We like our persecuted Christians heroic. The stories that circulate in Western churches are about believers who stand firm, refuse to recant, and stay put whatever the cost, are true and they matter. But they have left many Christians with an unspoken assumption: that the faithful response to persecution is always to endure it, and that anything else is a failure of nerve.
Nowhere does the Bible tell the persecuted that endurance is their only option.
It is not. That is the core argument of an essay Dr Ronald MacMillan and I published in the Evangelical Review of Theology in 2022. He has spent 35 years working among persecuted communities. The essay was particularly appreciated by the students in the class he taught at Fuller Seminary. Persecution is inevitable; Jesus warned that if they persecuted him, they would persecute his followers too (John 15:20). But nowhere does the Bible tell the persecuted that endurance is their only option.
Scripture repeatedly calls on believers to defend the vulnerable.
The Bible does seem to pull in two directions. Jesus tells his disciples to turn the other cheek and not to resist an evil person (Matthew 5:39). Yet Amos demands that justice roll down like waters (Amos 5:24), and Scripture repeatedly calls on believers to defend the vulnerable. Readiness to suffer for Christ and refusing to accept injustice are not competing commitments. The real question is not whether to respond to persecution, but how.
The Under Caesar’s Sword project, the first systematic global study of how Christians respond to persecution, distinguishes three broad strategies: survival, which preserves the life of the community; association, which builds resilience through cooperation with other churches and institutions; and confrontation, which openly challenges the persecutor. Each has its place. Heroic endurance is one response among several, not the default.
Flight... has a clear biblical mandate.
Start with the option that most unsettles the heroic script: flight. It has a clear biblical mandate. “When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another” (Matthew 10:23). Elijah hid from Ahab. Joseph took his family to Egypt. Jesus himself repeatedly withdrew when his life was threatened, because his hour had not yet come (John 7:30). Paul was lowered from the Damascus wall in a basket and left city after city when persecution broke out. In Acts 8, the scattering of the Jerusalem church carried the gospel into new territory.
A Christian is under no obligation to endure persecution if it can be avoided.
Spurgeon, preaching on Matthew 10:23 in his sermon Among Lions, concluded that a Christian is under no obligation to endure persecution if it can be avoided. Fleeing is not cowardice. Your goal is not to become a hero; it may be to stay alive so that your ministry can continue.
That does not make flight easy. It can mean abandoning a church that badly needs you, and sometimes the calling is to stay, as the apostles did in Jerusalem. Drawing on Jonathan Andrews, we suggest some practical questions. How long will you be away? Where will you go? How will you support yourself? Is crossing the border itself dangerous?
Andrews argues that leaving one’s country should be the last resort, though where staying threatens life, liberty or the custody of children, it may be the only one. The point is that it is a legitimate choice, made prayerfully, not a betrayal.
(We) can turn persecution into a badge of honor.
The heroic script has a darker side too: it can turn persecution into a badge of honor. We describe a short-term team that was arrested and deported from a Gulf state after openly distributing tracts, and then boasted at home about having been persecuted. They had simply disregarded their context.
Martyrdom should never be a goal in itself.
Telling your neighbors they are pagans headed for hell is not courage. It is a reliable way to make enemies and to lose your chance to be salt and light. The Under Caesar’s Sword project recommends practical steps such as keeping worship volume down, avoiding events on other religions’ festival days, relying on local leadership and refraining from disrespectful comments about other faiths. None of this compromises the gospel. Martyrdom should never be a goal in itself.
There are... lines no believer should cross.
There are, of course, lines no believer should cross. Daniel refused to stop praying even when it meant the lions’ den, and his friends refused to bow before Nebuchadnezzar’s statue. The hard part is telling those lines apart from the many customs that are not worth a fight.
I saw this play out painfully in indigenous communities in Mexico. Much of the religious persecution I came across there was related to an uncompromising refusal by evangelical converts to contribute to their community’s traditional celebrations, an attitude probably fostered by Western missionaries (who didn’t quite get the whole deal about contextual ministry).
Yes, these festivities include pagan elements. But in these communities, refusing to pay is also refusing to support the community and everything that belonging to it involves. The reaction is often hostile, and it frequently ends in beatings and displacement.
Pay your contribution.
The alternative my colleagues and I used to teach was simple: just pay your contribution. That allows you to remain in your community instead of uprooting your family and losing your livelihood. And by staying, you may actually be light where you are.
It is not so different from paying taxes in any country, even when you disagree with how those taxes are spent. That is not the stuff of heroic testimonies, but it is often the wiser and more faithful choice.
The same realism applies to legal and political action. Paul knew his rights as a Roman citizen and used them strategically: to demand an apology in Philippi, to avoid flogging in Jerusalem, to appeal to Caesar. Yet he did not always invoke them. Timing mattered.
We need to distinguish theological from legal-political understandings of persecution.
Two cautions follow. First, we need to distinguish theological from legal-political understandings of persecution. Social exclusion may be persecution in a theological sense, but it is not a crime or a human rights violation, and it cannot be litigated.
Respect for the rule of law.
Second, legal and political advocacy works only where there is some respect for the rule of law. Under authoritarian regimes it may achieve little, and it can backfire. We recount the case of an expatriate couple whose advocacy helped secure a detained believer’s release, only to have their own residency renewal refused months later. Every advocate has to ask: will this help the persecuted, or make things worse for them?
Pray... with them.
Finally, prayer. One comment from Egyptian Christians who had endured detention and torture has stayed with me. They asked believers abroad not to pray for them but with them. Those praying from outside, they explained, tend to ask for safety and an end to persecution, while they themselves were praying for their compatriots to come to faith and for the courage to stay faithful when the backlash came.
That reframing captures the spirit of the whole essay. The persecuted do not owe us heroism, and we should stop projecting our own scripts onto them. Sometimes faithfulness means standing firm. Sometimes it means paying the community contribution and staying. Sometimes it means packing up and leaving. Scripture leaves room for all three. Our job is to listen to those facing persecution and support the choice they make before God.
Read the full essay here: What Persecution To Endure, To Resist, or To Flee?
Originally published as a Five4Faith Substack article. Republished with permission.
Dennis P. Petri, PhD is the International Director of the International Institute for Religious Freedom and Founder and scholar-at-large of the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Latin America. He is a Professor in International Relations at the Latin American University of Science and Technology. He is the author of The Specific Vulnerability of Religious Minorities, a book on undetected religious freedom challenges in Latin America.
The International Institute for Religious Freedom (IIRF) was founded in 2005 with the mission to promote religious freedom for all faiths from an academic perspective. The IIRF aspires to be an authoritative voice on religious freedom. They provide reliable and unbiased data on religious freedom—beyond anecdotal evidence—to strengthen academic research on the topic and to inform public policy at all levels. The IIRF's research results are disseminated through the International Journal for Religious Freedom and other publications. A particular emphasis of the IIRF is to encourage the study of religious freedom in tertiary institutions through its inclusion in educational curricula and by supporting postgraduate students with research projects.
