Just one day after white supremacist Dylann Roof massacred nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina last month, Chris Singleton, the college-aged son of one of the victims, said he forgives his mother's killer.  A day later, other family members of the deceased addressed the suspect via video conference, to say that they, too, forgive him for killing their loved ones.

Let me say the essential thing first: what these grieving families did in offering their tormenter immediate forgiveness is stunning, gut-wrenching, and beautiful beyond language.  I hardly feel I have a right to speak in light of such sacrificial love, such bedrock faith, and I hope nothing I write in this essay will take away from the nobility of their gesture.

And yet.  Here's a confession: the public discourse that has risen up among Christians around the forgiving of Dylann Roof worries me.  No.  More than that.  It disturbs me.  I'm not convinced that glorifying forgiveness is what we Christians need to be doing right now.  

Why?  I've got a few reasons.  The first has to do with what I know about forgiveness, both from my own experience, and from what I've observed in the lives of people around me.  Forgiveness among us humans is not a one-time event.   Not if we're honest about it.  Forgiveness is a process — a messy, non-linear, and often barbed process that can leave us feeling healed up and free one minute, and bleeding out of every pore the next. 

No one who says the words "I forgive you" gets a pass from this messy, God-ordained process.  And no one who struggles extra hard with it for reasons of temperament, circumstance, or trauma should feel that they're less godly or spiritual than those who don't.

We were created for goodness.  For a just and nurturing world.  And when that good world is ripped away from us, it is appropriate — it is human and healthy --  to rage, grieve, howl, weep, and fear — over and over again.  Forgiveness isn't a high speed escalator; it's a spiral staircase.  Rickety. Fragile.  We circle, circle, and circle again, at times hardly noticing that we've ascended at all. 

So I worry about any Christian discourse that over-simplifies the process of forgiveness.   I find offensive and damaging the way such discourse implies a hierarchy between those "holy Christians" who forgive "easily" and those "lesser ones" who don't.  The bereaved families in Charleston have a long, arduous road ahead of them.  Let's not make it any longer by prettifying its ugliness.

Second: romanticizing forgiveness obscures its multi-layered power.  This is always true, but it is especially true when we're talking about marginalized communities.  In (White) Christian America, it's too easy to think of forgiveness as a culminating act, as a redemptive, "happily ever after" ending to the story of race-based violence. 

But when victims of racial hatred forgive their racist oppressors, they're not ending anything; they're preparing their hearts to begin. To resist.  To approach the battlefield one more wearisome time.  Forgiveness enables the oppressed not only to survive, but to lay down the cumbersome weight of hatred and bitterness, and gear up for the fight.

Forgiveness in this context also serves to undercut the power of the oppressor.  When Dylann Roof opened fire that night, he very explicitly wanted to start a "race war."  By forgiving him, his victims' families forestalled reactionary violence, and denied Roof the very thing he most desired.  This was not sentimentality; this was war.

In her provocative essay, "The Subversion of Forgiveness," Tawnya Denise Anderson frames the Charleston families' gesture this way: "Their actions are in the same spirit that has for centuries emboldened Black folks to find morsels of joy and magnify them in the faces of their oppressors.  This is not just an act of radical forgiveness, but of radical resistance.  This is them heaping their hot coals — a holy practice akin to flipping the bird to the system."

For those of us whose race, culture, socioeconomic status, or other marker of privilege puts us at a safe remove from race-based suffering, it's worth asking ourselves why we're so invested in Black forgiveness.  After all, I haven't seen a national discourse around forgiveness for ISIS and its horrific beheadings of American citizens. Or for the perpetrators of 9/11. 

Why do we need this story in particular — this centuries' long story of anti-Black racism in the United States — to end so neatly?  What does an easy forgiveness allow us not to see?

I can't answer the question for anyone but myself.  In the course of my research for this essay, I read Dylann Roof's manifesto on race.  I wasn't surprised to read the crass (and idiotic) things he has to say about the racial minorities he hates.  But I didn't in a million years expect to read this: "I have great respect for the East Asian races.  Even if we [White people] were to go extinct, they could carry something on.  They are by nature very racist and could be great allies of the White race."

Shudder.  Flinch.  Cringe.  Weep.  Now granted, when Roof writes about "East Asians," I'm guessing he doesn't mean an Indian-American like me; no doubt I'm far too dark-skinned for his liking.  But I flinch, still, because the South Asian community I grew up in — faithfully Christian though it was — eagerly participated in the social hierarchies that render Asians "the good minorities" and African-Americans the bad ones. 

Maybe I clamor for forgiveness because I don't want to look at how complicit I am in the system that produced Roof.  In the system that actually enables him to imagine me his ally.  I'd much rather spout some anemic Christianese and move on.

Finally, I worry about the glorification of forgiveness because it leaves little room for its necessary — and equally Christian — counterpart:  righteous anger.

We don't hear much about righteous anger in mainline churches these days.  After all, there's something unseemly about rage, right?  Something unsophisticated, something crude?  It's not polite to get angry.  And it's positively insupportable to stay angry.  It's not what good Christian folk do.

Um… signal Jesus cleansing the temple with a whip?  Signal Jesus blasting the religious hypocrites of his day with withering put-downs?  Signal Jesus rebuking his disciples for blocking vulnerable children from his presence?

Yes, Christianity insists on forgiveness.  But it also calls us to mourn, to lament, to burn with zeal, and to hunger and thirst for justice.  Forgiveness in the Christian tradition isn't a palliative; it works hand-in-hand with repentance, transformation, and justice.  There is nothing godly about responding to systemic evil with passive acceptance or unexamined complicity.

Theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned that we must never allow forgiveness to degenerate into "cheap grace."  That is, "the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession… grace without the Cross."

There's a time to get angry.  A time to insist on change.  A time to say, "Enough is enough." Perhaps it is the task of Roof's victims' families to extend forgiveness.  But I believe it is the task of the Church to honor that forgiveness with impassioned and sustained cries for justice.  

I'll be honest.  I have not forgiven Dylann Roof, though I'm committed (intellectually if not yet emotionally) to that high call.  It feels presumptuous even to say this; I'm not one of the devastated people whose lives he set out to destroy.  But as I struggle to absorb this horror, to sit with it instead of fleeing, it's the image of Jesus overturning the money-changers' tables in the Temple that keeps coming back to me. 

Yes, Jesus forgave.  But he also raged.  He would not stand for the violation of sanctuary.  He would not tolerate blocked access to his Father's house.  He would not stomach any version of cruelty towards the most vulnerable and beleaguered people in his society.

Neither should we.

Image credits: (1) Worldnow.com.