How could 41 percent of Americans support—or at least not condemn—the cold-blooded murder of Brian Thompson? When Luigi Mangione gunned down the UnitedHealthcare CEO in broad daylight this December, the response was chilling. Young Americans, in particular, celebrated. Among voters aged 18-29, a staggering 67 percent were either ambivalent about or supportive of the assassination. The killer became a social media celebrity, his face projected at concerts, his image plastered on merchandise.
The question haunts us: How could so many Americans cheer the execution of an innocent man?
The answer lies in a fundamental teaching about wisdom found in the Hebrew Bible.
“The beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord,” declares King Solomon in Proverbs 9:10. The Hebrew word for “beginning” —reishit—reveals the depth of this teaching. As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explains, reishit doesn’t just mean the starting point, but also the essential foundation, the core principle that makes everything else possible. Without fear of the Lord—without recognition that there is a divine moral authority higher than human judgment—there can be no true wisdom. All knowledge built without this foundation becomes distorted, even dangerous.
We see this principle’s devastating absence in the academic responses to Thompson’s murder. Columbia University Professor Anthony Zenkus was dismissive in his response to the murder, saying he would only mourn Thompson after “mourning the deaths of nearly 700,000 other people who have died in the past 10 years alone because of private health insurance.” Professor Julia Alekseyeva at the University of Pennsylvania celebrated the killer as “the icon we all need and deserve.” These weren’t uneducated reactions—they came from society’s intellectual elite. But their education, divorced from biblical foundations, left them celebrating murder in the name of justice.
The Hebrew prophets warned about exactly this kind of moral inversion.
Isaiah cried out against those “who call evil good and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). But he didn’t just condemn this confusion—he diagnosed its root cause. The following verse describes those who are wise in their own eyes. When human wisdom becomes untethered from divine truth, moral clarity dissolves into relativism.
This explains the disturbing poll numbers. Among younger Americans—shaped by an educational system that systematically excludes biblical wisdom—support for the assassination was highest. Their sophisticated university education taught them to analyze power structures and critique systemic inequalities. But without the foundation of divine wisdom, they lost the ability to recognize basic moral truths: that murder is wrong, that vigilante justice perverts true justice, that human life is sacred regardless of one’s political views.
The Washington Post faced fierce backlash when it dared to call the celebration of Thompson’s death a “sickness.” Nearly 12,000 subscribers protested, with many arguing that morality itself was merely a luxury of the wealthy. “Morality is only for the wealthiest class,” wrote one reader, echoing the materialist philosophy that has replaced biblical wisdom in much of academia. But this is precisely what moral sickness looks like: when basic ethical principles are dismissed as mere privileges of the wealthy, rather than recognized as divine imperatives binding on all humanity.
Without biblical foundations, even our most educated citizens lose the ability to make basic moral distinctions. Their education, impressive as it might be in technical matters, leaves them unable to recognize the fundamental difference between justice and revenge, between legitimate protest and cold-blooded murder.
America faces a choice. We can continue down the current path, in which we banish the Bible from schools and deny its teachings to American children, producing graduates who cannot distinguish between justice and revenge, between righteous anger and mere bloodlust. Or we can restore biblical wisdom to its rightful place at the center of education and public life. Only by rebuilding this foundation—by teaching again that there are moral truths higher than human judgment—can we recover the moral clarity we’ve lost.
The celebration of Thompson’s murder isn’t just a political crisis or a social media phenomenon. It’s the inevitable result of removing God’s wisdom from our schools and universities. Until we bring the Bible back to the center of American education, no amount of ethical debate or policy discussion will restore our moral compass.
The blood of Brian Thompson, like that of Abel, cries out from the ground. The question is whether Americans still have ears to hear it.
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