Sacred and Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland since 1914

John Wolffe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350019287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

During and immediately after the First World War, there was a merging of Christian and nationalist traditions of martyrdom, expressed in the design of war cemeteries and war memorials, and the state funeral of the Unknown Warrior in 1920. John Wolffe explores the subsequent development of these traditions of 'sacred' and 'secular' martyrdom, analysing the ways in which they operated - sometimes in parallel, sometimes merged together and sometimes in conflict with each other. Particular topics explored include the Protestant commemoration of Marian and missionary martyrs, and the Roman Catholic campaign for the canonization of the 'saints and martyrs of England'. Secular martyrdom is discussed in relation to military conflicts especially the Second World War and the Falklands. In Ireland there was a particularly persistent merging of sacred and secular martyrdom in the wake of the Easter Rising of 1916 although by the time of the Northern Ireland 'Troubles' in the later twentieth-century these traditions diverged. In covering these themes, the book also offers historical and comparative context for understanding present-day acts of martyrdom in the form of suicide attacks.

1

Varieties of martyrdom

Exploring sacred and secular martyrdoms

In late 1914, responding to heavy British casualties in the opening battles of the First World War, the bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, sought to console bereaved families:

You have lost your boys, but what are they? Martyrs – martyrs as really as St Stephen was a martyr – martyrs dying for their faith as really as St Stephen, the first martyr, died for his. They looked up when they died in the trenches, or in the little cottage where they were carried, they looked up and they saw JESUS standing on the right hand of GOD. And he is keeping them safe for you there when the time comes. Covered with imperishable glory they pass to deathless life.¹

Winnington-Ingram’s equation of dead soldiers with Stephen, the archetype of Christian martyrdom, is an apt starting point for this book, which seeks to explore the uses and ambiguities of the concept during the century since 1914.

Stephen’s martyrdom is described in some detail in the New Testament book of Acts (6:8–7:60). His preaching in Jerusalem about Jesus of Nazareth is ‘full of grace and power’ and leads to his arrest and trial by the Jewish Sanhedrin on a charge of blasphemy. Far from denying the allegation, Stephen delivers a provocative speech, offering his own reading of Jewish history and culminating with the charge that his hearers ‘always resist the Holy Spirit’, and that they were responsible for betraying and murdering Jesus, ‘the Righteous One’. Stephen then declares that he sees heaven opened and ‘the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God’, which is the last straw for his enemies, who refuse to listen further to him, drive him out of the city and stone him to death. Meanwhile Stephen prays that Jesus will receive his spirit and not hold the sin of his persecutors against them.

This account highlights a number of features of Stephen’s case that led to it readily becoming a model for subsequent narratives of Christian martyrdom. First, Stephen is fearless and consistent in his witness to Jesus: indeed, the very word ‘martyr’ derives from the Greek martus, meaning a witness.² Second, although verbally provocative, he is physically passive: he does not violently resist his persecutors or to incite others to do so. Indeed, he prays that those who are stoning him will be forgiven. Third, he dies in a state of religious ecstasy, confident that his spirit will be received by the Jesus to whom he testifies. Finally, implicit in the account is a sense that even if Stephen does not deliberately seek martyrdom, he makes no attempt to escape it and appears even to welcome it.

It is clear that Winnington-Ingram’s equation of fallen soldiers with Stephen stretches this concept of martyrdom substantially. First, Great War soldiers were not in general explicit witnesses to Christianity, and even the minority who were actively professing Christians died not because of their faith, but because they were taking part in a war against other Christian nations. Second, a soldier is an active combatant rather than a passive victim. Third, the brutal reality of death on the battlefield was in most cases far removed from the peaceful ecstatic experience that Winnington-Ingram visualized. Finally, while a soldier may well contemplate the possibility of death, he does not normally welcome it, and as he serves under orders, his sacrifice is likely to be involuntary rather than in any sense a matter of personal choice.

Ninety years later, as Mohammad Sidique Khan prepared to blow himself and others up on the London Underground on 7 July 2005, he recorded a video in which he represented his action as standing in a tradition of Islamic martyrdom:

Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood …

Our religion is Islam – obedience to the one true God, Allah, and following the footsteps of the final prophet and messenger Muhammad …. This is how our ethical stances are dictated.

Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetrate atrocities against my people all over the world. …

We are at war and I am a soldier …

I myself, I myself, I make dua to Allah … to raise me amongst those whom I love like the prophets, the messengers, the martyrs and today’s heroes …

With this I leave you to make up your own minds and I ask you to make dua to Allah almighty to accept the work from me and my brothers and enter us into gardens of paradise.³

While Sidique Khan thus claimed an Islamic legitimacy for his actions, in reality they also extended the boundaries of a traditional religious martyrdom, in a manner that was repugnant to the great majority of his own co-religionists. Although an Islamic concept of martyrdom contrasts with a Christian one by more positively affirming the case of a soldier who dies in active combat in defence of the faith, it is questionable whether it legitimizes suicide attacks, and it certainly does not justify the intentional mass murder of civilians.⁴ Nevertheless, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of his radical Islamist sympathizers, Sidique Khan was a martyr.

These two examples serve to introduce the complex and contested nature of the concept of martyrdom over the last century, which is the subject of this book. It is primarily a work of empirical history and hence does not seek to impose a single definition of martyrdom, but rather to identify and trace the ways in which the concept has been employed, both explicitly and also implicitly in more diffuse language of sacrifice. Central to the argument will be the presentation of martyrdom as both a religious phenomenon – rooted in particular in the teachings and traditions of both Christianity and Islam – and a secular one – rooted above all in nationalism as well as in other political ideologies. As the two quotations above well illustrate, however, the sacred and the secular often operate in complex interaction with each other: Winnington-Ingram’s words gave a Christian colour to an essentially nationalistic view of martyrdom; Sidique Khan claimed Islamic legitimacy for a particular violent politicized interpretation of the teachings of his faith.

There are revealing asymmetries in the academic literature between the treatment of martyrdom in Christianity and Islam. There is longstanding interest in Christian martyrdom treated predominantly as a historical phenomenon, concentrated particularly in the early centuries of the church⁵ and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁶ In the early period, Christian martyrs suffered primarily at the hands of the Roman authorities; in the era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, however, they were primarily victims of other Christians. Martyr cults are thus seen as having a formative role both in the emergence of Christianity itself and in the shaping of the rival Protestant and Catholic traditions that emerged from the fracturing of Western Christendom in the sixteenth century. More recent contributions, however, have drawn out the fluidity and variability of constructions of martyrdom across time and space both in early Christianity and in the Reformation era.⁷

While Christian martyrdom in other periods has received less-intensive attention it has not been neglected. The dominance of Christianity in most parts of medieval Europe rendered martyrdom at the hands of non-Christians an unusual occurrence. Indeed the church, while fostering the continuing cults of early Christian martyrs, appeared reluctant to recognize more contemporary instances. Nevertheless, attention has been drawn to more isolated medieval instances, such as the Christians who were martyred when they deliberately confronted Islam in ninth-century Córdoba⁸ and the cult of William of Norwich, a boy allegedly murdered by Jews in 1144. Moreover, endeavours to suppress later medieval heresies, such as the Cathars, Hussites, Lollards and Waldensians, led to numerous deaths that foreshadowed the intra-Christian martyrdoms of the Reformation era.⁹

Once the intense religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had given way to the relative toleration of the eighteenth century, minorities such as British Catholics and French Huguenots continued to be oppressed but were not normally martyred. However, in the 1790s, the French Revolution initiated a new era in which Catholics were persecuted under a secular republican regime. Ivan Gobry estimates that at least 100,000 people, both clergy and laity, died under conditions consistent with describing them as martyrs, although he was only able to document 4,600 of them.¹⁰ The upsurge of Christian missions outside Europe in the nineteenth century also led to perceived martyrdoms, although attention to cases such as that of Bishop Patteson, killed in Melanesia in 1872, and the young indigenous converts executed by King Mwanga of Buganda in 1886, has been episodic rather than systematic.¹¹ The same is true of Christian martyrdom in the twentieth century and the contemporary world, which has attracted relatively little scholarly attention, apart from those who suffered in the Soviet Union and the individual case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis in 1945.¹² However, as David Killingray argued in 1993 with particular reference to Africa, ‘there is a good case for regarding the twentieth century as the century of Christian persecution and martyrdom’, a view that is supported by a substantial devotional and popular literature. Indeed, the ongoing energetic activities of a number of charities, such as Open Doors in Britain and the Voice of the Martyrs in the United States, highlight continuing persecution of Christians and indicate that actual martyrdoms have remained widespread in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.¹³

By contrast, academic attention to Muslim martyrdom has only developed substantially during the last twenty years and has focused primarily on the present day and the recent past, despite the fact that Islam too has a very long history of martyrdom, at least back to the death of Hussain and his companions at Karbala in 680 ce. This contemporary upsurge of interest is largely attributable to the perception that Muslim beliefs about martyrdom are seriously problematic in giving rise to the suicide attacks that, since the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, have stirred profound anxieties in the West. Whereas studies of Christian martyrdom have been primarily the work of theologians and historians, initial analysis of Islamic martyrdom in the aftermath of 9/11 was predominantly rooted in the social sciences, and hence, while it offered a rich awareness of contemporary social and political context, it lacked detailed historical or theological perspective.¹⁴

Subsequent publications, however, have developed more subtle analysis of Islamic ideas and their implications. In his Martyrdom in Islam, David Cook demonstrated the complexity and variety of earlier Muslim views of martyrdom and hence that contemporary radical Islamist understandings rest on a selective reading of their own tradition.¹⁵ An important collection of essays, published in 2009, brought research on violence and martyrdom in Islam into dialogue with analysis of comparable dimensions of other religious traditions, thereby pointing up commonalities and distinctive features.¹⁶ Most recently, a major project on Legitimate and Illegitimate Violence in Islamic Thought, led by Robert Gleave, has generated further in-depth analysis spanning the longue du...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Varieties of martyrdom
• 2 The Cross of Sacrifice: Commemorating the dead of the First World War
• 3 Faiths of their fathers and their children: Varieties of martyrdom in inter-war Britain
• 4 From Easter to Good Friday: Martyrs for Ireland
• 5 Christian martyrdom and war remembrance: From the Second World War to the Falklands
• 6 Rejecting and reinventing martyrdom: The sacred and the secular since the 1980s
• 7 Conclusion: The legacies of history
• Appendix: Interviewee key characteristics and dates
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page