American Christians and the Longing for Martyrdom

I… cannot stop watching this.

It’s… a masterpiece 🥺😭 pic.twitter.com/zn4cDpT36g

— Trey Ferguson (@PastorTrey05) April 5, 2022

Regard, please, this lousy piece of half-religious propaganda. Like a train wreck in process, it’s impossible to look away. This man-child with a 2016 man bun and a fluffy beard that hasn’t come in yet, enacts a medieval morality play where a “shooter” targets him for his faith and politics. But everything’s okay, see, because in a psychedelic-colored flash of divine intervention, Jesus turns him into a superhero and absorbs the bullet damage! Somehow. Apparently.

Leave aside momentarily the knee-jerk objection to this terrible Easter pageant, that self-identified “conservative Christians” are more likely to be the shooter than the target. I’m more interested in the desires this video represents. The star, who looks like he could still be in high school, has fantasies of dying for his faith, like the earliest martyred saints. Yet simultaneously, he apparently believes that faith will immunize him against actual death, making him seem angelic.

I’ve long witnessed the White Christian yearning for martyrdom. Anybody who attended Protestant youth ministries in the 1980s or 1990s probably remembers their youth leaders recounting myths of early martyrs like Sebastian, Polycarp, or the Apostles. These breathless fables usually ended with the exhortation: would you willingly die to support the Gospel? I admit, I scoffed, but many of my peers legitimately believed they might have to choose between their bodily survival and their religion.

In fairness, there are places on Earth where Christianity is despised, and missionaries literally risk death—but not very many. In America today, you’re more likely to face persecution for challenging state authority; consider how often Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ, got arrested. Instead, reactionary Protestants claim they’re being “persecuted” because they can’t economically discriminate against LGBTQIA+ persons, a position that exaggerates their own moral courage, while cheapening actual Christian persecution in other times and places.

But this anonymous TikTok slacktivist adds a wrinkle. He longs for death in Jesus’ name, while claiming he won’t actually die. Instead, his display of muscles and leaning-in rage face demonstrate that he expects personal vindication. Standing up for truth seemingly makes him invulnerable, but that invulnerability is demonstrated only afterward. Instead he must step forward and voluntarily die. In other words, he becomes immune to death only by embracing death through someone else’s violence.

As a Lutheran, I recognize this narrative. During the German Peasants’ War of 1524, encouraged by firebrand preachers Andreas Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer, Lutheran peasants rose up against local Catholic aristocracy. Karlstadt and Müntzer believed such resistance was justified because the aristocracy derived its authority from Rome. (Luther, a fugitive from the gallows, was sheltered in Thuringia during these events.) Karlstadt and Müntzer wanted to smash painted icons, stained-glass windows, and other hated religious imagery.

Martin Luther

Their unlettered peasant followers, however, wanted more. They wanted aristocrats’ blood and, driven to passion by the pastors’ words, believed God would deliver it to them. They rushed into battle screaming that bullets wouldn’t pierce them, swords wouldn’t cut them, flames wouldn’t burn them. To the complete unsurprise of history, they were wrong. Though records were shoddy, evidence suggests that one-third of the peasants, around 100,000, were killed before Luther returned and stopped the carnage.

Our teenaged protagonist reduces this experience to abject silliness. He apparently believes, as the peasants did, that Jesus will make him invulnerable to death. (Eleven of the twelve apostles died violently.) But he accents this belief with camera effects pinched from MCU movies, and color trails more reminiscent of an acid flashback than Christian iconography. Then he finishes by showing the camera his “war face,” because apparently to him, Jesus is the ultimate drill sergeant.

This kid is, obviously, only one data point. But given what we’ve seen in recent years—petulant Christian resistance to mask mandates, for instance, or religious emblems in the attempt to overthrow the government—too many American Christians, mostly White, think Jesus immunizes them from consequences. American White Christianity has embraced a Nietzschean principle that only outcomes matter, that exerting our will to power is its own moral justification. The Bible I read says otherwise.

The expression “saying the quiet part out loud” has become a cliché. Too many Christians long for martyrdom, but they want it without dying. They want righteous recognition for their moral rigidity. That is, where the Apostolic Martyrs died singing “To God Be the Glory,” these would-be martyrs want to hoard the glory for themselves. In so doing, they become the opposite of Christian; they become secular gloryhounds who wear sacramental vestments as a costume.