On Forgiveness

I am not sure what Emily Oster expected when she published her plea for a “pandemic amnesty.” If her intention was to make peace, then she made a mistake, because peace cannot be made by nice intentions, and she offers nothing else. Peace takes work. But her message was that we should not try to do that work — the work of reflection, of taking responsibility, of offering and receiving forgiveness. 

Even now I wonder if it is still too soon to write about the pandemic. I wonder if whatever I can say now will prove stupid in hindsight, when time has cooled passions and brought facts into better order. Peace takes work, but work takes time, and maybe it is not yet time to start. But it is now almost three years since March of 2020, and Oster is calling for amnesty, and the response is a demand for reckoning. Maybe it is time for the work to start.

Forgiveness is for sin. It is not for empirical errors. It is not for “hard calls.” The problem with Oster’s argument is that she urges forgiveness while denying that any sins were committed. She pleads for amnesty while pleading innocence. More than that: she argues that we ought to forgive precisely because no one sinned (except for the usual “bad actors”). Instead, people made mistakes in the heat of the moment, and did their best in the fog of war. But this is not what forgiveness is for. The argument is incoherent.

She might reply that this is semantics. And we ought to allow for that, although we should also insist on the meaning of words, especially one so endangered as “forgiveness.” We should also allow that her argument could be stated more precisely. I think what Oster means is that one of the heat-of-the-moment mistakes was to confuse all those other mistakes, the empirical errors and the hard calls, with sins, and that this is the confusion that “amnesty” can resolve. What she really wants is for us to forgive each other for falsely accusing each other of sin.

This version of her argument is coherent. It does not abuse the meaning of forgiveness, because a false accusation of sin really is a sin. It is a sin whether or not it is committed cynically or accidentally, with bad intent or in the haste of feeling. And so those of us who have made such accusations, in public or in our hearts, have now something serious to consider. Have I sinned against my neighbors, in thought, word, or deed, by believing that they have sinned against me or others, when in truth they have not? 

Certainly I have committed many sins in my own response to the events of the past three years. I have taken an ugly pleasure in the ugly behavior of others. I have been quick to assume reasons and motives and to assign people to tribes. I have been especially quick to assume that other people have no reasons other than their tribal identities, while imagining that I am free of such influences, that I alone think independently. I have let social media do its dirty work on me, while explaining away the views of others as the work of social media. 

I have indulged in abstractions and avoided specifics. I have fed myself with lazy fantasies of apocalypse, with rhetoric and melodrama and purple prose. I have been entertained by my own seriousness. I have also felt genuine fear, and have not let love cast it out. I have let fear set up shop. I have felt real anger, and it has always been sweet, but it has not always been righteous. I have let anger last too long, and lead nowhere. I have let prejudice narrow the circle of my concern until it excluded those on the other side, and I have justified this by pointing my finger at their prejudices against my side.

And now, having confessed, I have invited another sin to knock at my door. There is a danger in what I have just said, because I have said it in part to prepare the reader for what I want to say next. The danger is that my confession will have been nothing but a tactic in an argument, an exercise in persuasion rather than repentance. It is to shun the pride of false humility that we confess in private, and pray in our closets. But there are temptations there too, and there is in our tradition a place for public repentance. One reason I am willing to name my sins in writing is that I suspect most of my readers are guilty of the same. These are not so much my sins as they are ours. If there is a need for forgiveness, it is widely shared. Oster is right about that — if indeed we can charitably assume that that is what she means to say. 

But in saying so she is wrong to suggest that these common sins are the only ones, or the only ones worth talking about. I am afraid that this suggestion, intentionally or not, serves to distract us from other sins that have been far less common and far more consequential. This is what provoked so many readers, including me, to an anger which I can hope is righteous. For there is a place in our tradition for that, too. There is a place not only for public repentance and forgiveness, but for public condemnation of the powers that be. There is a place for the prophet who accuses the king. It is one thing to say that all have sinned and fallen short. It is another to say that because this is true, people with power have nothing special to confess, and can be covered by a general amnesty. 

“The pandemic” — what an obnoxious shorthand for so much that has nothing to do with a virus. Of course it is all of that, not the virus itself, which generated the terrible enmity that now rules us, by means of which enmity the truly bad actors now consolidate their rule. As the Church we ought to be able to name the peculiar sins of the principalities and powers, the sins of our rulers and their servants, the sins disguised by virus talk. Greed, deceit, and banality should top our list. As the Church we should be able to address the obscene profits of pharmaceutical companies, the obvious corruption of academic institutions and government agencies by those companies, and the thoughtless collusion of journalists with the whole rotten enterprise. 

As the Church we should have something to say about the obvious profit-motive of the pharmaceutical companies, and the fact that they fund and staff the agencies created to regulate them; about the obvious special interest of other great corporations in the destruction of their remaining mom-and-pop competitors and the forced enclosure of social life within the walls of antisocial media platforms; about the funds provided by these corporations or by their billionaire founders, whether by advertising or “philanthropy,” for the promotion of narratives and policies that obviously serve that special interest; about the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history, and the perfectly predictable inflation that came in on the heels of the relief package that did much to distract the losers from this transfer while doing little to restore the fortunes that were sacrificed to “the pandemic.”

As the Church we should have something to say about demonstrably false or misleading claims constantly repeated by the same people who are constantly lamenting the spread of misinformation and the loss of public trust. These include claims about the origins of the virus; claims about the fatality and infection rate, and about the rate and mode of transmission; claims about the efficacy and risk of therapeutic drugs that pharma did not want us to buy; claims about the efficacy and risk of the vaccines that pharma wanted to sell; claims about the efficacy and risk of non-pharmaceutical interventions like masking and social distancing; and claims about anyone who ignored or challenged these claims. 

And as the Church, at the very least, we should have something to say about the missed surgeries and the “learning loss,” the lost livelihoods and the lives lost to anything and everything but covid, the desperate plexiglass separations and the lonely inhuman deaths, the heartbreak and the inhumanity and the incessant empty concern of slogans and rules and chirpy lies about sad necessities and shared experiences, all enforced by the tender hands of everyday bureaucrats who honestly believe that being a good person means following the rules wherever they lead.  

We should, in other words, be able to talk as the Church not only about the pandemic, which is the realm of errors and mistakes and common sins, but about ulterior motives and collateral damage, which is where the uncommon sins were committed, and where the reckoning is needed. 

This will be difficult for us, not least because some of these sins unfolded inside our doors. The Church must reckon, mostly, with its failure to say anything as an institution about the sins listed above. It must reckon with the atrophy of its prophetic voice. 

 But there is one particular sin for which the Church, or some churches, must repent. It is a sin of commission rather than omission, and it is a sin which was not a momentary lapse or an understandable mistake. The Church must reckon above all with the fact that some churches closed their doors to the unvaccinated, or excluded the unvaccinated from communion.

I cannot understand this. I can understand everything else. Every other sin I have mentioned, my own sins and the sins of the powerful, the sins of the rule-followers in the hospitals and the schools — all these I can understand. I can understand greed, I can understand deceit, I can understand banality; all these are in me. I can understand how systems and structures depend on and encourage such sins, for I am part of systems and structures, I feel and contribute to their effects. I am part of those problems. But this: this goes to the heart of what the Church is. There is no Church without this, without the open door and the open altar. For this, I feel no anger, no indignation; only confusion. How could this have happened?

This is the stuff of schism; we are in the realm not so much of sin but of heresy. For the whole disagreement here is about what counts as a sin. The demand for confession and repentance, for reckoning, feels premature, for on the other side of the divide are people who do not believe they need to repent for anything.

As “the pandemic” recedes from view, this sin will be forgotten, and this means it will not be forgiven. Instead it will fester under the surface, a continuing revelation that something has gone fundamentally wrong. This is not about a wrong response to the virus, an understandable mistake, a debatable decision. It is about the basic assumptions that Christians make, the thoughts at the root of things that gave rise to that response. I cannot say exactly and fully what the error was. There a long work of investigation to do here. But I think Ivan Illich was prophetic when he said that “life” would be the most powerful idol the Church had ever faced. “Life” bare and barren, the life those churches chose to serve when they closed their doors and their altars. Bare life, mere survival, the “life” so starkly contrasted but so easily confused with the life more abundant and free, which is the whole life of the Faith.

Forgiveness is for sin, not mistakes. I think that or Christians at least, the original sin of “the pandemic” was neither the common set of which I and most of my enemies are guilty, nor the less common set peculiar to the powerful, but was rather ancient the sin of idolatry. What is the name of this new idol, the god of “life,” the enemy of freedom and abundance? 

We will find out.