Humanitarian Victims or Christian Martyrs: What's in a Word?
Progressive religion is being called now to bear witness, and to claim solidarity with people who lose their lives in service of others. This ground must not be ceded.
By Donald Heinz
9/8/2010 Afghanistan (Religion Dispatches) – A month ago ten humanitarian aid workers in Afghanistan, most of them apparently called to medical mission by a deep Christian faith, were massacred by the Taliban. The New York Times’ front-page caption beneath their pictures read: “Humanitarian Victims of Afghan Violence.” The story began: “Their devotion was perhaps most evident in what they gave up to carry out their mission.” My question: should we not be calling them Christian martyrs?
Perhaps the Times’ neutral language was meant to counter the Taliban charge that they were proselytizers — to assert that they were humanitarians, not missionaries. And perhaps the genre of their deaths is yet to be worked through by their friends and families — and by all of us.
But imagine “Christian Martyrs” above the fold on the front page that first carried their story. How would readers have responded to the intrusion of deliberately religious language into the world of the well-educated Times reader, in which enlightened rationality is the lingua franca?
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