The Christian Impulse to Be Called a Martyr
My hot take on a very bad take from Voice of the Martyrs
Welcome to the Trauma-Informed Take! Today I rant (in a praising way) about the amazing US and the Holocaust documentary that was just released, and rant (in an angry way) about an audacious publication that came into my mailbox this week that happens to relate to the film. You gotta read on to find out what it said!
Because my spouse and I are apparently 30- and 40-somethings trapped in 70-year-old bodies, we have spent every night this week watching a documentary on PBS (with a one-night break for 60 Minutes, of course). I’ve been tweeting about it and hope for your sake that you are also watching it, because it is blowing my mind away (and breaking my heart).
The documentary is The U.S. and the Holocaust, produced by Ken Burns, who spent the last 7.5 years creating this in partnership with a slew of other talented folks.
Like…everyone, (I thought), I learned about the Holocaust in public school growing up. We read the Diary of Anne Frank. We learned what Kristallnacht was, and how Jews were forced to wear yellow Stars of David on the clothing to identify them. We learned about the concentration camps. We learned about the brutal murder of 6 million Jews.
How do you understand 6 million human beings killed in mass genocide when you are a middle schooler? A high schooler? A full-grown adult?
The documentary made me learn things I definitely didn’t learn in school, though. Some of these realities might probably be clumped under “critical race theory” and make those conservatives go nuts because of the unpleasant portrayal of the United States or some of its influential people. For instance:
Or this:
Despite all that, the United States was not worse than all the other countries around the world. The documentary clearly states that the US let in more refugees than other any other sanctioned country. But just because you keep company with lots of other guilty parties doesn’t make you innocent.
The painful realities of xenophobia, nativism, and anti-Semitism are laid bare throughout the film. To an aware viewer, the present feels like a chilling echo of the past. But if anyone is tempted to think that Ken Burns was out to get the MAGA folks specifically, just remember this project started before Trump even declared his candidacy. Because as Burns said in a Freakonomics podcast interview, this nativism and xenophobia has been with us for forever. He quotes Mark Twain: “The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
What do we do about the “human condition?” How can we learn from our grave mistakes of the past and become better humans who aren’t so damn dead set on hurting and killing each other?
I could probably go on for much too long about the documentary, but really, it’s worth watching yourself. It’s a long one but just dip your toe in — it’s worth it. (We watched it live and on the PBS app on our Roku!)
So given all this, it was quite the juxtaposition when I ran across something that came in the mail this past week. You know when former residents’ mail comes to your house, and it’s either junk mail or something that you’re obviously not going to take the effort to return to sender? Okay, so that’s where this particular piece of mail came from.
It’s a magazine called Voice of the Martyrs, which is a publication I’m familiar with because, well, *references entire childhood.* Out of sheer curiosity, I opened it up to see what they had to say about Christian martyrs around the world.
My mom (hi, mom! 👋) actually is the one who found the line in question below:
SCREEEECH!!!!!!! (*Slams on the brakes*)
Excuse me WHAT??
In case it’s difficult to read, let me quote it here: “Nazism and Communism threatened the lives and freedoms of Christians and millions of others in Europe throughout the 1930s and 1940s.”
You said…what??
Especially as I’m on the heels of watching a moving, painful, powerful documentary about the Holocaust, in which 6 MILLION (two thirds of the Jewish population in Europe — and every Jew was targeted, it’s just not all of them died) Jews were killed…
…you have the AUDACITY to talk about CHRISTIANS being targeted??
It’s enough to have me seeing red, and I’m not even Jewish. Are these Voice of the Martyrs people Holocaust deniers? Do they have no education? Are they that self-centered? Do they just not care about Jews? Are they blatantly that anti-Semitic?
(I’m not even getting into the next couple of lines that refer to atheism and hedonism as “ideologies of hatred” because that’s a whole other ball of wax. Also seriously, who self-identifies as a hedonist, or is that just perhaps their word for someone who has decided to not be weighed down by religious trauma baggage?? So anyway).
I’m disgusted by the publication I accidentally received in my mailbox and had the curiosity to open, but at the same time, it certainly proves that point that films like The US and the Holocaust are as relevant as ever.
We must not forget what happened. We most certainly must not fancy ourselves victims when we were not. We must take responsibility where responsibility is due. And we should be honest with ourselves about our moral failings in the past because it is only through honesty and repentance that we stand a chance to change our ways.
Thanks for reading the Trauma-Informed Take. If you have any thoughts, comments, or brilliant ideas about how to fix Holocaust denial or human cruelty in general… find me in the comments! And if you’re new here, don’t forget to subscribe!
Thanks for sharing about the Burns Holocaust series, Christine. As an almost 70-something (😅), I watched the full series this week. I don’t watch much about the holocaust anymore because it is so heartbreaking, and this series is no exception, but it delves directly into US attitudes and participation. I was both heartened by US organizations and politicians (FDR) who tried to aid the Jews of Europe, and horrified by the widespread antisemitism and overall xenophobia in the US. As the series so aptly points out, White Christians have always held these attitudes, as Black, Brown, and Jewish people have always known. But we White folks are just beginning to awaken to the centuries of horrors we have perpetrated. I liked your allusion to Critical Race Theory. Instead of running from it and passing laws against teaching it, White people need to face it squarely and dive deeply into the heritage of racism and ethnocentrism built into our culture and our laws and change them. As you said so well: “…we should be honest with ourselves about our moral failings in the past because it is only through honesty and repentance that we stand a chance to change our ways.”
As someone from one of the countries occupied by Germany during the war, let me just say the occupying forces would have had a much harder time getting the jews who lived here if the people had been less anti-semitic. How much is still a thing people argue about, but it's clear many lives could have been saved by the occupied people. People were more often willing to break the occupiers' laws for each other, but not so much for the ones considered outsiders. Very few jews were saved from the holocaust here.