Normally, people are too busy with life to consider the fate of martyrs. The word “martyr” means “witness.” The process of bearing witness doesn’t necessarily lead to the death of the witness, but it often has. For centuries, Christians have experienced a brutal end as they were imprisoned, tortured, or killed for their belief that Jesus was the resurrected Son of God. Later the term entered the English language as a loanword to describe people who die for the values they profess. Unsurprisingly, the term martyr tends to be used rather loosely in our modern lexicon. This has caused me to think about different contemporary expressions of martyrdom in our society.
Certainly, there are people that we would call faith-based martyrs. Many are Christian, but not exclusively. To be sure, there are many in other religions who have died virtuously for their beliefs. Martyrs exemplify the ultimate virtue of dying for one’s faith. Unfortunately, some religious zealots do not when they choose to use their faith as a reason to kill others.
Over the centuries, ideological-based martyrs have also been numerous. The virtue of those, however, varies depending on whether or not you agree with what motivated the person to die for a cause. This list is long, and no doubt controversial. Some are indeed virtuous. Those in the American Civil Rights struggle come to mind. Contrarywise, there are others who have died for causes we would consider deplorable. Nazis who died in the name of Adolf Hitler. Their deaths were in no way the result of virtue, but rather by allegiance to the worst aspects of humanity.
History has also seen what I would call paradox-based martyrs. These are people whose life and death are a seeming contradiction. Consider a person lacking virtue, who was wrongly killed. People like this may not have demonstrated much virtue during their lives yet having that deficiency in no way merited their wrongful death. For example, take the case of George Floyd, a man who had a criminal history—according to validated court records—of nine arrests including four charges of drug possession and distribution, two theft charges, one for illegal trespass, another for failure to identify to a police officer, and one of aggravated robbery. There was no virtue in those acts, but there was utterly no virtue in his wrongful death at the hands of an abusive police officer. Floyd’s death was wrong. And many people who were repulsed by his demise consider him a martyr for the virtues embodied in civil rights. Others may not agree that he was a martyr at all, even though they find his death egregiously wrong. In this case, martyrdom is in the eye of the beholder, paradoxes notwithstanding.
Yet another form of martyrdom could be expressed as hate-based. We’re seeing this play out in America today when one ideological group seeks to punish its opposition by depriving the latter of their livelihoods, property, or freedom using the criminal justice system. This is seen all too often. For example, Christian bakers or wedding planners who do not agree with same-sex marriages are accused of being bigots, as opposed to being people who have a sincere conscientious objection to certain lifestyles. Those who hate and persecute people of conscience with whom they disagree are motivated by the very hatred they find objectionable in others.
Consider this contradiction: I hate your thinking so very much that I will use the legal system to destroy your life, even if what you are doing is not illegal. Put another way, I will hate you like I say you hate me. Such thinking is profoundly wrong and dangerous. It’s wrong because it flies in the face of what law enforcement and courts were created to do, namely protect individual liberty. And it is very dangerous, because once such a practice becomes acceptable in society, it can be used against anyone, including those who today so passionately seek vengeance on others.
Consider the people who utterly despise former President Donald Trump who lost his reelection in 2020. He’s running again. The people who hate him will do anything to prevent his return to office. Their zealotry had created an unintended coalition of people who either do or do not want to see Trump return to the White House. Now they share a common view. They see Trump’s tormentors engaged in political persecution that’s unjust, the kind of persecution that our founders wanted to avoid by assigning such controversies to the arena of elected politics. Political revenge, in their judgment, was best exacted at the ballot box, not from a jury box populated with voters who previously refused to support the accused.
The Trump haters may not have intended to make him a martyr, but in their hatred, they surely have.
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