Excerpt: To Witness to the Truth Uncompromised: Reflections on the Modern Martyrs 0 comments

Dana Gioia's full essay can be found in Image issue 13.

THE twentieth century has reminded Christians that the history of their faith is inextricably bound with the sacrifices of its martyrs. Their example is not incidental to the Church's identity; it offers vital proof of the faith's continuing authenticity. Martyrs are not historical relics of Christianity's initial development, early believers risking death to convert others to the faith. They represent the eternal challenge for believers to witness their faith in a fallen world. Their lives and deaths also to the almost incomprehensibly vast violence that has marked the present age.

To most late nineteenth-century Western Christians, martyrdom had become an unusual and slightly exotic concept—a tragic event located either in the past or on the fringes of colonial empires. The missionary or native killed in a foreign persecution represented a real but remote risk faced by a relatively small number of believers. Martyrdom was something that occurred elsewhere. In that geographical entity once called Christendom, such heroic witnessing of the faith seemed an increasingly marginal concept. The nineteenth-century Western mind believed deeply in moral progress, and supporting evidence seemed everywhere—the abolition of slavery, the emergence of trade unions, universal education, rising literacy, national self-determination, expanded civil liberties, increased religious tolerance as well as myriad scientific and medical advances. Enlightened Christians could not help becoming swept up in this positivistic fervor The emergence of a just and tolerant Christian civilization, at least in Europe and North America, seemed to many not merely possible but historically inevitable.

The twentieth century, however, has tragically demonstrated that moral progress is neither linear nor inevitable. The dialectic of history pushes forward slowly and painfully. No sooner has some form of tyranny been banished than it reemerges in a new and equally pernicious form. The price of justice is unending struggle. Perhaps the most frightening lesson of the century has been how easily good impulses turn to evil ends. The nationalistic hunger for self-determination among nineteenth-century Germans and Italians become the militaristic fascism of the 1930s. The utopian egalitarianism of Russian progressives eventually justified the Great Famine and the gulags. Cambodia's desire to transcend colonialism created Pol Pot. These are lessons no one wanted to learn, but they are forgotten only at great moral risk. And yet these bitter lessons are being forgotten. The century is not yet over, but to most Americans the idea of martyrdom has once again begun to seem remote and abstract.

Western Christians often seem resigned to religious intolerance in other places. They show little surprise that persecution and martyrdom follow Christians in non-Christian societies. Recent religious persecution in China, Myanmar (Burma), Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Pakistan appear almost inevitable because Christians are minorities in those nations. Cultural and political animosities sometimes motivate these attacks more than essentially religious issues do. To established local power, Christianity often seems a threatening Western importation (just as two millennia ago Roman civil authorities considered it a threatening, Eastern importation.) The rights and safety of religious minorities always remain uncertain in times of political and social upheaval. But the modern persecution of Christians in Western nations—Germany, Russia, Mexico, El Salvador, Columbia—and the murderous struggle between Christian factions in Ireland and Rwanda suggest something more unsettling. Perhaps true professing Christians are always a minority everywhere, even in ostensibly Christian societies. The example of devout Christians always runs the risk of disturbing political authorities. Contemporary Christians need to understand this troubling issue, and the best place to begin is the example of modern martyrs—the believers of our own age who were forced to choose death rather than spiritual betrayal.

To read the rest of the essay, please purchase the issue here.