An errant Israeli mortar struck the Holy Family Parish in Gaza on July 17, killing three and wounding ten (including the parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli) — prompting an apology from the Israel Defense Forces and strong condemnation from the patriarch of Jerusalem. In the aftermath of this, Joel Berry, the managing editor of the satirical site the Babylon Bee, kicked up a fuss on social media by criticizing the Catholic Church in Gaza in a series of tweets:

This won’t be easy for people to hear, but there are only about 200 professed Catholics still living in Gaza and they all support Hamas. True Christian faith still exists in Gaza, but it’s all underground. Anyone allowed by Hamas to practice openly is allowed to do so only because they aid and support the terror regime. . . . Thousands of Catholics escaped Gaza after Hamas took over. The few hundred remaining support Hamas. . . . Anyone who supports Hamas and the extermination of the Jewish people is not a Christian, no matter what they profess, or where they go to church. . . . I love my Catholic brothers and sisters, I reject all the slander and twisting of what I say, and I’ll never stop calling out corruption and compromise in the church. That’s something godly Protestants and Catholics should unite around. I apologize for nothing. Go pound sand.

Now, I’ll leave to others the task of explaining why this is an unfair characterization of the church in Gaza. What’s missing here is an understanding of the difference between culpability and credibility.

Hamas is the government of Gaza; it has, in Hobbesian terms, a monopoly on force. And it rules as a totalitarian tyranny in which dissent is punishable swiftly and brutally without the mechanisms of law. Just as is true in China, Russia, North Korea, or Cuba, there is no such thing as a publicly visible institution in Gaza that is independent of the government, and that includes churches. In order for any institution to survive under such a regime, it must to some extent collaborate — and the extent of the collaboration demanded will always be a blank check to the state whose amount can change at any time.

In terms of credibility, this is why we can’t put any real stock in what is said (or, still further, not said) by people and institutions within those societies if it supports the party line of the state: They know what they must do in order to survive. This can be true even of people and institutions on the outside who may have de facto hostages on the inside.

But it’s another matter to take this basic observation about credibility and apply it to culpability. In moral terms, we know what is the ideal in living under tyranny. The Catholic Church in particular has that history in its bones: It was born a persecuted church, from Herod to Calvary. Of the first 31 popes, 28 are believed to have been martyred. But what we demand of heroism and martyrdom from ordinary people, and from institutions that have such people in their care, is another story. We are fortunate in America not to live under conditions that demand either collaboration or resistance to tyranny, but many others have not been so fortunate. Writers such as George Orwell, Vaclav Havel, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrestled with what was possible and what was demanded, as have many theologians; this remains a living question in pop-culture products such as Andor or The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s a question that haunted Western Europe for decades after 1945, and Eastern Europe after 1989.

Consider two well-known examples: During the Nazi years, the 14-year-old German Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, and then the German military, from which at length he deserted; the 13-year-old Hungarian Jew George Soros posed as a Christian and at least once helped a relative in the regime take an inventory of the confiscated estate of a Jewish family. These were boys, struggling to navigate the lines between collaboration, resistance, and simple survival, and countless others across a darkened continent who did not grow to such adult prominence struggled with similar demands. The Church itself — then as now — used its ability to keep operating in Italy as a means to save lives that would have been ended by the Nazis. I don’t have to rehash here the many debates over what the Church did then, or what it does today in China, in order to observe that the question of culpability for collaborating is not an easy one, and much turns on what sort of demands are acceded to, and what is saved by steering clear of open resistance and collective martyrdom.

It’s enough to note that there’s a lot more to the question than simply the syllogism that one is not Christian if one tries to survive. And it’s also a reminder that the corrupting choices put by tyrannies to the people under them is yet another reason why those who are in a position to resist a tyranny successfully by force have a responsibility to consider the human costs of allowing them to persist.