The gospels are filled with stories of radical forgiveness, including Jesus’ prayer that his own murderers be forgiven. In his earthly mission, Jesus forgives sins, tells parables about forgiveness, and instructs his followers to forgive “seventy times seven.” In the Bible, forgiveness is a major theme, and in the centuries after Christ, most Christian traditions have interpreted the crucifixion as an act of atonement for the forgiveness of humanity’s sins. Forgiveness, for Christians, is a big deal.
This spills over into broader culture, too. Kids are encouraged to forgive one another and make peace. When religious or political leaders gets caught in a scandal, they ask for forgiveness—and expect to receive it. We popularize stories of Holocaust survivors forgiving Nazis and victims of racially motivated violence forgiving their attackers.
But what if a person doesn’t want to forgive? And why is there such a push to forgive powerful people even though they often revert to the same damaging behavior? In her new book, Not So Sorry: Abusers, False Apologies, and the Limits of Forgiveness (Broadleaf Books), journalist and culture critic Kaya Oakes discusses how a fixation on easy forgiveness in both our church and broader culture privileges the powerful, lets abusers off the hook, and does little to heal those who were hurt.
Is forgiveness ever a bad thing?
Around 2017 or 2018, when #MeToo started, followed by #churchtoo, I began looking at the apologies for abuse that institutions and individuals were offering. I found something very hollow and lacking in many of them. I noticed that these requests for forgiveness often came without any promises of accountability or action. That led me to ask why we have such an empty approach to forgiveness.
Here’s part of the problem: People abuse forgiveness when they misconstrue it as permission to continue a certain behavior without any talk about accountability. Other times, people weaponize forgiveness: When somebody is pressured into asking for forgiveness without giving the injured party time to decide whether or not they actually forgive that person, a community uses forgiveness to manipulate people. An example is sexual abuse victims. A lot of the time, these requests for forgiveness are tied up in an effort to silence people.
The pressure to forgive also often involves large power imbalances. Our society is eager to forgive those in power but very unforgiving toward those who are less powerful.
Where I live, the most glaring example of this is with the unhoused population. Instead of trying to figure out how to help people who are homeless, people keep trying to blame them for being homeless. It’s very easy to say, “I don’t forgive this homeless person for sleeping on my block, and I’m going to punish them for doing it,” instead of finding out why they’re homeless and what services might help get them off the street.
It’s similar with poverty. The narrative about poverty in America in general is that people deserve to be poor because they’ve done something wrong. We don’t look at the systemic issues. We have a culture of ignoring institutions and systems and assuming people’s individual decisions got them into trouble. So our obsession with individualism makes us very unforgiving of people who are poor and marginalized.
This happens in churches with reproductive issues, too. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I thought a lot about how institutions like the Catholic Church place heavy demands on women who have had abortions but don’t put the same kind of pressure on the men who raped these women.
Does the church ever talk about forgiveness in an unhelpful way?
Many Catholics are familiar with the story of Maria Goretti. When she was 11 years old, a man attempted to rape her and then killed her. And on her deathbed, she forgave him. That was in the early 20th century—not that long ago. She was canonized as a saint and is thought of as the “patroness of purity” because she died, as they call it, in defensum castitatis—in defense of chastity. There are also other examples of women in the 20th century who died as a result of attempted rape and forgave their attackers. The church considers them virgin martyrs. But the church has manipulated this story. An 11-year-old Catholic girl would have had a very limited understanding of sex and the consequences of sex. How could she actually forgive her attacker if she didn’t even understand what was going on?
It’s also very strange for the church to teach that you are obligated to forgive somebody for raping you, especially since rape is often used as a weapon. In Ukraine, there are stories coming out about Russian soldiers raping women. We know this happened in the Rwandan genocide. Would we ask people to forgive a genocide? We might say, “What happened in Rwanda is unforgivable.” But the women are supposed to forgive the men who raped them? It doesn’t make sense. There’s a cognitive dissonance.
Even when rape is not being used as a weapon of war, it is still an attack that happens on a very vulnerable level. Telling women that they must forgive men who’ve done that to them communicates to women that their bodies are less important than men’s bodies.
We know that physical trauma stays in the body long after the initial action. So suppose a rape survivor goes to confession and says, “I’m having trouble forgiving the person who raped me.” Every time they talk about it, they have a physical reaction, and that chronic stress is leading to ongoing health conditions.
It feels hypocritical for a priest to say to this woman, “Your body is a temple, your body is worth protecting,” but also, “Forgive this man for doing this horrible thing. And if you don’t forgive him, you might be punished.” And again, the church isn’t having the same conversations with the men who rape women.
Yet you mention that the church itself hasn’t apologized very often. Why is this?
I’m not a church historian, but in my research for this book I learned that popes did not apologize on behalf of the church, because it made it look like the church had sinned. Papal apologies didn’t become a thing until the late 20th century. Nostra Aetate (On the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions) was one of the first official Vatican documents that sort of admitted the church’s fault, in this case, for how the church had treated Jewish people throughout its history. We’ve seen Pope Francis talking about colonization and sort of, at least, apologizing for the church’s involvement in things like residential schools. But it’s kind of a half-hearted apology, because on one hand, he’s acknowledging the history of colonization, and on the other, he’s canonizing someone like Junípero Serra.
So, the church is still learning to apologize. But it fumbles these apologies quite a lot of the time.
Are there times when it is better to withhold forgiveness?
The question is whether delaying forgiveness or giving somebody time to decide whether to forgive can help bring about justice. Forgiveness can sometimes give abusers a pass to continue hurting people or keep them from repenting in any actionable way. We tend to think of refusing forgiveness as being unmerciful, but isn’t it unmerciful to let somebody continue harming other people?
Jeanne Safer, a psychologist who’s written about the decision not to forgive, calls this choice moral unforgiveness. She talks about the example of a person who has an alcoholic parent. If you were raised by an alcoholic and were harmed by that person, it is morally OK to say, “I don’t forgive. I love my mom or dad, but I don’t forgive them for being a negligent parent, because it had these consequences for me, and for my kids if I have kids.”
A moral unforgiver is somebody who holds people to a moral accountability but chooses to say, “I’m not going to forgive you.” And we don’t recognize that in Christian conversation very often.
What about forgiveness in the Bible? What do we make of Jesus saying we’re supposed to forgive 70 times seven times?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, in her book On Repentance and Repair (Beacon Press), talks about Jewish understandings of forgiveness. She says that the process of forgiveness should be about asking the victim what they need out of the process and centering the person who’s been wronged rather than the person who did the wrongdoing.
This is reflected by the word for “forgiveness” that’s used in the Greek translation of this verse: aphiemi. This word means, literally, to take space from somebody. Forgiveness in the Bible doesn’t necessarily mean letting go and forgetting. It means putting distance between yourself and the person who harmed you.
Jesus’ understanding of forgiveness would have been much closer to this idea of taking space and taking time—maybe physically or emotionally putting distance between yourself and someone who’s harmed you.
We forget how much accountability there is in the gospels. Jesus does forgive people, we see that repeatedly. But it always comes with some sort of advice on what else to do. It’s not just a gesture; he doesn’t wave a magic wand over people and make the harm that’s been done to them disappear.
For example, we don’t know what happens to Judas. We assume that Jesus must have forgiven Judas, because Jesus forgives everybody, but there’s no evidence of that. Did he forgive Judas or not? Who knows. But that mystery and nuance are lost in these conversations a lot of the time.
You talk about how popular culture fetishizes forgiveness. Can you give an example of this?
There seems to be a forgiveness moment happening in popular culture. There’s a Hulu series called The Bridge that’s based on a true story in which parents forgive their child’s murderer. The problem is the way it’s depicted in the show. In real life, the process took years, both parties were involved, and there was lots of discussion and mediation. But in this series, it’s one scene. The woman visits the murderer in prison and says, “I forgive you.” That’s all. I think that when Hollywood and popular culture miss the nuances of forgiveness and portray it sentimentally, we miss the fact that it’s a lengthy process that involves a lot of conversation.
We are obsessed with forgiveness and love sentimental forgiveness stories because we like happy endings. Forgiveness gives us permission to believe every story has a happy ending, but that’s not necessarily how it works. Sometimes forgiveness is an ellipsis, a question mark, or a comma—not a period.
Does this societal obsession with forgiveness affect how we work for social justice?
One thing I discuss in my book is how we need to go beyond reparations, since reparations can sometimes be a way to try to make a problem go away: “Oh, we gave you reparations, or we’re talking about reparations, so stop complaining.” But racism in America is an unsolved issue.
Right now, we’re seeing a backlash in response to the progress that was made in regards to racial equity. Historically, this tends to happen. Reconstruction, civil rights, the Obama years—after every step of progress, there’s backlash. And a lot of that comes in the form of white Americans telling Black people that it’s time to forgive America for what the nation did in its history.
Here’s one example: In the show Finding Your Roots, educator Henry Louis Gates Jr. helps people trace their family trees. He had Ben Affleck on the show and found slave owners in Affleck’s family tree. Affleck later asked the show to edit that segment out, which led to a huge controversy. Editing that out is a form of saying, “Can my family just be forgiven? That wasn’t me; it was my ancestors.” But the fact is, white people benefit from our ancestral privilege, and that can include through things like slavery. So, no, people of color don’t owe us forgiveness.
I’m Irish American. My ancestors were recent immigrants, but they all became police officers. So while they faced anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bias, they became oppressors themselves and were very unforgiving. They participated in and benefited from systems of racial oppression. I can’t just move past the history that enabled them to do so.
What is restorative justice? Can it help us formulate a better view of forgiveness?
Restorative justice is a model that’s based on philosophies from a number of different sources, including Indigenous communities and Mennonites, who are Anabaptist Christians. The purpose of restorative justice is to put the wrongdoer and the victim into conversation with the community, so the community can be healed as well as the individuals affected.
If we go back to the example of the murderer and the victim’s parents from The Bridge, restorative justice would mean putting them into a conversation with a mediator and then asking the community: What is the harm that’s been done? What does the person who’s been harmed need? What does the person who did the harming need? What does the community need?
A school in Oakland, California has put this into practice. They’re in a really impoverished neighborhood and have a lot of fights. They implemented a program where they have the kids sit in circles and work things out, rather than having the adults come in and say, “You get punished! You don’t get punished! The end.” It’s been very successful.
This model has been used in prisons, too. In Canada, it’s often used in cases involving juveniles. Instead of incarcerating young people, the justice system attempts to find alternatives to incarceration. It’s a good process. It starts with the recognition that harm was done, and it ends with accountability. Forgiveness is the end point of restorative justice, rather than the beginning.
Could restorative justice change how we view forgiveness in the church?
We Catholics have got it backward: We start with “forgive me” rather than with the harm that was done. And then you know what happens: Those who harm others go right back to doing the same things.
It’s frustrating to see the same thing happen over and over again. It can feel like it’s never going to change. But there are examples of accountability happening; unfortunately, it’s often after the person’s dead.
For example, John Howard Yoder, who I wrote about in the book, taught at Notre Dame. He was a Mennonite and was revered for his writing on restorative justice. But it turned out he was abusing a number of women in the community. After his death, his reputation has been rethought and reexamined; he’s not quite as revered as he used to be.
But fundamentalist churches, including some forms of Catholicism, often fail to let forgiveness be a process. They get caught up in treating forgiveness as an obligation, rather than a grace. So they lose that understanding of it as something that a whole community should participate in—something that takes time.
This article also appears in the January 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 1, pages 20-24). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Add comment