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This chapter examines the politics of fear underlying the antipersecution discourse that revolved around evangelical Christians at the turn of the twenty-first century. A video made by the U.S.-based Christian evangelical group Voice of the Martyrs showed that Christians are being persecuted all around the world. By the turn of the twenty-first century, a passionate concern with the persecution of Christians united conservatives as well as liberal and moderate evangelicals. The chapter shows how antipersecution discourse resulted in the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. It also considers the significance of spectacles of the violated body to the discourse of persecution and how intense attention to Christian persecution created a tension for evangelicals between the universalizing language of human rights and a specific commitment to the “persecuted body” of Christ. Finally, it explores how evangelicals' attention to Christian persecution intersects with Islamic concerns.

Chapter 1 traces the paths through which martyrdom, apocalypticism, and holiness became intertwined from John Bale and John Foxe to Cotton Mather and the New England Primer. Biblical martyrs, early church martyrs, and especially the Protestants martyred in the 1550s under the Catholic Queen Mary—the Marian martyrs —became part of a shared historical imagination of the true church as the persecuted church. This demonstration of the diffuse and powerful significance of the martyrs in English culture lays the groundwork for the subsequent analysis of the historical imagination of martyrdom as it was fashioned and re-fashioned in specific situations in early New England. Narratives of martyrs and persecutors are pervasive in early modern English writings, as various groups competed to lay claim to the lineage of the true persecuted church.

Chapter 3 examines the rhetoric of emigration and the first major threat to Congregationalists’ identity as the true, persecuted church, the Antinomians. It asks how and why both sides of the controversy in Massachusetts drew on apocalyptic and martyrdom narratives to establish their positions. John Wheelright and Anne Hutchinson saw themselves within the lineage of the true persecuted church, and John Winthrop and others tried to invert their narrative by framing Antinomians as persecutors. Though Wheelright would later disavow intentions of violence, his apocalyptic language was deeply threatening to Congregationalist leaders, who disarmed his followers.

Chapter 5 analyzes the multi-layered polemics between Quakers and Congregationalists over suffering and political legitimacy. Believing that suffering was a crucial weapon in the apocalyptic Lamb's War, Quakers expertly inverted corporal punishment into a platform for spiritual authority. Quickly publicizing their ordeals, they framed New Englanders as cruel persecutors and Quakers as innocent martyrs. Congregationalists in turn argued for their own status as the true persecuted church and Quakers as dangerous weapons of Antichrist, aimed at the heart of New England society. By the time Mary Dyer and three other Quaker missionaries were hanged, Congregationalists hearing Quaker claims to be the true persecuted church were deeply troubled that New England leaders were acting more like the Marian bishops than they liked to admit.

The fictionalising of the Lancashire witches had begun even before the trials. If the witches of 1612 were the first example in fact in England of an alleged devilish confederacy, the first example in fiction came six years earlier with the most famous witches of all: the ‘weird sisters’ in Shakespeare's 1606 play Macbeth. This chapter shows how far the connections extend, in both historical and literary references. The grisly contents of Macbeth's witches' cooking pot is detected, finding the macabre relics of English Catholic priests, martyred under Elizabeth I. Connections with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 is established, to which, the activities of the Lancashire witches were compared by Thomas Potts, and whose conspiratorial connections reached into Lancashire. Finally, the manner in which Lancashire's gentry families were implicated in the underworld of persecuted Catholicism is shown, particularly through the mission of the martyred Edmund Campion, suggesting that their mostly Protestant Jacobean descendants sought to show their loyalty to the state by seeking out witches.

This chapter reviews the rabbinic responsa regarding the Boycott of Ancona. It was written by Ottoman rabbis addressing dramatic issues of international significance that affected both the morale and the economic well-being of many Jews. These texts, grappling with legal issues on the basis of conflicting narratives of what had happened, reveal that the boycott was far more complicated than it originally appears. The boycott of the port of Ancona in 1556 was an unparalleled event in early modern Jewish history, the only attempt before the twentieth century to organize Jewish economic pressure and to wield it in the arena of international affairs for the benefit of Jews persecuted in other lands. Powerful forces converged in this event.

This chapter examines the treatment of Patmos in the foundational early patristic period (2nd to 5th centuries). Given the paucity of Apocalypse commentaries in this period, most of the sources are biographical and hagiographical. Hence the dominant reading is literal, locating Patmos within the story of John, although often with more than mere historical interest, given the perceived parallels between John’s situation vis-à-vis a persecuting emperor and the situations of his early interpreters. Interpretations fall into two main groups: those which identify Patmos as place of exile (though with surprising diversity in details compared with the modern commentaries), and those which prioritize the role of the island as place of revelation, sowing seeds for the more creative aspects of medieval exegesis.

Chapter 5 analyses the meaning of ‘being persecuted’ for a Convention reason as it applies to stateless persons, by examining its interpretation and application in the case law of the leading common law and civil law jurisdictions. It begins by addressing deprivation of nationality (namely, denial of nationality and active withdrawal of nationality), and denial of the right to enter one’s country. It then considers other forms of harm related to an absence of nationality such as the right to education, right to work, right to health, right to liberty, and right to family and private life. It concludes by examining instances where claims for refugee protection failed but complementary protection may nevertheless be relevant. This may be the case where, for instance, no nexus exists between persecution and the Convention reasons, where the level of harm was not sufficient to constitute persecution, or where Article 1F applied to exclude a stateless (refugee) person from protection.