On Charleston, South Carolina and Forgiveness

(We bring you this break from our regularly scheduled Comps Reading Project to flush these thoughts out of my system).

Here there was no ambiguity: no conflicting witness accounts, no hackneyed defenses of police over-reaction, no possibility for victim blaming--simply, a deeply racist young man, sporting the flags of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia and the Confederacy, entered a historically black church famous for opposing slavery and Jim Crow, sat quietly in their Bible study for an hour, then shot 9 people to death for the stated reason that they were black.

I generally oppose the death penalty (there have been far too many posthumous exonerations for me to support it); nevertheless when the governor of South Carolina called for the death penalty, I found myself nodding my head.  Even when I could restrain my blood-lust to mere Life in Prison, I still found myself secretly hoping that he would get sent to a penitentiary filled with black prisoners who would beat him to death for me.

Which is why I found the responses of the families of the victims in the court room so remarkable; by all news accounts, they went around one by one, and even as they gave full expression to their grief and anger, still finished with "I forgive you."

Sweet merciful heavens, I have learned more about forgiveness from these people than from years of Sunday School.

Because this is the final, hardest test of one's Christianity, isn't it--to forgive each other, to love one's enemies.  There's a reason that "Love Your Enemies" comes at the end of Matthew 5, as the grand finale of the whole "Ye have heard it said, but I say unto you" section.  Christ is constantly upping the ante with each new parallelism: "Ye have heard it said, Thou shalt not kill," he recites, but Christ then amplifies that to Don't Insult Your Brother--Freud had said that he who threw the first insult instead of a stone invented civilization, but Christ maintains that even throwing insults is uncivilized of us. 

But then, not throwing insults is easy compared to: "Ye have heard it said, Thous shalt not commit adultery," but Christ amplifies that to Don't even sexually objectify women in your mind; men protest that that's nearly impossible, but Christ will accept nothing less.

But even that is not nearly as hard as "Ye have heard it said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you love your enemy." Because what we often elide when we quote that scripture is the fact that sometimes our enemies are our enemies for very good reasons.  "Wicked" is a borderline anachronistic word nowadays, but there are in fact wicked men out there: ones who open fire in churches, people whose only desire is to hurt as many people as possible for the most vile of reasons.  If ever non-forgiveness was justified, it was here.

But they forgave him anyways.

This is no small thing.  French theorist Rene Girard argued in Violence and the Sacred that vengeance breads only more vengeance, as each competing group constantly retaliates against the last murder, until one or both groups are completely wiped out by the violence.  We've seen this between Israel and Palestine, Catholic and Protestant Ireland, the Serbs and Croats, the Tajiks and Uzbeks, etc, etc, etc.  This is the plot of the Book of Mormon.  This is the history of racial violence in the United States.  Girard argued this is the reason for the pharmakos, the scapegoat that short-circuits the endless cycle of retributive violence; for Girard, this is why Christ died for our sins.

And these black Christians in South Carolina, who have every valid historical reason to withhold forgiveness from such a despicable, unrepentant creature, followed the example of Christ and gave it anyways.  This does not mean that the shooter will not be held accountable for his actions; only that Vengeance belongs to the Lord, and He will repay.  This is a lesson I will not soon forget.  And as the debates rage angrily over the coming days concerning gun-laws and institutional racism and so forth, I will need to remember this same Christian example.