and did create all things from nothing, and his one overruling providence governs all things.
One of the most profound expressions of Christian providentialism comes in Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). St. Augustine explains it thus: “I could not therefore exist, could not exist at all, O my God, unless You were in me. Or should I not rather say, that I could not exist unless I were in You from whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are all things?”
For Augustine, providence has both a transcendent and an immanent dimension. Transcendentally, providence consists in the ideas in God’s mind. Immanently, those ideas are, as it were, impressed into creation through the forms that determine each natural kind and endowed with powers of secondary causation. God alone knows the future, and he alone can efficaciously move any particular individual in a way that does not violate his nature. But it is possible for people, by the light of faith, to discern God’s purposes. Christians do this all the time when they pray, reflect, and seek God’s will in their lives, and St. Augustine sought to uncover how God worked through his life in The Confessions, his spiritual autobiography.
For Augustine, it was even sometimes possible for the Christian, by the light of faith, to discern what God’s providential will was for a nation in the past. But in Augustine’s own day, some pagan Romans thought they had contemporaneously discerned the will of the old gods for Rome. Rome was sacked by Alaric in August of 410. The sack of the “eternal city” shocked the Romans to their core and caused something of a spiritual crisis. Some began to murmur that this was the judgment of the old pagan gods upon the empire for having abandoned their worship for Christianity. Augustine wrote The City of God to refute this error. In order to refute it, he had to address the problem of evil. Why would God (or the gods) allow such evils to befall Rome?
The City of God refutes what I have called the divine patronage view of the city.1 On this view, a commonplace in ancient paganism, each city has a protector god. The city offered sacrifices and devotions on the promise of the deity’s favor and blessing. So, for example, the goddess Athena was the patron of Athens, and her cultus was thought to be essential to the city’s flourishing. Not only the pagans but also the ancient Hebrews held to the divine patronage theory. From their beginnings, they were a covenantal people. They promised to obey God’s commandments. In return, God promised them blessings—particularly, earthly blessings. For example, in Deuteronomy 28, a range of blessings are promised on the condition of obedience, including fertility of the womb, bountiful crops and livestock, and victory in war.
Augustine interprets the New Law of the Gospel as something entirely different. Jesus teaches, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). According to Augustine, Christ willed for this to be written down in the Bible “to show the falsity of the notions of both Jews and Gentiles as to his kingdom.” Augustine’s gloss on the passage was that it was as if Christ had said,
“I hinder not your dominion in this world.” What more would you have? Come by faith to the kingdom which is not of this world. For what is His kingdom, but they that believe in Him, of whom He says, you are not of the world: although He wished that they should be in the world.2
Augustine’s reply to Christian murmuring about the evils that befell Rome, then, was that they had a false understanding of God’s relationship to the city, which Christ upended. By the secret providence of God, evils are permitted to befall both good and evil persons, and blessings are bestowed upon both good and evil. Accordingly, Christ did not promise to be the guarantor of temporal protection of the kingdom of Israel. Rather, he vowed to protect his otherworldly kingdom, his Church, which he promised Peter the gates of hell would never prevail against.
In short, the Augustinian political theologian maintains that under the New Covenant, divine patronage is guaranteed only to the City of God, and not to any terrene city. Hence, Augustine declines to identify a providential mission for Rome in his time. Who could know what God’s will for the Roman Empire was? I call Augustine’s attitude one of existential humility.
God has given Trump more time on earth, and thus the capacity to choose to live the rest of his life as God would want him to.
One with an attitude of existential humility seeks a middle way between two rival attitudes about God’s providence. On the one extreme is an attitude of indifference (rooted in a belief in divine indifference as a function of deism, agnosticism or atheism). On the other extreme is an attitude of presumption (rooted in an extreme form of belief in divine patronage of one’s polity).
Did God save Donald Trump’s life (and permit the death of Corey Comperatore, who was struck by the assassin’s bullet intended for Trump’s head)? We cannot know whether it was merely through human secondary causes or supernatural intervention, but it is of course true that, at least in the broad sense of providence, God saved Donald Trump. For secondary causes are under the wings of God’s providence, being radically maintained in existence by God’s concurring power. And does not the Bible teach us that “every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow” (James 1:17)? It could also be inferred that in his wisdom and mercy, God has given Trump more time on earth, and thus the capacity to choose to live the rest of his life as God would want him to.
But what more can be inferred about God’s will for the United States? Existential humility dictates caution here. Some have suggested the date of Trump’s survival, July 13, 2024, is significant because it is the anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima’s third apparition. One might even wonder whether Trump’s fate is tied to the secret Our Lady of Fatima revealed on July 13, 1917. In the secret, Our Lady warned of Russia spreading Marxist errors through the world, but promised, ultimately, Russia’s conversion and the triumph of her Immaculate Heart. Did God save Trump so that he could play a role in defeating woke neo-Marxist ideology? Or, more broadly, does God have some great purpose(s) for the nation using Trump as an instrument? Such a view is more likely to be held by a group of Americans that Salena Zito and Brad Todd have called “King Cyrus Christians.” Roughly two-thirds Protestant, and one-third Catholic, these conservative Christian voters disapprove of Trump’s past lascivious personal conduct but see him like the pagan king of old: a strong, junkyard bulldog–like figure that God raised up to protect the garden from the wilderness—that is, to forestall the legal and cultural assault on traditional Christian belief and practice.
In some ways, it could be argued Trump in fact did forestall that assault. For example, he appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who avow a judicial philosophy that includes protection of the rights of religious liberty and of local communities to foster ordered liberty. But musings about the providential meaning of the failed assassination for a possible second Trump term and the future of the nation can only be speculation, absent God’s revelation. Like Augustine said of the Roman Empire: Who can know God’s secret providential will for the United States?
What can be presumed? At least this: whomever is elected president is subject to higher law, a law that God has made known by reason and faith, that its precepts are the foundation of just and prudent governance, and are therefore the reliable criterion to judge whether the president is advancing or subverting what God has revealed his will is for all political authorities (cf. Rom. 13:1-7). What should one with an attitude of existential humility do? At least this: he should thank God for all the blessings that he has bestowed on this country; he should pray for his country and political leaders; and, judging in light of the aforementioned principles, he should vote for candidates who are most likely to execute their offices for the common good.
1 See Kody W. Cooper, “Existential Humility and the Critique of Civil Religion in Augustine’s Political Theology,” in Augustine in a Time of Crisis: Politics and Religion Contested, ed. Boleslaw Z. Kabala, Ashleen Menchaca-Bagnulo, and Nathan Pinkoski (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), which this essay draws from.
2 Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea, trans. John Henry Newman (London: J.G.F. and J. Rivington, 1842), Gospel of John, Lectio, 10