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“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” These words, spoken by Jesus on the cross at Calvary, according to the Gospel of St. Luke, constitute the apotheosis of one of the most important virtues in Christianity.
At the time of his greatest suffering and as his mortal life was about to end, Jesus was asking God to show love and mercy toward those who had wrongly condemned him to imminent death. This courageous act of forgiveness, as all good Christians know, is one of the central messages of Easter. The sinless Jesus died on the cross to redeem all of us mortal sinners, so that we can be forgiven by God.
In fact, forgiveness is a major theme throughout the New Testament, and thus it is an important part of being a Christian (and being a follower of many other major religions). During the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus encouraged His followers not only to love their enemies as they love their friends, but also to pray for those who might persecute them. In the Lord’s Prayer, Christians ask God to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”, connecting divine forgiveness of imperfect humans with our commitment to forgive others.
And yet, in our increasingly secular, consequentialist world, in which the very notion of virtue has fallen out of fashion, forgiveness is no longer talked about much, or even held up as an aspiration. In fact, it is often considered quite the opposite: tantamount to moral weakness, or even downright immoral.
Strange, this often happens when one does not have Done it’s wrong but it is Said or even conceived This is wrong. The problem seems to be that they have thought wrong thing; Once they said the wrong thing, they were out. If you dare to give them a “platform” to explain themselves or apologize, and in doing so “abandon them”, it may mean you may be out too. You could say that forgiveness takes away guilt.
And so, with no path to redemption, those who are believed to have done, said, or thought wrong are left in a moral mantua with their fellow reprehensibles, and often pulled into more extreme situations without any incentive to do otherwise, their voices amplified to one side of the spectrum due to their exile from the mainstream. Witness the evolution of JK Rowling, for example, from someone concerned about the loss of single-sex spaces to someone who is mean and small-minded (or sometimes downright wrong) when it comes to trans people. With the possibility of never receiving an apology, the discourse descends into more and more toxicity.
We must establish what we mean by forgiveness, broadly speaking, outside the Christian context. Because it seems to me that two different types can be identified, and each has different beneficiaries. The first type, which occurs internally on a psychological and emotional level, is defined by the American Psychological Association as “deliberately harboring feelings of resentment toward someone who has wronged, been unfair, or hurtful, or otherwise caused harm in some way”.
We might think of the main beneficiary of this internal kind of forgiveness as the person who is being forgiven as the person who has been “saved” from wrongdoing in some way – but that is not necessarily the case. No, the main beneficiary of such an internal decision to forgive is the forgiver. As the APA says, forgiveness involves “the voluntary change of one’s feelings, attitudes, and behavior toward the person, so that one is no longer held back by resentment”. It’s like clearing away the negative emotions that are blocking our hearts, taking up valuable space and energy and preventing us from moving forward in our lives. It is the acceptance of what is past, so that we can live fully in the present.
The second kind of forgiveness occurs when we collectively, as a society, decide to forgive someone who has wronged us. The beneficiary here is not just the wrongdoer – who is given a path back to respectability as long as they appear to be trying to do the right thing – but also society at large. It can allow nations to recover after decades of conflict, facilitate reconciliation, and bridge the kind of deep divisions and polarization we now see in our societies, if we can only maintain it as a virtue.
This is not about failing to hold people accountable – quite the opposite. But due to the decline of religion many people no longer have any moral framework to follow. And the irony is that when we fail to value forgiveness we actually discourage people from apologizing for their transgressions. “I think I’m probably not going to heaven,” Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One last year. Funny – I never heard of him doing anything wrong.
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