‘Anointed by God’: The Christians who see Trump as their saviour
NOTE TO READER: This article was written by Aleem Maqbool and published by the BBC on 16 November 2024. The beginning of the article is reprinted below verbatim. Click here to read the entire article.
Standing on a podium in a Florida convention centre on the night of the election, a row of American flags behind him and a jubilant crowd looking on, Donald Trump declared: “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason, and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.”
This was one of the most striking themes of his election campaign – that he had been chosen by God. Yet even before the attempt on his life on 13 July in Butler, Pennsylvania, millions of Americans already felt guided by their faith to support the former, and now future, president.
Some cast the election in an apocalyptic light and likened Trump to a Biblical figure.
Last year, on the Christian show FlashPoint, TV evangelist Hank Kunneman described “a battle between good and evil”, adding: “There’s something on President Trump that the enemy fears: it’s called the anointing.”
Jim Caviezel, an actor who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, proclaimed, albeit jokingly, that Trump was “the new Moses”. Then, in the months leading up to the election, many of his supporters referred to him as a “saviour”.
The question is why. What makes so many see this man, who isn’t known to have an especially strong faith, as sent from God?
And what does that say about Christianity more broadly in a country where the numbers of churchgoers is in rapid decline?
Reverend Franklin Graham is one of America’s best-known evangelists and the son of Billy Graham, arguably its most famous preacher. He is one of the Trump believers, convinced there is no doubt that the president-elect was chosen for this mission by God.
“The bullet that went through his ear missed his brain by a millimetre, and his head turned just at the last second when the gun was fired,” he says. “I believe that God turned his head and saved his life.”
The questions asked about Trump’s character – including accusations of sexual misconduct, and his alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels and associated hush-money trial – don’t dim Mr Graham’s view.
“Remember when Jesus told the crowd, ‘Let the one without sin cast the first stone’ and that slowly, the entire audience began to disappear? All of us have sinned.”