This guy evidently never heard of voluntary martyrdom and the zeal for it in early Christianity

Christian Nihilism is Taking Over American Life

Luke Lyman The Spectator

 ... A saint isn’t supposed to ask to be martyred. ... 

Let's see: Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, the Voluntary Martyrs of Asia under the Proconsul Arrius Antoninus, the Martyrs of Palestine, Perpetua, Saturus, and Felicity, Timolaus and his companions . . . 

They were a big problem in early Christianity, but the author doesn't seem to know that, either.

Meanwhile, the article feels overwrought and hysterical, erecting a giant straw man of leftists all over the place consciously copying Christianity in thrall to some kind of mad death wish, when what we're really talking about is just liberal Minnesota, which we wouldn't be talking about had the Trump administration not deliberately targeted it and murdered two protestors there, one shot in her left temple through the side window of her car, the other shot multiple times in the back.

The nihilism on display is all the government's, not the people's.

There may be Christian nihilism aplenty in Minneapolis, I don't really know, but this author never establishes the actual Christian bona fides of any of the principal nihilistic actors so that he may legitimately call any of them "Christian nihilists" who self-consciously pattern themselves on the religion in their confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. 

How anyone could do that though is a mystery, since nihilists reject all religious and moral principles. 

Christian nihilism is an oxymoron, coined by a moron.

Hero priest almost instantly excommunicated in Livorno, Italy for calling Pope Francis the anti-pope, a usurper, and a mason

 From the story here:

Jesting, he said he received the decree of excommunication Jan. 1, and that “It’s nice, it’s really nice. It’s written well, very precise.”

“In the decree there are specific citations of canon law, which appear as such when it is necessary to strike a priest who shouts the truth, but for defending the Throne of Peter, it doesn’t exist,” he said.

Guidetti referred to a band of red that runs along the top of the decree, saying red is “the color of martyrdom, of blood, of witness.”

“It is a beautiful picture; I’ll make a nice frame for it and hang it on the wall. It will be something I will gladly brag about,” he said, but admitted that he feels “a little bitterness for this blindness and harshness on the part of one who should be a mother, the church, which should be maternal, and who in reality is a tyrant.”

 

Despite being killed in a conflict over his polygamist designs on the wives of his inner circle, Mormons still view the death of Joseph Smith as a martyrdom

 

This was that: Misinterpreting the past with the present

What are we to make of John Allen Chau, an American missionary murdered in India?:

I think his was authentically a Christian death. ... I believe he is indeed a martyr.

I believe this, one, because of all the laughter, because his sanity's been questioned. Some thought the same of Jesus, you see, some even from his own family. In early accounts of Christian martyrs, centuries ago, repeatedly, the scorn leveled against them was that they were crazy too, unbalanced, that they had a death wish. "Why do you rush towards death?" they asked Pionius, one of our early martyrs, a mouthy Christian priest crucified, the story goes, just like Christ. "I am not rushing towards death, but towards life," he said. It's a misunderstanding typical between those who believe and those who don't; one thinking the other one crazy, the other embracing life in death amid the ridicule of those playing it safe. It's why nothing of the laughter or of the disapproval of the agnostically sane persuades me to pass judgment. Because martyrs don't make sense, never have. But neither did Jesus, nor his Crucifixion.

Jesus wasn't thought crazy by his family because he had a death wish.

He was thought crazy because he renounced his family and his social responsibilities and took up the mantle of prophet, urging others to do just as he had done in order to escape the imminently coming judgment.

The death wish idea was imported ex post facto and superimposed on a narrative which remarkably resisted and survived.

The only thing worthy of scorn is Jesus' would-be followers' immemorial ignorance of why he believed Israel deserved the judgment he preached in the first place. 

Peter Hitchens: Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared

From his splendidly temperate and richly informative essay, LATIMER AND RIDLEY ARE FORGOTTEN: A PROTESTANT UNDERSTANDING OF ENGLAND’S MARTYRS, here:

 

 

 

 

 

 

For More and Fisher have, more or less, won. The Elizabethan settlement long ago broke down. The Anglican Church, once forged to a gleaming hardness by the fires of Bloody Mary, has rusted away. Its Catholics now brandish thuribles and don chasubles, bowed down by embroidered copes at elaborate High Masses. Even its archbishops of Canterbury now array themselves in garish vestments that would have appalled their grandfathers. Its Protestants have wandered off into a land of guitars and modern language, full of the sort of enthusiasm Anglicanism once feared and despised, its Calvinism quite undiluted by godly order, sobriety, and reverence. The Elizabethan Prayer Book, which Catholics were once forced to endure, has almost disappeared from use in its own churches, except in cathedrals, or in a few services for very old people, held early in the morning or at sunset, until the Grim Reaper takes a hand, attendance dwindles, and they stop forever. The Prayer Book’s penitential, stern theology is too rich a mixture for a land that has grown comfortable with divorce and abortion. The English Bible, that great cause for which William Tyndale was strangled, is neglected and unread, its thrilling trumpet-blasts of seventeenth-century poetry unknown even to the officially well-educated, and almost never used in church. By another paradox, Roman Catholics have their own vernacular Bible and prayers, dreadfully inferior in beauty and euphony to those of the Church of England, though few know, because they have never heard or seen anything better. The Roman Catholics have even introduced Communion in both kinds, taken to singing hymns, and brought in married priests through the back door by ordaining married Anglo-Catholic defectors to the Ordinariate. Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared, and its once-universal opinions are now regarded as odd, eccentric, and intolerant. Only in Northern Ireland and a few corners of Scotland will you find any remnant of the once-dominant worldview that saw popery as the ally of poverty, of “brass money and wooden shoes,” and of despotism.

Paul's chutzpah: Chief of sinners says "I am pure from the blood of all men"

Wherefore I take you to record this day, that I am pure from the blood of all men.

-- Acts 20:26

And Saul was consenting unto his death. 

-- Acts 8:1

And when the blood of thy martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by, and consenting unto his death, and kept the raiment of them that slew him.

-- Acts 22:20

Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.

-- 1 Timothy 1:15

Perhaps Jesus' worst legacy is the trail of "heroic" but really mentally ill "self-sacrificial" suicides he encouraged, starting with Paul

He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. -- Matthew 10:39

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. -- Matthew 16:25

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. -- Mark 8:35

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. -- Luke 9:24

Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it. -- Luke 17:33

He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. -- John 12:25 (!)

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. -- Philippians 1:21

Candida Moss pretends that eyewitness reports can't possibly be morality tales ...

. . . and has a curious list of historical sources she likes and dislikes to say the least.

She doesn't trust The Acts of the Apostles, The Da Vinci Code, The Gospel of John, The Da Vinci Code, Tacitus, and The Da Vinci Code.

But she rather likes The Acts of Peter, The Hebrew Bible, The Letters of Paul, The Hebrew Bible, John Chrysostom, and The Hebrew Bible.

Here.

"The irony here, as I argued in my book Myth of Persecution, is that Christian myths about the martyrdom of the apostles don’t even pretend to use the earliest historical sources. Which is just fine, as long as you recognize that they are morality tales, not eyewitness reports." 

The whole idea of Jesus' resurrection is a morality tale, in which the tragedy which befell a good but crazy man consumed with ideas of justice is rationalized to preserve those ideas and those who believe in them.

Tertullian's encouragement to martyrdom

Roman Carthage

The flesh will perhaps fear the heavy sword and the lofty cross and the wild beasts mad with rage and the most terrible punishment of all—death by fire—and, finally, all the executioner’s cunning during the torture.  But let the spirit present to both itself and the flesh the other side of the picture: granted, these sufferings are grievous, yet many have borne them patiently, nay, have even sought them on their own accord for the sake of fame and glory; and this is true not only of men but also of women so that you, too, O blessed women, may be worthy of your sex. 

-- Tertullian, To the Martyrs, 4.35 (circa AD 197)

However consequential Jesus has been for human history, zeal for Muhammad's message and its success have been at least comparable

From a follower of NT Wright, here:

"The real Jesus must have been . . . consequential. Jesus left such an impact on the early Christians that they were willing to suffer and die for their testimony that he’d risen from the dead. A failed prophet or revolutionary might have attracted lasting admiration at best, but what could’ve happened to make devout monotheistic Jews worship this man after his death?"

For a false prophet in the opinion of Christians, Muhammad's message has built quite a following in the world despite being a younger religion in the history of humankind. It's laughable not to notice how successfully Islam has revolutionized vast swaths of the globe despite having no divine man who rose from the dead to worship, and how many have died in the cause of pressing its case on an unbelieving world in the past and in our own time, through war and through martyrdom. 

Worldwide the 1.6 billion adherents of Islam face Mecca five times a day in something more than "lasting admiration", and now equal more than 70% of the global Christian population, while Hinduism's practitioners equal another 50%. Together the Muslims and Hindus outnumber the followers of Christ by over 20%.

Consider how many Muslims have martyred themselves in suicide bombings just in the period since 1982, as tracked by the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, here. There are in excess of 4,600 cases. Compare that with the number of Christians martyred until the time of Constantine, which my late teacher Robert M. Grant in a seminar on the apologists back in the day once put at no more than 5,000.  

N. T. Wright misses that Paul took recourse to conceptions of a heavenly dwelling in order to advance beyond the older failed apocalyptic

 

 

Here is N. T. Wright, wrong again, fittingly in Slate:

Jesus, Paul, and all other first-century Christians known to us embraced the older Israelite view, in which the created physical order was of primary importance. God’s promises concerned the present world, seen as the combination of “heaven” and “earth.” The Jerusalem temple symbolized the coming together of those two spheres, pointing ahead to a time when the divine glory would fill the whole creation. Israel’s scriptures offered only cryptic hints about resurrection and the divine purpose extending beyond the grave. But this belief came to the fore, not least through times of persecution, in the last centuries before Jesus. God would, at the last, raise from the dead all his faithful people to share in his new creation. This belief remained at the heart of early Christian hope. ...

They still believed in an interim between death and resurrection, though they did not speak of this in terms of immortality, a word they applied rather to the new resurrection body itself. When Paul speaks of the “interim,” he talks about “departing and being with the Messiah, which is much better.” Perhaps that is the best way of putting it: Jesus, the prototype of new creation, will look after those who belong to him until the moment of new creation. The Book of Revelation speaks of “souls under the altar;” the martyrs pray for God’s ultimate justice to triumph. Like all our speech about life beyond death, this is picture language. The first Christians were not hugely concerned with the immediate post-mortem future, but rather with the ultimate resurrection and new creation, the bodily immortality launched with Jesus’ own resurrection.

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The narrative of 2 Corinthians 5 argues that Paul had moved forward in his thinking to reconcile the failure of the predicted kingdom to appear by recasting the old ideas in terms of heavenly, eternal, non-corporeal living realities with which we are clothed quite apart from the resurrection:

For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling, so that by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we sigh with anxiety; not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always of good courage; we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body.

Similarly Romans 14:

None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.

And 1 Thessalonians 5:

For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we wake or sleep we might live with him.

And Philippians 1:

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.

Without The Bible, Vices Become Our Virtues, Tyrants Our Liberators

Cristina Odone, here:

The extraordinary, subversive book, with its lessons on charity, compassion and respect for others inspired generations to rebel against tyrannies of all kinds – dictators, addictions, vices. Men and women dedicated their lives to its teachings – and were ready to die for it. But today it seems that a host of martyrs lost their lives in vain: the Bible is just another book that sold more than the Hunger Games trilogy at some point.

Joel Miller Misunderstands "Martyr" From Every Angle

Joel Miller, here:

"Coptic Christians have long tattooed their wrists with small crosses, little blue-green marks that silently profess their faith. It’s not without irony that the word witness in Greek is martyr. Copts are often harassed by Muslim neighbors for their markings, and reports of Christian girls forced into Muslim marriages include references to having their crosses cut out or burnt off with acid."

Not only did Greek "martyr" not have the sense Christians later came to invest it with but had instead a long judicial pedigree which informs the main sense of "witness" in the New Testament itself, the idea of actually craving to be tortured and killed for Christ like Ignatius is probably the last thing on the Copts' minds when they get a small tattoo on the wrist. It's like an identity card you flash to identify yourself to a fellow Christian, or to a westerner you assume is Christian, in a country where you need all the friends you can get.