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Reprinted in Reader's Digest,
March 1998, from The Wall Street Journal
When Forgiveness Is a Sin
By Dennis Prager
The bodies of the three teen-age girls shot dead last December
by a fellow student at Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky.,
were not yet cold before some of their schoolmates hung a sign
announcing, "We forgive you, Mike!" They were referring
to Michael Carneal, 14, the killer.
This immediate and automatic forgiveness is not surprising. Over
the past generation, many Christians have adopted the idea that
they should forgive everyone who commits evil against anyone,
no matter how great and cruel and whether or not the evildoer
repents.
The number of examples is almost as large as the number of heinous
crimes. Last August, for instance, the preacher at a Martha's
Vineyard church service attended by the vacationing President
Clinton announced that the duty of all Christians was to forgive
Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who murdered 168 Americans. "Can
each of you look at a picture of Timothy McVeigh and forgive
him?" the Rev. John Miller asked. "I have, and I invite
you to do the same."
Though I am a Jew, I believe that a vibrant Christianity is essential
if America's moral decline is to be reversed. And despite theological
differences, Christianity and Judaism have served as the bedrock
of American civilization. And I am appalled and frightened by
this feel-good doctrine of automatic forgiveness.
This doctrine advances the amoral notion that no matter how much
you hurt others, millions of your fellow citizens will forgive
you. It destroys Christianity's central moral tenets about forgiveness.
Even by God, forgiveness is contingent on the sinner repenting,
and it can be given only by the one sinned against.
"
And if your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents,
forgive him," reads Luke 17:3-4. "And if seven times
of the day he sins against you, and seven times of the day turns
to you saying, I repent, you shall forgive him."
These days one often hears that "It is the Christian's duty
to forgive, just as Jesus forgave those who crucified him." Of
course, Jesus asked God to forgive those who crucified him. But
Jesus never asked God to forgive those who had crucified thousands
of other innocent people. Presumably he recognized that no one
has the moral right to forgive evil done to others.
You and I have no right, religiously or morally, to forgive Timothy
McVeigh or Michael Carneal; only those they sinned against have
that right, If we are automatically forgiven no matter what we
do, why repent? In fact, if we forgive everybody for all the
evil they do, God and his forgiveness are unnecessary. We have
substituted ourselves for God.
I host a talk-radio show, and when confronted with such arguments,
some callers offered another defense: "The students were
not forgiving Carneal for murdering the three students. They
were forgiving him for the pain he caused them." Such self
centered thinking masquerading as a religious ideal is a good
example of the moral disarray in much of religious life.
Some people have a more sophisticated defense of the forgive-every-one-everything
doctrine: doing so is psychologically healthy. It brings "closure." This
is therapy masquerading as idealism: "I forgive you because
I want to feel better."
Until West Paducah, I believed that Christians will lead America's
moral renaissance. Though I still believe that, the day those
students, with the support of their school administration, hung
out that sign I became less sanguine. If young Christians have
inherited more values from the '60s culture than from their religion,
where can we look for help? |
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