Do you remember back in Sunday School, when the teacher would impress on you how important it is to stay true to your faith, even if someone were to demand that you renounce it to save your life? And you thought to yourself, “that’s foolish to make such a big deal out of it — stuff like this just doesn’t happen any more.”
Remember at the Columbine shooting, when one of the victims was claimed to have been martyred, that is, targeted because she was a Christian and stood up for her faith? Turned out to have been wishful thinking, a desire to by grieving parents to make the story one of heroism rather than just senseless killing.
But read this description of the beheading of the 21 Coptic Christians by their ISIS captors:
Even under the blade, some were making their last prayers and as the blade came to their neck they all cried in unison “Ya Rabbi Yasou’” (O My Lord Jesus) the caption by ISIS stated “these insisted to remain in unbelief”. In other words, they were given the option to convert or die and everyone of them refused, even unto death.
(The site this came from, shoebat.com, I’ve not seen before, and it’s certainly not a mainstream news site, but I am not going to watch the video myself just to confirm this caption.)
Is this just like the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire? Even in the Early Church, persecution waxed and waned, and Church leaders were faced with the decision of how to respond to those Christians who had converted during times of little persecution, recanted when their life was at stake, and wanted to re-join the community when that wave of persecution was over.
What would you do if your life was at stake? What would I do? One thing’s for sure, I can’t, and won’t make the claim that I’m sure I wouldn’t be desperately trying to save my life any way I could. (Sorry — too many negatives there, but you get my point.)
(originally posted 2/17/15; UPDATE below.)
Here’s another perspective, via Ann Althouse, a discussion by Bobby Ross Jr., on whether James Foley, an American who was captured and later beheaded by ISIS, had genuinely converted to Islam, or claimed to have done so to receive favorable treatment, or somewhere in-between. According to the tenets of Islam, one converts by speaking aloud the profession of faith; it’s equivalent to baptism in Christianity. In the middle ages, in times of persecution, Jews were forcibly baptized, and the general belief at the time was that, from that moment on, they were “stuck” — they were Christian and couldn’t “un-do” it. Later on, in Spain, Jews were not so much forcibly converted as given the choice to convert or leave the country; many chose the former but continued to practice secretly, and were watched closely by neighbors to see if they would eat pork, for instance, and sent off to the Inquisition if their behavior was suspicious.
At the same time, by the time World War II came about, and nuns hid Jewish children in convents or convent boarding schools, there was no longer any thought that these children were betraying their faith in learning to appear as Christians, nor, afterwards, had any obligation to continue as Christians.
But, anyway, this Althouse link makes me want to see if I can dig out something on the topic of early Christian recanters, and what the compromise was that the Church Fathers eventually came to on the topic. And I imagine that the case of James Foley, when you’re without support from others but pretty much on your own, and are worn down over a long period of time, and a few simple words (which, after all, you can tell yourself — and God — you don’t mean) is all it takes for your treatment to improve, is, in a way, the more “normal” way to react to the situation, however religious you are, and the 21 martyrs (not to discount their heroic witness to faith) likely also stayed true in part because they were able to support each other.
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