The Brett Kavanaugh Assassination Plot and What Justice Demands of Christians
A sentence has been handed down. Eight years in federal prison for a woman who plotted to kill a sitting Supreme Court Justice. Prosecutors, unsatisfied, are pushing for more. And in the space between those two positions — the sentence and the push to extend it — lies a profound and necessary conversation about justice, mercy, and the irreducible sanctity of human life.
This is not a partisan story. Strip away the names, the ideological coordinates, the noise of the culture war — and what remains is something ancient and terrifying. A human being made a plan to end another human being's life. Not in a moment of passion. A plot. Deliberate. Calculated. That distinction matters enormously, and it matters first to God before it matters to any court.
Political Violence Is Not a New Temptation
The desire to destroy an opponent — to remove them not through argument but through force — is as old as Cain. What has changed is the cultural permission structure around that desire. When political opponents are systematically dehumanized, when rhetoric frames ideological disagreement as existential evil, the distance between hateful thought and violent action begins to collapse. We should not be surprised when someone finally walks across that distance. We should be grieved. We should be warned.
The Christian tradition has always understood this dynamic. The tongue — and by extension, the culture that shapes what tongues say publicly — has the power of life and death. Proverbs does not speak metaphorically when it says so. Words form the architecture of action. A society that routinely traffics in eliminationist language about its opponents is a society manufacturing the conditions for exactly what happened here.
"Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone." — Romans 12:17–18
Paul wrote those words to a church living inside an empire that was not always friendly to them. He was not naive. He was not asking for passivity in the face of injustice. He was identifying something structural about Christian ethics: that the people of God are categorically prohibited from participating in cycles of retaliatory violence, no matter how righteous the cause feels from the inside.
The Sanctity of Life Does Not Have an Ideological Exception
Here is where many Christians quietly fail the test. The sanctity of human life is not a selective doctrine. It does not apply only to the unborn, the elderly, or the vulnerable populations we have been taught to champion. It applies to judges. It applies to politicians. It applies to people whose decisions we believe are catastrophically wrong.
Justice Kavanaugh is a human being made in the image of God. Full stop. Whatever one believes about his jurisprudence, his rulings, or his confirmation process — none of it removes him from the protective canopy of the imago Dei. Any theology that quietly carves out exceptions for certain political figures is not Christian theology. It is tribalism wearing a cross.
This is a hard word, and it is meant to be. The temptation is real. When we believe deeply that a person in power is causing harm — real harm, harm to real people — the emotional logic of "stopping them by any means necessary" has a seductive internal coherence. The gospel refuses that logic entirely. It does not negotiate with it. It confronts it.
Justice, Mercy, and the Tension Every Sentencing Reveals
Prosecutors want more than eight years. The defense presumably argued for less. Both instincts are morally comprehensible, and both miss something if taken to their extreme.
Justice requires proportionality. A plot to assassinate a federal official — a member of the nation's highest court — is not a minor offense against bureaucratic order. It is an assault on the structures that protect civic life for everyone. The rule of law, however imperfect, is one of the primary instruments through which human societies restrain violence and create the conditions for human flourishing. An attack on a justice is, in a real sense, an attack on justice itself. The sentence must communicate that some things cannot be tolerated in a society that wishes to remain a society.
And yet mercy is not weakness. The Christian understanding of punishment has never been purely retributive. Punishment exists to protect, to deter, to potentially restore — and yes, to carry a proportionate cost for genuine wrongdoing. But the purpose of a prison sentence is not to satisfy our outrage. When prosecutorial zeal becomes an expression of political score-settling rather than the sober pursuit of justice, it too has crossed a line.
We can hold both truths simultaneously. Eight years may or may not be adequate — we are not the court, and we lack access to every detail of the case. What we can say with confidence is that the Christian does not approach sentencing with the question "how much can we make them suffer?" but rather "what does true justice, tempered by wisdom, actually require here?"
The Christian Call to Uphold Lawful Order
Romans 13 is not a comfortable passage, but it is a clear one. Governing authorities, Paul insists, exist as servants of God for the good of society. This does not mean every government is godly or every law is just. History disproves that reading with devastating force. But it does mean that the institution of ordered civil life — the courts, the rule of law, the protection of persons in public office — carries a weight that Christians are called to respect and uphold.
When someone plots to kill a Supreme Court Justice, they are not only attacking a person. They are attacking the principle that disputes between citizens and their government must be resolved through lawful, accountable processes rather than private violence. That principle is not just politically important. It is morally important. It reflects something deep about the nature of a society where image-bearers can coexist without devouring one another.
Christians of every political persuasion should be among the loudest voices saying: this is not acceptable. Not because we agree with every ruling. Not because we believe the courts are above criticism — they are not, and prophetic challenge of unjust law has deep roots in Christian history. But because we know what the alternative to ordered justice looks like. It looks like every man doing what is right in his own eyes. Scripture tells us exactly where that leads.
What This Moment Asks of Us
The sentence for plotting to kill Brett Kavanaugh is not the end of this story. It is a data point in a much longer and more troubling narrative about where political passion, unchecked by moral formation, ultimately arrives. A culture that has forgotten how to disagree without dehumanizing has made itself fertile ground for exactly this kind of violence.
The response of the Christian community cannot simply be condemnation. Condemnation is easy and cheap. The harder and more faithful response is formation — shaping people, in our homes and our churches, into the kind of human beings who refuse the logic of political violence at the level of the heart, long before it ever becomes a plan.
Protect life. Uphold order. Pursue justice with mercy. Refuse the tribal exception that whispers your enemies do not fully count. These are not political positions. They are the ancient, costly, and glorious demands of following Jesus in a fractured world.
The seat of justice was protected this time. The question the church must sit with is this: are we forming people who would protect it as a matter of conviction — not because of who sits there, but because of what it represents to a society that still, however imperfectly, tries to order itself under law?
That is a question worth more than an eight-year sentence. It is the question of what kind of people we are becoming.