The Spirit of Martyrdom

Recently, I read Father David Knight's book, His Way. I've probably mentioned before how interesting and insightful I found Father Knight's Confession Can Change Your Life, and I'd been meaning for a long time to read more of his books. One of the things Knight talks about in His Way is the spirit of martyrdom in the modern world. Those of us who have always lived in the west have rather lost our sense of what that means. After all, we're rarely called upon to sacrifice our lives for our faith, and no one ever shows up and confiscates our land because we won't abdicate loyalty to Christ. It creates the impression that martyrdom is a concept of days gone by.

Really, though, Father Knight points out that it simply tends to manifest itself far less dramatically in our culture today. The point, he says, is that those early Christians knew that they risked everything every day simply by being Christian. They didn't remove themselves from everday life or avoid building homes and families and owning property and working at their trades--they simply did it all with the knowledge that the day might come when they had to choose, and that when that day came, they would choose Christ.

In some small way, we all face those decisions every day. We all live out that spirit when we decide to pass up on a profitable venture because it's not consistent with Christian values or to skip a social event because we can't condone the atmosphere or any of a hundred other things that we might not consciously connect to martyrdom--might not even consciously connect to our faith.

The whole idea that martyrdom was a necessary condition of any Christian life, but that it didn't mean quite what we associated it with from history and the idea that it wasn't about giving things up so much as a continual state of willingness to give them up if that's what Christianity required resonated with me. The apparent conflict between the focus on the value of relationships and the admonishment against attachments always created some dissonance for me, and this gave me a new perspective to consider.

But I must admit that even as I read those words and gained those insights, I was thinking that even the kind of choices Father Knight described didn't come up so often in modern life. Specifically, he pointed out that any friendship that wasn't founded in Christ was at risk, could always turn if you chose to stick to your principles and be true to Christ. And I didn't really get it. After all, I have many friends who disagree with me about many things. I think that most of us do.

But God has a way of clarifying these things for us, and just a few short days after I'd read those words and questioned their validity, a group of people I'd been associating with in an online forum took the surprising step of pulling away from the main forums and forming their own discussion group for the express purpose of limiting religious discussion.

The controversy that led up to their decision was, indeed, unpleasant, and on one level it might even have been understandable. But the options proposed frankly shocked me: come join our new group and agree to "leave God out of it" or don't come and talk to us at all. This wasn't, understand, and anti-religious or anti-Christian group. It was a group of people who was sick of listening to people proselytize and debate and squabble and so chose to create a safe haven where all discussion would be free from mention of God, positive or negative.

But is it really possible, if you're attempting to live a Christian life, if you're making decisions and analyzing situations in light of Biblical imperatives, to "leave God out of the discussion"? I determined that it was not, and off they drifted. But the controversy didn't end there. The backlash from the previous discussions continued to grow until there was more backlash than there was discussion. And the knee-jerk negative reaction to anything remotely related to religion became so extreme that I found that there were people I hardly dared respond to, because I was repeatedly faced with the choice of triggering that reaction, answering less than honestly so as not to reveal that God was part of my analysis, or simply not responding at all.

Of course, we all encounter people it's best to simply ignore, people best kept at a distance. But in this case, the people I found myself most reluctant to be honest with were the people I'd found most interesting, the people I'd believed to be most open-minded and capable of rational discussion that considered all viewpoints.

I don't fault the people involved; I can see how every new step along the path developed, and how each decision along the way seemed like a reasonable one in the moment, and how different the issue looks from "the other side". But it came as a startling revelation to me that I'd one day suddenly be asked by rational, thinking people to choose between talking to them and acknowledging the role that God plays in my life--and it gave a concrete context to what I'd been thinking just the week before "couldn't happen here".