We are not yet facing the gallows for believing that conjugal marriage alone is marriage. While many Christians have already staked out this place as their hill to die on, the landscape is shifting faster than they can plot. Moral silence—silence that suppresses moral truth—is not permissible. But neither is a zealous race to the gallows before it’s our time. Both assume we cannot do anything. Both are ways of giving up.

I sometimes feel guilty for being too stirred up by the image of Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. The play captures just one dimension of a man who biographers agree—by their failure to agree—was a very complex person. Maybe too much has been said of Bolt’s hero, whose witness to truth when forced to swear against his faith began with silence and escape and ended forcefully by a full “discharge” of opinion and later of blood. Still, the story consoles me, and it’s worth telling time and again.

Moral silence and martyrdom are the two traps to avoid. More’s example teaches us that silence alone is not courageous, but that silence can sometimes create the space for goodness to prevail. More’s silence was not a moral silence but a tactical, legal one. And his escape from the oath was never intended to be permanent, only immediately and practically necessary. Everyone, after all, knew what he thought. He was not denying the Church’s teaching nor implying that he rejected it.

While silence can be one trap, the desire for the simple fate of martyrdom is another. More’s example teaches us also that it is our duty as Christians and as reasonable people not to “jump the shark” for martyrdom but to dig deeply into the grit of our lives, into “the stuff of which martyrs are made” as he puts it, and to discern carefully what we’re called and compelled to do in the present moment. Those who are eager can imagine a martyr’s fate as being bloody or unbloody, and depending on which prevails upon us more it can look a lot like a culture war or the Benedict Option. In any case, a fatalist approach to martyrdom turns out to be either morally deafening or inconsequential.

In one of the more vexing scenes from A Man for All Seasons, Thomas Cromwell reminds the jury quite rightly that “there are many kinds of silence.”

Consider first the silence of a man when he is dead. Suppose we go into the room where he is laid out and we listen. What do we hear? Silence. What does it betoken, this silence? Nothing. This is silence pure and simple. But let us take another case. Suppose I were to take a dagger from my sleeve and make to kill the prisoner with it. And my lordships there, instead of crying out for me to stop, maintain their silence. That would betoken! It would betoken a willingness that I should do it. And under the law, they would be guilty with me. So silence can, according to the circumstances, speak.

Cromwell’s perversion of this principle of law that silence gives consent (qui tacet consentire videtur) famously confirmed Parliament in its desire to convict More of treason and have him executed, just as the Supreme Court’s perverse activism in the face of constitutional rule confirmed the slow death of conjugal marriage in the West. Yet we can learn an important lesson from the first that might help us to endure the second. There are, indeed, many kinds of silence; and our retreat toward peaceful existence in post-marriage America can be both quiet and also performatively loud. Evangelization and reprieve need not be juxtaposed—unless by evangelization we mean simply advancing and defending countercultural claims.

Neither moral silence nor a zealous race to the gallows before it’s our time is permissible.

These lines by Bolt are especially timely, if also shrouded by the confusion and uncertainties of our present moment:

If [God] suffers us to come to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can. And yes [...] then we can clamour like champions, if we have the spittle for it. But it's God's part, not our own, to bring ourselves to such a pass. Our natural business lies in escaping.

Let’s not imagine our choices are finished. Let’s not loathe a tactical silence just because it’s not martyrdom.

Andrew M. Haines is the editor and founder of Ethika Politika, and co-founder and chief operating officer at Fiat Insight.