How do we preach about a vigilante murder?
As preachers consider their response to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a sermon from the Gilded Age might guide the way.
On December 4, a masked shooter killed Brian Thompson, chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, in Midtown Manhattan. The shooting, coupled with the discovery of bullet casings at the scene with the words delay, deny, and depose on them, prompted an online frenzy. New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufecki details the celebratory public response in the days after the shooting, from viral posts delighting in the killing to rage-filled posts describing the agony caused by health insurance companies. Observing that never before has social media so openly celebrated a murder in the United States, Tufecki suggests parallels to the public discontent and political violence characteristic of the Gilded Age in the late 19th century. Following the discovery that the alleged killer was carrying a two-page document protesting the healthcare industry, the conversation is far from over. The document includes the words, “These parasites had it coming.”
It is difficult to know how to preach after an event like this, a horrific killing that reveals and lacerates an already deep, seeping wound. But this is not the first time preachers have been challenged to offer a word in the aftermath of a public killing imbued with the symbolic weight of public outrage at an unjust system.
On September 15, 1901, Methodist minister and labor activist Harry F. Ward took to the pulpit of 47th Street Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago. The day before, President William McKinley had died as a result of a shooting by anarchist and laborer Leon Czolgosz. Ward, who would later become the first national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union, devoted his entire life’s work to economic justice, fair working conditions, and the advancement of the social gospel. The sermon he preached the day after McKinley’s death—a transcript of which is held in the Burke Library Archives at Union Theological Seminary—is instructive for us today.
