Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [190]
These people were not necessarily conscious martyrs to their cause in the Christian, Jewish, or Muslim tradition, but they are bizarre variations of them. Many were martyrs by their own definition. In the case of the Heaven’s Gate group, they simply thought they had found the door to a better existence. But this is a common claim of willing martyrs.
Martyrdom, we can see already, is an oblique attack by the powerless against the power of oppressors. It is a way of canceling the power of an oppressor through moral claims to higher ground and to a resolute claim to the afterlife, as the better, permanent reward, giving the oppressors only a temporary advantage. The sinister aspects of this inversion of authority were only fully revealed when used by the power structure to encourage martyrdom of their soldiers-in short, to encourage martyrdom as a motivation for an army. This is not usually an apocalyptic notion but it can be a key power of the powerful over the naively religious, as in Islamicist political extremism when martyrdom was turned into an offensive weapon. We shall turn to the Islamicist version of suicide soldiering in the last chapter.
Let us review. From modern examples, we can see that what produces martyrdom and exaltation of the afterlife is, first of all, a colonial and imperial situation, a conquering power, and a subject people whose religion does not easily account for the conquest. There must also be a society that is predisposed to understand events in a religious context. This can be provided by either an apocalyptic cult or a fundamentalist movement within the society, as well as ordinary religious life. “Deprivation” of some sort is another important ingredient. The word “deprivation” has been highlighted with quotation marks because the nature of the “deprivation” will be our next topic of attention. We shall see that “deprivation” is not necessarily or even primarily political or economic. Those dominated believe the “deprivation” is not just political but also a religious challenge. It may merely be the superiority of an imperial class over a group of the pious who consider the imperial class sinful.
For this imperial situation to be an active motivator, the political, social, or economic oppression of the disadvantaged must be perceived as a religious as well as a political and social threat. The oppression must be an event that is seen as a possible disconfirmation of the religious views of the society: The death of saints was a seeming disconfirmation of the covenant of Israel or the salvation of Christ. The existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state in the midst of the traditional Dar Essalam, the habitation of Islam, is not just a political threat but a disconfirmation of the continued progress Islam should be making in its pacification of the world. So it serves as one motivation for the terrorist acts of extremists groups like Hamas and Hizballah. (There is far more to this story, which we will discuss in detail in ch. 15.)
From here we must face the thorny problem of the motivation of the society that supports martyrdom as an option. There is no modern consensus on what constitutes the exact motivation of the oppressed in the book of Daniel and the associated ancient literatures. Indeed very few scholars have even tried to link the ancient events to the modern world.
Dissonance and Status Ambiguity as Deprivation
THE MOST RECENT searching challenge to the notion that deprivation and disconfirmation are motivators to apocalypticism and martyrdom has been tendered in the interesting book by Stephen L. Cook, Prophecy and Apocalypticism.41 In the end, I disagree with the main point of his book, but he reviews the issues in a suggestive and interesting way. So it is useful to bring up the issues in the book directly. The book surveys the later prophets as well as much of anthropological