Reddit reviews Forgiveness & Reconciliation: Public Policy & Conflict Transformation

> How do we forgive those marching with torches, many of whom self-identify as Christian?

Look to Africa! In Rwanda, there's been a massive effort at reconciliation between groups that decades ago were literally attacking one another's families with machetes. In South Africa, they created an official Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who has written several books on the subject. (There are three links in there.)

He goes further than forgiveness and says we must have restoration and reconciliation. The goal needs to be restoring the good relationship between people, not merely punishing the offenders.

Lewis's chapter in Mere Christianity on forgiveness is one of my favorite passages of his. He even mentions the subject of your second paragraph.

> I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. It is laid down in the Christian rule, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,’ because in Christian morals ‘thy neighbour’ includes ‘thy enemy’, and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies.

> Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. And then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible. ‘That sort of talk makes them sick,’ they say. And half of you already want to ask me, ‘I wonder how you’d feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?’

> So do I. I wonder very much. Just as when Christianity tells me that I must not deny my religion even to save myself from death by torture, I wonder very much what I should do when it came to the point. I am not trying to tell you in this book what I could do—I can do precious little—I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, I find ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.’ There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. What are we to do?

He then suggests the advice of maybe starting with something a bit easier than the Gestapo. Learn to forgive small things so you can later forgive large ones.