After the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the candidate declared, “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.”

Trump’s acolytes agreed. Franklin Graham credited “God’s hand of protection” to spare the life of the former president, and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida concurred, “God protected President Trump.”

Not to be outdone, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina assured the Republican National Convention that Trump enjoyed divine favor. “Our God still saves, our God still delivers,” he said, “because on Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle. But an American lion got back up on his feet, and he roared.”

In accepting his party’s nomination, Trump himself declared, “I had God on my side,” as the delegates roared in agreement. “I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God,” he added. “Many people say it was a providential moment.”

No decent person begrudges the Almighty for diverting a bullet to spare Trump’s life, although it does raise awkward questions about the fate of Corey Comperatore, the firefighter killed in the failed assassination attempt, not to mention the hundreds of schoolchildren mowed down in mass shootings in recent years.

It would be irresponsible, even cruel, to suggest that the shooter, a Republican, was part of a conspiracy to boost Trump’s popularity, but as polls indicate, becoming a near-martyr has its political benefits, especially when you’re trying to burnish your credentials as a messianic figure. Trump’s favorability ratings have risen since the shooting in Pennsylvania.

But the effort to anoint Donald Trump as a messiah has been brewing for a long time.

“God bless Donald Trump,” Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, said in 2016, and James Dobson, then head of Focus on the Family, declared Trump “a baby Christian.”

That same year, Franklin Graham announced that his support for Trump was not about the candidate. “I’m here running a campaign for God.”

Apparently, it’s easy to confuse the two.

Following the election, Graham said that Trump’s victory in 2016 was a sign of “God’s hand at work.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, then Trump’s press secretary and now governor of Arkansas, concurred. “I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times,” Sanders told David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network. “And I think he wanted Donald Trump to become president and that’s why he’s there.”

To be fair, this is not the first time that the Republican Party has anointed a political messiah. In 1980, leaders of the Religious Right chose Ronald Reagan, a divorced and remarried former actor from Hollywood, not known to evangelicals as a province of piety. Despite the fact that as governor of California, Reagan had signed into law the most liberal abortion bill in the country, the Religious Right preferred Reagan to Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher.

Although Reagan disappointed leaders of the Religious Right by not prosecuting their agenda as vigorously as he had promised, he was still a decent man and a serviceable messiah.

Trump’s messianism, however, needed a boost. When critics pointed out that 81% of white evangelicals had embraced a thrice-married self-confessed sexual predator, Religious Right leaders shrugged and came up with the Cyrus defense.

Although these same voices had argued “character matters” in opposition to Bill Clinton, they reversed course for Trump, who is now a convicted felon. They compared him with Cyrus the Great in the Hebrew Bible, the Persian king who freed Jewish captives in Babylonia and allowed them to return to their homeland.

Trump’s questionable morals in this analogy are irrelevant to their calculus. Yes, Trump may have a history of philandering and has clearly broken a majority of the Ten Commandments that the Religious Right want to post in public school classrooms, especially the one about bearing false witness. But he speaks the same vocabulary of victimization that evangelical leaders use to describe themselves.

It’s an improbable alliance, to be sure. But the shooting in Pennsylvania, when according to Tim Scott the devil showed up with a rifle, may have finalized Trump’s coronation as messiah, the chosen one.

Randall Balmer, a professor at Dartmouth College, is the author of “Saving Faith: How American Christianity Can Reclaim Its Prophetic Voice.”