Our Post-Christian Culture is Forgetting the Radical Virtue of Forgiveness

 Every pandemic needs a good stack of self-help books, to keep readers entertained and sane. Fortuitously, this March Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer released such a book, based on their popular podcast. That book, How to Be Fine: What We Learned from Living by the Rules of 50 Self-Help Books, is dry, entertaining, but (caveat lector) salted with R-rated language. The coauthors sift through the self-help strategies they attempted to follow, praising some and discommending others. Sometimes their meta-advice seems to be the product of a luminous commonsense that makes one wonder what the original “helpful” authors were thinking. Sometimes it is clearly a product of their own backgrounds, experiences, and ideologies — progressive, feminist, secular. Almost always it is entertaining or at worst innocuous.

There’s one spot, however, that gave me pause. It wasn’t one of the many paeons to gender equality, critical theory, etc. It was Greenberg’s and Meinzer’s unwillingness to countenance forgiveness as a self-help strategy. Meinzer, who wrote most of that section, quotes a friend and fellow podcaster, Cameron Drews, saying that “There are a lot of options between unconditional forgiveness and burdened misery” (144). Meinzer then expands on that idea:

We can choose not to wish any happiness upon the people who’ve done us wrong and live happy lives. We can choose not to feel grateful to the people who’ve hurt us and be grateful for the lives we have. And, we can choose to have some anger in our hearts towards those who’ve abused us and still have hearts that overflow with joy.

The world is filled with in-betweens, and I honestly believe life is better when we don’t force ourselves to live on the extreme ends. If you want to, go ahead. But I, for one, don’t want to. And I feel at peace — unforgiving heart and all (144-5).

It might seem initially that Meinzer and Greenberg and Drews are being inconsistent. Left-leaning people tend to value tolerance and being open to other people and experiences, tend to profess live-and-let-live philosophies, tend to value niceness and kindness highly, and tend to condemn anger, rage and violence. These qualities are, to be clear, not exclusive to progressives; and they are values that people across political and ideological divides — especially Christians — can, do and should recognize. But they remain for all that stereotypically progressive values.

Unwillingness to forgive seems to strike at the heart of such a personal philosophy. So when Meinzer admits to still being angry at those who did terrible things to her as a child, it might seem to be incompatible with the philosophy upheld elsewhere in the same book.

I think, however, the incompatibility is superficial ...

Read the rest at the Register.