On the failure to become martyrs

David Warren has no use for the two Fox News journalists who converted to Islam at gunpoint rather than accept martyrdom. Warren wrote that very many Christians over the centuries have gone willingly to their deaths rather than renounce Christ. Even if the two journos aren't Christians, what they did is still disgraceful, says Warren:

You don't necessarily have to be a Christian, to be Western. Two years ago, an heroic Italian captive, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, asked to make whimpering statements as part of the video of his execution in Iraq, ripped at his hood and instead declared, "This is how an Italian dies!" to his contemptible captors. He must have upset them: for they shot him instead of sawing off his head. In making his stand for human dignity, he also turned one of their propaganda videos, into one of ours.

When I first read the Warren column, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted to agree with him, but wondered what I would do if I had been captured by Islamic terrorists and told to convert or die. I would hope and pray that I would have the courage to die for Christ. But I wonder if my fear, and my fear over what would happen to my wife and children if I were to die, would get the best of me? There's a reason we Christians pray "lead us not into temptation." I felt that I ought to be merciful toward the Fox guys, because I don't know how I would behave in that situation.

Warren considers this point, and has a great comeback in his latest column:

I cannot know how I will behave in such a situation, until I am in it. But if I capitulated, from fear of pain and death, I would be deeply ashamed of what I had done. And this shame would haunt me for the rest of my life. I would not be appearing all smiles on TV, I would not be accepting the accolades of my colleagues, and I would surely have the decency to contradict anyone who dared call me "brave" for saving my own skin.

And if I had, in that moment of cowardice, denied Christ, I'd be praying for forgiveness as Judas should have prayed. Unless, like his, my soul had been broken by the gravity of my act.

This is no mere ethics quiz: I invite my reader to ask himself what he would do in the situation those Fox journalists found themselves in. Not what I would do -- I am just the messenger -- but what you would do. And before you give any quick or clever answer, recall that our whole civilization stands or falls on what you decide. Do you, do we, have the courage to hold our spiritual fortress? Or will we, in the time of trouble, give everything away?

This is exactly right, it seems to me. If I had capitulated, the shame of it would haunt me for the rest of my life. And it should. What those two men did was understandable on a human level, but they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

UPDATE: A colleague sends this quote from Thucydides: "Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face, and after one brief moment, while at the summit of their fortune, escaped, not from their fear, but from their glory."