Martyrdom and Sterilized Saints

Here in the United States, we have witnessed high-profile murders of fellow Christians. The 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, the recent Annunciation Catholic Church shooting in Minneapolis, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University have been brought to the forefront of our hearts, minds, and prayers. Across the nation, Christians of all stripes–including pastors and other Christian leaders–have started to use the “M” word to identify these victims: martyrs.

And, of course, there’s been pushback. While these recent casualties are brethren in Christ, do they qualify for the veneration Christians typically grant martyrs? While we in the Protestant world often lack official institutions and mechanisms for adjudicating such matters, we do recognize martyrs, including those slain in the Protestant Reformations or on the foreign mission field. Do the victims of Nashville, Minneapolis, and Utah fit into this category of honor? What is owed them?

While some of us might be incensed at this skepticism, caution over labeling the killings of Christians as martyrdom is warranted. For one thing, Christians can die in battle or be murdered for reasons having nothing to do with their own confession of faith. A soldier going to war or the victim in a robbery gone wrong aren’t typically martyrs. We can still honor their memory, but martyrdom pivots on something more specific.

And that gets to another important problem: the category for martyrdom has extended in the popular imagination to include all sorts of non-Christians. Many political and social leaders have been assassinated for their stances which may or may not spring from Christian commitments. And the high-profile killings of these leaders ignites a reaction, often fulfilling the dreams and purposes of these slain leaders. Thus we find people talking of martyrs for democracy and human rights. But this is not Christian martyrdom.

In the original Christian sense, a martyr is a Christian who witnesses to Christ in his death at the hands of persecutors. “Martyr” simply means “witness.” The first martyr was St. Stephen the deacon, whose boldness in evangelizing and contending for the faith against nonbelievers cost him his life. The reason that the martyr finds his own life in peril is because of his call to Christian faithfulness. Rather than retract their profession of Christian faith in apostasy or shirk their Christian duty, martyrs sacrifice their lives in the name of Christ. The martyr thus wins the “crown of life” as revealed in James 1:12 and Revelation 2:10. In the liturgy of the heavenly Temple, the martyrs have a unique roll of crying out for judgment as recorded in Revelation 6:9-11–their innocent blood cries out for divine vengeance, which is a theme reaching all the way back to the death–martyrdom?–of righteous Abel (cf. Matthew 23:35, Luke 11:51). And of course we know from history that martyrs inspire all believers to wax bold in the faith, receiving a uniquely high honor and special remembrance from the Christian Church.

But martyrdom is messy. For example, the killers’ motivations might not be clear cut. Some are motivated by vicious racism. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and the Charleston church shooting of 2015 come to mind. In those cases, the martyrs were killed by murderers under the influence of deeply sinful error–a hatred that struck out against believers. The killers almost assuredly would not have attacked white-dominated churches. But the victims were killed because they showed up in faith to worship the living God. 

Other persecutors are mentally imbalanced (with or without demonic influence). Several houses of worship in America have suffered such attacks. This mental instability can be coupled with anti-Christian bias, as seen in the Sutherland Springs shooting of 2017. Indeed, mass shooters in general often fit a particular profile of mental and spiritual sickness, resulting from sin, especially the curse of the Fall.

Yet others might have simply been violent and killed Christians for being present in the world, particularly the mission field. The Holy Innocents were killed because a homicidal tyrant wished to eliminate a rival claimant to the title “King of the Jews.” Their resemblance to Jesus, particularly in their innocency, cost them their precious lives. St. Boniface and his company were killed by armed robbers. As a friend recently observed, Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian were speared to death because the Waorani were violent and hostile to outsiders. The martyrs of “Operation Auca” didn’t get the chance to speak about Jesus. But they were killed because they answered the call of God to the mission field of Ecuador, heeding the Savior’s Great Commission.

To top it all off, not only can a persecutor’s motivations be confused or mixed, but so also can the martyr’s. Oftentimes, religious and political motivations intertwine on the part of the victim. Church history is littered with martyred saints who were implicit in or reacting against things like imperialism, national independence, claims of papal supremacy, and colonialization. Complicating things more are “tribal” martyrs. Was St. Joan of Arc a martyr? Bishop Thomas a Becket? Sir Thomas More? The Oxford Martyrs? They had views of the nation, royal supremacy, clerical immunity to criminal charges, and so forth that plenty of biblical Christians take exception to. As an Anglican, I see Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, and Thomas Cranmer as heroic martyrs. A Roman Catholic? Not so much. Church history is chock full of similar examples.

Sadly, many Americans toil under a naive historiography, and so they demand martyrs purged of political entanglements. I do not know what to label this impulse–call it pietistic, Radical, or what have you. But, in this view, true martyrs and even true persecutors must be sterilized of political controversy. 

This sanitized historiography can combine with a particular rhetorical habit of many evangelicals and Mainliners in the United States. They love to scold their fellow Christians over their prosperity, ease, oversensitivity, and sense of self-entitlement. There’s a certain kind of preacher that thrives on castigating their fellow American Christians for being spoiled and for dishonorably fostering a “martyrdom complex.” Any time an American Christian complains about an infringement of their rights or various moral outrages foisted upon the public, the reply is always the same: “You have nothing to complain about. Christians get killed in XYZ country.”

This brings us to our current question. Were the victims of Nashville, Minneapolis, and Utah martyrs? It certainly challenges the “real persecution doesn’t happen here” trope, doesn’t it? In all three of these stories, we find a theme of what I think is religious or spiritual violence. The killers, while fitting the profile of a public shooter, worked from a radical pro-LGBT worldview, particularly of the noxious “Protect Trans” variety. In this worldview, the worst villains are conservative Christians. And they become the target of lethal violence. At the very heart of this is actually a hatred of God–a hatred of Christ.

In light of this, I think it’s clear that the victims of the Covenant and Annunciation shootings qualify as martyrs. They were targeted because they were Christians, and the shooters hated Christ, so anyone bearing His name and looking like Him was placed in the crosshairs, no matter how helpless. 

The Charlie Kirk assassination is much more controversial. Because of his political activism, somehow venerating him as a Christian martyr is perceived as the work of political hacks. Now, there is a real danger here. Too many people cannot seem to delineate between the City of God and the City of Man. They have grown deeply partisan and untethered from a strong confessional identity of theological and moral orthodoxy.

The complaints over this seem strongest in the “orthodox but liberal” crowd. For one thing, they neglect that Charlie Kirk changed over time, growing from a brash bachelor who possibly embodied the “post-Religious Right” to a married family man urging his audience to convert to Christ, get married, raise children, and go to Church. For another, American Christians have seen and heard politicians, service personnel, nextdoor neighbors, and friends celebrate the death of a Christian brother, often summarized with the logic of “he had it coming.” And the ire there isn’t necessarily directed toward things that Kirk said or held to that Christians can disagree on. It’s often against Christian essentials regarding morals and the exclusivity of Christ for salvation. Indeed, it is especially chilling to consider that Kirk was publicly shot while arguing against the problems of the transgender community, all by a man deeply corrupted by digital perversion.

My concern for the “orthodox but liberal” crowd is that their leftist political commitments are a lot stronger than they probably realize. Their distaste for MAGA is so severe that it keeps them from joining in with Christians, identifying persecutors of the Church, and sufficiently honoring a slain brother in Christ. It’s all permanence, catholicity, and solidarity until a low-brow rightwing believer shows up.

And I think the problem of naïve church historiography plays a role. Political concerns will always be entwined with religious or spiritual. We so often try to strip martyrdom of political dimensions, but this fails even the test of the New Testament. As a colleague of mine, Fr. Richard Tarsitano, pointed out in a recent sermon,

“Jesus, by declaring Himself the Messiah, the new Davidic King of Israel, was making a theological statement which carried with it gigantic political ramifications for Judah and the Roman Empire. We see this reality in the words Pontius Pilate wrote over the crucified Jesus: “The King of the Jews”. Every Christian evangelist who followed Him brought Christianity to barbarous peoples who sacrificed humans to their demon gods, and with the Gospel, they brought a peace which cannot help but change a commonwealth, nation, a people. I believe we must look at the totality of Mr. Kirk’s work and see a man who helped bring thousands of young people to trust in Christ and was killed for that effort, and so it is appropriate to mourn Kirk as a martyr.”

I agree with Fr. Tarsitano. As another colleague observed, Kirk was indeed a Christian, and he saw his social advocacy as an outgrowth of that. As such, I personally think Kirk really and truly is an American martyr, joining the ranks of other precious souls whose innocent blood has been spilt on our soil for the sake of the true faith.

How we respond to such martyrdom is a different and very important question altogether. May it include the godly example of St. Stephen, who, when stoned by his opponents, saw the enthroned King of Kings, entrusted his spirit to God, and cried out, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.”