l of Japanese Christianity is itself a powerful testament to the effectiveness of their strategy.
Among my students, this discussion typically ends with expressions of gratitude that modern-day Americans are unlikely to find themselves in such a desperate position. For an undergraduate ethics course, I am content to leave it at that, but in my private reflections, I am sometimes unsure. I have no taste for torture, and no desire for an early death; nevertheless, there is something enviable in the stark simplicity of the Japanese choice between apostasy and death. We moderns are more likely to find ourselves caught among fifty shades of grey.
Modern-day Americans are rarely presented with a single, dramatic test of faith. We are left to ponder subtle questions about focus and emphasis. When, and how loudly, are we obliged to articulate Catholic teaching? Under what circumstances does silence constitute assent? At what point does honest dealing turn into overzealous contrarianism? There are no easy answers to these questions, which only become harder as we proceed through life, taking on heavier responsibilities and building more bridges that we are loathe to burn.
Catholics today are seldom offered a quick and dramatic exit from the dispiriting realities of modern life. This means, among other things, that we must live with the temporal consequences of our choices (and watch our loved ones do the same), possibly for a good long while. We differ from the Japanese martyrs, too, in that attacks on our faith rarely come in the form of a full, frontal assault. No one will offer us the honor of being publicly executed in witness to our faith in the Resurrection. Far more likely, we will languish for decades in a windowless cubicle, eking out the only living left available to us after our refusal to celebrate committed homosexual love. Or, we may find ourselves the least-anticipated arrival at countless family gatherings because we refuse to agree that cousin Sam is truly cousin Sandra, and that hormone therapy has liberated him from the erroneous physiology of his birth. Modern tormentors tend to prefer the slow and agonizing spiritual death to the quick and painless physical one.
Thinking over the Christian martyrs in all of their awe-inspiring diversity, I sometimes find it fun to speculate: for which Christian principle would I prefer to die? Transubstantiation? The Trinitarian formula? It is easy to lose oneself in a kind of holy envy of generations past. Even St. Thomas More, though no stranger to tawdry political realities, was ultimately able to offer his life as a testament to the authority of Rome. We for our part are most likely to suffer over sex, since that is the place where the enemy has now concentrated his forces in the battle for souls. It is a thoroughly unedifying subject, even to those of us who understand the significance of this skirmish in the larger war over the normativity of nature. By comparison, a good, impassioned fight over Christology would be a breath of fresh air.
Like all good soldiers, however, we must accept the assignments given us, without complaining that we would prefer to be set in a different part of the battlefield. It is not our prerogative to choose the hill on which we would prefer to die. But we may rest assured that defending the integrity of the faith will never, in the long run, turn out to be a trivial effort. Like the Japanese martyrs before us, our witness may teach our children that it is our individual willingness to fall that ultimately makes our Church indestructible.
Editor’s note: The image above is a detail from a monument in Nagasaki, Japan, depicting 26 Christians, including two teenage boys, martyred in 1597.