Despite a popular culture that is saturated with cheap contrition, there are legitimate attempts on an international level to incorporate some principles of the forgiveness Christ taught in dealing with political turmoil.
Because TV talk shows now focus on professional victims or victimizers, "it is sometimes tempting to dismiss all acts of public contrition as insincere," according to Jean Bethke Elshtain, of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Yet "it's necessary to distinguish between 'contrition chic' and serious public or political forgiveness," she said.Her remarks came Thursday as a keynote speaker at a conference on forgiveness, which runs through Saturday at the University of Utah. Sponsored by the Tanner Humanities Center, the conference has drawn scholars from across the country to discuss both public and private forgiveness.
Elshtain -- who is renowned as a world authority on ethics and political issues -- quoted another scholar who called the principles of forgiveness "the greatest contribution of Jesus Christ to politics," because they are "the only way for the repetitive cycles of vengeance to be broken."
Such is evidenced in South Africa, she said, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has worked to not only document the heinous political crimes of apartheid but laid out the basic facts in a public forum and acknowledged openly what happened -- in detail. While there has been no attempt to coerce a confession or apology from the perpetrators, most chose to do so, she said, and such acts will be considered during the amnesty phase of deliberations.
The exercise has been carefully crafted by leaders, she said, to avoid the type of trial that Nazi war criminals faced at Nuremberg because -- rather than dealing with hate itself -- that tribunal dealt only with punishing the perpetrators.
While the long-standing tradition of "justice" in such a trial may temporarily salve some collective wounds, it does nothing to heal them, she said. Because of the magnitude of the crimes, no possible reparations could even be attempted.
One main goal of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was "to not allow (the perpetrators) to be martyrs or to stay in prison as a burden on taxpayers." Rather, the commission has dictated that they "instead have to face a new community of people who are fully aware of what they did and when they did it." Whether they are, at some point, integrated back into society will be up to those among whom they must live, she said. Such public shaming was a conscious alternative to mere retribution through execution.
The commission's approach also is designed to avoid "any attempt by future revisionists to make (apartheid) seem a good idea that went awry," as has happened with revisionist historians looking back at the Holocaust.
Such a break from the historical precedent of merely punishing perpetrators is "a very complex job. You have this deep backdrop of theological ideas, where people are acknowledging their crimes, seeking restitution, looking at amnesty -- all as part of creating the foundation of a new legal structure." In this, she said, South Africans believe they are making a vital contribution to modern thought and practice on how to deal with wrongdoing on an institutional level.
The approach frees an entire nation "from the full burden of the past to make way for some kind of decent future," where tables aren't merely turned to allow the victimized to become the perpetrators of retributive violence.