White Christians and the Romanticization of Sacrifice
I am a white man who grew up under the tutelage of white voices extolling the glory of white sacrifice.
I quickly learned that sacrifice was pretty much synonymous with martyrdom - an exclusive club that I would inevitably be inducted into by the tip of an Ecuadorian spear or the impact of a school shooter’s bullet. First, there was Jim Elliot, then Cassie Bernall, then, last but certainly not least, Austin Yoder.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! To live is Christ, and to die is gain!
Looking back, I can’t help but wince at my being taught the virtue and necessity of sacrifice by the very group of people that have historically been called upon to sacrifice the least. I marvel at the self-assuredness we all possessed. We were not only prepared to die for our faith, we welcomed the prospect. A self-assuredness that can only exist when one knows they will not have to back it up with action. This is like a dad shouting out a Jeopardy! answer only to change the channel before finding out whether or not he’s right.
It was enough to know that we would theoretically lay our lives down. All the while we actively avoided any situation that threatened to put that theory to the test.
As white Christians, we often worship at this altar of hypothetical sacrifice. This practice makes it easy to justify our ignorance of the tangible opportunities for sacrifice that are constantly presenting themselves to us. We forget—or perhaps intentionally disregard—the fact that we have far more to give than our mere lives.
We must be confronted with the counter-intuitive, even uncomfortable truth, that the day-to-day and “mundane” sacrifices are likely make more of an impact than being martyred.
This is why it grieves me to watch, as those same voices that so loudly sang the praises of martyrs, now complain about mask mandates and bristle at the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” They have classified these as inconveniences rather than what they actually are: invitations to beautiful, literal sacrifice in service of the marginalized.
That being said, a life lived sacrificially is, by its very nature, an inconvenient life. This is undoubtedly a bitter pill to swallow for white, middle-class Christianity, which counts convenience among its gods. But there is nothing convenient about dismantling the systems and institutions that uphold and enforce our privilege. To do so would be to cut that precious convenience off at its source, and surely the brown-skinned refugee who was lynched for our sins would never ask that of us. Right?
It seems to me that in this Romanticization of Sacrifice, as I have taken to calling it, something critical has been lost. We have subscribed to a narrow, incomplete definition of what it means to live sacrificially and, in doing so, conjured a new and perverted god - one seemingly more interested in our death than our life.
This is not the God I have to come to know.
This is not the God I want to know more.
This is not God.
Jesus, throughout his life, was far more concerned with our willingness to sacrifice wealth and comfort and privilege—to die to ourselves—than with whether or not we’d take a spear or bullet for him. It’s time for white Christians to follow suit.
- Austin Yoder