Martyrdom

A Dangerous Reward for Contemplation

Dear Greg,

Thank you for the honesty with which you name the weight you’ve been carrying and the way silence and prayer have been sustaining you. I recognize that terrain. I’ve been carrying some of my own weariness as well. The ongoing instability of my employment has been more grinding than I like to admit, and depression still pops up to knock me down regularly. As I know is the case for you and DaMetz, these questions about trust, fear, and faithfulness are not abstract for me. They are being worked out in real vulnerability, not all of which, I share here of course.

I’m deeply sympathetic to your reading of Merton. I agree that distorted vision produces distorted action, that activism untethered from prayer easily reproduces the violence it claims to resist, and that contemplation is not an optional accessory to faithful political life but its moral ground. We cannot see clearly when our imaginations are constantly formed by outrage, fear, and the machinery of attention.

I see this pattern in Jesus’ life, right up to the night he’s crucified. He goes away somewhere, usually by himself or with a few others, to pray then he returns to preach, agitate, advocate, and eventually die. Others, like Civil Rights Leaders, followed a similar pattern, where they spent time in worship, prayer, and fellowship before protests or other actions, and sometimes death.

So, one key thought your letter has brought to mind as I consider those patterns in relation to the current violence and social unrest. For Christians, at least, it seems like contemplation should lead to more martyrdom in times of violent upheaval, and that Christians should be ready to die for their faith rather than defending it. By defending it, or being willing to do so, with violence or coercion is in reality to deny the faith, but to fail to defend it and instead die for it, that is the truest defense of the faith because we believe in the Resurrection.

Sounds easy enough, right? No, seriously, having watched multiple people executed in the streets, not to mention those killed in detention centers, this thought kind of terrifies me. It is easy to talk about martyrdom when it doesn’t seem like a real possibility. Yet, now when I consider that going to a protest or other action of civil disobedience, could really get me shot in the face, it gets a lot scarier. I’ve been to protests before, and I never once feared for my life, but recently as ICE has been seen in our area, I have truly had to consider how I will continue to be involved in the work of peace and justice. For example, I have never hesitated to bring my kids to protests, events where I was speaking out against the powers, or other gatherings aimed at peace and justice. But, now, I have had to talk with my wife about whether or not I should take them with me to events like this for the time being.

My friend and co-editor of my first book, Tripp York, has written on the politics of martyrdom in some ways that help me think about this, but unfortunately, in ways that make it seem more, rather than less, like a possibility of Christian faithfulness in these times. York presses the claim that martyrdom is not accidental to Christian life but one of the church’s most truthful forms of political speech. Martyrs expose what the world actually worships and whom it is willing to sacrifice in the name of order, security, and progress. I think we can see this happening in real time lately, as state murders have exposed the tactics of the powers and principalities.

Martyrs unmask the lie that violence saves or redeems. In refusing to kill and instead accepting suffering, the church tells the truth about power without becoming power’s mirror image. Martyrdom also disciplines the church’s imagination, forming a people who learn how to desire faithfulness rather than control, even as York carefully warns against romanticizing suffering as a spiritual achievement. In short, we should expect martyrdom as faithful Christians, even though we don’t seek it out, lest that be its own kind of pursuit of a status symbol.

This is, in part, why I have been so drawn Bayard Rustin. Rustin understood nonviolence not primarily as a tactic but as a form of truthful witness, a refusal to let fear, coercion, or scarcity determine what counts as realism. He believed that the means we use inevitably train our desires and loyalties, and that violence always catechizes us into trusting the wrong gods. Rustin’s insistence on disciplined vulnerability helped form Martin Luther King Jr., including King’s growing clarity near the end of his life that fidelity might very well cost him his life. In fact, when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, King, had several guns and even armed guards. Rustin persuaded him that nonviolence must be a lifestyle, not just a tactic, and by the end of his life, King was ready to die but never kill.

We see that in his Mountaintop speech he gave in Memphis. King’s final speech in still startles me for its calm moral clarity. He does not deny the danger. He recognizes it clearly, and he names it directly. And yet he refuses to let the possibility, even the likelihood, of death determine his obedience. “I may not get there with you,” he tells the crowd, but that acknowledgment does not paralyze him or push him toward self-protection. He says, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.” That absolutely haunts me. Can I say, “Well, I’m ok being gunned down relatively young as long as I’m doing God’s will”? I sure hope so, but that also terrifies me at times. I’ve experienced a number of difficult consequences for attempting to be faithful, but the idea of facing death as one of those consequences is almost too much to imagine. Yet, for King, it frees him to speak and act without illusion. That feels to me like contemplation made flesh, prayer turned into courage, resurrection hope reminding us that survival is not the highest good.

This is why the distinction between dying for the faith and killing for the faith feels so decisive to me. The moment we imagine that Christianity must be defended by violence or coercion, we have quietly confessed that resurrection is either implausible or insufficient. We begin to behave as though truth must be enforced because it cannot survive vulnerability. To kill in order to defend the gospel is not only a moral contradiction. It is a theological denial. It suggests that we trust weapons, laws, and dominance more than we trust the God who raises the dead.

To fail to defend the faith violently and instead to suffer for it is not defeat. It is the truest defense of the faith precisely because it embodies what we claim to believe about Easter. The martyrs did not overcome empire by overpowering it. They overcame it by refusing to grant it the authority to decide what was finally real. Rome could take their bodies, but it could not make death ultimate or love irrelevant. The church did not grow because Christians were skilled at winning conflicts. It grew because Christians were willing to lose their lives without surrendering their hope.

At the same time, martyrdom must never become a form of spiritual bravado or romantic excess. Suffering is not holy in itself, and danger is not something to be curated for its own sake. The cross is received, not manufactured. We follow Jesus, and sometimes risk finds us. Martyrdom always names the tragedy of a broken world even when it bears faithful witness within it.

And so, DaMetz, when you ask what we are to do in a world that tears families apart, baptizes violence in religious language, and tempts us either toward frantic political obsession or cynical withdrawal, my best answer is not a program but a posture. We are to become a people so formed by contemplation and resurrection hope that we no longer need to secure the world by force or abandon it in despair. We stay politically awake, attentive to suffering, resistant to lies, and stubbornly local in our loves, while refusing to grant ourselves permission to kill, dominate, or dehumanize in the name of any cause, however urgent. That is not indifference. It is a costly way of remaining present without surrendering to the logic of fear. What is there to fear if death itself has been defeated?

Still, if contemplation really forms us as Merton hopes, then perhaps its most unsettling fruit is not serenity but courage, not retreat but availability, not insulation from the wounds of the world but deeper exposure to them. In seasons of violent upheaval, maybe the church’s most honest political speech is not how effectively we defend ourselves, but how faithfully we refuse to kill, how truthfully we are willing to suffer, and how stubbornly we trust that God raises what the world crucifies.

Before we “do” anything, perhaps we need to first consider what we are willing to die for, and therefore hopefully what we’re willing to live for everyday.

Your Friend and Fellow Exile,
Justin