Martyrdom and Memory

John Allen raises an important point.  Excerpts:

Here’s a question that astute observers of the religious landscape find themselves asking these days, and which deserves a serious response: Why doesn’t Christianity have its own Holocaust literature?

By that, of course, no one means to minimize the absolute singularity of the Holocaust against the Jews during the Second World War, and the moral imperative of keeping that memory alive. Yet the question persists: Given the harrowing realities of Christian martyrdom during the 20th century, and the rising global tide of anti-Christian violence in the early 21st century, why isn’t there a budding genre of Christian analogs to Night by Elie Wiesel, or Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List”?

(A rare example is the compelling 2010 French film “Of Gods and Men,” based on the assassination of a group of Trappist monks in Algeria in 2006. It’s too bad the movie wasn’t nominated for “Best Foreign Language Film” at the Oscars, which would have given it broader exposure to American audiences. The U.S. debut is Feb. 25.)

More broadly, why don’t attacks against Christians in places such as Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, India and Pakistan, to cite just a few recent examples, generate the same outrage among Christians in the West that similar oppression directed against followers of other faiths elicits among their coreligionists?

According to the German-based relief agency “Aid to the Church in Need,” fully 75 percent of all acts of religious intolerance in the world are directed against Christians. Yet in the court of popular opinion, the mythology persists that Christians are more likely to be the oppressors than the oppressed...

No matter what the causes, it’s appalling that the suffering of Christians around the world has not stirred the Christian conscience in the West to a greater degree. It’s especially shocking that American Christians have not reacted more strongly to anti-Christian violence in Iraq, given the responsibility the United States bears for creating the conditions in which that insecurity could metastasize.

Disappointment ought to be particularly acute among Catholics, since Catholicism prides itself on forming a communion of saints linked by bonds of solidarity that transcend both time and space.

Perhaps what the Christian world needs is precisely the call to conscience that a thoughtful, evocative Holocaust literature would elicit. May its moment come, and that right soon.