The sins of the fathers

Amanda Shaw at First Things:

I’ve heard priests remark about the disconcerting tendency of penitents to confess other people’s sins. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My spouse got angry because I misplaced the car keys... ” Then, there’s our curious compulsion to confess offenses that are long past....

... “False Apology Syndrome,” Theodore Dalrymple calls it in the Templeton Foundation’s In Character journal. Under the guise of assuming the guilt of the past, it sets the righteous present apart in self-congratulatory humility:

There is a fashion these days for apologies: not apologies for the things that one has actually done oneself (that kind of apology is as difficult to make and as unfashionable as ever), but for public apologies by politicians for the crimes and misdemeanours of their ancestors....

Let us examine briefly the apology for the Crusades as an example of the whole genre. It is not exactly a new discovery that the Crusaders often, perhaps usually or even always, behaved very badly. It is not in the nature of invading armies to behave well, even when discipline is strong, morale is high, and control of the foot soldiers is firm; it is no secret that these conditions did not exist during the Crusades, to put it rather mildly.

They were, however, rather a long time ago. The Crusades were an attempt to recover for Christendom what had been lost by force, with all the accompanying massacre, pillage, and oppression that the use of force in those days implied. No one, I think, expects an apology from present-day Arabs for the imperialism of their ancestors, either as a matter of moral duty or political likelihood. We are all born into the world as we find it, after all; we are not responsible for what went before us. It is rather easy, after all, to apologize for the sins of others.

Albert Mohler, responding to Dalrymple's article, argues that while an apology may be inappropriate, acknowledgement of historical evil sometimes is:

In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention struggled to find a way to deal with the fact that our denominational history is rooted in a defense of chattel slavery. We could not celebrate the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the SBC without recognizing that dark fact of history. ....

We worked for hours on the wording, and left the meeting with a final form we all felt was just about right. The convention adopted the statement and we celebrated 150 years of working together in the cause of the Gospel. Looking back, it's hard to see how we could have celebrated the anniversary of the SBC without that acknowledgement. ....

Perhaps honesty is the real issue here. Many of the apologies offered for past events seem false on the face. Others seem, at least to me, to be nothing less than necessary. We cannot repent for our ancestors, but we can confess the reality of historic wrongs. ....

First Things » Blog Archive » “Bless me, Father, for others have sinned…”, I'm Sorry, So Sorry -- "False Apology Syndrome"