Martyrdom movements can backfire and accelerate conversion to the oppressor’s faith

Evidence

One of the principal tasks of the polemicist or war propagandist is to convince the people of the alterity of the enemy. Should we consider this voluntary martyrdom as the last desperate act of a few Christians who saw their culture, language, and religion dissolving into the mass of Muslim culture, as a last-ditch effort to affirm and resuscitate Christian Latin culture? If indeed this was their goal, they failed miserably: the strife caused by the martyrs probably encouraged Christians to convert to Islam, rather than discouraging them. The fifty-odd dead, mostly monks and priests, represented that many fewer priests and bishops for al-Andalus, where they were already in short supply. Eulogius himself, according to Alvarus, had been named bishop of Toledo in 851; he chose martyrdom over episcopal duty. Indeed, the martyrs were motivated more by a yearning for personal salvation than by a desire to help the Christian church as a whole. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 540

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive paradox that a martyrdom campaign meant to shore up a threatened identity instead accelerates its dissolution — a dense, widely applicable insight about how resistance can feed what it resists.
• XREF: Connects to the broader question in this book’s project about how religious minority identity solidifies or dissolves under alien rule; also resonates with how ritual sacrifice/suffering produces social effects opposite to intentions. — connects to: Anti-conversion violence targets even non-proselytizing Catholic churches — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 254; Extremists are propelled by belief in a saving mission that others will initially oppose. — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 376