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This essay was prompted by the assassination of the CEO of United Health Care Insurance.
Killing
A hot ethical issue as 2025 begins is killing, causing the death of another person. With many other viewers, I follow a popular genre on streaming TV called “true crime” revolving around murders and their investigations. “Cold cases,” long- unsolved homicides, “serial killers,” and “parricide,” the killing of parents or siblings, are of special interest. Murder as an intentional, premeditated killing is a crime, an offense against public standards codified as law, punishable by death, life without parole, or some lesser punishment. Some jurisdictions allow capital punishment as the fitting penalty for murder; others forbid executions as cruel, inhumane, and degrading punishment, as murder committed by the state. Distinctions are drawn: was it a “cold-blooded,” unfeeling, execution-style act? Was it a “crime of passion” or opportunity? Was it motivated by love or lust, revenge or anger, hatred or greed? Had the murderer suffered a violent childhood?
Drama and literature from Shakespeare to Dostoevsky to Scott Turow and Louise Penny have given us profound thoughts and questions about murder. Modern entertainments and pop culture continue these ethical inquiries. In the film, The Unforgiven (1992), a teenager has killed a man for no reason. Munny, the experienced gunman played by Clint Eastwood, tells him, “It's a hell of a thing, ain't it, killin' a man. You take everythin' he's got... an' everythin' he's ever gonna have.” The kid says, “Well, I gu-guess they had it... comin'.” Munny tells him “We all got it comin', Kid.” The main character in the televised series, Evil (2020-2024, season 2, episode 6), is a woman psychologist who kills a serial killer who threatens her and her children. A detective who knows her and the situation says, “What happened...was justice.... Some people deserve to die. Cops know that better than anyone.” Later she makes an emotional confession to a priest. This takes place within the story of a White cop acquitted of killing a Black woman because he believes she has a gun, but she did not. Justice does not look kindly on evil, but evil often wins. Sometimes evil acts bring justice, but killing is hard even on the killer.
Defense and War
Killing is accepted and allowed by just about everyone under certain circumstances. Self-defense or the defense of innocents is often allowed by the law or the courts. Probably most people would justify killing in cases of personal and national defense. War declared by a nation legalizes murder by its citizens when they serve as soldiers, and such service in the military is seen as honorable. But many wars have been fought for land, treasure, and the increase of power over others. Significantly, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914, triggered World War I because of alliances among the nations of Europe at the time.
A decision to go to war or not has distressed many leaders. Some have chosen not to engage an enemy because of the unknown, unintended consequences of such action. Obama’s reluctance to enter the Syrian conflict is a recent example. Other leaders have declared war to use the resulting patriotism to boost political support. Several U.S. Presidents have been accused of “wagging the dog” by using invasions, missile strikes, or air strikes to divert attention away from political problems. Assassination is a feature of “hybrid warfare” today. Russia has assassinated individual citizens who have opposed the government at home and abroad; China claims assassination as a legitimate tactic, and India has been accused of assassinations in Pakistan, Canada, and the US.
Some argue that a particular war is unjust; others declare that all war is wrong and never justified. Some governments make exception for those who are against war and killing by allowing “conscientious objection.” I claimed such objection to the American war in Vietnam. On the other hand, an assassin may reason that if the state can execute its enemies and ask its citizens to kill in war, he or she is justified in using violence to achieve justice. The most famous political assassination is probably that of Julius Caesar, killed because he had become a tyrant. But his death brought about the further destruction of representative democracy in Rome, and the establishment of even worse tyrants.
In the US the most famous historical assassination was of Abraham Lincoln. Timothy McVeigh, when arrested for bombing a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, wore a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis” (“thus always to tyrants”). John Wilkes Booth shouted these words after he shot President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, quoting the same words Brutus is supposed to have said after he and his friends murdered Julius Caesar. Matthew Alan Livelsberger, who exploded a truck in Las Vegas January 1, 2025, left behind writings about his view that the US was collapsing and the need to purge Washington DC of Democrats. False conspiracy theories are an increasing motivation for terror bombings and assassinations.
The Assassin As Hero
The folk hero of the day is Luigi Mangione, the handsome, well-educated man who assassinated Brian Thompson, CEO of United Health Care, presumably for denying health care claims from a back injury. I join many thousands who reluctantly sympathize with Luigi because we view the insurance industry as unfeeling and uncaring intermediaries standing between the medical profession and the public they serve. Some have even lionized him on social media, treating him as a Robin Hood-like hero, but such assassinations are still murder and may change little or nothing.
Horrified leaders of the insurance industry, supported by those in the legal and political systems, object that such violence solves nothing and is always wrong. They label such violence vigilantism, terrorism, and revolutionary behavior. Vigilantes enforce laws, find facts, decide guilt or innocence, sentence, and even execute those accused and found guilty entirely outside of established judicial and legal systems, without authorization by anyone but themselves. Such unregulated law and order breaks the law and disturbs the civil peace so that citizens cannot know what is the law or expect it to be fair and just. Terrorists commit violent acts in order to instill fear among the populace, who, without protection, will surrender governance to them. Revolutionaries commit violence in order to bring down an existing government, which they believe to be unjust and oppressive, in order to establish a new one, which they believe will be more fair and just than the one overthrown.
Assassination
“Assassination” is the targeted killing of a prominent, public person in government, politics, the press, or even entertainment. In 2022 a man called the police to confess that he was at the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanagh, with homicidal and suicidal thoughts. He said, “I was under the delusion that I could make the world a better place by killing him.” Because we might oppose or applaud the motivation behind any assassination, we need to ask if this motive was “a delusion.” I remember viscerally the deaths of JFK (1963), Malcolm X (1965), MLK, Jr. (1968), and Bobby Kennedy (1968), all people I admired. Others disliked them intensely. Such events are shocking at the time and raise fears about the immediate future, but these events recede in memory and are remembered with less outrage as time passes.
Computer searches reveal that assassinations in my lifetime were more numerous and perhaps more significant than I realized previously. A first search found 130 important, world-changing assassinations in the years before my birth, 35 significant, global attacks since my birth, and at least 15 political killings worldwide thus far in 2024. Wikipedia lists 112 assassinations in the history of the United States, but lynchings are not included, perhaps because few were of prominent persons. The sheer length and breadth of these lists disturb me. Further searches produce longer lists of assassinations and attempted assassinations within the United States and by the United States. The number of homicides (approximately 25,000 homicides in 2022) that could be classified as assassinations is not known. Many of the approximately 12,000 hate crimes in 2023 possibly were assassinations or attempted assassinations. We might think assassinations are rare, but they are a fact of life in our nation and in the world.
Assassins desire not only the end of the target’s life, but great change resulting from their removal from the world stage. While the search for the truth behind the JFK assassination is continually in the news, the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in 1944 is of greatest concern to me and to many others today. Actually, there were at least 42 plots to kill Hitler by members of the military and civilian resistance, in efforts to stop the war, the monstrous killing of millions in concentration camps, and the destruction of Germany. Many were and are convinced that the death of Hitler would have brought about an earlier end to the war, but this cannot be known. Hitler survived every plot including the famous “Valkyrie” plot. Nearly 5,000 were executed by the Nazis in retaliation.
When Is Assassination the Solution?
The question for all social justice activists of the left and the right through the centuries has been: when if ever is it legitimate, acceptable, or even needful to assassinate a public figure, official, or national leader? We may see the killing of George Tiller, a legal abortionist, or Martin Luther King, Jr., a civil rights and anti-war leader, as evil, but their assassins did not. Many opposed to assassination believe that such violence is never the answer to political disputes or issues of justice. They believe that all caring and careful people should work for changes in systems, but let political and judicial processes work themselves out. In this moral dilemma, pesky unknown, unintended consequences are reasons to stand down, while the death of innocents by the targeted person is reason to move forward. Still, assassination is murder; an assassin must accept responsibility for the act of murder, whether it is justified or not.
Religious belief and philosophical principles are key to ethical decision-making. I opposed the war in Vietnam because of a commitment to the teachings of Jesus. I concluded that there were causes worth dying for, but few if any worth killing for. I was alarmed that I was expected to kill on command someone I did not know for dubious reasons. Refusing to comply with a government-issued draft order was, for many young men like myself, a major means of resistance to that war, although some told me that by refusing to go, I was sending someone else, perhaps to die.
The Common “Bonhoeffer Moment”
Some Christians and others today and in the past have debated whether a particular US President is a tyrant and when assassination might be appropriate to stop him. The assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy were political in motivation, but each killing was motivated by an element of religious fervor or strong philosophical belief. The question for some Christians today is when and how can we know that we are in a “Bonhoeffer moment,” commonly understood as a time of crisis calling for violent action to stop or prevent evil. They speak of that moment as the turning point when someone decides it is better to commit evil than to allow greater evil.
For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian, that moment began to form when he publicly denounced Hitler the day Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933. With that denunciation he became a central figure in the “Young Reformation Movement” which later that year became the “Confessing Church,” opposed to cooperation with the Nazis. In April he delivered a speech titled The Church and the Jewish Question, in which he challenged the new prohibition on the baptism of Jews. There he wrote that the church could respond in three ways: challenge the state regarding the legality of their demands, help those hurt by state actions, and third to act directly by “putting a spoke in the wheel” of the system which was running over people.
He rebelled by founding an underground seminary in faraway Finkenwalde, but it was closed by the Nazis in August 1937, endangering his colleagues and students. Bonhoeffer’s decisive moment may be said to have arrived in February1938 when his brother-in-law introduced him to a group planning the assassination of Hitler. Or in 1939, when he sailed to the US to give lectures but returned a month later on the last ship to Germany, because, he said, “I will have no right to participate in the re-establishment of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share this time of trial with my people.” Or it may have been in 1940 when he won appointment to the Abwehr, military intelligence, where he was expected to spy on his church friends in and outside Germany, but instead used his position to smuggle Jews to Switzerland. In April 1943 he was arrested, and while writing his book, Ethics, he lied to his captors because he had determined that it was not wrong to misdirect those who do evil.
Bonhoeffer’s life was complex with many contradictions. Bonhoeffer may have joined the Abwehr partly to avoid conscription, as I was accused of claiming conscientious objection to avoid the draft. In his 1933 speech on The Church and the Jewish Question, his anger may have been rooted in his continuing belief that Jews should convert to Christianity, which the Nazis prevented by prohibiting their baptism. Bonhoeffer was not reared in the church; he was the only one in his family to have interest in the church or theology; his family was intellectual, elitist and secular. He was not ordained until his return from the US in 1931, and his only work in churches was brief, as a university student chaplain and as a teacher of a confirmation class in a parish in Berlin. His book, Life Together, shows that he seems to have thought of his small group studies and discussions, and later his seminary, as his church.
Bonhoeffer was a committed Christian pacifist who joined a group plotting to kill Hitler. I infer the following ethical principles and questions from his writings and imagine he may have made his decision to participate in or support the assassination plot accordingly:
1. Does the political leader demand publicly that his enemies be killed?
2. Does he imprison, harm, or torture his enemies?
3. Does he order the murder of his enemies?
4. Do the actions of the leader directly threaten the existence of ethnic groups or other states?
5. Do his actions directly threaten the future of civilization itself?
From 1933 onward, Bonhoeffer was increasingly able to answer “yes” to these questions.
The True Bonhoeffer Moment
I now see that the true “Bonhoeffer moment” is not the one that moves us to stand against evil by committing evil. Others who were executed for participating in the same or similar plots are not given the attention we give to Bonhoeffer. The difference must be that he was a more prominent Christian and writer, whose intellectual struggle became better known than others. And he stood out because his conclusions were radical and ahead of the time.
This leads me to think that Bonhoeffer’s real moment of truth was when he most fully understood that the old religion, which allowed itself to be enlisted in the service of evil, was over and past, when he came to believe that all religion must involve “responsible action,” and that what remains of Christianity is“religionless.” His earlier book, The Cost of Discipleship, had presented Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), as a call to an active ethic of choice and decision. From his Letters and Papers from Prison we learn that he moved from thinking of Christian faith as belief in doctrines to an understanding that faith is one’s response in situations demanding action, even when we cannot know for sure that our action is right.
Studying science, he had learned that the world had “come of age,” so that God cannot be the stand-in for what we do not yet know (“the God of the gaps”). The church could no longer be a mediating authority between us and God, and God could no longer be seen as separate from the world but fully in the world, in us. Bonhoeffer’s truth was that we must live in this world as it is, and take responsibility for the world and ourselves by responding as best we can to each challenge put before us.
Bonhoeffer seems to have given up on the institutional church, its traditions, and some of its teachings, but he did not give up his basic, pietistic belief in the crucified Jesus and the risen Christ. He did not give up his Lutheran “theology of the cross” in contrast to a God of glory. We may not be Lutherans or pietists, but the symbol of the crucifixion of an innocent retains its power. Bonhoeffer’s beliefs changed and we are reminded of Samuel Johnson’s famous quote, "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Christ for Bonhoeffer became more clearly the one who suffers, perhaps not “for us,” not on our behalf as the Son of God, but in the ways we all suffer, especially like those who suffer unjustly under oppression.
He famously said, "Before God, and with God, we live without God," which I take to mean that new language is needed to express Christian faith and ethics, and what we mean when we name God or speak of divinity or Providence. One of Bonhoeffer’s attempts at this was to call Christ “the man for others” by his values and personal example and integrity, not by myth or divine interference. Christ had become for Bonhoeffer the historical Jesus, and the symbol both for the humanity of God and the possibility of the experience of the divine in human life.
Our pivotal moments are when we think and decide for ourselves, and refuse to leave this work for someone else or to chance. I have moments of despair and anger when I want to see persons in power who support or commit great injustices removed by any means. But Jesus suggested that my hatred makes me guilty of killing without having actually killed anyone (Mt 5:21-22). I know that I am capable of killing, which proves the Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity (without the notion of original sin), but I doubt that I could actually kill anyone, partly because I would not want anyone to kill me (yet another Jesus reference). I admit also that I am a coward and hypocrite when I approve and celebrate someone else doing evil that I will not do myself.
If a nation’s leader starts killing people, does assassination become acceptable? If so such an assassination would benefit from the wisdom of a group in order to avoid the act being by a mentally unstable lone wolf. A member of such a group might still claim to be a pacifist, because the act is done to save others. This was Bonhoeffer’s situation, not unlike Caesar’s attackers. And so the question remains: if all five of Bonhoeffer’s questions can be answered in the affirmative, then is the one who does not kill him less guilty than the one who does? And is assassination an ethical imperative in that situation?
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Many of us were introduced to Bonhoeffer in Honest to God by John A.T. Robinson (1963), then reading The Cost of Discipleship, Letters and Papers from Prison, and Ethics by Bonhoeffer. I have immersed myself in Bonhoeffer again the past four years. He has been called the most popular religious person today. Numerous books, films, websites, classes, and video discussions about him may be found online. ChatGPT tells me that “an exact count of books written about Bonhoeffer is challenging due to the extensive literature.” The complete and annotated Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works are now available from the International Bonhoeffer Society and its English Language Section.
