Why Persecution?

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I find it uncomfortable to talk about persecution, for two reasons.

For one, right now, in the world today, real people are harassed, intimidated, abused and killed for being members of Christ’s new Kingdom.

How to speak responsibly about their experience from the vantage of a rich, liberal, industrialised nation in the Global North isn’t self-evident to me.

There is real persecution today, no doubt about that. Just not here.

In truth, there’s not much in our experience that’s comparable to persecution, certainly not our comparatively minor complaints about not being allowed to gather for worship to avoid spreading COVID, or not being able to wear crosses to work, or cancel culture, or the evils of secularism more widely. Not that any of that is to be celebrated. Just that with astonishingly few exceptions, Christians in the Global North today enjoy more freedom to practice their faith than virtually anyone else in history, no matter what story we tell ourselves.

I worry that claiming persecution as at all characteristic of our lives disrespects the hardship endured by those who’ve sacrificed their lives and livelihoods for the Gospel. I don’t want to belittle the real courage they show in the face of it. We’re not really persecuted. Not like that, anyway.

But maybe we should be.

And that’s the second reason I find it hard to speak about persecution: that persecution might actually be a sign that Christians are living in the way they’re meant to live and that the absence of any real resistance to it reveals something we’d probably rather not admit: that the way we way we live out our Christian faith has lost the revolutionary character of Jesus’ message.

Let me explain Order (social, political, economic order) is incredibly hard to achieve. All manner of forces pull against it. Civilizations and cultures, nations and states, laws and judicial systems, markets and economies, institutions and organizations, they all require a tremendous investment of energy not only to get them up and running, but also to keep them running. They require convincing huge numbers of people to play their part, to collaborate together, to share purposes, values, and common frames of meaning. And at least some of the time this requires violence, or the threat of it, whatever’s needed to supress tendencies undermining to stability. The 17th century Philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, knew as much three hundred years ago: that a State just is that entity possessing a monopoly on the use of violence in a society. That’s what a state is. Violence is a part of its definition.

I once inadvertently stumbled into an anti-globalisation protest. I refer to it now as my civil disobedience phase. It lasted for precisely four minutes.

My mates and I were in Montreal on a weekend away. As we came onto the main road from among the quaint side streets in the old city where we’d been visiting art galleries we suddenly found ourselves in the throng of a mob raising all out hell. The point of the protest had to do with the G20 leaders meeting in town that weekend, or something like that. Anyway, we quickly realised this wasn’t the place we wanted to be.

But as we attempted to find an exit, we found ourselves face to face with a wall of troopers in full battle attire, masked, helmets, body armor, dressed in black, with Billie sticks and plexiglass shields. And behind them stood troopers on horseback, flanked by armored assault vehicles. For a brief moment I found myself on the borderline of where our system limits dissent, a limit policed by men with guns.

Happily, providence had foreordained for the protest to go down just outside a McDonalds and we were able to dash in before watching the scene play out from the upstairs window munching on a Big Mac and a milkshake a safe distance from the billy clubs and the armored assault vehicles.

I tell you that story to illustrate that societies have something like immune systems – highly developed techniques for deploying force in a way that regulates the ways people act, speak, even think. And these techniques are deployed with particular force when confronting anything threatening to destabilise their order. Of course, judged against examples from history, the mechanisms our society uses are actually relatively humane, in the main at least. There’s a lot to say here.

But I want to come back to the problem of talking about Christian persecution. When Jesus announced that his Kingdom was at hand, he was announcing a revolution. And he was serious about it. That’s what got him killed. Right? Because, revolutions are always a threat, no less today than under the Roman Empire. And when he calls us to become members of his Kingdom he is calling us to a revolutionary life. Not least because we obey a King not subject to the political powers of our world and we practice a culture wildly at odds with the mores and norms that sustain the systems and structures ordering our society.  

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Christians are called to be politically non-compliant, nor that we’re called to foment civil unrest. With few exceptions, scripture seems clear in saying Christians are called to live peaceably, to obey the law, to pay their taxes and to contribute to the good of society. But that can’t conceal the fact that the deep logic guiding Christian life, the values it promotes, the purposes it pursues, the goods it aims at, the practices it performs are, nonetheless, revolutionary.

And when members of Christ’s Kingdom live them out to the full, those things destabilise the orders we live in – not because we’re trouble makers, but because those things are transformative. They transform individuals. And they transform whole cultures. And that triggers an immune response. It must.

Let me give a couple examples. One of the deep premises underpinning our society has to do with our being independent, self-reliant, individuals, each responsible for their own preservation and prosperity, each with rights over their own patch.

In Christ’s Kingdom, however, we have a different understanding. We know we are always inter-dependent - mutually-dependent - and reliant on one another not only for material things, but also for all the things that matter: unconditional relationships, loving communion, belonging and a common commitment to a set of values and practices that achieve what Jesus calls Makarios (happiness).

We know we’re responsible for one another because we are commanded by God to love each other like Christ loves us, which is sacrificially. We know that God requires us to treat each other justly, to show hospitality and kindness and to act mercifully in the face of offense and failure.

Or think about our economies. Where our economic system is predicated on an idea of humans as consistently rational and narrowly self-interested, optimally pursuing their subjectively-defined ends, we have a different view entirely.

In Christ’s Kingdom, our economic purposes consists in obedience, not self-interest. We regard our ends as set for us by God, that’s true of the economy also. We view the world a gift and a responsibility to be stewarded, never merely as a resource. We understand that our individual good is bound up with our common good and so we are willing to endure great sacrifice to demonstrate God’s love to the vulnerable and the dispossessed, or at least we aspire to be. We reject our culture’s goals of success, beauty, celebrity as empty. Instead, we recognize our highest ideal is the God who was born in a motel car park and lived homeless and broke.

My point is that revolutions transform the world. For that reason, they necessarily incur the resistance of the powers, structures and interests that benefit from the status quo. And if the threat is serious enough, this resistance usually comes in the form of persecution.

When Jesus says: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness, who are persecuted for my sake, I think he’s suggesting that Christian faith is inherently transformative and therefore destabilizing – that we should expect, as a matter of course, as a matter of necessity, that the structures and powers that rely on violence and coercion to maintain their order will be threatened by a Kingdom like Christ’s.

And if we are not met with the tools those powers always use, if we are not met with persecution, we might be well advised to question why.