Kim Davis is not a martyr

Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who rose to prominence for her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of court orders, has apparently been jailed until she is willing to do so.  Her appeals essentially exhausted, she was taken into custody on contempt of court charges.  To her opponents, she is a hypocritical public servant who simply will not do her job out of irrational prejudice, and who ought to be removed from office.  To her supporters, she is a shining symbol of the refusal to yield her religious liberties in the face of rampant secularism, one who is suffering for her beliefs--in other words, a martyr.

Already from the usual suspects like Mike Huckabee (among other GOP presidential hopefuls) and Bryan Fischer have come the accolades for Davis, standing strong in her belief that marriage is a sacred covenant between a man and a woman.  Christian media have repeated the meme, casting her willingness to suffer imprisonment for her beliefs as the kind of courage shown by those who, when offered the choice of renouncing their religion or suffering death at the hands of Roman authorities, chose the latter.

Of course, this narrative of martyrdom is a powerful one and underlies the meme that there is a war on religion in the United States.  Its proponents wouldn't use it if they didn't realize this power.  The whole idea of martyrdom is that the willingness to face persecution at the hands of the authorities for one's religious beliefs is good for the religious community.  It galvanizes the faithful and it elicits sympathy from the wider culture, which can see itself in the persecuted.

This is precisely why Kim Davis falls short as a martyr. She does not come across as a sympathetic figure; she comes across as a bully, using the twin cudgels of her faith and her elective office to beat down those she sees as sinners.

Think about this: early Christians were occasionally persecuted  (or perhaps simply prosecuted) because the dictates of their faith prevented them from participating in state-mandated rituals.  But the key distinction between those early Christians and Kim Davis (not to mention other clerks asking to be excused from doing their jobs) is that the one crying persecution is the state.  She cannot be persecuted if she refuses to do her job because in not doing her job she is the persecutor.

In the martyrdoms of the Roman era, we can see people denied their rights by an oppressive state.  Davis does exactly the same thing when she, as an agent of the state, refuses to respect the civil rights of all citizens.  She dehumanizes her fellow citizens in the name of her personal belief under color of legal authority.

So those defending her have it entirely wrong. In this little drama, Kim Davis is no martyr; she's the Roman authorities feeding the lions.