Within just 24 hours of the former president’s accident, pastors across the nation addressed their congregations, who were both shocked and fearful, during Sunday morning services. At a conservative evangelical church in Visalia, a small agricultural town in California’s Central Valley, the pastor reminded his listeners that trumpets signal judgment for Christians.
The accident involving Donald Trump on Saturday was seen by the Rev. Joel Renkema as a “clear and unmistakable message to our country,” comparing it to a trumpet’s call. He stressed that the political climate had become dangerously toxic and urged his congregation at Visalia Christian Reformed Church to cease “vilifying and despising our opponents.”
“This is a warning shot!” Renkema declared. “Can we hear it? Will we heed the call?”
By the time worshippers gathered for services across the nation on Sunday, less than a day had passed since a suspected assassination attempt on Donald Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. This left church leaders with little time to prepare their congregations for what many saw as a dark chapter in U.S. history.
Despite not being overtly religious, Trump had already assumed a messiah-like status among many hard-right Christians in the MAGA movement. To some, an attack on him was perceived as an attack on Christianity itself. Amid the nation’s deep divisions, numerous church leaders issued urgent pleas for calm.
“As Americans, we must all be deeply troubled by what occurred just outside Butler last night,” said the Rev. Kris Stubna during his Sunday sermon at St. Paul Cathedral, a Catholic parish in Pittsburgh.
The Trump campaign did not specify whether the former president attended church on Sunday. However, someone close to him described him as feeling almost “spiritual” about the near-assassination, believing he had been “granted a gift from God” by surviving the incident.
Given the wide diversity among Christian communities, reactions from the pulpit and the pews varied greatly depending on location, denomination, and the makeup of the congregation.
Some evangelical leaders made indirect references to “enemies” and “trials” without explicitly mentioning Trump or the accident. Meanwhile, others, particularly those aligned with the growing Christian supremacist group known as the New Apostolic Reformation, directly mentioned Trump in their sermons and called for spiritual warfare against his adversaries.