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It’s been a Bloody Easter. We need to start thinking seriously about how we forgive.
After Brussels, and Lahore on Easter Day, I didn’t really think about the perpetrators. My thoughts, naturally, were for the victims and their families.
Should I have spared a thought for the terrorists, beyond the ambiguous mix of sadness and disgust? Should I have tried to offer them in my mind some level of forgiveness? Could they ever deserve forgiveness? Indeed, was this any of my business?
Such thoughts beg the question – whose business is it in our society to forgive? Is forgiveness something that is appropriate only for the private sphere, and for personal relationships? Is there a place for it in public and political discourse? Could it ever be right for a politician to express forgiveness in public?
David Cameron’s Easter message comes to mind here. As he has done in previous years, he used the occasion to appeal to Britain’s Christians – “we are a Christian country” – while simultaneously acknowledging that such “Christian values” are also universal. Christian values here became reduced to a kind of Big Society/Tory work ethic: “responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion and pride in working for the common good”. It was the government’s ‘British values’ rhetoric dressed up as the Easter bunny. Forgiveness, mercy and love were conspicuous by their absence.
But if not in rhetoric, we can expect – or at least hope – for mercy in practice from our political leaders. True leadership is grounded in authority and authority in justice. Mercy is the flip side of justice – an exceptional overriding of the normal sanctions. It is the virtuous inconsistency, which can only be exercised by those with power over the rules. It isn’t popular in society – the majority rarely want judges or politicians to show leniency to criminals – but it is surely necessary.
Yet forgiveness is something different to mercy. It is a shifting of attitudes towards the offender, a letting go of feelings of vengefulness and hate; a renewed attempt to see the humanity behind the offender’s failings, to re–establish the relationships that are the essence of life to the full.
This doesn’t mean that forgiveness can only be a private, or personal thing. As we saw in the aftermath of Brussels, communities have collective emotions too – collective hatreds that need to be put to rest. Perhaps they can also collectively forgive?
Could a British politician ever stand up and express forgiveness of a terrorist on behalf of the community, even while demanding just punishment?
It would undoubtedly be political suicide. It would be dismissed as a sham, or portrayed as a weakness, or an intrusion of piety in the public sphere. An inappropriate expression by a political representative of something that many of the represented do not feel. Something to be devolved vicariously to religious leaders, who are better placed to act as the pious conscience of the nation. Forgiveness, perhaps the hardest process, or feeling, that one can partake in, is seen as feeble in politics and the market economy.
However much that may be true, we need it now more than ever. The entire raison d’etre of terrorism is to divide: West against East, Muslim against non–Muslim, community against community. Only a collective effort at reconciliation, involving all of us, will defeat it.
If the business of forgiveness is a business we must all engage in, then we’ve got to find a way to make our public and political space open to it too. It is, ironically, the most powerful weapon we have in our armoury.
Simon Perfect | @simplymrperfect
Image by Alexander Boden from flickr.com, available under this Creative Commons Licence
