Many American Christians seem to always be looking for their next hill to die on. In many ways, we feel that what defines us most is our sense of embattlement. We almost relish in the idea that the odds are stacked against us.
Not that dying on a hill is inherently a bad thing. In fact, the earliest generation of the Church did it all the time.
Throughout the first few centuries of its existence, the Church was constantly, and often brutally, persecuted. Early Christians who refused to deny their faith were beaten, tortured, and killed. Some were even fed to hungry lions in the Roman Colosseum as a form of morbid entertainment for thousands of people.
For many Christians around the world, persecution is still their reality today.
But for the early Church, something interesting happened in the third century. Their faith went from being persecuted to being the official religion of the Empire.
That seems like it would be a unilaterally good thing. But the early generations of the Church had grown to admire the bravery of martyrdom so much that they almost didn’t know what to do with their newfound security. Always being willing to suffer was their way of becoming more like Jesus.
So in the absence of an external threat that would inflict suffering, they began engineering ways to experience suffering of a different kind. This is how monastic traditions were born. Groups of Christians began to deprive themselves of food, sleep, comfort, and marriage relationships. They intentionally made their lives harder in order to grow like Jesus. Their martyrdom changed from being externally applied to being experienced within their own hearts.
This Mentality Continues to Pervade the Church Even Today.
Again, that isn’t always bad. The bible teaches us that we need to die to ourselves, crucify our flesh, and take up our cross.
But there’s also a danger. Sometimes, we end up dying on hills that Jesus never asked us to. We engineer suffering, or at least perceived suffering, in the name of Jesus. But Jesus isn’t always in those places.
While our faith deeply informs how we understand suffering, and we know that we will sometimes be misunderstood, disliked, and even persecuted for our faith in Jesus, it’s never healthy to tend toward a martyr complex.
Sometimes, American evangelicalism seems to be in a codependent relationship with its own sense of embattlement. And so if there is no monster to slay (or be slayed by), we will create one. We will ramp up rhetoric about a world that is coming for us, to persecute us, to steal our children, to ruin our American-Christian values.
In the midst of that, we cry persecution.
But the truth of the matter is that our non-Christian neighbors don’t hate us for our faith. They dislike us because we have failed to love them well. And we have failed to love them well because we were too busy dying on hills that Jesus never asked us to die on.
That isn’t to say that we don’t have legitimate battles to fight. And it can certainly be difficult to discern which hills we’re actually called to die on.
So here are three signs that you might be dying on a hill that Jesus never asked you to.
1. You Aren’t Ever Able to Be Critical of Your Own Tribe.
In the age of cancel culture, loyalty and conformity to your base is often more highly valued than truth and virtue. While many conservative Christians decry this kind of moral relativism, they are nonetheless just as likely to be guilty of it.