Article45

Christian suffering as a marketing technique and propaganda

The world kneels at the cross, year after year, as though the crucifixion of Jesus were the supreme tragedy in human history. Churches darken their sanctuaries, hymns resound with sorrow, paintings linger on the nails and the crown of thorns. The Roman execution of a provincial preacher has been elevated into the cosmic drama of redemption, the death that split time itself into “before” and “after.” Yet to any clear-eyed observer, this claim wilts under scrutiny. The agony of Jesus was real, but it was not unique. What made it “world-historical” was not the pain of crucifixion but the propaganda of empire. By contrast, the vastly greater ordeals of Hindu saints, Sikh Gurus, and Buddhist monks—whose sacrifices dwarf that single crucifixion—have been erased or demeaned as the suffering of “heathens.”

Consider the Sikh tradition. Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru, was executed in 1675 in Delhi under orders from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. He was tortured and then publicly beheaded for defending Kashmiri Pandits against forced conversion. His martyrdom, unlike Christ’s, was not for a narrow sect but for the principle of religious freedom itself, centuries before Enlightenment Europe claimed to discover it. His son, Guru Gobind Singh, endured what no parent should: all four of his sons lost—Ajit Singh and Jujhar Singh killed in battle, Zorawar Singh and Fateh Singh bricked alive in Sirhind in 1705. He himself was assassinated in 1708. This was a man who lost his father, his children, his peace—yet never surrendered his people’s dignity. By any human measure, Gobind Singh’s suffering was greater than Jesus’. But while the crucifixion became the axis of world memory, Gobind Singh’s agony remains regional history, revered by Sikhs, ignored by the world.

Or take Hindus under Portuguese rule in Goa. Beginning in 1560, the Portuguese Inquisition—sanctioned by the Catholic Church—unleashed systematic persecution. Hindu temples were demolished, worship outlawed, and families dragged before inquisitorial courts. Jesuit missionaries like Francis Xavier, later canonized as a saint, explicitly urged the Crown to enforce the Inquisition against Hindus. Contemporary records describe torture chambers in Goa where Hindus and “heretics” were flogged, imprisoned, and burned alive. Thousands of sacred practices and texts were destroyed. These were not martyrs in Christian eyes but “idolaters” whose suffering deserved no recognition. Their agony was real, but it was never sanctified.

Buddhism’s fate was no different. Nalanda University, the crown jewel of Buddhist scholarship in Bihar, was burned in 1193 by the Turkic general Bakhtiyar Khilji. Its vast library, said to contain hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, smoldered for months. Monks were massacred, entire traditions extinguished. Across Central Asia, stupas and monasteries were obliterated by Islamic invasions. The colossal Bamiyan Buddhas, carved in the sixth century, stood for more than a millennium before being dynamited by the Taliban in 2001. Buddhist monks were not remembered as martyrs; they were written off as relics of “heathenism” in both Islamic chronicles and later Christian accounts. Their blood, like that of Hindus and Sikhs, never entered the sacred vocabulary of martyrdom.

Here lies the great asymmetry. Christianity monopolized the language of sanctified suffering. When Christians were weak under Rome, they called their dead “martyrs.” When they gained power, they called their victims “pagans,” “idolaters,” or “infidels.” The same act of violence—execution, torture, massacre—was interpreted differently depending on who suffered. Christian pain became holy witness; non-Christian pain became heathen obstinacy. This is not the language of truth but of power.

And Christianity perfected it into a global marketing technique. The cross became a brand, the martyr its salesman, victimhood its most effective advertisement. When Christians were powerless, their suffering elicited sympathy; when they became powerful, the same narrative turned into a weapon to justify conquest. Missionaries and colonizers in India perfected this inversion: while breaking temples, mocking ancestral gods, and coercing conversions, they wept about “persecution” when Hindus resisted. Christian suffering became theater, a way to invert reality: the aggressor as victim, the persecutor as persecuted. The crucifixion became not just a story of one man’s death but a template for eternal victimhood, endlessly recycled to extract pity, money, and submission.

If suffering is the standard, then Jesus’ crucifixion was ordinary compared to the mountains of agony borne by others. Guru Gobind Singh saw his father executed, his four sons murdered, his body scarred and finally assassinated. Hindu saints were tortured in Goa’s Inquisition chambers, their temples razed, their families broken. Buddhist monks watched Nalanda burn, their life’s learning consumed by fire. Their suffering was greater, deeper, longer. The difference is not in the fact of suffering but in the scale of storytelling. Jesus’ death was universalized by empire; their deaths were endured with dignity but never marketed to the world.

It is time to strip away the myth. The crucifixion of Jesus was not the supreme sacrifice; it was the supreme success of theological propaganda. The Sikh Gurus, Hindu saints, and Buddhist monks who suffered left behind legacies of courage that outshine the cross in sheer human endurance. To continue pretending otherwise is not reverence—it is submission to a global fiction.

Citations

• Macauliffe, M.A. The Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings, and Authors. Oxford University Press, 1909.
• Grewal, J.S. The Sikhs of the Punjab. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Scholberg, Henry. The Portuguese in India. Asian Educational Services, 2000.
• Priolkar, Anant Kakba. The Goa Inquisition: Being a Quatercentenary Commemoration Study of the Inquisition in India. Bombay University, 1961.
• Thapar, Romila. A History of India, Volume I. Penguin, 1966. (On Bakhtiyar Khilji and Nalanda).
• Marshall, Peter. The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation. Oxford University Press, 1996 (on Francis Xavier and the Inquisition).
• Flood, Gavin. An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000.