Explainer
Atonement
Creed
Easter
Morality
Suffering
5 min read

Christianity, suffering and the morality of the victim

Graham Tomlin explores the real reason why Christianity seems fixated on suffering.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A medieval painting of a suffering Christ surrounded by two angels looking concerned.
Andrea Mantegna, Christ as the Suffering Redeemer.
Richard Mortel, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

The Times caused a bit of a stir over the Easter weekend with an article entitled 'I’ll choose heroes rather than martyrs anyday.' The article linked Christianity’s fixation with suffering, climaxing with the crucifixion of Jesus, with the tendency in modern life to accord moral value to victimhood.  

The article’s author, Matthew Parris, is a wonderful writer, always interesting and provocative, and often talks a lot of sense. He is absolutely right to resist the urge to elevate an often self-claimed victimhood as in itself giving moral power and authority. Being a victim of bad treatment doesn’t in itself make your moral cause right or wrong. It might simply mean being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

The problem with elevating victimhood, is that none of us are solely victims. Most of us can find some area of life where we have felt we have been badly treated, but if we’re honest, we can also find other parts where we have treated others badly too. Although it’s tempting to divide the world into villains and victims, oppressors and oppressed, it’s never quite as neat as that. Of course, some people, and some groups of people are definitely more sinned against than sinning; issues of real injustice matter and need urgent attention, but however true that is, none of us falls solely on one side or the other of that line. We are not all equally guilty or innocent. At the end of the day, we are all part villain and part victim. 

Parris is also right that Christian art and literature tends to focus on suffering to an extent that jars with our modern sensibilities. I just don’t think he understands why. Because the more I’ve thought about the article, the more it seems to me to miss something essential about Christianity. 

We Christians believe that the passion of Jesus – his death and resurrection – has saved the world. Yet, even though we often focus on the agony of Christ on the cross, or the sacrifices of the saints and martyrs, we don’t believe in the redemptive power of suffering in itself. Suffering was never part of the original plan. It is not suffering or victimhood that saves, but love. Divine love.  

 

It is not the victimhood that conveys moral worth, but the kind of divine love that is so strong that even suffering will not knock it off course.

When Divine Love entered a broken and fallen world, it was always going to be messy. The love of God for the human race meant suffering for Jesus, but only because we humans have become such twisted, confused and blind creatures, that we failed to see that in Jesus, God himself was coming to us and we tried to kill him. Love may or may not lead you to become a victim (more often than not it does in a broken world) but it is not the victimhood that conveys moral worth, but the kind of divine love that is so strong that even suffering will not knock it off course.  

Real, gritty, determined love, not the sentimental, starry-eyed kind we often think of, is so strong that it keeps going, even when there are real sacrifices to be made, losses to be endured, pain to be borne. That is divine love. That is the kind of love we saw on the cross of Jesus - the kind that compelled Jesus to take on the sin and suffering of the world to neutralise its power once and for all. It was love so strong that on the first Good Friday it stood alongside the victims of injustice and suffering, the countless, unknown people over the centuries who have been persecuted or executed unjustly. And yet it was also so scandalous that it could also reach out to the villains, the criminal on the cross next to Jesus, the soldiers who tortured him and say ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ It is the kind of love that is so strong that not even death can stand in its way, as we saw on that first Easter Sunday. 

That is why we Christians value suffering, especially that which is voluntarily borne. Not because it conveys the spurious moral high ground of victimhood but because it is a sure sign of love. It is why we have always venerated our martyrs – because their love for God was so strong that they would even give up their lives for him. It is why the early Christians chose the cross as the central symbol of their faith – because it was the unmistakeable sign of how deep and strong was the love of God for the human race, despite our thoughtlessness, cruelty and self-centredness. Being a victim meant very little to the early Christians, and they never played that card, because what mattered to them was not victimhood but love.  

A recent story highlighted Catholic seminarians in Mexico who were willing to press ahead with getting ordained, even though 50 priests in the region have been murdered since 2006 for speaking out against the violence and damage done by the drug cartels which rule the roost in the local area. As a bishop, I have ordained many priests here in the UK. Not many of them will face that kind of danger, yet the calling is exactly the same – to love people in the name of Christ and to grow the community of people who follow him. Whether you end up getting killed or not, it is not the sacrifice, or the victimhood that gives value, it is the love that inspires the sacrifice. 

What our world needs is not so much martyrs or heroes, but people committed to deep, passionate, determined love.

Instead of martyrs, Parris wants heroes. He plumps for Nietzsche’s vision of the powerful assertiveness of the minority, and his despising of weakness, pity and victimhood. Yet be careful what you wish for. If moral authority and rightness become a matter of who has the power to assert their will more strongly than the rest, what we end up with is just the kind will to domination, the competitive, contentious public space, the desire for power and influence for its own sake, the silencing of others, just because social media means you can, that is the blight of so much modern life. 

What our world needs is not so much martyrs or heroes, but people committed to deep, passionate, determined love. Seeking the best and the good of your neighbour as much as yourself, whoever your neighbour happens to be, might mean you end up a hero, it might mean you end up a victim, but to love God and to love your neighbour – this is what lies at the heart of things.  

That is the kind of love we celebrate every Easter in the story of Good Friday, leading through to Easter Sunday. It is that that lies at the heart of the Christian story, not victimhood. And that is why we need more true, deep Christian faith in our societies, not less. 

Article
Belief
Creed
6 min read

2024 - the year Christianity bounced back?

From the opinion sites to the churchyard, we’re seeking a better way to live.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A man sits in a church pew below a colourful stained glass window, looking pensive.
Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash.

Was 2024 the year Christianity turned a corner? Throughout the year, on substacks, websites, YouTube videos, and Instagram posts, the signs kept cropping up of what Re-Enchanting co-host Justin Brierley has called the Surprising Rebirth of Faith in God.  

Over recent years, and throughout 2024, we have seen a stream of public figures declaring various degrees of interest in Christianity, or even full-on faith. Rowan Williams described the usual suspects well, imagining a scene in an English Churchyard: “Some… have been professed believers (Francis Spufford, Nick Cave, Paul Kingsnorth), some have lingered in the church porch (Tom Holland, Philip Goff), some are still on a bench in the grounds (Alain de Botton).” And there is Ayaan Hirsi Ali (singing along from the pews), Russell Brand (posting Instagram reels from the font?), Louise Perry (on the bench, next to de Botton?), Jordan Peterson (sometimes in the pulpit, sometimes in the porch), and even Richard Dawkins (smiling at the choir’s rendition of Silent Night as he wanders past). 

In the USA, it’s similar. Yet more complicated. The alliance of Evangelicalism with Donald Trump is problematic, to say the least. J.D. Vance is a serious Christian, having made the journey from an evangelical church upbringing, through student atheism into Roman Catholicism. Shia LeBoeuf and Candace Owens are among other US celebrities finding faith recently, while academic Rod Dreher’s public journey into Eastern Orthodoxy has been watched by many. On our Re-Enchanting podcast, Molly Worthen is a good example of why, despite everything, sceptics like her can still find faith in the USA. 

In the UK’s Assisted Dying debate, the place of religion was a hot topic. The case made against the bill by Christians gained a strong hearing, so much so that secular voices started crying foul, arguing that religious voices should not be heard, or at least, such people should declare their hand (though the number of people starting their case with ‘I’m a secular person, and that may colour my beliefs on this, but…” were hard to find). 

In public life, explicitly Christian writers such as Rowan Williams, Elizabeth Oldfield, Nicholas Spencer, Madeline Davies, Giles Fraser and Marcus Walker command an audience, and maybe this website - Seen & Unseen - in its own small way is helping to provide a stronger, more intelligent Christian voice in culture.  

Nonetheless, let’s not get carried away. The Assisted Dying bill passed. Despite the celebrity names, numbers going to church continue to fall, and the public assumptions of the culture remain firmly secular.  

Recent articles in the Spectator express the dilemma well. A. N. Wilson pens a gloomy assessment of the prospects of Christianity in the west, entitled Is the End of Christendom Nigh?, looking out from his pew on a dwindling local congregation of elderly people, watching the lights go out on Christian culture in the west. Yet at the same time Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes a piece about her second Christmas as a Christian, called A Christian Revival is Under Way. Which is it? Maybe to adjudicate, an editorial, presumably written by its new editor, Michael Gove, entitled In Defence of Faith makes a strong case for Christian faith and its place in national life. 

Anecdotally, at the local level, stories abound of people stepping into churches, seeking some kind of meaning in life and re-engaging with faith. Sometimes it’s the powerful emotion of charismatic or Pentecostal worship, sometimes the majesty of cathedrals or the mystery of Orthodox liturgy. Our local church in Oxford has a regular stream of stories of students exploring and finding faith and I keep hearing the same story in churches across the country.  

“People need meaning, and the secular world didn’t come up with the goods.” 

Nick Cave

My take on this, for what it’s worth, is that western culture has run out of steam, either temporarily or for good. In the twentieth century, both Fascism and Communism rose and fell. Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’ in the triumph of secular, liberal, consumer capitalism. Yet this too has run out of steam, increasingly felt to be spiritually hollow and politically suspect. ‘Woke culture’ was an attempt to restore a set of moral values to restrain the unpleasant and unjust effects of the unbridled market, yet its stridency and aggressiveness, its Canute-like attempt to resist aspects of natural order, not to mention its adoption of a destructive fixation on a reductive identity politics has generated a backlash of its own.  

The elections of 2024 were instructive. Keir Starmer won not because he offered a compelling vision but because he said so little. There was no ‘Yes We Can’ Obama slogan, no Blairite ‘New Labour, New Britain’ moment. No-one knew what he stood for, but we were so fed up with the Conservatives that we just wanted them out. Even with Trump in the USA, unlike last time, people knew what they were getting, yet they voted for him anyway, mainly because they felt he would fix the economy and immigration better than the Democrats who had failed on both. 

Nick Cave put it well in a recent interview in the Times: “people need meaning, and the secular world didn’t come up with the goods.” The perennial human search for purpose and significance hasn’t gone away, and there is not much on offer in secular culture. So, people are suddenly open to exploring more ancient stores of wisdom. 

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that just at the time when we might be seeing the stirring of an openness to the spiritual, the numinous and the religious, the Church (at least in the UK - other places may be doing better) seems in no state to capitalise. The Church of England has been absorbed in a lengthy and acrimonious debate over human sexuality and same-sex marriage over the past five years, the Archbishop of Canterbury has had to resign over the Church’s failure to enact a properly functioning safeguarding culture, and the free churches are in free fall.  

So, what are the prospects for 2025? Maybe the Church of England can find a settlement in its civil war on sexuality, finding a way for the warring parties to live together, even if it has to be at some distance within the same church for a while. Then we might see which side (or perhaps both in their different ways?) might be better placed to appeal to jaded, secular people who are waking up to the lack of meaning in their lives and the potential of Christian faith to offer a satisfying vision of reality and a new way of living. 

Perhaps a new Archbishop of Canterbury might come in, untainted by past safeguarding failures, and, despite the impossibilities of the job, able to steadily steer the church towards its spiritual heart. At the end of his monumental and increasingly influential The Master and his Emissary, neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist (not a Christian himself) makes a telling point: “The Western Church has in my view been active in undermining itself. It no longer has the confidence to stick to its values but instead joins the chorus of voices attributing material answers to spiritual problems.” 

Back in 1930, an Anglican lay mystic from Notting Hill, Evelyn Underhill wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Cosmo Lang with words that put their finger on what the Church might need now: 

“God”, she wrote “is the interesting thing about religion, and people are hungry for God.” She went on: “We look to the Church to give us an experience of God, mystery, holiness and prayer which, though it may not solve the antinomies of the natural world, shall lift us to contact with the supernatural world and minister eternal life.”  

A church that is seen as ‘a dull echo of the liberal consensus’ as the former Bishop of London, Richard Chartres used to say, is hardly worth the candle. If the message of the church is a vaguely religious version of what you can already find in the Guardian (or the Telegraph for that matter) then why bother with it? 

As Rod Dreher put it recently: “only the return of strong religion - one that makes demands, offers compelling explanations to the problems of death and suffering, and gives worshippers a visceral sense of connecting to the living God - has any hope of competing in the post Christian marketplace.” 

In 2024, religion in general and Christianity in particular has never been far from the front pages, for better or worse. God has not gone away. Dreher may well be right. And the Church, if it is to make the most of a season where troubled people are beginning to look its way again may need to take notice.