“One demise is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic.” Generally attributed to Joseph Stalin, this quote describes lifestyles below the Soviet dictator’s totalitarian regime, for the length of which an estimated 6 to twenty million folk died from mass executions, labor camps, imprisonment, and famine.
Among them were dozens of Russian Orthodox bishops and thousands of priests, most often killed by firing squad. Many more Orthodox Christians were arrested and sent to labor camps. Christian intellectuals were purged from the Soviet Union; many died in prisons and concentration camps, the well-known of which became established in a aged Orthodox monastery in the Solovetsky Islands in 1923. Non secular leaders and laypeople of every kind suffered below Stalin, who became once himself a scholar at Tbilisi Theological Seminary.
To the merciless dictator, these deaths weren’t folk to be mourned. They were numbers in columns, inconvenient barriers in the kind of a political aim. Statistics, no longer tragedies.
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We know that “statistics, no longer tragedies” is an inhumane paradigm. On the equal time, it might in all probability be straightforward for us to gaze mass martyrdom merely as a recordsdata level moderately than the fate of folk.
The World Christian Database defines martyrs as “believers in Christ who have misplaced their lives prematurely, in eventualities of check out, as a results of human hostility.” By this definition, more than 70 million Christians were martyred all thru the final two millennia—more than half of in the twentieth century below Stalinist, Communist, fascist, and Nazi regimes, and a great deal of of in the 21st century below Islamic militancy in locations all thru North Africa and West Asia. Since 2020, martyrdoms have furthermore been recorded in Myanmar, Uganda, Mozambique, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Burkina Faso, and Mali, amongst other nations.
The 21, a brand contemporary rapid movie that portrays the horrific beheading of 21 Christians by ISIS militants on a seaside in Libya in 2015, counteracts the tendency to numb ourselves to this actuality. (Christianity This day is an executive producer on the movie.) Produced by More Productions and intelligent by a team of discontinuance to 100 artists from all thru the arena, the movie showcases the spirituality and sacrifice of its subject issues—20 Christians from Egypt and 1 Christian from Ghana, all of them migrant team who were captured merely for being Christian. Imprisoned, tortured, and demoralized, they confronted tension to drawl their faith but refused to beget so.
The broader context of this episode is the persecution of Christians in ISIS-managed territory in Iraq and Syria, the put thousands of Christians were completed, girls and girls forced into intercourse slavery, and clergy kidnapped and assassinated in a ruthless are trying to wipe the faith out of the disclose. ISIS’s protection is abundantly definite in The 21: recant or die. Confronted with a mortal decision, the captives selected to die.
Engaging in a neo-Coptic kind evocative of the prolonged history of Orthodox art, The 21 pairs earthly realities with non secular ones. An ISIS fighter glimpses a haloed Jesus sitting alongside the inch and blindfolded prisoners in the abet of a clattering van. Shivering at evening on a moist penal complex floor, the lads assert Kyrie eleison; disclose and lightning crack thru the sky, and a dove flits all thru the horizon. “The more they were tortured,” the narrator says, “the more their faith looked as if it might per chance in all probability grow.” All any other time, Jesus looks, eyes glinting in the shadows of the cell. Rocks jut up from the earth. “Then the ground started to shake love an earthquake,” says the narrator, “and ISIS became afraid.” When the lads come what would possibly march to their deaths, otherworldly figures accompany them, reflections glinting in the saltwater.
The movie furthermore functions footage from ISIS’s customary propaganda video of the executions. It is some distance a plucky but well-known substitute by the filmmakers, a substitute that keeps their target market from dropping gaze of the sobering indisputable truth that these men were true folk with true struggling. The juxtaposition is jarring: Viewers are face-to-face no longer with ingenious renderings and iconography but with the martyrs themselves—first marching all thru the sand in orange jumpsuits, then turning the waves crimson with their blood.
The 21 tells simplest one martyrdom story in much less than ten minutes, bringing fewer than two dozen husbands, brothers, sons, and fathers to lifestyles in swish intelligent ingredient. However these ten minutes topic. These men are a testomony to Christian faith below tension. Their lives and deaths stand alongside other Christians who proceed to invent plucky selections in the face of violence and persecution.
Larger than 50,000 Christians were martyred in Nigeria since 2009 by the palms of Boko Haram, ISIS-West Africa, and Fulani militants. Many millions more were displaced, making a extreme humanitarian disaster. Christianity in Syria has been virtually eradicated, with the country’s Christian inhabitants dropping from 10 p.c (1975) to 2 p.c (2025). The bid is equal in Iraq, the put Christians fled and died after the invasions of the US (2003) and ISIS (2014–2017). Christians had three selections below ISIS adjust: convert to Islam, pay the jizya tax, or die. The Christian community in Mosul, Iraq, once 50,000 solid, has been diminished to an estimated 20 Christian households.
Every martyr all thru Christian history has had a name, a family, and a faith. Let The 21 be a reminder no longer lawful of lives misplaced but of the cost to be a follower of Christ below the most indecent conditions.
Gina A. Zurlo is a visiting lecturer in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity Faculty and editor of the World Christian Database.
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