45 miles north of Pittsburgh

Last week, whenever anyone asked me where I live, I typically responded, “45 miles north of Pittsburgh.”

By 8 p.m. on Saturday, I found myself a resident of the most famous county in the world. Ten miles from where I am sitting now, a 20-year-old attempted to take the life of Donald Trump at a rally. For the time being, everybody knows where Butler County, Pa., is.

It is odd to be so close to a moment in history, but it is also important to set that moment in context. Political assassinations are as old as politics itself. The histories of Greece, Rome, and, indeed, even the Old Testament kingdom narratives are not exceptional in this regard. And the modern age has produced enough of them. The Kennedy murders of the 1960s still loom large in the American mind. And if Charles de Gaulle died while watching television, it was not because of the lack of effort by his enemies to have him dispatched somewhat earlier and much more violently. Indeed, the last three decades in the West have arguably been the exception for their lack of assassins. Not yet 60, I can recall the deaths of Aldo Moro and Olaf Palme, the shooting of Ronald Reagan, and the Brighton Hotel bombing of the U.K. Conservative Party Conference in 1984. And it seemed at one point in the 1970s that everyone was trying to assassinate Gerald Ford. One early memory is asking my father if “Squeaky Fromme” was a cartoon character. The comparative lack of assassinations over recent decades could well be the result of better security procedures rather than a sea change in the nature of politics itself.

Yes, the highly charged rhetoric from the online radicals on both right and left has been nauseating now for the longest time, but the demonization of opponents is nothing new. Read the speeches of Cicero. And Winston Churchill likened the Labour Party of 1945 to the Gestapo, a comparison about as inflammatory as one could imagine in that day. Rhetoric is rhetoric, and the twisted fantasies of power it can be used to express are typically only put into action by those who are already unhinged. Christians, of course, need always to speak and write in a way that honors Christ, but angry tweets do not by themselves assassins make. Thus, the question of whether the would-be assassin is a particular product of this political moment or just a random psychopath who happened to breach security will only become clear, if at all, over time.

For me, the proximity of the act brought home not the unique nastiness of our political moment, despite the hype, but on the contrary, the universal truth of the human condition as it touches on politics: The politics and the politicians of this world are as ephemeral as the world itself.

Mediated through television and the internet, our politicians are celebrities. They loom larger than life. They often have a messianic, almost immortal quality. They seem to exist in a world where most of us have no access, a parallel universe of invulnerability and power. But when one of them comes inches from death just a few miles from your front door in a field you have driven past countless times, their flesh-and-blood existence—and their flesh-and-blood vulnerability—is impossible to avoid. The distant world of the celebrity and the local world of my neighbor came together on Saturday. I know people who attended the rally. I know others who were going to attend but decided at the last minute to stay home. The man who was tragically killed could have been somebody whose company I had enjoyed. And at that moment, the specious promises—and threats—of earthly leaders were put into eternal perspective. They are as weak and frail as the rest of us.

The psalmist tells us to put not our trust in princes. That can be hard to obey in times of cultural chaos and especially during a presidential election touted by all sides (as every presidential election in my 23 years in the United States has been touted) as the most consequential, make-or-break election in history, upon which the very future of civilization depends. But the awful events of Saturday remind us that this statement is true, not merely because our leaders are limited and flawed but also because, like the grass and the flowers of the field, they can pass in the twinkling of an eye. Only the Lord and the Word of the Lord remain forever.