How Then Shall We Forgive?

Did Ross Douthat ask Donald Trump the wrong question?

Let the record show that I’m not a great fan of Donald Trump. Let the record further show that I am a great fan of Ross Douthat. Many people who can relate to me on both counts have been sharing around some of the choicest bits of their recent 60 Minutes interview, which Douthat seems to have handled with his usual adroitness. In particular, people are having a stimulating discussion about the nature of forgiveness (refreshing change of pace from the usual petty discourse topics), because of how Douthat chose to draw the conversation to a close. First, he asked what the president thinks will happen when he dies, and after some clarification that he meant what would happen to the president himself as opposed to his legacy, Trump said he considers himself a “religious person” and as such he’d like to think he’ll go to heaven. He definitely doesn’t want to go to hell!

Then, pointing back to Trump’s less than magnanimous past remarks about forgiving his enemies (or not), Douthat set Trump a challenge: Suppose you’re at the pearly gates, and the only requirement for admission is that you “feel love and forgiveness” for your political enemies. Could you do it? The president, expressing a preference to “be real” over giving a feel-good answer, said no:

The moment has gone viral, with many describing it as something like a scene out of C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. Someone compared it to the tableau where an angel asks if he can kill a lizard on a troubled young man’s shoulder (which seems to represent his besetting sin of lust). Except the young man, unlike Trump, says yes.

I rate The Great Divorce very highly. It was a formative work in the development of my thinking about heaven and hell. And as I said, the record will show that I don’t rate the president very highly. It thus may surprise my readers that I’d like to say a word for the president. Sort of.

Douthat’s first misstep, if I can be bold to criticize, was to begin with a focus on “feeling” forgiveness. Let us for the moment forget President Trump. Many (most?) of us would not be able to gin up a “feeling” of love and forgiveness on command for our worst enemy. We are, however, commanded to love and forgive said enemy. This, I would submit, is not the same thing.

But beyond the feeling of forgiveness, I would also submit that this is not how the act of forgiveness works, although I realize that is a very hotly debated take. And I realize it is how Erika Kirk conceived of it in the remarks at her husband’s memorial that Douthat pointed back to, which the president followed up in such an uncouthly contradictory fashion. Through tears, Erika declared that she forgave Charlie’s killer. Trump, speaking immediately after her, said that was very big of Christians like Erika and Charlie, but speaking for himself, he hates his enemies and doesn’t want the best for them.

Several things were going on at once in that moment, and I think it’s fruitful to tease them apart. The most visibly obvious things going on were that Erika was being a saint and Trump was being a cad. But on a more philosophical level, there is also something worth teasing apart in the nature of their respective declarations. These declarations were not true opposites. The true opposite declaration to Trump’s declaration, as Trump himself summed it up when describing what Charlie Kirk would have said, is “I love my enemies, and I want the best for them.”

This love, this pure willing the good of the other, is surely the heart of what Erika was expressing when she said, “I forgive him.” But is forgiveness, in the nature of what it is, the sort of thing that’s even possible between humans when only one human is willing to play his or her part? That’s clearly the assumption from which Douthat asked Trump his question, but it’s not obvious to me that the answer is yes.

I wrote about the discourse around Erika’s gesture at the time, and how it quickly ballooned into a broader heated debate over the manner of response we can (or should) expect from Christian victims of horrific crimes. While many were inspired, others felt that it was a disturbing symptom of a cultural expectation that victims need to “say the words” to be considered appropriately saintly. Dennis Prager expressed these disturbed feelings in a very angry Jewish key about 30 years ago, in a Wall Street Journal article about school shooting victims who, like Erika, immediately forgave their friends’ killer. Timothy McVeigh’s crimes were also in recent news, after which the pastor at a large memorial service said it was every American Christian’s duty to forgive McVeigh. Prager says he is not against forgiveness as defined by “grace extended to someone who’s repented for his wrongdoing,” and he points to Jesus’ own command, “If your brother repent, forgive him.” But he believed the pastor was presenting a therapeutic distortion of that biblical script. He fumes that “this feel-good doctrine of automatic forgiveness…undermines the moral foundations of American civilization because it advances the amoral notion that no matter how much you hurt other people, millions of your fellow citizens will immediately forgive you.”

To say that there’s a lot going on there would be an understatement, as it would be an understatement to say that there’s a lot going on with Prager’s attempt elsewhere in the piece to put a Jewish gloss on Jesus’ “Father, forgive them.” “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 because he recognized that no one has the moral right to forgive evil done to others.” Well…about that, Dennis…

All the same, I understand what Prager is trying to say, and I’m not alone among Christians in thinking we can acknowledge something true in it even as we retain our distinctly Christian understanding of what forgiveness means, and what it mirrors in how God deals with us. A Protestant pastor unpacks his response at length here, distinguishing the “therapeutic” framing of forgiveness (i.e., forgiveness as private coping strategy to help us release our feelings of bitterness and move on, as developed in lots of literature that isn’t even in Christian perspective) from the “gospel-shaped” framing (i.e., forgiveness as an act between two people in which the guilty party seeks and receives pardon). He offers various powerful case studies of Christians modeling the latter approach. Another example I encountered recently comes from this extraordinary article about the Rwandan genocide, focusing on a mother who forgave the young murderer of her family when he came knocking on her door after his long prison sentence. He became so devoted to her that she would introduce him beaming, saying, “He is my son!” This is a picture of the gospel.

Now, one could point to an idea of human forgiveness as one-sided action that’s distinct from a therapeutic framing. For example, in Aquinas, who contrasts the ordinary pattern of forgiveness where offended seeks out offender with the supererogatory reverse: “the forgiveness of those who are perfect.” I would part ways with the Angelic Doctor in that I think the word “forgiveness” in that latter scenario needs some suitable alternative, but I obviously can’t accuse him of being too wedded to modern therapy. I haven’t chased down the full context in English. This is a nice short paper comparing and contrasting Aquinas’s commentary with Aristotle’s pagan honor-based framing for forgiveness, as something that high-minded magnanimous people do. (It’s tempting to wonder whether the president could be persuaded to rethink if the concept were spun in an Aristotelian way. Then again, he’d probably read that through the lens of his own mob-boss distortion of magnanimity: If you grovel low enough, he might graciously consider letting bygones be bygones—for now.)

At the same time, per the argument in that pastor’s long blog, I don’t think it’s wrong to observe that for us in the West today, the language of therapy culture has bled into how many Christians can frame forgiveness for themselves, particularly to the extent that it’s framed as a feeling. I will say though, in defense of Erika Kirk, that she seemed to see her choice quite clearly as a choice, distinct from a warm fuzzy feeling. I would be loath to say it’s not “gospel-shaped,” even if it still seems to me the act of forgiveness is by definition incomplete until such time as Tyler Robinson is willing to accept it. In the same way, Anna Karenina’s Dolly wills herself to extend forgiveness in her mind to her unrepentant adulterous husband: “If you forgive, it’s completely, completely.”

The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff analogizes forgiveness to a hug:

A father might say to his son, “Dick, always hug your sister Jane,” without specifying the condition that he can only do so when Jane is willing to be hugged. But if Jane refuses her brother’s hug, Dick is not guilty of disobeying his father. At the same time, Dick should not say to his father, “I hugged Jane.” Calling Dick’s willingness to hug his sister an actual hug would redefine what it means to hug and diminish the actual hugs that did take place in his life. And Dick’s claims of hugging his sister would not treat his sister, who did not wish to be hugged, with proper respect.

This doesn’t satisfy some people, because one could after all imagine trying to hug someone who doesn’t hug you back, and indeed there’s a certain poignancy in that image. I suppose it’s all in how you define a hug, isn’t it?

Some have gone after Douthat because they see “works salvation” in any question around some choice one might need to make, or a vice one might need to surrender, in order to enter heaven. Others say the question wasn’t inappropriate, however Trump is stumbling onto a theological half-truth for his part since man has no power in himself to forgive, only Christ working in us to will and to do. Aquinas’s version of this would be that we forgive through the grace of the Church.

Needless to say, I am not going to summarize every interdenominational squabble about faith and works ever right here in this Substack. But in my own Lewis-pilled, mere-Arminian-Protestant-Christian way, I will maintain that Hell is a door locked from the inside, and that each of us has that proverbial lizard on our shoulder that we have to let the angel kill before we can enter Heaven. Trump certainly has his, for all that I think Douthat made a misstep in trying to frame the lizard as “the failure to muster warm fuzzy forgiving feelings about Nancy Pelosi on divine command.” Personally, if I were going to poke at the president’s moral shortcomings, I wouldn’t have pursued the whole enemy-forgiving tack at all. I would have sooner picked some way in which Trump himself has wronged others and needs forgiveness, maybe most obviously the cruel way he’s turned different innocent people’s deaths into an opportunity to gloat or make memes. But perhaps Douthat wanted to see if he could appeal to the president’s magnanimous self-image. A better way to do that would have been simply to ask, “Mr. President, is it possible that you could sincerely will the good of Nancy Pelosi?” Still, I doubt that he would have gotten a substantially different answer.

A few people have been quoting from Cormac McCarthy’s play The Sunset Limited, in which a black man tries to talk a misanthropic white man out of suicide. At one point the black man asks, “Suppose I was to tell you that if you could bring yourself to unlatch your hands from around your brother’s throat you could have life everlasting?” Metaphorically speaking—the white man has no blood brother, but he loathes his fellow man. In the end, he cannot answer yes.

I fear the president’s eternal destiny appears similarly bleak. But, in the spirit of grace we seek to inspire, I close with one of his own more graceful moments: