The Cruelty of Cheap Grace

It’s not uncommon for women in really difficult marriages to reach out to me on Facebook. With the very clear disclaimer that I have no counseling credentials whatsoever, I always consider it an honor to be able to speak life into people who are presently navigating waters I managed to survive. It’s healing to be able to see my personal trauma used as fuel to illuminate the way forward for others.

Inspired by my conversations with these women, a few months ago I took to Facebook and penned the following post:

Dear wives of cruel husbands,

Here’s something I learned the hard way: Half ass apologies aren’t good enough. As my therapist says, “The work of restoration cannot truly begin until a problem has been fully faced.”

Here’s what a half ass apology might look like:

• ”I’m sorry I screamed at you and broke your belongings; you just really make me mad when…”

• ”Why do you still want to talk about that? I apologized for it yesterday, so you need to stop being bitter and forgive me.”

• “Man, I’ll have to be extra careful around you since you obviously can’t take a joke.”

• “I probably shouldn’t have done that, but if I really wanted to hurt you, I would have.”

• The gift in lieu of an apology

• The unfulfilled promise to seek therapy or help. For example, alcoholics do this when they make public announcements of their decision not to drink for 6 months in order to get unmerited praise and applause for their courage while secretly returning to drinking a week later.

Genuine apologies are accompanied by genuine remorse, not demands or deadlines on your reciprocated efforts. If someone is sincerely sorry for wounding you, they won’t resent you for having the audacity to bleed or tend to your wounds. Genuine apologies center your healing, not the perpetrator’s ego or feelings.

Cheap grace produces cheap results, not real healing.

I meant it when I wrote it, and I still mean it today. The topic resurfaced for me this week on a larger scale when I read about a disgraced pastor who had abused and/or lied to hundreds and hundreds of people only to emerge a few months later to open a new church as though nothing had happened. And I saw a number of prominent Christians urging people to exercise forgiveness, which, in this context, really just means, “Be quiet and move on already.”

The problem with this approach is that it short circuits true healing for all parties involved. No one wins when we do this, no matter how holy we feel by pretending this is what forgiveness looks like.

I’ll probably never forget showing up to Christian marriage counseling the day after a particularly violent altercation with my ex. I was deeply traumatized and angry and hurting and a bit scared. I wanted to talk about what had happened. I needed to process it. I needed to grieve it. I needed to create space to breathe and think and pray from a safe distance.

But my ex had pre-empted our session by contacting the counselors and giving them his version of events and assuring them that he was truly repentant and eager to reconcile, and they believed him. So when I started explaining the trauma I had just endured, the well-intended counselors reminded me that “Love keeps no record of wrongs,” and I was informed that if I wanted to have any chance of repairing the marriage, I would need to let it all go and stop reminding him of it.

They meant well. They believed what they were saying. But it was reckless, dangerous counsel, and it was the equivalent of treating a compound fracture with a bandaid and the instruction to just think happy thoughts and let it all go.

That’s not how humans work.

I’ll give you another example. Steven Sitler was already a convicted serial pedophile, categorized with a high risk for reoffending, when Pastor Doug Wilson decided it would be a good idea to marry him off to a naive woman in his church who had sought church counsel in finding a husband.

The church rationale was explicitly this:

While we do not believe that marriage is an automatic “fix” for the temptations to molest children, we agree with Judge Stegner who approved the wedding and said that ‘an age-appropriate relationship with a member of the opposite sex from Mr. Sitler is one of the best things that can happen to him and to society” (emphasis added).

(I should probably write a blog on the horrific nature of that quote alone. No, friends, we do not offer up God’s daughters as “solutions” to sexual deviance. Pedophilia is not cured by having sex with someone who just happens to be of legal age. But I digress.)

Ignoring the experts’ warnings about high recidivism rates, Wilson officiated the wedding and specifically asked God to bless the union with children. No one should have been terribly surprised when, shortly after the couple bore a son, Sitler became sexually aroused by him, as documented on a mandatory polygraph.

Despite all this, Wilson maintains that he did nothing wrong, that he would do everything the same way again if given the chance.

It’s the kind of situation that makes any thinking person scratch her head and ask, “How can this be? If you know that what you’re doing is going to result in the sexual exploitation of a child, why wouldn’t you make different choices?”

There are layers to the answer for this question. Part of it has to do with insufferably arrogant church leaders who genuinely believe they’re more qualified to assess these situations than the experts who’ve dedicated their entire lives’ work to understanding the pathology of predators. It’s as audaciously absurd as a pastor who claims, by virtue of his knowledge of the Bible, that he knows more about cancer progression than an oncologist.

But the other part has everything to do with the get-out-of-jail-free approach to forgiveness.

Steven Sitler didn’t need a wife to function as a receptacle for his deviant sexual urges. He needed to be “blessed with children” just about as much as a recovering alcoholic needs to be blessed with a bottle of whiskey. What he needed were leaders who cared enough about him to do the work of understanding his pathology and creating boundaries around it. He needed people to treat him like the addict that he is in order to save him (and others) from himself. Failure in this regard was actually pretty cruel to Steven, cruel to his wife, and especially cruel to his little boy.

The broader issue of the church’s approach to forgiveness overall is one that I think needs a lot more discussion. In the Christian church, we are instructed to forgive with reckless abandon.

“How many times should we forgive?” the disciples asked Jesus. “Seven?” they guessed, assuming that was a generous number.

No. “Seventy times seven.” (Or 77, depending on translation)

Either way, that’s a lot of forgiving. The premise here is that, no matter how egregious the nature of sin committed against us may be, it’s going to pale in comparison to the volume of evil for which Christ has forgiven us. If the righteous God of the universe could condescend to pardon our filth, who the heck do we think we are to withhold forgiveness from others?

And listen, I’m mostly onboard. I agree with Anne Lamott when she says that harboring unforgiveness is like “drinking rat poison and expecting the rat to die.” Bitterness and resentment cost us more on an individual level than they ever really cost the people who pissed us off in the first place. Forgiveness is ultimately a way of liberating ourselves from the burden of our own bitterness. It’s a choice to place our pain and desire for revenge into the hands of a just and merciful God who works all things together for our good. It’s a choice to say, “Even though you hurt me, I no longer wish to see you suffer. I wish to see you redeemed.”

But forgiveness doesn’t require us to pretend like nothing ever happened. Forgiveness does not require us to withhold necessary consequences from the offending party. Forgiveness does not require us to restore relationship with the person in the wrong. Forgiveness is not the absence of tension or accountability. It’s not a forfeiture of boundaries. It’s not a summons to doormat duty. All these things are just cheap grace, a form of laziness, a refusal to love well enough to do the hard and often laborious work of actual restoration.

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