Believing in Repentance is Easy. Doing It is Hard.

I gave my AI this assignment:

Please frame a statement, as if you were a Christian thinker well-attuned to the spiritual vision of Christianity, that explains the meaning and importance of Repentance in the Christian worldview. Do it in less than half a page, please.

AI (AL):

In the Christian vision, repentance is far more than feeling sorry for having done wrong. It is a turning—the reorientation of the self toward God and toward the good. The New Testament word metanoia suggests a transformation of mind and heart: I come to see that something in how I have lived, chosen, or understood has been wrong, and I allow that recognition to change me.

That is why repentance requires truthfulness. I must cease defending myself against the truth about what I have done. But its purpose is not self-condemnation. Christianity does not regard guilt as the destination. The destination is restoration: confession makes forgiveness possible, forgiveness releases the person from bondage to the past, and repentance opens the possibility of becoming different.

In that sense, repentance is one of Christianity’s great doctrines of hope. Human beings can participate in evil without being forever defined by the evil they have done. But redemption requires something morally demanding: that we see what we have done, acknowledge it as ours, and turn away from what in us produced it. Without repentance, the past remains spiritually alive in us. Through repentance, even wrongdoing can become the beginning of transformation.

ANDY:

Christianity has a profound insight here—an insight into the human struggle to deal with Good and Evil.

Christianity’s demanding insights focus on the state of the spirit, or heart. It was a profound insight, too, to say, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Which is such a good recipe for achieving the ideal human world: for if everyone could open their hearts to the rest of humanity in that fashion, the dynamics of the world would be vastly different.

That injunction evokes a clear spiritual state that is ideal, but is very difficult for people to achieve. The spiritually beautiful actually do that. The rest of us are somewhere along a spectrum running between complete selfishness and the fulfillment of “Love thy neighbor.”

The call for repentance is another major challenge — for repentance requires a person who has done evil to recognize that the evil was a sign that something in that person had gone wrong.

They have loved the Good too little to be restrained from doing what contributes to Evil in the world. They have failed to turn back from Evil and serve the Good.

Repentance is, as you said, a TURNING. (A turning toward service to the sacred in the world, having felt the pain of falling short and newly committing one’s heart to what is holy.)

Repentance means rejecting the part of the self that led to doing wrong, and fully embracing the part aligned with the Good, with God, with the commandments, with conscience, and with caring about others and the world.

Christianity asks more of people than most of us find ourselves able to do.

Repentance is among Christianity’s difficult demands because genuine repentance requires a humbling. “I am a sinner” is fundamental to the Christian understanding of the self. But it is one thing to acknowledge that truth in the abstract, and another to confront some important part of one’s own history and say: I was wrong. Something in me led me away from the Good, and I need to change.

It can require relinquishing one’s image of oneself as righteous, surrendering the assumption that one always knows what is on the side of the Good. It can require recognizing defects that need to be changed. Repentance can entail a painfully humbling revision of one’s self-image.

History gives us evidence of how difficult repentance is.

Consider Germany after the Third Reich. Millions of Germans had supported or participated in the transformation of their nation from a more or less decent society into perhaps the most powerful embodiment of Evil in the history of the Western world. Yet apparently many found ways of living with that history that did not require them truly to SEE how broken was the place from which they had come. They spared themselves the pain of conscience that repenting of their part in that Evil would have entailed.

In our time, we again have a whole swath of people – this time in the United States — that have aligned themselves with an Evil that is equally blatant. (By Evil, I mean what I have elsewhere defined as “a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world more broken.”) Even if it hasn’t produced so grotesque a historical act of Evil as the Holocaust, this political force has made its character equally clear with the extraordinary stream of lesser evil acts it produces– one outrage after another, without let-up.

The Evil they are supporting makes no effort to hide what it is: at every move, in full view, the political leader and political force that millions of Americans support acts in ways that damage the world.

• The brutal use of ICE against people in American cities.
• The repeated disregard of the law and the Constitution.
• The extraordinary stream of demonstrable lies.
• The reckless launching of wars abroad and trade wars against other nations.

It is precisely this consistently destructive political force that brings me to contemplate the challenge of REPENTANCE.

For those who have supported this political force, genuine repentance would require much more than deciding someday that their political party lost its way. They would have to reckon with the reality that they chose to use their votes to give a destructive force the power to wreak havoc on the world. It would require the kind of TURNING Christianity demands: asking what in themselves enabled them to give their support to what they should have recognized as wrong.

I have a very strong hunch that over the coming years and decades, very few of the people who have supported Trump will experience such repentance. Most, I expect, will find ways to remain comfortable with their own political history—to continue seeing themselves as having been on the right side of things, perhaps conceding only that their leaders “made mistakes,” rather than undergo the painful humbling of asking what in themselves enabled them to support what they should have recognized as wrong.

Only a few, I suspect, will have the spiritual honesty and courage to do what Christianity demands: truly repent.

And honesty is central to the challenge. As the AI said at the outset, speaking from within the Christian understanding: “Repentance requires truthfulness. I must cease defending myself against the truth about what I have done.”

That requirement presents an especially formidable obstacle here, because the Trump phenomenon has been permeated by falsehood to an extraordinary degree. The Washington Post Fact Checker counted 30,573 false or misleading claims during Trump’s first term alone. Those who have continued to support him have therefore already had to develop ways of accommodating an extraordinary stream of demonstrable untruths—believing some, disregarding others, or deciding that they did not matter.

But repentance would require the opposite habit of mind. It would require a willingness to let unwelcome truth in, even when that truth says something painful not only about the leader one supported, but about oneself.

The challenge may be greatest for those Christian conservatives for whom being on the side of the Good has been an important part of their identity. I know something about that from the ten years I spent talking with Christian conservatives on talk radio. Not only was the issue of Good versus Evil deeply important to them, but often they conveyed a moral certainty about which side stood for Good and which for Evil.

Consider the slogan, “Jesus is my Savior. Trump is my President.” For some of Trump’s most fervent followers, Trump has been not simply a political leader whose policies they support. He has been understood as somehow connected with the sacred—as a leader chosen by God to serve His purposes. That would make the challenge of repentance profoundly wrenching.

If truthfulness requires admitting that one has mistaken the Evil for the Good, and even for the sacred, the humbling could reach to the foundations of one’s understanding of oneself and the world. How many of those Germans for whom Hitler had represented a kind of messiah ever came fully to recognize what it meant that the man they had revered would forever stand in history as an embodiment of monstrous evil?

But Christianity envisions repentance as a means of healing the soul and restoring a person to the Good, not as an exercise in self-wounding. As the AI said at the outset, Christianity “does not regard guilt as the destination. The destination is restoration.”

Repentance therefore requires compassion for oneself as well as unsparing truthfulness about oneself. One must be able to recognize what in oneself made it possible to go so badly astray, and to resolve to change it, without being forever condemned by that failure. The purpose of uncovering what was broken is to heal it.

But Christianity’s promise of restoration does not make repentance easy. Repentance is a path toward greater wholeness, but the very brokenness that makes repentance necessary can also make that path difficult to travel. The farther we have moved from the Good, the harder it may be to see clearly what has happened to us, to overcome the brokenness that has become part of our structure, and to undertake the turning that healing requires.