A Hard Look

"Forgiveness is the act of admitting we are like other people." Christina Baldwin

A Hard Look

By Marcia Ford

When I was a young evangelical, I worked as the religion editor at a suburban New York City daily newspaper. Our proximity to the city gave me access to religious leaders and laypeople of all faiths, and I was passionate about giving all of them an equal-as-possible voice.

Now, I had grown up in a mainstream church, so I expected few surprises any time I set out to interview Methodists or Presbyterians or Lutherans and others. That is, until I met a militant mainstream church activist whose one and only cause—infant nutrition in developing countries—had blinded her to the progressive steps that NGOs, missionary agencies, corporations, and private individuals were making. Ignoring the often dangerous opposition those efforts faced, she hated, and I mean hated, any person or entity who could not come up with a miraculous solution to such an overwhelming challenge. Which of course meant every person and entity. She spewed venom on every individual she met, me included, and held us responsible for the plight of mothers and babies who were dying. She was unforgiving to the max.

I’d interviewed enough secular activists, political partisans, and the like to suspect they weren’t exactly a forgiving lot, but this young woman was a Christian or at least a Christian churchgoer. Over the years, my misguided notion about secular people has been challenged any number of times, and I’ve certainly gotten used to Christian leaders disappointing me.

I’ve also had to confront my own penchant for unforgiveness more times than I care to admit.

What has worsened, and what concerns me most, is the anger and hostility of Christians against Christians, as myriad controversies in the church have run their course. And yet, week after week, Christians join hands and pray the Lord’s Prayer, failing to recognize the disconnect between their words and their actions.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen parents forgive the people who took the lives of their children, survivors forgive murderous terrorists, rape victims forgive their attackers, high-profile victims openly forgive militant abductors and cold-blooded killers. But people of faith on opposite sides of a supercharged issue like abortion or LGBTQ lifestyles find it difficult to forgive one another.

Bitterness stems from an inability to forgive, and the inability to forgive prevents the kind of cooperation it’s going to take to solve the real and immediate problems our nation is facing. What is sorely needed is for all of us to cultivate a lifestyle of forgiveness toward entire groups of people—not compromising our convictions, not backing down on what we believe to be right, but living in an attitude of ongoing forgiveness toward each other.

It’s not enough to point to the many times we have forgiven others, even those who continue to hurt us. Forgiving your spouse for being insensitive to your needs does not cancel out the need to forgive all those dastardly Democrats or Republicans, pro-abortionists or anti-abortionists, pro-gays or anti-gays. Try as we might to get around it, there’s simply no such thing as partial forgiveness in the kingdom of God.

It gets harder once we figure out why we resist forgiving others. Any good counselor has the answer to that: We find it hardest to forgive in others the character flaws we see in ourselves. Your militancy exposes my militancy; your intolerance reveals my intolerance; your judgmentalism reflects my judgmentalism; your pride mirrors my pride. Not a pretty picture, but an accurate one.

But seeing ourselves in that not-so-pretty picture is what it takes to cultivate forgiveness toward the opposition. When we feel passionately about an injustice or sin or any one of a host of theologically and socially controversial issues—and are tempted to take an unforgiving stance against those who disagree—that’s when we need to recognize our own character flaws. If your narrow-mindedness makes me seethe, you can be pretty sure that I have a few narrow pathways in my own mind.

It’s never easy to take a hard look at ourselves. We want so much to believe that not only are we right, but we are also better—better than others, better than we used to be, better at reaching those right conclusions that we cling to so tenaciously. But forgiving others becomes easier when we realize that those “others” aren’t all that different from us—or that we aren’t all that different from them.

We can be passionate about a cause without causing strife. We can fight for what we believe in without fighting people. We can work toward eradicating injustice without treating others unjustly. It just takes a little face time—with our own image.

Adapted from a column that first appeared on the web site Explorefaith.org.

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