This Easter, American Christians Should Embrace Persecution

Holy Week is upon us. For billions of Christians around the globe, this means grappling with, mourning, and rejoicing over the central teaching of the faith: the crucifixion and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. For the American media, it means suddenly remembering that most Americans identify as Christians, however lukewarmly.

Of course, we would all be better off if the media didn’t remember this, since its Lenten meditation is to attack the faith that we hold dear. This year, the opening salvo came from The New Yorker in the form of an article entitled “We’re Still Not Done With Jesus.”

“Not done” should be read “not done spitting on Him, whipping Him, and killing Him again.” Under the guise of two new book reviews, the article goes over all the tedious “scholarly” ground that we have seen before, from likening the Gospel account of the virgin birth to pagan mythology to attributing the resurrection to “bereavement hallucinations” to claiming that Jesus never actually existed at all (a claim that the New Yorker would never entertain with figures such as Buddha or Muhammad). No believing orthodox Christians are referenced in the article; only non-believers and the occasional secularist heretic.

This supposed media skepticism hides a much darker trend. For several years now, Christians have been targeted by both ordinary leftists and the government officials they support, a fact that the Trump administration recognized when it issued an executive order in February establishing a task force to combat anti-Christian bias.

But government attention can only partially fix the problem. American Christians should use this Holy Week to expect and embrace persecution as a blessing.

More Than Just Bloodshed

The term “martyr” comes from the Greek word martus, which means “witness.” For centuries, the church has recognized several types of martyrdom, the most powerful being “red martyrdom,” in which believers have their blood shed for their belief in Christ. This cruelty was the fate of most of the apostles and thousands of other Christians through the ages.

“White martyrdom” involves suffering for the faith without actual threat to one’s life. The modern poster child for this form of martyrdom is Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who has spent more than ten years dealing with vicious lawsuits against his business because of his refusal to use the talent God gave him to celebrate sexual sin. Despite several legal victories (including one at the Supreme Court), leftists continue their efforts to make him an example of what happens when a Christian stands up against their tyranny.

The third type of martyrdom is more active on the Christian’s part; it involves a willful embrace of penance and fasting in an effort to free oneself from evil desires and come closer to God. This “green martyrdom” has become traditional among ordinary Christians during the season of Lent, which culminates in Holy Week.

In His Sermon on the Mount, Christ ended the Beatitudes saying, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven” (Matthew 5:11-12). All three types of martyrdom should therefore be seen not as something to be avoided, but as a mark of God’s favor that will be honored both in heaven and on earth.

A Historical Precedent

This was the mindset of the third-century Christian apologist Tertullian, who wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the faith.” He understood the central paradox of church history: that the Christian’s willingness to endure pain and even die for the truth made Christianity more attractive to a world desperate for meaning.

This was certainly the case under the Roman emperor Nero, who sought to use the Christians as a convenient scapegoat to distract from his many failures as a leader. The historian Tacitus (who considered Christianity a “destructive superstition”) noted that the brutality of Nero’s persecution only inspired pity in the Romans, who saw their society’s ancient virtues as dead and buried. With that pity came interest in what these strange Christians had found that they were willing to suffer so heroically for, and the rest is history.

Persecution Takes Many Forms

Sadly, there are many opportunities for American Christians to suffer persecution nowadays. Despite his claims of Catholic piety, President Joe Biden’s four years in office were a dangerous time to be a Christian in America. Much of the hatred stemmed from the collapse of Roe v. Wade; the Family Research Council has documented hundreds of attacks against churches and crisis pregnancy centers since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision was handed down. Late last year, Erin Hawley, senior counsel and vice president at the Alliance Defending Freedom, testified that “There have been zero — zero — prosecutions under the FACE Act for that violence,” referring to the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.

Instead, Biden’s Department of Justice used the FACE Act to prosecute peaceful pro-life protestors and even invoked the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 to sentence them to up to ten years for a nonviolent first offense. Biden’s FBI also sought to infiltrate and spy on Catholic communities that celebrate the traditional Latin Mass based in part on an article published by The Atlantic linking such communities to political extremism.

When a woman deluded into thinking she was a man shot and killed three elementary school students and three staff members at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, in March of 2023, the Biden administration painted her and the trans community as the real victims. Two years later, Nashville police have closed the case, claiming that the shooter, a former student at the school, acted purely out a desire for notoriety, not hatred of Christians. Yet they have still not released the massive amount of material written and recorded by the shooter by which they came to this conclusion.

President Donald Trump’s landslide victory has only exacerbated the left’s rage towards Christians. Late last month, a group calling itself the Satanic Grotto attempted to celebrate a Black Mass outside of the Kansas Statehouse, ostensibly to support “separation of church and state.” When a counter-protester attempted to snatch the script for the Black Mass from group founder Michael Stewart’s hands, Stewart punched him, leading to both men being arrested by the Kansas Highway Patrol.

A recent bombshell report from the Network Contagion Research Institute reveals that 55 percent of self-identified leftist Americans are comfortable with using violence to pursue political and cultural ends. Given these events, it is only a matter of time before the scare phrase “Christian nationalism” becomes an excuse for even more vicious acts of aggression against Christian targets.

As American Christians experience persecution by modern Neros, we should once again accept the ideal of martyrdom in its varying forms. Doing so will not only save our own souls but also provide an example to possibly save the souls of those currently seeking to destroy us.

Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.