“The Politics of Forgiveness” or How the Christian Church Guilt-Trips Survivors by Fred Keene While still an adolescent, my wife, Hannah, was sexually abused over a period of months by her Episcopal priest. Hannah describes the pressure to forgive as coming from her upbringing within a Christian church. All her life she was taught that she was to forgive those who did bad things to her. Then, when something terrible happened, she was the one who felt guilty, because she could not forgive the man who abused her in his authority as her priest. Ann, a professional woman whom we first met when she attended Hannah’s workshops on religion and sexual violence, suffered for years in an abusive marriage. Active in her Christian denomination, she talks of being under constant religious pressure to forgive her husband. Now that she is divorced, she is still working on that problem. What Ann finds so hard to forgive, she says, is not what her ex-husband did to her; it is what he did to their children. Many Christian clergy interpret the Bible to mean that survivors of child abuse, battery, and sexual assault are somehow supposed to forgive the perpetrator. Many psychologists and therapists follow suit. Add in the voices of popular advice columnists (Dear Abby and Ann Landers), TV talkshow hosts (Oprah Winfrey), self-help gurus (Marianne Williamson, John Bradshaw, et al.), and it seems as if everyone in the world believes the same dictum: If you have been abused, you should find it in your heart to forgive your abuser. And if you cannot, there is something wrong with you; you are not a good person. One incest survivor was told by her mother as her father lay dying: “If you don’t forgive your father, he’ll burn in Hell forever!” Typically the forgiveness dictum gets turned against the victim: A woman’s father may have raped her and she may have spent her life recovering from his violation, but if she’s not ready to forgive, then her hardheartedness is her fault -- and maybe God won’t forgive her. The idea of forgiveness is one of the most difficult issues with which survivors of sexual or domestic violence must deal. Almost from the first impact of the event, they are under social pressure to forgive. The pressure is doubled if they belong to a church or seek counseling from a Christian priest or pastor. For religious Christian survivors, such counsel adds horrible complications to the healing process. But even in its secular form, the pressure to forgive abusers is a powerful tool of social control, one that continues to blame the victim. The demand to forgive seems to come from almost everybody. Mollie McLeod has publicly proclaimed that when she was a teenager she was sexually abused by her pastor, D. Andrew (Andy) Kille, of the Grace Baptist Church in San Jose, California. In her twenties Mollie decided to make this public and wrote letters to many of the members of the congregation telling them what had happened. All the letters she got back said she should forgive her abuser. Instead, Mollie -- who with her sister Diana has since founded the Clergy Abuse Survivors Alliance (CASA) -- called on Kille’s denomination, the American Baptist Churches, to revoke his ordination. She is furious that the denomination still has not done so. The virtue of “forgiving those who harm us” is part of Christianity’s pervasive legacy to Western culture. It is invariably attributed to the teachings of Jesus as found in the Christian Bible. Ironically, though, there is absolutely no scriptural basis for this notion of interpersonal forgiveness. What the New Testament does say is that people with more power should forgive people with less power -- or, as in the case of the first-century Christian communities, people should forgive each other because they are social equals (“brothers and sisters”). Nowhere in the Christian Bible is forgiveness even discussed, much less required, when the person who is harmed is less powerful than the person doing the harming. There are three words used in the New Testament for the verb “to forgive.” (Readers of the original Greek texts would recognize them as aphiemi, charizomai, and apoluo.) These three words -- especially aphiemi, the one most commonly used for interpersonal forgiveness -- are the same words used for acts of absolving a debt or releasing a prisoner. These are financial and juridical acts, and the capacity to perform them could only belong to more powerful people in the society. There is no instance in the New Testament of a person’s being “forgiven” by someone lower in the power hierarchy. In fact, it was probably impossible. New Testament society was extremely hierarchical, and someone higher up would be mortally insulted to be “forgiven” by an inferior. Only someone with greater power in the relationship could perform an act of forgiveness. Even the Lord’s Prayer, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, asks God to “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” The forgiveness clearly flows downward -- from God through the petitioner to the debtor. (And in Jesus’ time forgiving a balance due was no small matter: A debtor could legally be sold into debt-slavery.) When Jesus forgave people, it was always as a more powerful person. As an honored teacher, for example, in one of his most famous such acts, he forgave the sins of a prostitute. The only time Jesus was in a less powerful position was on the cross. There, according to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Jesus himself did not forgive the people who were killing him. Linguistically and politically, he was in no position to do so. All he could do was to take a pass on the forgiveness question and hand it upstairs to God. If Jesus never said to forgive those more powerful, then why is the idea of unconditional, bottom-up forgiveness so firmly embedded in church teaching? And how has this doctrine become such a commonplace in Western culture? One can only guess, of course, but part of the problem seems to stem from confusing Jesus’ teaching to “love your enemies” with the fictional “forgive those who have done you harm.” (That mixup not only mistakes the New Testament idea of forgiveness; it gets the New Testament meaning of love wrong as well.) Protecting Hierarchy But there is another, more political reason for preaching to the less powerful that they should forgive unconditionally: It protects the powerful. If a person with more power -- whether familial or ecclesiastical or economic -- does something harmful to another, it is very convenient to have the dominant religion teach that the person harmed must forgive the wrong. If the person harmed will not do so, then that person can be shamed and blamed for being “unforgiving,” and responsibility for the crime can be shifted from the perpetrator to the victim. This nonscriptural switch has proven extremely useful to the church. Having taught for centuries the necessity of forgiving one’s abuser, the church now uses the doctrine to protect abusive clergy, making survivors of clerical sexual abuse feel at fault. It is no coincidence that the very word hierarchy, in its Greek root, means “priestly (hier-) power structure (-archy).” The original first-century Christians seem to have thought of themselves as communities of equals. Particularly unusual for ancient organizations, these communities even had women leaders (several are named in the New Testament: Phoebe, Lydia, Priscilla). But as these early Christian churches became more organized and institutionalized, trying to become more accepted in the ancient society and culture, they became more hierarchical. The idea of unconditional interpersonal forgiveness turned into a useful management tool for church leaders, who could insist that if they abused their power they had to be forgiven by those they harmed -- and without paying any penalty. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and then dominated Europe until relatively modern times, this idea of forgiveness became ever more entrenched. For anyone in a position of power, secular or religious, it was a pretty good scam. The church’s preaching of forgiveness has proven useful for preserving all sorts of power structures, and it has crept into much contemporary counseling and therapy as well. If a husband beats his wife or a father rapes his daughter, for instance, the perpetrator-friendly forgiveness dictum is sure to come up. The husband may be bigger and stronger, and the father the dominant adult in the daughter’s life, but the beaten wife and the raped daughter are still supposed to forgive. In the rare cases when they are not made to feel guilty about not forgiving, they are told that it is unhealthy for them to fail to forgive. The church’s forgiveness dictum -- now in the guise of “mental health” -continues to lead countless counselees and analysands into further pain. If the actual New Testament teachings were applied, the result would be quite different. In the New Testament, the only way a person can forgive is to become no longer the weaker party in the relationship. Either the survivor must be raised up to equal power, or else the abuser must be stripped of power. One way or another, the former power relationships must no longer exist. So Mollie McLeod is right to be angry. If Andy Kille sexually abused her while he was her pastor, the church has no business asking Mollie to forgive him until it has stripped him of his ordination. For the church to preach a doctrine of forgiveness consistent with its own scriptures, expecting her to bear the brunt of the “reconciliation” is sheer hypocrisy. Some Christian churches teach that the husband is “in charge” in a marriage. This authoritarian model has been a basis for allowing wife-beating. It has also been the basis for repunishing battered women, who are made to feel it is their wifely duty to forgive a husband’s “abuse of authority.” But according to the core meaning of interpersonal forgiveness in the text of the New Testament, no husband can be “in charge” and be forgiven at the same time. There can only be interpersonal forgiveness within a marriage of equals. Making Justice Several years ago, I wrote a paper exploring the theme of forgiveness as it is portrayed in the New Testament. The paper grew out of my reading in New Testament scholarship, and out of Hannah’s and my experience with her healing from having been sexually abused. The paper was generally well received by everyone with the exception of one group: white male clergy. Almost to a man, they rejected the idea that to be forgiven a person must give up power within an abusive relationship. They especially disliked the conclusion that abusive clergy should be stripped of their ordination. Those who object to the idea that abusers must give up power often raise the idea of “repentance.” Just as abusive clergy often express sorrow and remorse (at least when they are caught), wife-beaters are notorious for saying they are sorry, in order to get their wives to take them back (at least until next time). But these are empty expressions of contrition. Actual repentance (as spelled out in Christian Scripture) requires a real, substantive change. The Greek word for repentance in the New Testament is metanoia, which means “a reversal” or “turning around.” Remorse is not enough; metanoia, repentance, means that the power relationship has to change. The abusers -- the perpetrators of pain and injustice -- must no longer have the power to continue their abuse. Put simply, the meaning of repentance is the giving up of power. There are two approaches to implementing this concept of repentance. The one that first occurred to me when I started working with questions of forgiveness was that the person with power must give it up -- or have it taken away. When I discussed this with Rev. Marie M. Fortune, she told me she saw it differently. As founder and director of the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence, an interreligious educational ministry based in Seattle, Rev. Fortune has devoted most of her career to fighting sexual violence. She advocated “justice-making as a prerequisite to forgiveness.” She saw justice-making as efforts to “help empower those rendered powerless by abuse so that forgiveness becomes an option.” In other words, I wanted to take the power away from the perpetrator, and Rev. Fortune wanted to give power to the survivor. Both Marie Fortune and I now agree that each of these two approaches to substantive change in an abusive relationship can be appropriate, depending on the context. But I would insist that empowerment must mean giving real power to the survivor, not merely some vague psychological or “spiritual” power. Certainly it is neither useless nor unhealthy for people to forgive. People often need to let go of their pain in order to heal. But letting go must not mean letting those who hurt them off the hook. No survivor should be guilt-tripped into forgiving. No survivor should be expected to forgive before ready to do so. And if a survivor does not or cannot forgive, the perpetrator should not become an object of sympathy. So what about the woman told by her mother to forgive her incestuous father at his deathbed? The choice is the daughter’s, and it depends on her relationship to the man. If he has remained a dominant “Father,” then there is no call for her to forgive him, especially if he has never expressed remorse. On the other hand, if he has expressed remorse and he is no longer a dominant figure in her life -- if his age or infirmity have rendered all his former political or psychological power over her moot -- then, conceivably, she could consider forgiving him. (Of course if that were the case, she probably would have considered it long before he was about to die.) Either way, if she believes her father will “burn in Hell forever,” it would still not be her fault, no matter what her mother says. No daughter bears blame for the results of incest. If her father does “burn in Hell,” it is his own fault, not hers. Fred Keene is a mathematician in California who also writes frequently on Christian biblical theology. He adapted this article for On The Issues from his scholarly essay “Structures of Forgiveness in the New Testament,” just published in Violence Against Women and Children: A Christian Theological Sourcebook, edited by Carol J. Adams and Marie M. Fortune (Continuum). Fred sometimes joins his wife, Hannah Abigail Keene, in presenting workshops on issues of religion and sexual violence. © 1995 On The Issues. http://www.culthelp.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=717&Itemid=8 accessed on March 7, 2007
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