America is experiencing a crisis of unforgiveness

There’s been no time in my memory when we’ve witnessed so many people abjectly apologizing for so many perceived misdeeds great and small, only to find the offended so unmoved.

As a people we’re suffering a crisis of unforgiveness. Or maybe it’s a massive lack of self-awareness. Or maybe it’s a refusal to grow up and become adults.

It’s impossible to go online, pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV without finding yourself bearing witness to another famous or, for that matter, obscure person who’s run afoul of some constituency and is then forced (by a sincere change of heart, or by fear of a Twitter mob, or by a threat to his livelihood) to beg absolution.

Jessica Bennett, a contributing editor for the New York Times’ Opinion section, wrote an excellent op-ed about this ongoing national spasm of self-flagellation. See tinyurl.com/yc8kws4z.

Among others, she highlighted an apology by U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., who poked a Democratic congresswoman in the back and told her to kiss his keister when she objected in February to his unmasked face inside the Capitol.

In addition to recent apologies by Whoopi Goldberg and Joe Rogan, Bennett also added that of Jeremy Schneider, “an otherwise private individual” who angered people on Twitter when he joked, “Please know, if you’re someone who brings a book to the bar … nobody likes you.” Schneider subsequently delivered a mea culpa that was, by Bennett’s count, “27 times the length of the original offense.”

But, as I said, while we’ve never seen quite so many people publicly begging for forgiveness, I don’t know that we’ve ever seen so many of the offended unwilling to grant it. Too often, it’s one strike and you’re out. Forever. Say or do something that aggrieves us, no matter how minor it might seem in the grand scale, no matter how unintentional the offense was, and you’re dead to us.

“Instead of leaving us feeling healed, or as if there is a rightful place for accountability in our world,” Bennett notes, “all this apologizing seems to, instead, have had a flattening effect. Everyone is sorry, yet at the same time, no one’s apology feels like enough.”

She cites social science research to back up her observations.

For instance, there’s a 2019 study that applied hypothetical apologies to real-life scenarios “in which a prominent figure said something controversial — in one experiment, [Kentucky U.S. Sen.] Rand Paul’s comments about the Civil Rights Act, in another, [former Harvard president] Larry Summers’s comments about female scientists.”

In both cases, scholars found that respondents were either unmoved by the apology or more likely to want to see the person punished. You apologize, and then you get punished harder.

By coincidence, I assume, political essayist Rebecca Solnit wrote an equally insightful piece in the Times about Americans’ loss of faith in the principle of redemption, which is the belief that people can change for the better. See tinyurl.com/ yb6zvwdm.

Solnit tells of her friend Jarvis Masters, who entered San Quentin prison in 1981.

“From death row he has created a wide circle of friends outside, published two books, become a beloved protege of the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron, read deeply and taken vows from a Tibetan lama,” she says.

Yet, in her account, California officials have shown themselves largely unwilling to believe strong evidence that Masters was wrongly convicted to begin with or even to consider that during the past four decades he has become a different man from the violent teenager who was sent to San Quentin.

It’s not only the criminal justice system that’s unable to accept human transformation, Solnit says. Our larger society rejects the idea, too.

She argues that this belief in “the fixity rather than the fluidity of human nature or maybe in guilt without redemption” permeates everything. It’s also wrong-headed and destructive.

“Are you who you used to be?” she asks. “Specifically, are you the person who made that mistake, held that view now regarded as reprehensible or ignorant, committed that harm years or decades ago? Most of us who came of age in the last century have changed our worldviews around race, gender, sexuality and other key issues over the decades. The past decade in particular unfolded like an ad hoc seminar on these issues for those who chose to pay attention.”

Religion has much to offer in this discussion.

Not only Christianity but most religions with which I’m familiar revolve around a core belief in redemption. Generally, religions teach that anyone can become a better version of him- or herself, a true child of God.

Redemption is often a process, though, not a one-time awakening. We see our errors, change our minds and alter our behaviors — which religion refers to as repentance. We ask for forgiveness from God and the people we’ve injured, and likewise grant forgiveness to others. We make restitution if possible. Transformation gradually results. Over time, as we practice these steps again and again, we find ourselves remade.

It’s not a perfect process, because none of us is perfect. But as we’re discovering in our society now, a belief in redemption sure beats the alternative.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling, Ky.You can email him at