Living Martyrs are Made for Atheist America

Christians must use the faith as a rigorous defense against our regime.

Roy Mathews is a writer for Young Voices. He is a graduate of Bates College and a 2023 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Law & Liberty, and The American Mind.

Regardless of our many differences on theology, devout Catholics and Protestants in America today understand that we live in our own Rome. Indeed, the United States government is taking action against pro-life activists like Mark Houck for simply proclaiming the truth that every human life is made in God’s own image. While our regime may be taking police action against defenders of the faith, Christians have the ability to use the faith both as their own anchor in times of personal hardship and as a rigorous defense against our regime that is attempting to impose the inevitability of scientific progress as the guiding ideology of American culture. Throughout Church history, the greatest defenders of the faith have always persevered proclaiming Christ despite overwhelming odds.

Whenever a regime cannot convince, influence, and instruct away the Christian faith, it resorts to violence. Richard Wurmbrand’s defiance of Communist Romania serves as a warning of both the capabilities of state power to take control of the Church and to co-opt its leaders. Yes, I am aware that there are no clandestine prisons being used to torture priests, pastors, or vicars into becoming a watchful eye and listening ear for the federal government. However, the amount of power that the American state, controlled by the areligious at best and militant atheists at worst, exercises over American culture actively degrades the Christian faith as backward and promotes ideologies that are diametrically opposed. 

American Christians today need not despair at the moral decay of the churches and the corrupting influences of leftist ideologies. Rather, we should rejoice knowing that it’s for the darkest places that Christians are meant to bring the Gospel. Richard Wurmbrand’s imprisonment, torture — both physical and mental — by Nicolae Ceausescu’s Securitate during the Cold War shows how the modern state, in attempt to pacify Christians, turned Richard Wurmbrand into a living martyr and how American Christians must strive to be as relentless to their faith as Wurmbrand.

Richard Wurmbrand never let the Communists break or co-opt him. Understanding how Wurmbrand’s experience from being brutally interrogated, tortured, and imprisoned for years under a regime of state atheism is an example for Christians today, who face being driven out of the American public square. The Soviet Romanian regime bulldozed churches and public religious iconography (statue removal on steroids), while co-opting the Romanian Orthodox Church to perpetuate Communism.

American churches that champion the destruction of the nuclear family or characterize Christ as a “liberal,” an “immigrant,” or a “dreamer” to wield as a political club are not so much threats to the faith as extensions of the state actively engaged in crafting anti-Christian culture.

As for Richard Wurmbrand, he defied the Soviets by continuing to spread the Gospel and was sentenced to multiple terms in Soviet re-education prisons. During his confinement, the Soviet Romanian authorities attempted to get him to turn over fellow Christians to the state, as well as to brainwash him into forsaking Christ. Richard was kept in an underground cell for three years with no windows and light, with absolute silence enforced by the guards to slowly pulverize the prisoner's sanity.

After numerous rounds of interrogation went nowhere, Soviet guards beat the soles of Richard’s feet down to the bone. Richard again refused to renounce his faith or divulge his fellow believers whereabouts. Brainwashing took the form of being dragged from his cell and being forced to stand in a concrete room for seventeen hours straight while loudspeakers blared, “Communism is good, Communism is good, Christianity is dead, Christianity is bad, give up, give up” on a loop. Richard still refused to renounce his faith. Even through the physical and mental pain, Richard would maintain his faith by composing and delivering sermons at night, regardless of the threat of more beatings.

The multiple lines of attack that the state and its foot soldiers use to denigrate the faith is well-known: Jesus was trans, Christianity is akin to fascism, Catholics are an extremist threat, and Satan deserves hate crimes protections. The sheer deluge of materialism, anti-Christian ideologies, and the massive cultural pressure to live for the moment and forsake any sort of higher power or absolute truth seems like a mountain for especially young Christians to overcome. This current cultural moment is built especially for living martyr Christians. Churches are being placed under FBI surveillance, activists have been arrested, and Gen Z is the driving force behind the explosion in young people identifying as LGBT. Yet, the Church still perseveres.  

Wurmbrand suffered in prison, preaching to the other prisoners and resisting the beatings, beratings, and blackmail from the Soviet authorities that tormented his wife for over a decade. Today’s counter-culture is not non-binary, but Christian. Wurmbrand reflected on his time in prison as remarking that “not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death, but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”

Wurmbrand’s faith carried him through the darkness of atheistic Communism because he “put on the full armor of God … for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:11-12). Christians today should rejoice in the struggle as Wurmbrand did, for he truly “stood in the midst of lions, but they could not devour him.”

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