Witnessing, Religion, and Politics: From Martyrdom to Political Martyrdom

Any attempt to articulate a notion of political martyrdom depends upon reconsidering two important and related terms: “religion” and “politics.” Fortunately, the idea that religion and politics denote clearly distinct phenomena no longer commands widespread allegiance. Once a pillar of secularization and modernization theories, such a view has given way to a far more nuanced understanding of the two concepts as closely intertwined, highlighting different aspects of humans’ search for individual and collective meaning. The term “religion” itself, after all, arose in a particular context, for particular reasons having to do with the exercise of hegemonic and colonial power; and many now view it as a concept to be problematized rather than simply deployed as if its meaning were obvious (Allen and Allen Reference Allen and Allen2016; Asad Reference Asad1982; Lincoln Reference Lincoln2008; W. Smith Reference Smith1963). In other words, religion and politics are not distinct fields, but rather interrelated “spaces for the circulation, exchange, and transfer of meanings” (Catoggio Reference Catoggio2013, 713).

Martyrdom has always been a religious and political phenomenon, challenging the status quo in the societies where it appears. It has energized and mobilized those who experience it (both as martyrs and as observers) from its emergence in the early Christian tradition (which reworked preexisting tropes of noble death; see Droge and Tabor [Reference Droge and Tabor1992]; Van Henten and Avemarie [Reference van Henten and Avemarie2002]) to its more recent appearance in debates about the politicized deaths of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt. The term originated in the Greek martys, or “witness.” Paul calls Stephen a martyros in Acts 22:20; in Acts 5:32, Peter says to the Sanhedrin, “We are witnesses [martyres] of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.” Parallel terms like shahid in Islam of course have their own distinct etymology and conceptual history, but scholars often use the terms more or less interchangeably (Afsaruddin Reference Afsaruddin, Janes and Houen2014; Cook Reference Cook2007; Hatina Reference Hatina2014).

In the early Christian context that did so much to shape subsequent understandings of martyrdom, “witness” evokes a number of different images, both legal (i.e., witness in a courtroom, an association bolstered by the fact that many martyrdom accounts featured dramatic confrontations between Christians and Roman authorities) and embodied (i.e., the idea of one’s life as a witness to the Truth). In all these cases, a witness is one who bears testimony, who attests to something known by experience. “The martyr’s witness points beyond the martyr to a larger truth [and] involves the subsuming of the person witnessing into the truth witnessed” (Fruchtman Reference Fruchtman2019). In emphasizing the importance of witnessing, accounts of martyrdom pay particular attention to the ways that martyrs seek to direct their audience’s attention to the thing to which they are witnesses and thus to testify to something beyond themselves.

Like the traditional concept of martyrdom, political martyrdom offers martyrs a life beyond the grave. It does so in a different manner, however: by providing a cultural or political immortality, enshrining the martyr within a community’s collective memory. The referent shifts, in other words, yet the process—individual death as a means of witnessing to something larger than itself—remains broadly parallel. Although political martyrdom includes a broader swath of the politicized dead than those whose sacrifice invokes a national interest, Baldassare Scolari’s (Reference Scolari2017, 100) account of “state martyrdom” helpfully traces the distinction between the conventional account of martyrdom and the political understanding I am advancing here: “What in the … context of Christianity was represented as an act of witness to faith in God, in the context of secular modernity becomes an act of witness to faith in the values and principles at the core of the modern nation-state.” In Scolari’s words, “church martyrs and state martyrs seem to function almost the same way; what changes is the truth instance to which they refer” (100). The notion of political martyrdom presented here includes not only those who die in the service of the state, but also those whose deaths are claimed by community members for a variety of political causes; the larger point, however, about the migration of the thing witnessed from divine to historical registers, remains.Footnote ⁵

Martyrdom is an essentially collective phenomenon, a process in which many people participate at various points in time, since witnessing implies not only a thing witnessed, but also an audience toward which that witness is directed. There is no martyrdom without martyrdom narratives, stories, and representations about some individuals, told by others, with the aim of inducing certain dispositions, values, commitments, or behaviors in still others. All accounts of the early church emphasize the active role of the Christian community in constituting martyrs by sanctifying their deaths and preserving their memory after death (Castelli Reference Castelli2004; Perkins Reference Perkins1995; Riddle Reference Riddle1931). Political martyrdom is no different, although the community of reference is no longer confined to the ecclesiastical.

Political martyrdom involves three components, and it is only when these three elements are present, at least to a degree, that we can speak of a political martyrdom as having been established:

1. 1. Death in circumstances somehow connected to an individual’s identity (or identities) or political commitments, often involving acts of violence committed by state authorities, community members, or even martyrs themselves.Footnote ⁶ Many scholars insist that a martyr’s death must involve an intentional choice of some sort, but restricting ourselves to such cases will lead us to overlook important aspects of the cultural power of politicized death. The circumstances of individual deaths, I argue, matter far less than their posthumous consecration and the transmission of memory across time.Footnote ⁷

2. 2. The consecration of that death, ascribing to it transcendent meaning and setting it apart from the countless other deaths that happen each day. Consecration invests a death with broader symbolic and political meaning, framing the martyr’s death as pointing to something larger than itself (recall the term’s origin in the notion of “witnessing”), be it as an act of conscience and self-sacrifice central to communal identity or as part of a community’s struggle for recognition (see the cases in Fierke [Reference Fierke2012]; Outram and Laybourn [Reference Outram and Laybourn2018]). The consecration of political martyrs endows those dead individuals with sacred meaning, and “[a] martyrdom is created when a narrative about a death is told in a particular way” (Middleton Reference Middleton2014, 130). Consecration charges the death with powerful cultural and political resonances, and places the death within narratives that attribute it sacred significance. (As we shall see below, such meanings need not imply traditionally religious notions of sacrality.)

3. 3. The transmission of the martyr’s memory across time. To be successful, consecrated martyrdom narratives and the politicized memories of those they memorialize must be both embedded in a community’s collective memory and transmitted over time and across generations, through media, ritual, and commemorative practices. Each of these avenues, and the variety of media that accomplish such purposes, will highlight certain aspects of the martyr’s life and career, and de-emphasize others. The martyr’s legacy represents a continuing locus of mobilization for members of the community, and motivates further commitment either to the cause that the martyr espoused or to the community’s fundamental values more generally. “Adherents, by claiming the martyr as one of their own, announc[e] an identity” (Outram and Laybourn Reference Outram and Laybourn2018, 20).

Although the final stage of the martyrdom process is still very much ongoing in these two cases, a closer examination of the cases of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt can help scholars to articulate this new vocabulary of political martyrdom, one that focuses less on the personal qualities of individuals and more on communities’ narrations of their lives and deaths—supplementing attention to individual martyrs with analyses of the ways that communities consecrate and commemorate their memories after death. Claiming martyrdom enables communities to reject the label of victimhood and to elevate their dead into cultural and political exemplars. For example, Maria Soledad Catoggio (Reference Catoggio2013, 696) has explored the ways in which Argentine political actors drew on the rhetoric of martyrdom to “reconcile the apparently mutually exclusive figures of the hero and the victim,” to “draw on the political power of the religious figure of the martyr in order to invoke a legitimate and heroic victim of political violence.” In addition, attention to political martyrdom highlights such narratives’ capacity to build collective identities over time, often in contexts far removed from the martyrs’ lives and deaths, and offers new interpretive lenses for considering twenty-first-century issues of systemic violence and structural injustice.

Political and Politicized Death: Beyond Individual Intentions, toward Collective Meanings

One of the most long-standing (and, I will argue, unhelpful) elements of the literature on martyrdom—both historical and contemporary—insists that, in order to be properly considered a martyr, an individual must make an intentional decision to court death by acting on a firm adherence to principle. Droge and Tabor’s A Noble Death (1992, 1, 2), for example, opens with the martyrdom account of Perpetua and her companions, describing “how some early Christians chose death rather than compromise their religious convictions” and characterizing the Christians in this account as “embrac[ing] death willingly” (emphasis added). They focus on “voluntary death,” defined as “the act resulting from an individual’s intentional decision to die” (3, 4, emphasis added); though, to be sure, how enthusiastically potential martyrs ought to embrace, or even seek out, death has given rise to a contentious scholarly debate.Footnote ⁸ Introducing their anthology of classical, Jewish, and Christian texts, Van Henten and Avemarie (Reference van Henten and Avemarie2002, 3) propose that a martyr is someone who “in an extremely hostile situation prefers a violent death to compliance with a demand of the … authorities” (emphasis added). Other accounts use terms like “elective deaths” (Kitts Reference Kitts2018, 1, 3), or view martyrdom as “a considered choice” in which an “otherwise ordinary person [is] willing to accept death and extraordinary pain” (DeSoucey et al. Reference DeSoucey, Pozner, Fields, Dobransky and Fine2008, 101, emphasis added). The continuing resonance of the language of individual choice—epitomized by words like “will,” “intention,” “decision,” or “preference”—reflects a widespread emphasis on the precipitating factors that surround martyrs’ deaths. In all these cases, the notion of individual preferences dictating a course of action that culminates in death is taken to be central to the phenomenon of martyrdom.

This conventional view that martyrs make intentional choices to die remains deeply entrenched in much of the scholarship, and it figured heavily in the discourse surrounding George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt. A number of observers declined to call Floyd a martyr due to the lack of an intentional decision leading to his death. Juliet Hooker (Reference Hooker2023, 89) insisted that Floyd “was not an activist” and that he “was not a willing political martyr in the cause of US racial progress.” Ernest Owens (Reference Owens, Life and Pelosi2021), editor at large of Philadelphia magazine, starkly distinguished martyrdom from murder: Floyd was not “a martyr who was killed for his belief in racial justice,” but rather “a man who’d been murdered by a police officer.” As evidence that Floyd was no martyr but rather a murder victim, Owens offered the lack of Floyd’s “deliberate choice” to lie down and be killed; he was not “killed for his belief in racial justice,” and “didn’t wake up that morning to sacrifice himself” (in other words: no deliberate choice, no martyrdom). Britni Danielle (Reference Danielle2021), writing in the immediate aftermath of Derek Chauvin’s conviction for Floyd’s murder, also dissented from those (e.g., Nancy Pelosi, in an embarrassingly ham-handed remark) who called Floyd’s death a “noble sacrifice” or a martyrdom. Such a formulation, she argued, “downplays what actually happened—George Floyd was murdered.” Danielle tied her argument against viewing Floyd as a martyr to a lack of intentionality on his part: “He didn’t set out to make a point … he was simply going about his day … a murder victim who wanted to live” (in other words: no attempt to make a point, no martyrdom).Footnote ⁹ Sophia Moskalenko (Reference Moskalenko2020) also focused on the lack of intentionality in Floyd’s death: “George Floyd was not a martyr—he was a victim, unable to escape a fate he didn’t choose” (in other words: if a victim, then not a martyr). Portraying Floyd in such terms emphasizes concepts—deliberate choice, killed for a belief, sacrifice—that have long unduly narrowed our understanding of what martyrdom is, how it comes about, and how it shapes communities over time.

Yet despite these demurrals, we do see inklings of the broader understanding of martyrdom that I am suggesting in other commentary on Floyd’s death, where observers proclaimed him a martyr even while acknowledging the lack of intentionality surrounding his death. On such accounts, Floyd’s status as a martyr hinged on the ways that activists and observers understood his death as witnessing to larger issues beyond itself. Ellen Amster (Reference Amster2021, 64) invoked the notion of witness explicitly: “If the Constitution ‘constitutes’ the polity, then Floyd witnesses its violation by the state.” Writing in The Afro, Micha Green (Reference Green2020) called Floyd “an unintentional martyr.” Distinguishing Floyd from those on the front lines of civil rights and social justice movements, who “knew their lives were in danger and, in a way, prepared to die in their fights for justice,” she continued, Floyd “didn’t have his ‘Mountaintop’ moment.” Notwithstanding the unintentional nature of his death, Floyd’s (and Eric Garner’s) final words, “I can’t breathe,” became a catchphrase, and his death served as “a wake-up call in the fight for justice.” Similarly, Saul Williams (Reference Williams2016) has directed our attention to “unwilling martyrs,” who “become symbolic representations of a cause”; he specifically includes victims of police violence in this category.Footnote ¹⁰ Green’s and Williams’s terms—acknowledging that martyrdom can be unintentional, even unwilling—require us to prise apart individuals’ posthumous careers from their personal intentions during life. It allows for a more capacious understanding of the complex relationship between politics, death, and memory.

The question of intentionality is clearer, perhaps, with regard to Babbitt, who after all had taken part in the storming of the Capitol and was “a willing and enthusiastic participant in the Capitol riot” who “voluntarily joined the attack” (Mandziuk Reference Mandziuk2022, 151, 150), attempting to enter a forbidden area in pursuit of a concrete political goal. Her brother, Roger Witthoeft, clearly saw her as a martyr, and connected her death to an intentional decision to join the crowd storming the Capitol. “My sister died for a bigger picture, a bigger cause” (Schwartzman and Dawsey Reference Schwartzman and Dawsey2021). Then again, was she actively seeking death? Although Babbitt’s decision to enter the Capitol unlawfully put her at risk of arrest, injury, and ultimately death, this is not to say that she sought death or chose to die; what she intended to do, most likely, was to prevent the certification of the Electoral College results. Such questions notwithstanding, at a New York event, Trump supporter Cara Castronuova of Citizens Against Political Persecution promised the audience that “insurrectionist is no longer going to come up” when they “Google Ashli Babbitt’s name in five years.” “She’s a martyr, okay?” (Schwartzman and Dawsey Reference Schwartzman and Dawsey2021).

Why is this discussion of motives and intentions significant? Seeing George Floyd and Ashli Babbit as martyrs requires letting go of the notion that individuals control the meanings of their own deaths, that the term “martyr” applies only to those who make intentional sacrifices in service of a cause, and that what defines martyrdom lies primarily in the concrete circumstances of individual deaths and the psychological orientations of those individuals toward their own demise. Doing so enables us to highlight the political contexts and dynamics that lead communities to find meaning in such deaths, without the need to know individual motivations or subjective states. In doing so, this framework pushes back against broader depoliticizing contemporary discourses such as “responsibilization” (Brown Reference Brown2015) and the related neoliberal emphasis on individual actors and actions. It returns an attention to politics—symbolic and otherwise—in the consideration of death, and acknowledges that individuals do not control the narratives surrounding their own deaths once those deaths have happened.

Thus, any death becomes a potential martyrdom, capable of being conscripted into uses far beyond those that the individual actor might have contemplated, given a community prepared to consecrate that death and actors prepared to transmit its memory through time in furtherance of their identities or interests. Moving away from an emphasis on intentionality also helpfully undercuts another dichotomy that has characterized the scholarship on martyrdom: that between “active” martyrs, who “precipitate their own deaths and sometimes even bring about the deaths of others,” and “passive” martyrs, who “accept their deaths without resistance or violence” (Mitchell Reference Mitchell, Janes and Houen2014, 274). The language here—distinguishing between “precipitating” and merely “accepting”—simply does not capture the complexity and the inescapably political context within which judgments about martyrs are formed. Did Floyd and Babbit “precipitate” their own deaths? That depends, of course, on one’s assessment of the conditions under which they died, an assessment that is itself inescapably political. (It is even more difficult to see how one could view either of them as “accepting” their deaths.)

Such a prospect might unnerve those who object to the use of individual deaths for purposes that diverge from those intended by the individual while alive, or who view such divergences as evidence of the “hijacking” of a death by those with other agendas (Barkun Reference Barkun2007, 119).Footnote ¹¹ I address this issue to some extent in the next section on Floyd’s and Babbitt’s consecration, but here I simply note the importance of Alasdair Macintyre’s ([Reference Macintyre1981] 1984, 213) famous observation that “we are never more (and sometimes less) that the co-authors of our own narratives.” Focusing on the communities that perpetuate martyrdom emphasizes the fact that martyrs do not make themselves; they are made. And it facilitates a move away from viewing martyrdom as bestowing supernatural rewards and toward a recognition of its historical, or rather transhistorical, power as an expression of communal regard.

Such issues become even clearer when we move to the second phase of the political martyrdom process: consecration. Here we see most explicitly the ways in which communities, or rather specific and motivated actors within communities (what DeSoucey et al. [Reference DeSoucey, Pozner, Fields, Dobransky and Fine2008] call “reputational entrepreneurs”), construct and proclaim the significance of individual deaths, in ways that may or may not neatly line up with what the individual martyr thought during life. If, as Amster (Reference Amster2021, 64) puts it, “martyrs have a social function,” that social function becomes clear in the process of consecration.

Consecration: George Floyd’s “Crucifixion” and Ashli Babbitt’s Veneration

When applied to cases of martyrdom, consecration involves the removal of a death from the sphere of the mundane, investing it with sacred meaning. It thus emphasizes the ways in which communities imbue aspects of their collective experience with transcendent or transhistorical value. As such, and as mentioned above, consecration involves the claiming of an individual death by a community, and thus introduces the potential for a wide range of narratives and interpretations around that death, a transfer of the symbolic power of the dead individual from more immediate relationships like family and friends to broader ones like those involving social and political movements and communities.

While much of the literature in this area has its roots in the analysis of religious communities—the Temple in the Jewish tradition (2 Chronicles 7) or the Prana Pratishtha rituals in Hinduism; we could add further examples from the Islamic and Christian traditions—and presents theological accounts of consecration (see, e.g., DeSilva Reference DeSilva2015; Farouk-Alli Reference Farouk-Alli2002; Scott and Simpson-Housley Reference Scott and Simpson-Housley1991), political martyrdom operates within an immanent frame, and thus we need to clarify the notion of political consecration that lies at its heart. The foundational analysis offered by Durkheim, for example, viewed the distinction between sacred and profane as lying at the heart of human social organization and experience. Society creates the sacred, infusing everyday objects and experiences with transcendent meaning: “[W]e see society constantly creating sacred things out of ordinary ones” (Durkheim [Reference Durkheim and Swain1912] 1965, 243). Although such sacred things have generally been understood under the rubric of “religion,” their power originates in their status as signifiers of communal expressions of value. Durkheim understood the sacred to encompass both traditional religious observances and sociopolitical ones:

So the sacred need not be traditionally religious in form, but is present in a community’s collective rituals and memories.

In recent years, psychologists of religion have elaborated a related phenomenon: sanctification. Sanctification refers to “the ways in which individuals interpret aspects of life as having sacred qualities and/or as being a manifestation of their particular image(s) of God/higher powers” (Pomerleau, Pargament, and Mahoney Reference Pomerleau, Pargament, Mahoney, Russo-Netzer, Schulenberg and Batthyany2016, 37–38); such objects or activities point “beyond themselves” and highlight the various ways in which individuals make aspects of their everyday lives sacred. “Sacred matters are interwoven into the fabric of life experience, and, in the process, the experience takes on a special character” (Pargament and Mahoney Reference Pargament and Mahoney2005, 182, 196, 180). Detaching the notion of sanctification from traditional religious contexts and connecting it with psychological processes that infuse meaning into everyday life makes possible a richer understanding of its functioning in concrete social and political affairs.

In contemporary scholarship, consecration is probably most closely associated with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who employed the term to explore processes of legitimation among intellectuals, broadly defined. The power to consecrate “objects … or persons,” Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1980, 262) wrote, is “a form of cultural power.” More recently, Želinský (Reference Želinský2020) has offered an explicitly political approach that views consecration as a multifaceted struggle over communal identity.

Želinský focuses on the importance of narrative to the process of consecration, emphasizing the ceremonial, performative, aesthetic, institutional, and interactional ways in which some individuals come to occupy culturally central positions in the life of a society, while others do not.

In sum, then, we need not confine the notion of consecration to traditionally religious forms and spaces. A more capacious understanding of the ways that societies generate value and assign that value to particular lives and deaths will go a long way toward understanding the power of political martyrdom as an expression of communal regard and reverence.

In practical terms, consecration generally begins shortly after death, often with a funeral, memorial service, or other ritual of laying a body to rest.Footnote ¹² Collective expressions of grief provide evidence that some subset of a community ascribes powerful meanings to this particular death. In George Floyd’s case, a funeral and two memorial services—in Houston, where he grew up; in North Carolina, where he was born; and in Minneapolis, where he died—as well as national and worldwide protests, testified to his death’s profound national impact. Although the Black Lives Matter movement dates back to the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, and in the intervening years the campaign had memorialized “a cloud of witnesses testifying to American injustice” (Ployd Reference Ployd2020, 41)—again, the notion of witnessing—Floyd’s death catalyzed and reenergized supporters, who saw in his fate the larger legacy of American white supremacy and anti-Black police violence. At the Minneapolis memorial service, the Rev. Al Sharpton (Reference Sharpton2020) insisted that “George Floyd’s story has been the story of black folks because ever since 401 years ago, the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed to being is you kept your knee on our neck.” Across the nation, marches and protests linked Floyd’s death to larger and long-standing struggles for racial justice, the unfulfilled promise of American democracy, and continuing issues of race, policing, and mass incarceration.

One need not go as far as to label Floyd’s death a “crucifixion” on a “street-corner Golgotha” (Rhodeen Reference Rhodeen2020)—with all the messianic overtones implied by such a claim—to acknowledge the profound import with which Black communities in the United States, as well as broader audiences, invested Floyd’s death in its immediate aftermath.Footnote ¹³ Ellen Amster (Reference Amster2021) has described an “American Spring,” not unlike the Arab Spring of 2011, with Floyd a kind of American analog to Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation set off a string of protests that spread across the region. Although the two uprisings “emerged from very different politics, actors, ideologies, and contexts … each crystallized around a secular martyr. … Secular martyrs like Floyd render the abstraction of political injustice visible and visceral; their life stories and bodily suffering inspire others to political action” (2021, 63). (That the concrete outcomes of each “Spring” have fallen short of the high hopes of many of the participants does not negate the power of what took place, nor their long-term significance as episodes of political mobilization.)

Public mourning of the type seen for George Floyd was not available to Ashli Babbitt’s supporters; the charged atmosphere following the January 6 assault on the Capitol led the federal government to retain custody of her body and ultimately cremate it in accordance with her wishes (engendering additional conspiracy theories in the process). Her family subsequently scattered the ashes in the Pacific Ocean. Almost immediately after her death, however, Babbitt’s image began to proliferate online, with the appearance of a banner depicting Babbitt framed by a blood-red Capitol building, her neck displaying a drop of blood.Footnote ¹⁴ Within days of her death, calls for further action proliferated, including a proposed “Million Martyr March” and “Million Militia March,” both planned for January 20, Inauguration Day (Anti-Defamation League 2021b). (Neither one materialized.) Commentators reported on the ways in which Babbitt “has become a martyr to many of Mr. Trump’s followers, praised and venerated” by the former president himself, who reportedly still regrets not lowering flags at the White House to half-staff in her honor in the wake of January 6 (Meyer Reference Meyer2021). In the months that followed, her death “inspired vigils, rallies, rap lyrics, social media hashtags … T-shirts … as well as an article in The American Conservative comparing her fate to that of George Floyd” (Schwartzman and Dawsey Reference Schwartzman and Dawsey2021).Footnote ¹⁵

The details laid out above illustrate, in the specific cases of Floyd and Babbitt, some of the broader features of consecration as it operates in cases of political martyrdom. Three aspects of such political consecration are particularly worth noting: its immanence, its legitimation-conferring quality, and its conflictual nature. An immanent understanding of consecration directs our attention to its human dimension: the elevation and veneration of particular deaths as opposed to others, and the infusion of cultural and symbolic power into narratives around their significance. The consecration process confers legitimacy by providing evidence that the individual or individuals occupy a place of cultural centrality, embodying core tenets of the communal ethos or identity. Finally, consecration processes are inherently conflictual because they involve struggles over social control and competition for both symbolic and material resources within a community as well as between communities. The cliché “One’s martyr is another’s terrorist” (or vice versa) nonetheless contains a grain of truth about the fundamentally conflictual nature of political martyrdom, and the ways that competing communal values and commitments show up in processes of cultural valorization.

Transmission: Beginnings

I shall say relatively little here about the third component of political martyrdom—transmission—primarily because it refers to the perpetuation and commemoration of the martyr’s memory over time and thus, although we have seen the beginnings of this process for both Floyd and Babbitt, it is still very much in progress. As a key element of this third stage of martyrdom, commemoration rituals further fuse the martyr’s legacy with a movement or community’s identity and/or values. Certainly, “[i]f martyr rhetoric is to be a vital and lifegiving force [for a given community], it must be embodied with practices of remembrance and resistance” (Ployd Reference Ployd2020, 43); or, as Amster (Reference Amster2021, 74) has put it, “Martyrs are ephemeral and disappear without institutional memory.” Such practices of remembrance, and the creation of collective memory, lie at the heart of these nascent processes of transmission in each case.

Even in the brief time since the deaths of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt, we can see the beginnings of the process taking shape. A film version of Floyd’s life is being planned, and a biography of Floyd, which presented his story as “encapsulat[ing] many of the compounding and relentless traumas that have characterized the Black experience for four hundred years,” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 (Samuels and Olorunnipa Reference Samuels and Olorunnipa2022, introduction). Minneapolis-area efforts to mark the spot where Floyd died led to the creation of George Floyd Square and the George Floyd Global Memorial, which seeks to link Floyd’s death to “stories of resistance to racial injustice” by “curat[ing] spaces for all people to grieve, pay respect, and be a voice for justice.” Regular vigils and weekly music performances continue to take place at the site, which also offers pilgrimage journeys guided by members of the community (Cobb et al. Reference Cobb, Bui, Alvarez and Bright2024).Footnote ¹⁶ An annual “Day of Remembrance” sponsored by Minneapolis-area nonprofit organizations takes place at George Floyd Square. Other commemorations have linked Floyd’s memory with the issue of police violence, most recently in “Twin Flames,” a collaboration between Rise & Remember, which operates the George Floyd Global Memorial, and the Arizona State University Art Museum (Mumphrey Reference Mumphrey2024). All of these events and practices connect Floyd’s life and death to broader issues of racial inequality in the United States, and seek to keep Floyd’s memory and the causes espoused by the memorial alive for those who will come after.

Of course, the link between the creation of martyrs and concrete political change is anything but linear and direct, and supporters’ hopes for swift political action against police violence in the wake of Floyd’s death have gone largely unfulfilled. Both President Joe Biden and Minnesota governor (and, later, vice-presidential candidate) Tim Walz have marked the anniversary of Floyd’s death with renewed calls to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and to continue the work of undoing racism in law enforcement specifically and American society generally, but the prospects for real change remain uncertain, to say the least.

The transmission of Ashli Babbitt’s consecrated memory has been aided by former president Donald Trump himself; the former president recorded a video homage on what would have been Babbitt’s birthday, and frequently invokes her name when accusing his opponents of stealing the 2020 election and misrepresenting the events of January 6 in an attempt to discredit him or his supporters. A website (4ashli.com) continues to commemorate Babbitt, and offers merchandise for purchase as well as a running list of events nationwide. Roseann Mandziuk (Reference Mandziuk2022, 163) has traced the process of martyr making in Babbitt’s case, paying particular attention to the ways in which a wide range of media in the “conservative memory community” (social media; artistic, musical, and video productions; conservative TV and cable stations; and merchandising outlets) have reconstructed Babbitt’s biography and linked her death to the purportedly stolen election, emphasizing her military service as a way of combating charges of seditious behavior made by critics. The emphasis on Babbitt’s military service continues to shape much of this commemorative effort: As part of a 2024 Memorial Day rally in memory of Babbitt and in solidarity with the “January 6 hostages” (those imprisoned on charges relating to the January 6 storming of the Capitol), supporters attempted to deliver an “Ashli Babbitt Memorial Stone” to Arlington National Cemetery. (They were turned away at the gate.) And the transmission process continues in a variety of more localized rallies and rituals, often below the radar (such as the one explored in Sharlet [Reference Sharlet2023]), performed by people for whom Babbitt represents a willingness to stand up to an oppressive government and protect endangered liberties. Indeed, Babbitt’s mother, Micki Witthoeft, relocated to the Washington, DC area after her daughter’s death, and has been part of a daily prayer vigil at the jail holding those facing charges in the January 6 attack.

In both of these cases, particular individuals and groups have shaped and managed the process of transmission: most notably (but by no means exclusively) the organizers of the George Floyd Global Memorial and the “conservative memory community” referenced above by Mandziuk (Reference Mandziuk2022). Such actors have sought to pass down a particular understanding of the death in question: I mentioned DeSoucey and colleagues’ (Reference DeSoucey, Pozner, Fields, Dobransky and Fine2008) notion of “reputational entrepreneurs” earlier, but the concept bears repeating in this context. As DeSoucey and colleagues (Reference DeSoucey, Pozner, Fields, Dobransky and Fine2008, 100) put it, these agents “leverage the martyr’s story” after death, thus “mak[ing] tangible the values and beliefs reputational entrepreneurs seek to promote.” In short, “[i]t is the reputational entrepreneur, not the martyr, who transforms the bodily image” into a powerful cultural product (100); the product, an “embodied reputation” (110), is then available to be evoked in future political contexts as a way of ensuring long-term visibility for the martyr. All of these efforts aim to ensure that Floyd or Babbitt will live on in the collective memory of a given community, and in doing so they illustrate the truth of a basic observation about memory: “Recollection of the past is an active, constructive process, not a simple matter of retrieving information” (Schwartz Reference Schwartz1982, 374). That active, constructive process continues to this day.

Martyrdom, Witness, and American Democracy

The transmission stage is closely related to the process of witnessing so central to the creation of political martyrdom. Such witnessing is nothing new in American history, of course: from Mary Dyer and the Quaker martyrs of 1660 to Crispus Attucks, whom Mitch Kachun (Reference Kachun2017) has called the “first martyr” of American liberty, and from the assassinated president Abraham Lincoln (whom one contemporary declared “Our Martyred President” [Johnson Reference Johnson1865]) to Martin Luther King Jr., memorialized as a twentieth-century martyr at Westminster Abbey, agents of transmission have shaped (and, in the process, kept alive) the memories of political martyrs. Attending to George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt reinforces the timeliness and relevance of political martyrdom as a constitutive element of American democracy.

Many of those who drew connections between George Floyd’s death and notions of political martyrdom pointed to the events as witnessing to the nation’s failure to live up to its vaunted rhetoric about equality, and the persistence of a toxic combination of white supremacy and police brutality against members of minoritized communities. The effective witness of Floyd’s death inhered not in the way that he died (which was, to say the very least, unintentional), but in what his death illuminated about race and American society. Ama Karikari-Yawson (Reference Karikari-Yawson2020) called Floyd “a perfect martyr” whose death “show[ed] us racism in its most raw, gruesome, brutal, and arrogant form.” In fact, Karikawa-Yawson argued, Floyd’s life offers a valuable opportunity to put the “politics of respectability” behind us and to affirm the inherent dignity of all Black lives. Ja’han Jones (Reference Jones2021) made a similar argument on The ReidOut blog, describing Floyd’s murder as issuing “an urgent call for police reform” and reform of the criminal justice system more broadly. Of course, the ways in which Floyd’s witness transpired clearly differs markedly from other iconic “martyrs for civil rights” like Martin Luther King or Medgar Evers (Naveh Reference Naveh1990; M. Williams Reference Williams2011), who, even if they did not seek out death per se, clearly chose repeatedly to put themselves in danger in pursuit of political change. Yet these and other observers insist that Floyd’s death points to something beyond itself as well, that it witnesses to a larger point about American society, culture, and politics.

The notion of Black death as political martyrdom, of course, is not without controversy. Juliet Hooker (Reference Hooker2023) has powerfully argued that framing deaths like Floyd’s as martyrdoms can romanticize social movements and create narratives that ultimately aim to redeem Black death in the service of racial progress, as part of a strategy that instrumentalizes Black grief in service of white purposes (note King’s “unearned suffering is redemptive,” from his “I Have a Dream” speech). As Hooker (Reference Hooker2023, 185) notes, “[G]rieving Black families do not uniformly accept” such strategies, and “some push back against the instrumentalization of Black grief and refuse the expectation that their suffering will become a form of martyrdom.” (Brett Krutzsch [Reference Krutzsch2019] has made a parallel argument about gay martyrs in American society, and the way that martyrdom rhetoric can domesticate gay experiences in service of an appeal for mainstream legitimacy.) That said, though some surely do reject the martyrdom framework, others, as we have seen, have embraced it as shedding light on the profound injustices perpetrated against Black Americans.

If George Floyd’s death bore witness to the continuing phenomena of police brutality and systemic racism, Ashli Babbitt’s death is inseparable from the events that led up to the January 6 assault on the Capitol: claims about a stolen election, unsuccessful efforts to challenge the results in court, and, ultimately, a violent attempt to prevent the certification of that election’s outcome and the peaceful transfer of political power. To Time’s Vera Bergengruen (Reference Bergengruen2021), Babbitt’s death “became a rallying cry that united the maze of factions and ideologies that converged for the Capitol riot. Many of them cite her death as evidence of what they say brought them to DC in the first place: a corrupt US government occupied by nefarious forces seeking to suppress and destroy Trump supporters.” For anti-government activists, Babbitt became “a patriot who was fighting against government tyranny in order to free the American people when she was executed by government agents” (Fischer, Flack, and Wilson Reference Fischer, Flack and Wilson2021). Such claims were reinforced by frequent invocations of Babbitt’s service in the armed forces, in an attempt to cement her status as a patriotic defender of American freedoms (see Mandziuk Reference Mandziuk2022, 156–57).

But in addition to the general pro-Trump dimension of the January 6 rally and its aftermath, critics also noted a more specific racialized and gendered narrative undergirding much of the discussion around Babbitt. On this account, Babbitt was not just a martyr for the pro-Trump political movement, her death symbolic of patriotic struggle against a tyrannical “deep state”; she also served a powerful symbolic role for a broader political ecosystem including “White Power movements, National Socialist, Accelerationists, Boogaloo movements, Militias, Neo-Nazis, and others seeking to supplant the federal government” (Argentino and Raja Reference Argentino and Raja2021). Argentino and Raja (Reference Argentino and Raja2021) further connected Babbitt with the wider world of ideologically motivated violent extremist (IVE) groups, drawing links between Babbitt and Dylan Roof, Timothy McVeigh, Anders Breivik, and other partisans of white supremacy. Others sought to cement her legacy by linking her with Vicki Weaver, wife of Randy Weaver who was killed at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, thus bringing together racialized and gendered narratives of endangered whites and the need to avenge dishonored white women (Mandziuk Reference Mandziuk2022, 157–58).

Such efforts did not lack for critics, of course, in either Floyd’s or Babbitt’s case. Many observers drew parallels between pro-Trump lionization of Ashli Babbitt and the Nazis’ use of Horst Wessel’s murder in 1930 to stoke division and rally their supporters, recalling “a dark path made infamous by the Nazi propaganda machine” (Burns Reference Burns2021; see also Rozsa Reference Rozsa2021). Writing on Vox, Aaron Rupar (Reference Rupar2021) drew an explicit connection between Babbitt’s martyrdom and a refusal to admit the results of a democratic election: “Turning Babbitt into the MAGA version of Horst Wessel has become a central theme of Trump’s return to public life. And her ascension to martyr status symbolizes how, now more than ever, Trumpism stands in opposition to free and fair elections.”Footnote ¹⁷ With regard to Floyd, critics offered scathing critiques of his personal history, which involved drug use and a criminal record, or attempted to discredit the movement for racial justice by pointing to protests that turned violent and led to injury and property destruction.

In each case, the meanings of the death do not inhere in the specific actions that took place in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, or in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021. Rather, individuals and communities asserted such larger meanings, in complex acts of cultural construction. Such consecration rests upon an act of communal and commemorative assertion: that this death means more than its individual components, more than the fateful interactions between Derek Chauvin and George Floyd, and between Lieutenant Michael Byrd and Ashli Babbitt; and that it provides insight into the ongoing political struggles onto which those deaths are brought to bear.

Conclusion: Floyd/Babbitt, BLM/MAGA, and Contemporary Political Martyrdom

In this paper, I have explored the ways in which the deaths of George Floyd and Ashli Babbit, and their aftermaths, illuminate broader aspects of contemporary American political, cultural, and religious conflict, and simultaneously reflect long-standing dynamics associated with martyrdom understood in an explicitly political register. I have offered a (brief) overview of the concept of political martyrdom, and suggested that a continuing focus on intentionality as a defining feature of martyrdom unhelpfully constrains our ability to see the broader political dynamics at play in the processes by which communities infuse such deaths with meaning. Those broader meanings reflect the active construction of martyrdoms by communities after their death more so than any specific actions of Floyd or Babbitt themselves during their lives.

Political martyrdom operates in an environment characterized by conflict and violence, one in which political communities and subcommunities make meaning out of death and use the cultural and symbolic resources available to them to elevate martyrs from within the ranks of their dead. Focusing on the deaths and afterlives of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt provides a case study in some of its contemporary manifestations. It thus illuminates the fact that debates over martyr making illustrate broader political tensions—often violent ones—both within and between communities, and reminds us of the conflictual and contentious nature of martyrdom at all three stages laid out above.

Martyrdom, of course, has always been simultaneously political and religious, and arguments over who can be properly classified as martyrs long predate our own time. Like their Augustinian precursors—for whom the righteousness of the cause, and not the mere fact of punishment, made an individual a proper martyr (Augustine’s noted formulation non poena sed causa)—many contemporary observers expend a great deal of effort in policing the boundaries of martyrdom, of taking it upon themselves to declare who is, and who is not, a “real” martyr. Conservative critics who highlight Floyd’s struggle with drugs or his convictions for petty crimes as a way of besmirching his character and undermining the political significance of his death engage in such ideological gatekeeping. But the same can be said for efforts to delegitimize Ashli Babbitt’s death. For example, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko (Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021) call Babbitt both a “manufactured” and a “fake” martyr. Unlike true martyrs, who engage in “noble individual self-sacrifice for the greater good,” “fake martyrdoms” like Babbitt’s—which in reality represents merely an “unfortunate death”—follow in the footsteps of Nazi mastermind Joseph Goebbels and “a long list of propagandists” in their efforts to “construct and weaponize fake martyrs.”Footnote ¹⁸ On this view, “Babbitt is the object of an unprincipled attempt to create an emotionally resonant and characteristically conspiracist rallying cry for Trump’s base, and to build a complete parallel narrative for the events of January 6th, from insurrection to stymied resurrection.”

But central to the analysis I have been putting forward here is an insistence that all martyrs are, in fact, “manufactured martyrs.” Martyrdom is a collective process of cultural construction, of manufacturing a sacred phenomenon from a mundane occurrence. The claim—either explicitly, or implied—that Babbitt is not a “real martyr,” or that her martyrdom is “manufactured” or “unprincipled,” fails to do justice to the common processes of consecration and commemoration that characterize all martyr narratives. The creation of martyrdom narratives is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for any martyrdom (such narratives must be transmitted throughout the community, and take hold at some level), and not merely a “tactic particularly suited to the rhetoric of fascism and the radical right” (Mandziuk Reference Mandziuk2022, 153). The idea of martyrdom being manufactured is hardly unique to pro-Trump forces’ embrace of Ashli Babbitt or to Black Lives Matter lifting up George Floyd’s memory: it equally explains how we still know about such iconic early Christian martyrs as Perpetua and Felicitas. In other words, the idea of one’s martyrdom being manufactured by others does not distinguish Babbitt from other martyrs: rather, it constitutes what martyrdom is. Bloom and Moskalenko’s one-dimensional understanding of martyrs—as pure vessels for high-minded activism, personally upright and morally blameless—oversimplifies the complex reality that all martyrs are constructed by movements.

The difference between the deaths and posthumous consecrations of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt lies not in the fact that one is noble and the other is unprincipled, but rather in the respective causes to which their deaths bore witness, as refracted through the experiences and actions of the communities that claimed them: between the historical legacy of American racism and state violence against communities of color on the one hand, and Trump’s calls to “Stop the Steal” and discredit the 2020 election results on the other. The processes of infusing deaths with transcendent significance extending far beyond their particular circumstances, of keeping those politicized memories alive, and of continuing to tell stories about those deaths that serve communal purposes are common to both. In each case, communities create martyrs in an effort to embody, quite literally, what they take to be their central values and commitments. “The abstraction of political injustice is personalized by [political] martyrs,” writes Amster (Reference Amster2021, 66).Footnote ¹⁹

In other words, martyrdom remains alive and well in the contemporary United States. In one of the few extended treatments of political martyrdom, Eyal Naveh (Reference Naveh1990, 168) argued that the “significance [of martyrdom] declined in the modern culture of the twentieth century.” Similarly, Lacey Baldwin Smith (Reference Smith1997, 307) has called twentieth-century martyrs “an endangered species.” Yet such claims overlook the ways in which death and memory continue to permeate American political discourse. Martyrdom has not disappeared in twenty-first-century society. It is everywhere—in our politics, in our culture, in our literature (Akbar Reference Akbar2024; Oates Reference Oates2017)—and continues to place individual deaths within broader frames of meaning and to inspire political movements long after the martyr has left the stage. If we want to contest the valorization of a particular martyr, we will do better to engage with the substantive political causes to which their memories are being put to use than to attempt to police the conceptual and definitional boundaries of martyrdom itself.

Much of the focus in this essay has been on American democracy and politics, but a much broader set of concerns animates my inquiry into political martyrdom. A broadened understanding of political martyrdom’s capacity to connect an individual (or individualized) death with a community’s collective memory offers new perspectives on the timeless phenomena of death, politics, and memory, and helps us to think more capaciously about the ways in which memories of death and conflict extend well beyond the confines of the world’s religious traditions. Emphasizing the notion of witnessing in martyrdom, in the words of Fruchtman (Reference Fruchtman2019), “helps us foreground the communicative and communal aspects of martyrdom, and to ask what values and what truths are being encoded and endorsed in the choice and representation of a martyr.” In the cases of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt, those values and truths lie at the heart of the public dimensions of their respective deaths, and tell widely divergent stories about the contemporary state of American democracy and prospects for its future.