Transactional Forgiveness

I've thought a lot about forgiveness. I'd hoped I could make this post the last one of 2024 but it's been hard to gather my thoughts around it. The past year has been difficult, due in part to interpersonal conflicts that have festered and the feeling of not being supported. I find myself in a position to try to forgive perceived wrongs and how to pick up pieces of relationships to repair and continue in some form or to brush aside.

Much of my therapy has focused on forgiving myself for past failures. "Accepting that I cannot change the past" and not allowing it to affect my future. This is really, really hard because I don't think I can go more than a day without my brain reminding me of some terrible or stupid thing I did years ago.

What I realized is that I've held a warped view of forgiveness most of my life. It's a view coded in Evangelicalism that's easily confused with mercy. In some ways I think we (as a society) conflate mercy with forgiveness or the word "forgiveness" has multiple meanings because English be weird. I'm not writing about small slights or transgression. If a person bumps into me while in the grocery I'm going to shrug it off. That's mercy. I'm not holding someone accountable for a slight infraction. When we get to forgiveness it's true harm and true anger that we have to figure out how to move on from and heal the relationships. For this article, I'm talking about the big ugly stuff and how the Evangelical view of forgiveness empowers abusers.

I told a story in Deconstruction Part 6 about my former church where the son of the pastor sexually assaulted the pastor's adopted daughter. I was a deacon^[1] at the time and in our meetings about how to deal with this issue (among others), we had a man who asked. "Why can't the girl forgive her brother and move on?"

What an appalling statement. A victim of a crime is supposed to "move on"? Their life is destroyed and they're supposed to forget about it and allow an abuser to walk away? It's unconscionable to think some people believe that, yet the idea is preached in churches every Sunday.

To understand this absurdity it helps to know how a bit of evangelical theology:

1. God is perfect. Anything he does is "good" by definition.
2. All people committed "sin" or transgressions against God.
3. Because God is perfect he can't have "sin" near him so sinners must annihilated or endure eternal torture depending on their specific beliefs.^[2]
4. Because all sin is kryptonite to God, it doesn't matter how small the transgression is. Murder is the same as calling someone a mean name.
5. God was sad that he was forced to murder everyone so he sent Jesus to make up for the transgressions by dying and coming back.

Point "5" is what they call "forgiveness".

Evangelicals treat abuse the same as bumping into someone in the grocery store. We're so awful that we should be put to death but Jesus shows us mercy. Therefore we should show the same mercy to others, regardless of the wrong. It's entirely transactional and focused on what the abuser receives, not what the victim receives. It ignores justice and in many ways ignores mercy for the victim.

From my previous example, my fellow deacon wanted the abuser absolved so that everyone could maintain the status quo. Instead of justice for the victim, he requests mercy without consequence. It's a way to reset the timeline, to actually make forgiveness change the past by requiring everyone to forget the problem and sweep it under the rug. Everything can go back to the way it was and no one has to feel uncomfortable.

Another tidbit of theology makes this even more sinister. In Matthew 6:14-15 (NRVS1995), Jesus says, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, ¹⁵ but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."

If a victim doesn't absolve an abuser then they are in danger of Hell. This may seem foreign to an outsider but people are indoctrinated with this stuff from a very young age. In rural areas, where churches play an outsized role in community life, victims can experience real ostracization from their families and friends. Churches don't like to admit their failures and they perpetuate this behavior to save face and hold on to power, especially when powerful community leaders are acting as abusers.

It's an abuser's dream where they can commit heinous acts and it's swept under the rug because that's what Jesus does for us. As a bonus, organizations explain in self-righteous terms how they "police their own" and their "victims forgave everyone so it's totes okay!"

True forgiveness is for victims. It's the acceptance that we can't "make a better past". It's a way to prevent an abuser from controlling our lives long after they're gone. Forgiveness doesn't magically remove pain or absolve someone of consequences but it allows us to let go of our anger so that we can heal. Forgiveness breeds empathy for ourselves and even for someone who wronged us. Empathy to see their point of view and to treat them as fellow humans– not so they are absolved but that justice can happen without vengeance. It can include mercy but it doesn't have to.

Most of all, forgiveness grants the victim agency. Evangelicals want forgiveness to equal the status quo. Whatever the relationship was before can continue because a victim shows the required mercy. True forgiveness means relationships can be redefined and reevaluated. A person who is wronged can set boundaries and heal. Maybe it can be restored, maybe not, but forgiveness is a step that allows for growth.

Hopefully, none of us will be involved in serious abuse accusations but if we should wrong another person we must own that and face the consequences of our actions. I love the Buddhist sentiment to "apologize for causing suffering" even if we feel justified in our actions. Rather than making forgiveness a transaction that we require of others, we must learn to forgive ourselves. We have to own when we're wrong and be okay with it. Maybe my readers are collectively better at this than I am, but I struggle with it.

A rambling post to say the least. Be excellent to each other.

1. A deacon is an ordained person but not a trained minister. Baptists have little leadership heirarchy, usually an elected pastor and an elected council of deacons.
2. Or a weird combo of the two. Most subscribe to eternal torture which is one part Bible and about 10 parts Dante's Inferno. As with most things the cruelty is the point.