Orthodox America
Russia's New Martyrs: Politically Incorrect?
Many converts have been inspired by Russia's New Martyrs. Sadly,
outside the Orthodox community they are virtually unknown. As First
Things' editor, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus perceptively suggests, the
reason for this may be something other than lack of information.
There is little disputing the fact that this, above all others, has
been the century of Christian martyrdom. Yet that reality receives
curiously little attention among contemporary Christians.
Presbyterian writer Herbert Schlossberg has recently discussed this
phenomenon in A Fragrance of Oppression: The Church and Its
Persecutors, and offers some suggestive ideas about this strange
neglect. Additional dynamics, one suspects, are in play. For
instance, in theologies of past decades the prophetic, the radical,
and the liberationist all came in for great attention. Priests and
nuns killed for their involvement in various social justice
struggles in Latin America have received a great deal of attention
But there seems to be an ideological test for the veneration of
martyrs.
Those killed under Hitler, notably Dietrich Bonhoeffer, are
celebrated. It is respectable, indeed required, to be anti-Nazi.
But for forty-plus years anticommunism was suspect, and of course
many more Christians were killed by the Communists for begin
Christian than by the Nazis. The undeniable fact is that during the
Cold War those in the West who raised the question of the
persecution of Christians behind the Iron Curtain were viewed as
reactionary. Unlike, say, the Jesuits of El Salvador who were
struggling for a revolutionary new order, the Christians massacred
by the Communists were resisting what presented itself as the
revolutionary new order. They failed the test of being progressive
martyrs. The twentieth-century martyrology, such as it is, is a
canon of the politically correct. There are martyrs, and then there
are "politically interesting" martyrs. There is a certain sniffing
condescension toward those who simply died for the faith, without
some further and redeeming political merit. The innumerable martyrs
buried under the snows of Siberia have gone largely unremarked, at
least among Christians in the West. And today not much notice is
paid the brutally persecuted Christians in the south of the Sudan,
or the Copts in Egypt. Millions of Christians are involved in just
these two instances, and they are under attack because they are
Christians. Scholars who attend to the statistics of world
Christianity tell us that some 300,000 Christians each year are
killed for being Christians. We are not quite sure how they arrive
at that figure, but there is no doubt that attention to martyrdom in
this century has been and continues to be highly selective.
From"Martyrs, Correct and Incorrect" in First Things, Nov. 1993.
