Luigi Mangione and the Spiral of Violence
How Should Christians Respond?
The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson two weeks ago, and the subsequent manhunt in pursuit of his killer, Luigi Mangione, brought out startling reactions from Americans. On the one hand, many expressed sympathy with Mangione, who apparently acted in vengeance for cases in which health insurance companies deny coverage to patients suffering from debilitating medical conditions. On social media, people shared their own examples of being denied coverage and data about the percentage of insurance claims denied by the major health insurance companies, including UnitedHealthcare. During the manhunt, Mangione (whose identity was then unknown to the public) was compared to criminal folk heroes like Robin Hood and Bonnie and Clyde. After Mangione was captured as a result of a tip from a McDonald’s employee in Pennsylvania, reviewers on Yelp bombarded that McDonald’s location with negative reviews. Thompson’s murder brought to the surface a palpable anger at the for-profit health insurance industry among a significant portion of the population at large. There are powerful reasons to be angry at the American health care system, but violence will not address those real injustices.
On the other hand, others reacted to the crime with a horror wildly out of sync with American culture’s typically blasé attitude toward gun violence. For example, writing at The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance argued that Thompson’s murder represented a “blinking-and-blaring warning signal” that American society is approaching what she calls “decivilization,” a state in which society breaks down into more widespread violence and social distrust. It’s hard to see why this particular act of violence serves as a warning signal, rather than, say, the murder of 23 people in an El Paso Walmart by a shooter motivated by white nationalist ideology in 2019, the regular school shootings that take place in our country (including one just this week), or even the dozens of gun deaths (excluding suicides) that occur every day in the United States. Indeed, LaFrance admits that the shooting takes place against the backdrop of a culture “already too inured to bloodshed and the conditions that exacerbate it,” but then how is Thompson’s death a turning point?
In response to Thompson’s shooting, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she would consider the creation of a “hotline” where CEOs could report security threats, a proposal discussed this past Tuesday with “175 corporate representatives, state Homeland Security, counterterrorism officials, and private security teams,” according to WBLS, a New York radio station. Although the initiative was incorrectly mocked as a hotline to help CEOs “feel safe,” the potential devotion of such significant government resources to address the security of a particular class of people suggests that it wasn’t the “brutality” of Thompson’s murder that was particularly “shocking”, to use LaFrance’s words, but rather the fact that it demonstrated that corporate CEOs could be the victims of violence precisely because they are CEOs, the same way school children or immigrants can be the victims of violence because of who they are. The murder wasn’t a harbinger of coming pervasive violence, which is already reality, but rather a shock to the cultural ethos of American-style capitalism. I think this conclusion is reinforced by Mangione’s outsized law enforcement escort as he was extradited to New York; a handcuffed Mangione can be seen escorted by more than twenty heavily armed, and in some cases armored, law enforcement personnel, as well as New York Mayor Eric Adams. The entourage perhaps suggests the perception that Mangione is a threat to the “system,” despite posing no more violent threat to the public at large than any other captured murder.
How should Christians think about all this? Theologian
has written one response for his own Substack newsletter, Epistles from Babylon. Although unlike Barringer I’m not a pacifist, I guess I am close enough to one that I agree with most of what he has to say. In a key passage, he writes:We don’t have to choose between condemning violence and acknowledging the structural evils that give rise to it. Both are true. Mangione’s act of killing cannot be justified, but neither can the systemic violence that denies people basic healthcare and drives them to despair. We cannot allow ourselves to be manipulated into thinking it’s an either/or.
Barringer notes what many others have suggested, as well, that the U.S. health care system embodies a certain type of violence that deprives people of the medical attention they need and would receive in a more just society.
I think he also insightfully points out that sympathy for Mangione’s violent act (and not just his cause) reflects the appeal, and also the folly, of the “myth of redemptive violence,” the idea that violence can save us from injustice or restore right order to society. Barringer calls on Christians to resist both physical violence, like Thompson’s murder, and systemic forms of violence like the lack of affordable health care.
I think Barringer’s argument can be complemented by Dom Hélder Câmara’s short 1971 book The Spiral of Violence. Câmara was the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil from 1964 to 1985, which included that country’s time under the rule of a military dictatorship. A supporter of liberation theology, he was an outspoken critic of the regime.
In The Spiral of Violence, Câmara argues that the extreme poverty found in Latin America and other parts of the world which had inspired revolutionary violence was itself a form of violence, even the more basic form of violence. Poverty is a form of violence because it is not an accident of nature but rather the result of the deliberate choices of those who have the power to shape the institutions and structures that contribute to poverty.
Câmara goes further than Barringer, adding that revolutionary violence in turn engenders a third form of violence, the repressive violence of the state: “When conflict comes out into the streets . . . the authorities consider themselves obliged to preserve or reestablish public order, even if this means using force.” Of course, one of the most important purposes of the state is to preserve public order, but Câmara’s point is that this repressive violence is used not just to respond to revolutionary violence, but to quell the demand for justice itself. It also escalates to extreme forms such as torture.
By distinguishing systemic or structural violence from revolutionary violence, Câmara’s point is not to justify the latter. Rather, as the title of the book suggests, he claims that all three forms of violence are part of a spiral of violence. It is the responsibility of Christians to break from this spiral of violence. In particular, he advocates for nonviolent forms of resistance to oppression inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Interestingly, Câmara points out that it is often not the poor themselves, or at least not solely the poor, who engage in revolutionary violence; in many cases, it is young people whose consciences are moved by injustice. In the end, he calls on these young people to turn to nonviolence as a way to respond to the promptings of their conscience while breaking free from the spiral of violence.
I have two reservations about interpreting Mangione’s actions and the responses to them through the lens of Câmara’s ideas. First, when talking about systemic violence, Câmara was describing widespread, extreme poverty, a situation not directly comparable to the U.S. health care system. For example, two thirds of Americans report being satisfied with their health insurance coverage, and the number of people completely uninsured has declined by almost half since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, falling from 15.5 percent in that year to 8 percent in 2023. That being said, that 8 percent represents 25 million Americans without health coverage, and even when coverage is available, it is often inadequate or places huge financial burdens on individuals and families, as the editors at Commonweal describe in their recent editorial on the issue.
Second, Mangione’s murder of Thompson is, arguably, not really an act of revolutionary violence. It was carried out by a lone actor who had given very little thought to how his action would bring about change. As LaFrance rightly points out in her article in The Atlantic, however, it is possible that Mangione’s actions may inspire further, sporadic acts of violence; she argues that violence has a tendency to “snowball,” although she adds that it often loses its clarity of purpose in the process.
To conclude, I also want to point out that Barringer’s argument that we should reject the “either/or” of either justifying Mangione’s violence or defending the health care status quo should not be understood as a weak condemnation of “both sides” that fails to muster a response to the injustices involved. As Barringer himself adds, as Christians, our responsibility is not just to resist violence, but “we are called to imagine and embody a justice that restores rather than destroys, a justice that heals rather than harms.” Our belief in human dignity, that we are each created in the image of God, is what leads us to reject both forms of violence, but also what leads us to work toward a more just health care system.
Of Interest…
A few weeks ago, I called on the US Catholic bishops to be prepared for some of the policies President Elect Donald Trump has promised to implement starting in January, including a plan for the “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants. As I later noted, the bishops did offer some firm statements at their annual fall meeting on the need to protect immigrants. Writing at America, theologian Kristin Heyer raises similar concerns, but more importantly she points out that the Catholic imagination should look at the phenomenon of migration differently than what she calls the dominant “scripts” of today’s political discourse, which primarily see migrants as economic or cultural threats. Appealing to the Scriptures and the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching, she argues that we should express solidarity with migrants and refugees concretely reflected in Pope Francis’s call for us to “welcome, protect, promote, and integrate.” Drawing on her own scholarly work, she also analyzes how our current immigration system can be interpreted through the lens of the theological notion of structural, or social, sin.
In an article in US Catholic magazine, which unfortunately was not published online until the day of the election (!), I summarized the arguments Catholics might consider for and against voting for a third-party candidate in this year’s election, or in any election. I ultimately argued, however, that it was up to each person’s conscience to decide how to vote. Writing in America, Phillip Hicks makes an argument in support of voting for a third party more consistent with Catholic social teaching. In particular, he makes the case for the American Solidarity Party, of which he is a local official. He argues that a third-party vote is not “wasted” just because the candidate will inevitably lose; the vote serves as a protest against the two major parties and exposes others to alternative ideas that may then become more widespread. He also calls on the US bishops to make it clearer in future versions of their voting document, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, that Catholics can rightly consider the option of voting for a third-party candidate. I support this latter argument. I consider the pros and cons of a “protest” vote in US Catholic.
Coming Soon…
Earlier this month, Pope Francis gave an address on the nature of theology at an international conference at the Pontifical Lateran University on the theme of “The Future of Theology: Legacy and Imagination.” Francis’s remark that “An all-male theology is an incomplete theology” has perhaps garnered the most attention, but he raised several themes. As soon as I get a chance, I will offer some reflections on this recent address. Late last year, I also commented on his apostolic letter Ad Theologiam Promovendam, which provided a more thorough account of Francis’s vision for theology. Those commentaries can be found here and here.