Conquering Rome: Constructing a Global Christianity in the Face of Terror. A Case Study into the Representations of the Beheading of Twenty-One Migrant Workers in January 2015

Abstract

In January 2015, a video was uploaded to the internet showing the beheading of twenty-one men. A branch of the Islamic State claimed responsibility. The atrocity evoked frames that developed rapidly along historical memories and theologies. In this chapter several trajectories that have led to, and several trajectories that followed this atrocity are discussed. The focus is on frames that were active in different media following the killings and suggests a relation between a ‘global Christianity’ and suffering: the frame used by Islamic State charged its version of a global Christianity with the historic aggression of ‘the crusader’; the Coptic Church inscribed the laborers as official ‘martyrs’ into the Coptic Synaxarium; Pope Francis presented the blood of the laborers as part of an ‘ecumenism of blood’ that unites all Christians in suffering, and an evangelical frame focused on the conversion of one of the laborers as a sign of God’s grace. Each of these representations fashions a specific notion of a ‘global Christianity’ by discursively constructing connectivities through time and space. The biographies of the migrant workers ‘imploded’ into the different frames that were applied to them.

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