What Kind of God Is This

I'm doing the last set of readings for my Capital Punishment class, one chunk of which is about innocence, that is to say, about the process of getting people out of prison and out from under a death sentence on the grounds that they actually didn't commit the crime. And some of the readings are about the case of Anthony Ray Hinton, recently exonerated off of Alabama's death row after nearly three decades. Hinton was surprisingly honest about how angry he was, saying, for instance:

"The State of Alabama let me down tremendously. I have no respect for the prosecutors, the judges. And I say that not with malice in my heart. I say it because they took 30 years from me."

And:

"When the very people that you've been taught to believe in, the police, the D.A., these are the people that are supposed to stand for justice, and when you know that they lied to you, it's hard for you to have trust in anybody."

Pretty, y'know, reasonable, right? I share his sentiments, basically, though I've never suffered from the problems he's talking about. But then there's this:

"I've got to forgive. I lived in hell for 30 years, so I don't want to die and go to hell. So I've got to forgive. I don't have a choice."

And can I just say, f*ck that. That is so effing messed up. I mean, look, some people find it therapeutic or whatever to forgive those who have wronged them; certainly there's something to be said for not carrying your anger around with you forever. But, like, the people in question do not on the merits deserve forgiveness (at least, unless any of them have fessed up and admitted that they made a mistake, as the original prosecutor in another one of these cases did). They did something that was not so different from a murder, when you think about it, in robbing a person of the ability to pursue any happiness at all for the better part of his adult life and probably making it damned difficult for him to do so even after he's been released.

And the idea is that God, the Almighty and Benevolent, will punish Hinton with an eternity of damnation and torment if he does not forgive these people? That's just... that's just sick. Whatever there can be said for forgiveness, I think it just cannot be something that anyone gets to demand of you. Forgiveness is an act of grace, a fact which I believe is a big part of Christian theology.* And this is worse than just the various prosecutors and judges and the like demanding forgiveness from Hinton as of right. The idea here is that failing to forgive in Hinton's situation would be a sin, an offense not against those who wronged him but against the sovereign, so to speak. What kind of sovereign makes that a crime? What kind of sovereign turns to the victim of such a horrid injustice and says, look matey, if you don't find it in your heart to forgive your oppressors, I will consider that an offense against me and I will punish you for it, harshly? Like, what the hell? A god who demanded such of his subjects would not deserve words like "benevolent," to my mind; no, he would deserve words like "tyrant." Certainly he would not deserve our allegiance, let alone our love; perhaps our obedience, simply through raw brute-force deterrence, but that's not a very awe-inspiring figure.

Fortunately, the god in question (almost certainly) does not exist. But the people who propagate the idea of that god do exist. And really it's them I'm angry at. Anthony Ray Hinton should not be required to forgive the judges and prosecutors who robbed him of the better part of his life on pain of damnation; that's obvious. But equally, Anthony Ray Hinton should not be led to believe that he has to forgive those judges and prosecutors on pain of damnation. They don't necessarily have as much to answer for as the judges and prosecutors themselves, but the people who lead other people to believe in a tyrant god like this have an awful lot to answer for.



*Okay, yes, there is or at least has been a big split over whether salvation is a matter of grace or a matter of doing good works. But I'd say that the latter camp basically doesn't believe that salvation is a matter of forgiveness, of god's forgiving people for their sins, but rather sort of a matter of weighing a person's sins against their good works and seeing which predominates. I think. But don't really ask me, it's really not my area.