“One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Often attributed to Joseph Stalin, this quote describes life under the Soviet dictator’s totalitarian regime, during which an estimated 6 to 20 million people died from mass executions, labor camps, imprisonment, and famine.
Among them were dozens of Russian Orthodox bishops and thousands of priests, often killed by firing squad. Many more Orthodox Christians were arrested and sent to labor camps. Christian intellectuals were purged from the Soviet Union; many died in prisons and concentration camps, the first of which was established in a former Orthodox monastery in the Solovetsky Islands in 1923. Religious leaders and laypeople of all kinds suffered under Stalin, who was once himself a student at Tbilisi Theological Seminary.
To the merciless dictator, these deaths weren’t individuals to be mourned. They were numbers in columns, inconvenient obstacles in the way of a political objective. Statistics, not tragedies.
We know that “statistics, not tragedies” is an inhumane paradigm. At the same time, it can be easy for us to see mass martyrdom merely as a data point rather than the fate of individuals.
The World Christian Database defines martyrs as “believers in Christ who have lost their lives prematurely, in situations of witness, as a result of human hostility.” By this definition, more than 70 million Christians have been martyred over the past two millennia—more than half in the 20th century under Stalinist, Communist, fascist, and Nazi regimes, and many in the 21st century under Islamic militancy in places throughout North Africa and West Asia. Since 2020, martyrdoms have also been recorded in Myanmar, Uganda, Mozambique, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Burkina Faso, and Mali, among other countries.
The 21, a new short film that portrays the horrific beheading of 21 Christians by ISIS militants on a beach in Libya in 2015, counteracts the tendency to numb ourselves to this reality. (Christianity Today is an executive producer on the film.) Produced by More Productions and animated by a team of close to 100 artists from around the world, the movie showcases the spirituality and sacrifice of its subjects—20 Christians from Egypt and 1 Christian from Ghana, all of them migrant workers who were captured merely for being Christian. Imprisoned, tortured, and demoralized, they faced pressure to deny their faith but refused to do so.
The broader context of this episode is the persecution of Christians in ISIS-controlled territory in Iraq and Syria, where thousands of Christians have been executed, women and girls forced into sex slavery, and clergy kidnapped and assassinated in a ruthless attempt to wipe the religion out of the region. ISIS’s policy is abundantly clear in The 21: recant or die. Faced with a mortal decision, the captives chose to die.
Animated in a neo-Coptic style evocative of the long history of Orthodox art, The 21 pairs earthly realities with spiritual ones. An ISIS fighter glimpses a haloed Jesus sitting alongside the bound and blindfolded prisoners in the back of a clattering van. Shivering at night on a wet prison floor, the men sing Kyrie eleison; thunder and lightning crack through the sky, and a dove flits across the horizon. “The more they were tortured,” the narrator says, “the more their faith seemed to grow.” Again, Jesus appears, eyes glinting in the shadows of the cell. Rocks jut up from the earth. “Then suddenly the ground began to shake like an earthquake,” says the narrator, “and ISIS became afraid.” When the men finally march to their deaths, otherworldly figures accompany them, reflections glinting in the saltwater.
The movie also features footage from ISIS’s original propaganda video of the executions. This is a bold but important choice by the filmmakers, a choice that keeps their audience from losing sight of the sobering fact that these men were real people with real suffering. The juxtaposition is jarring: Viewers are suddenly face-to-face not with artistic renderings and iconography but with the martyrs themselves—first marching across the sand in orange jumpsuits, then turning the waves red with their blood.
The 21 tells only one martyrdom story in less than ten minutes, bringing fewer than two dozen husbands, brothers, sons, and fathers to life in beautiful animated detail. But those ten minutes matter. These men are a testament to Christian faith under pressure. Their lives and deaths stand alongside other Christians who continue to make bold choices in the face of violence and persecution.
Theirs Is the Kingdom of Heaven
More than 50,000 Christians have been martyred in Nigeria since 2009 at the hands of Boko Haram, ISIS-West Africa, and Fulani militants. Many millions more have been displaced, creating a severe humanitarian crisis. Christianity in Syria has been nearly eradicated, with the country’s Christian population dropping from 10 percent (1975) to 2 percent (2025). The situation is similar in Iraq, where Christians fled and died after the invasions of the United States (2003) and ISIS (2014–2017). Christians had three choices under ISIS control: convert to Islam, pay the jizya tax, or die. The Christian community in Mosul, Iraq, once 50,000 strong, has been reduced to an estimated 20 Christian families.
Every martyr throughout Christian history has had a name, a family, and a faith. Let The 21 be a reminder not just of lives lost but of the price to be a follower of Christ under the most extreme circumstances.
Gina A. Zurlo is a visiting lecturer in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School and editor of the World Christian Database.
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