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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
“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 towards those who had wrongfully condemned him to his imminent death. This courageous act of forgiveness, as all good Christians know, is one of Easter’s central messages. The sinless Jesus died on the cross in order to redeem all of us mortal sinners, so that we may be forgiven by God.
Indeed, forgiveness is a key theme throughout the New Testament, and thus forms an important part of what it means to be a Christian (and to be a follower of many other major religions, too). During the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus encouraged his followers to not only love their enemies as they would love their friends, but 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 us imperfect humans with our own commitment to forgive others.
And yet, in our increasingly secular, consequentialist world, in which the very notion of virtue appears to have gone out of fashion, forgiveness is no longer much spoken about, or even held up as something to aspire to. In fact, it often seems to be considered as quite the opposite: something akin to moral weakness, or even altogether immoral.
Bizarrely, this is often the case when someone has not done the wrong thing but has said or even implied the wrong thing. The problem seems to be that they have thought the wrong thing; once they’ve said the wrong thing, they’re out. If you dare to “platform” them so that they might explain themselves or apologise, and in so doing “let them off the hook”, that can mean you’re out too. Guilt by forgiveness, you might say.
And so, faced with no route to redemption, those who are deemed to have done, said or thought the wrong thing are left in moral Mantua with their fellow deplorables, and often drawn into more extreme positions with no incentive to do otherwise, their voice amplified on one side of the spectrum by their very banishment from the mainstream. Witness, for instance, the evolution of JK Rowling, from someone concerned about the loss of single-sex spaces to someone mean and small-minded when it comes to trans people (or sometimes just plain wrong). With the prospect of no forgiveness, ever, the discourse descends into more and more toxicity.
We should establish what we mean, broadly, by forgiveness, outside of the Christian context. Because it seems to me that two different kinds can be identified, and each has different beneficiaries. The first kind, which happens internally at the psychological and emotional level, is defined by the American Psychological Association as “willfully putting aside feelings of resentment toward an individual who has committed a wrong, been unfair or hurtful, or otherwise harmed one in some way”.
We might think of the main beneficiary of this internal kind of forgiveness as being the person being forgiven — the person who has in some ways “got away” with doing wrong — but this is not necessarily the case. No, the key beneficiary of such an internal decision to forgive is the forgiver. As the APA puts it, forgiveness “involves a voluntary transformation of one’s feelings, attitudes, and behavior toward the individual, so that one is no longer dominated by resentment”. It’s a letting go of negative emotions that are blocking our hearts, taking up valuable headspace and energy, and preventing us from moving on with our lives. It’s an acceptance of what is past, so that we can be fully in the present.
The other kind of forgiveness happens when we collectively, as a society, decide to forgive someone for having done wrong. Here the beneficiary is not just the wrongdoer — who is offered a path back to respectability, as long as they appear to be trying to do the right thing — but society at large. It can allow nations to heal after decades of conflict, can facilitate reconciliation, and could bridge the kind of deep divides and polarisation that we now see in our societies, if we could only hold it up as a virtue.
This is not about failing to hold people to account — quite the opposite. But the decline of religion is leaving many with no moral framework to follow. And ironically, what we do when we fail to value forgiveness is actually to disincentivise people from apologising for their transgressions. “I think I’m not maybe heaven-bound,” Donald Trump told reporters last year on Air Force One. Funny — I’ve never heard him admit to doing any wrong.
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