Our pain cuts that much deeper because it happened in a church. The church is and always has been the center of African-American life—a place to call our own in a too-often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships.
President Barak Obama, June 20151
During the following days and weeks, Dylann Roof’s life, background, and beliefs begin to surface, unfolding and reaching a public still shaking its head in horror and confusion, still unable to fathom such a shocking, racist act. I hear much more about this young man who purposely shot and killed my wife. The more I learn, the more I understand Dylann Roof to be a man who possesses pure evil in his heart and mind.
Dylann sits in jail awaiting his multiple courtroom trials, spending most of his time penning thoughts in a personal journal. Some of his entries are boyish, immature—one of them admitting that he enjoys being sad and having pity on himself because sadness is such a strong emotion.
Others depict a self-centered young man who expresses a selfish regret: “One of my only regrets is that I was never able to fall in love.”2
But most of his recorded thoughts show his sinful soul, his inner prejudices, his ungrounded and illogical hate based solely on race. His statements send chills down my back.
“I did what I thought would make the biggest wave,” he writes, as if driven by a sense of national pride, loyal brotherhood, and patriotic duty. “And now the fate of our race is in the hands of my brothers who continue to live freely.”
In what is now called his “jailhouse manifesto,” Roof railed against Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans, homosexuals, and Muslims. He wrote that someday his hero, Adolf Hitler, would “be inducted as a saint,” and warned that unless white people “take violent action, we have no future.”3
How interesting that Archbishop Desmond Tutu also wrote about a future, but in these incredibly different words: “Without forgiveness, there is no future.”4
Dylann Roof’s murders were labeled a “hate crime.” The U.S. Justice Department announced it would investigate the killings as a possible act of domestic terrorism, since the shooting was “designed to strike fear and terror into the community.”5
Planning the Murderous Plot
Details about Roof’s activities and prejudices continued to pour forth from the media. On the morning of the shooting, after a long cocaine- and vodka-fueled night spent with his friend, twenty-two-year-old Joey Meek, Roof confided in Meek, telling him he wanted to start a race war by killing black people at a church. Roof raged on and on about how blacks were taking over the world, and how someone needed to do something about it for the sake of the white race.
Not taking his friend’s threats seriously, Meek kept Roof’s murderous plots to himself, having no thought of alerting police. Meek didn’t know that Roof began planning the attacks against African-Americans some six months before that night. During that period, Roof spent ample time online scouting out potential targets, railing against blacks in his journal, posting photographs of himself on social media with a Confederate flag, and wearing flags of defunct white-supremacist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia. He posted on his internet website (called “The Last Rhodesian”) a manifesto of white supremacy, and bought a Glock 45 handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Roof yearned for revenge for his perceived offenses by the black race against the white race.6
Some of his internet images showed him holding a gun while standing outside South Carolina’s Museum and Library of Confederate History, and posing in front of a sign that reads, “Sacred burial site. Our African ancestors.” He also posted a photograph of himself standing on and burning an American flag.7
In his online personal manifesto, written before the shooting, Roof admitted he had not been raised in a racist home, but became “racially-awakened” by the 2012 Trayvon Martin shooting, the black Florida teen killed by George Zimmerman—who was acquitted of the murder.
“At this moment,” Roof wrote, “I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on white murders got ignored?”
He mentioned that he “had no choice,” and chose Charleston because it was the most historic city in his state, at one time having the highest ratio of blacks to whites in the country.
“We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet,” he wrote. “Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”8
He also broadcasted online his views on African-Americans and segregation.
“Segregation was not a bad thing,” he wrote. “It existed to protect us from [African-Americans]. . . . Not only did it protect us from having to interact with them and from being physically harmed by them, but it protected us from being brought down to their level. Integration has done nothing but bring whites down to [the] level of brute animals.”9
Roof continued, commenting negatively about Jews, Hispanics (whom he called “our enemies”), and patriotism.
“I hate the sight of the American flag,” he wrote. “Modern American patriotism is an absolute joke. People pretending like they have something to be proud [of] while White people are being murdered daily in the streets.”10
After reading Roof’s online manifesto, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan Williams concluded, “You can see what kind of hatred he had: a vast hatred that was cold and calculated.”11
“The evidence, along with his manifesto, hundreds of photos, and a confession to the FBI,” according to a news report, “draws a portrait of a young white man consumed by racial hatred who carefully planned the killings, picking out meek, innocent black people who likely wouldn’t fight back.”12
Others believed that Dylann’s taped confession “was that of a confused, wannabe warrior who soaked up hate on the internet and waged a mission of no clear purpose against people who had done him no wrong.” They described how the jury in Roof’s federal hate crime trial “listened intently as Roof regurgitated venomous online hate for blacks by way of explaining his bloody shooting rampage through Emanuel AME Church.”13
Dylann was just one of the many proponents of the rising white supremacist violence in the United States. In 2017, white supremacists committed the largest share of domestic-extremist-related killings, claiming eighteen lives, and highlighting the danger of racist rhetoric and hateful ideas. Dylann Roof’s writings showed that he bought into the “modern white-supremacist ideology . . . the belief that white people are on the verge of extinction, thanks to a ‘rising tide’ of non-white populations (supposedly controlled by a Jewish conspiracy).” Some white supremacists and other racists, like Dylann, “justify their actions as attempts to ‘save’ their race,” saying the white race is being threatened with genocide or extinction, making it easier for them “to justify or rationalize violence in the name of preserving the race.”14
Dylann was shown to be obsessed with white supremacists’ claims, thinking himself to be one of their devoted soldiers, called to the mission of eliminating those he felt threatened his race. It took only a short time of internet study on hate-based websites for Dylann to buy into their white supremacist beliefs and carry out its lethal consequences.
Propelled by white supremacist teachings, Roof had made six recent trips to Charleston from his home in Columbia, South Carolina. Authorities believed Roof made these drives to case the church and plan the shootings at Emanuel.15
After his arrest, Roof told FBI officials that he was “worn out” by the Emanuel shooting and didn’t plan to commit more killings that night after he fled Charleston. But based on further examination of the GPS in Roof’s car, a newly unsealed court document two years later revealed that after the Emanuel shooting, he drove twenty miles to another African-American church—Branch AME Church in Summerville, South Carolina. Like Emanuel, Branch AME Church also held a Wednesday evening Bible study. The new information gave officials reason to wonder if Dylann had been planning another massacre on that same night. Evidence showed that he slowed his car and stopped at the Summerville church for two to three minutes and then drove away.16
Dylann Chooses Charleston
Dylann Roof carefully researched the racial history of South Carolina, Charleston, and the Emanuel AME Church before he chose his shooting location. His premeditated plan to kill people as they worshiped at Mother Emanuel in Charleston, South Carolina, was not a random choice, but a well-thought-out and deliberate decision. His internet research made him highly aware that the African-American church was more than just a place for members to meet, greet, and worship. Throughout its many years, Emanuel had been known as a spiritual refuge and “a beacon and as a bearer of the culture.”17
In a sermon at Emanuel in 2013, Pastor Clementa Pinckney stated from the pulpit, “What the church is all about is the freedom to be fully what God intends us to be and have equality in the sight of God.”
And then, as if prophetic, Pinckney added, “And sometimes you got to make noise to do that. Sometimes you may have to die like Denmark Vesey to do that.”18
Two years after making his Denmark Vesey statement, the pastor himself lay bleeding and dying on the floor of Emanuel’s fellowship hall.
Race-Related Tension
The pastor’s killer, Dylann Roof, grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, where a large Confederate flag waved proudly above the city’s State House Capitol Building, the same tendentious flag Roof displayed on the license plate of his car. Perhaps he saw the flag as other white supremacists did, “a reminder that the hatred behind the proclaimed right to own another human being has never left our shores.”19
Dylann knew about the long history of race-related tension that lurked beneath the old cobblestone streets of Charleston’s historic downtown district, a deep-seated hostility threatening to erupt at any moment with volcanic violence. He frequently visited the 345-year-old city that, on its surface, was steeped in Southern gentility, graced by moss-covered oak trees and blooming azaleas, and boasted of beautifully preserved plantations like Magnolia Plantation, Boone Hall Plantation, and Drayton Hall, all built and sustained by the whipped, scarred backs of slaves.
Dylann also knew the pain suffered by African-Americans at Charleston’s busy harbor, where eighteenth-century ship captains unloaded their weary human cargo after a lengthy, deadly trek across the Atlantic’s Middle Passage. The port, only a five-minute walk from the Emanuel AME Church, saw more than 40 percent of North America’s enslaved Africans disembark from the filthy hulls of ships. After a long, terrifying voyage, the chained Africans experienced an almost unbearable time of quarantine at Sullivan’s Island Pest Houses, so as to become “fit” to be sold in Charleston’s popular slave auctions.
During the Atlantic slave trade, the city processed nearly half of all incoming slaves from the African West Coast.20
“Charleston’s racial history runs deep,” one reporter wrote. “The ‘Holy City’ was once home to one of the state’s primary slave ports, where beaten and bruised black bodies were auctioned off to white owners. Yet while the days of slavery are long gone, racism still persists throughout the town.”21
Knowing Charleston’s history of slavery and hoping to ignite the city’s and nation’s past and present racial unrest, Dylann purposely chose Charleston, sometimes called “the cradle of racism,” as the city for his hate crime.
During his taped two-hour confession, Dylann responded to FBI agents, laughing repeatedly and making exaggerated gun motions, stating that he “targeted Charleston and Mother Emanuel because they were historic and would resonate with people as he tried to avenge perceived black injustices against whites.”
“I didn’t want to go to another church,” he admitted, “because there could have been white people there. . . . I just knew [Emanuel] would be a place where there would be . . . black people.”22
He admitted he wanted to leave at least one person alive to tell about the shooting, and complained that his victims “complicated things” when they hid under tables during the massacre.
He also told agents that he chose the church because he wanted to slaughter those who were more likely to be meek and wouldn’t shoot back, explaining that the Wednesday night Bible study provided an easy target.
Leaving bullets in a magazine of the gun, Roof admitted he planned to kill himself after murdering Emanuel members, but changed his mind when he saw no police and could simply walk out the door.23
The Rebuilding of Mother Emanuel
Two years earlier, when Pastor Pinckney mentioned the name Denmark Vesey in his sermon, he knew Vesey still held great significance in Charleston. Emanuel AME Church, a “revered symbol of black resistance to slavery and racism,” founded in 1816–1818 by black pastor Morris Brown, became the spiritual refuge for Vesey, the freed slave and Methodist carpenter. In 1822, Vesey planned a slave rebellion in Charleston, but the revolt failed. Receiving a death sentence, Vesey and thirty-five of his black supporters were hanged, and Mother Emanuel was dismantled. The congregation met underground in secret until the Civil War ended, and they rebuilt the church. But the church was again demolished in 1886 when Charleston experienced the largest recorded earthquake in the history of the southeastern United States. Mother Emanuel rebuilt, refusing to be buried and forgotten.
For the young white supremacist hoping to start a race war, the choice of the Emanuel AME Church, the city of Charleston, and the state of South Carolina proved the perfect place to inflame racial violence and fuel more bloodshed. In his jailhouse diary, he claimed he wanted to make a huge impact by taking an action that “would make the biggest wave,” and kill blacks “at a significant church.”24
The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama
Charleston isn’t the only city in the nation that has had its past marred by violent and rampant racism. Recently I visited and spoke in another Southern city with a race-related past as dark and ugly as Charleston’s. For years, Birmingham, Alabama’s, strict Jim Crow laws meant the state’s black residents couldn’t ride in the front seats of city buses, vote without first passing unfair exams under the threat of violence, eat in restaurants, use certain toilets, drink from water fountains, shop at some department stores, live in “white” neighborhoods, work in higher-paying leadership jobs, swim in public pools, etc. The city’s leaders and active Ku Klux Klan made sure these segregation laws were harshly enforced.
Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church have much in common, both being long-time “revered symbols of black resistance to slavery and racism.” Founded about a half century later than Emanuel, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church served as a gathering place for most African-American social events, as well as a concert hall, a public auditorium, and a lending library when blacks weren’t allowed to use the city’s public library.
Like Emanuel, Sixteenth Street was the first black church in Birmingham, organized in 1873. During the early 1960s, the church became the meeting place of the civil rights movement, supporting marches and demonstrations for black equality, led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, James Bevel, and significant others.25
In 1963, Sixteenth Street experienced a racially motivated hate crime: a deadly assault upon its church members at the hands of white supremacists. Four Ku Klux Klan members planted sticks of dynamite outside the basement of the church building, timing them to go off during the morning worship service on September 15.
That morning, Pastor John Cross planned to preach his sermon at 11:00, “A Love That Forgives.” But at 10:22, just as members began to pour from their basement Sunday school classes into the sanctuary, the dynamite exploded, crumbling a thick brick wall, breaking windows, injuring twenty-two church members, sending terrified churchgoers racing to exit doors, and killing four young girls in the basement restroom.
Dr. King called the heartbreaking massacre one of the “most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.”26
President John F. Kennedy stated, “If these cruel and tragic events can only awaken that city and state—if they can only awaken this entire nation to a realization of the folly of racial injustice and hatred and violence, then it is not too late for all concerned to unite in steps toward peaceful progress before more lives are lost.”27
The bombing and the girls’ deaths proved to be the “shot heard ’round the world,” beginning the city’s and nation’s deep soul-search about civil rights and leading to legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights of 1965.28
A fifth little girl survived the blast in the restroom that killed the four other children. When the dynamite exploded, Sarah Collins Rudolph, Addie’s sister, was hit with a storm of flying glass and debris, resulting in a lost eye and a three-month hospital stay. A half century later, Sarah recalled her experience after the bombing: “When I would go to bed at night, I would just cry all night long, just why did they kill those girls?”
Sarah decided to forgive the white supremacists.
“Being bitter won’t bring the girls back, won’t bring my sight back,” Sarah said fifty years later. “So I had to forgive because it was what God wanted me to do.”29
Forgiveness Complicated by Racism
As Sarah Collins Rudolph forgave, I, too, chose to forgive Dylann Roof. When Dylann opened fire on Emanuel’s church members, he told them, “I’m here to kill black people.” He stated no other reason for the massacre except for the fact that he hated black people.
Since I publicly voiced my forgiveness for Dylann at his bond hearing two days after the shooting, sincere Christians and others have repeatedly asked me this question: “Does biblical forgiveness require ‘forgiving the debt’ when the vicious crime is complicated by centuries of deep racial hate, violence, and cruel injustices? Does our heavenly Father really expect us to forgive such horrifying hate crimes?”
I consider it a reasonable and justifiable question due to the nature of the crime. My answer is always immediate. “Yes. He does.”
During my lifetime, I have met many people who refuse to forgive hate crimes—those deeply disturbing acts of violence based on a person’s skin color or race or lifestyle choices. They happen so frequently these days that new laws are being passed, such as the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.30
As incredible as it sounds, in 2016 more than half (almost 59 percent) of the nation’s crimes were “motivated by hostility based on race/ethnicity.”31
Hate crimes, and whether or not they are forgivable, have become popular radio and television talk show topics as people everywhere are voicing opinions on forgiving and/or not forgiving those who commit hate crimes. In a recent CBS 60 Minutes story, an invited guest asked the interviewer, “How can someone possibly forgive somebody who would kill or maim in the name of white supremacy?” He then added: “Those are the people who are irredeemable.”32
Recently I heard a black Catholic author admit, “Forgiveness does not come easily to me. I am fine with this failing.” Referencing the Emanuel Church shooting, she added, “I deeply respect the families of the nine slain who are able to forgive this terrorist and his murderous racism. I cannot fathom how they are capable of such eloquent mercy, such grace under such duress.”33
I am discovering more and more that hate crimes can be huge obstacles to forgiveness. People tell me that crimes based solely on hate “generally hurt more than general crimes.” They suggest that “hate crimes inflict greater harms on their victims.”34
I can understand why this is true. According to the American Psychological Association, hate crimes are not only an “attack on one’s physical self, but . . . also an attack on one’s very identity . . . [producing] psychological and emotional damage, intense feelings of fear, vulnerability, anger, depression, physical ailments . . . and difficult interpersonal relations—all symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.”35
Outrage and anger seem to be expected and common responses to hate crimes, arising “from a deep sense of personal hurt and betrayal . . . [producing] feelings of powerlessness, isolation, sadness and suspicion . . . [and violating] the equality principle, striking at the core of the victim’s self.”
A hate crime tells the victim, “You’re not fit to live in this society with me. I don’t believe that you have the same rights as I do. I believe that you are second to me. I am superior to you.”36
Such was the underlying message of slave purchasing and human ownership that, over long, dark centuries of continuing victim abuse, layer upon heavy layer of deepening anger, frustration, and exasperation were added, thus complicating one’s choice to forgive ongoing hate crimes.
Anger is not an emotion I feel, or have felt, about Dylann’s act of murder. Some criticize me, saying, “Anthony, it’s not human not to feel anger, one of the most natural and understandable stages of the grief cycle, especially when racism is involved.”
They theorize about the possible negative health impact on me and other African-Americans of “forgiving acts of white racism”—“post-traumatic slave syndrome,” they call it—implying that our forgiveness means “repressing justifiable feelings of anger and outrage” that are “transmitted from generation to generation.” Internalized anger, they say, “driven deep into the unconscious, contaminated by unresolved pain . . . becomes problematic.”37
They see the African-American’s forgiveness of white racist crime as some sort of shortcut around anger, believing the black church teaches its members that it is un-Christian and unspiritual to be angry about racial injustices. Some may wonder if forgiveness is simply a way to eliminate anger from the black Christian’s heart.38
While it might seem understandable that black people feel angered by a white racist’s cruelties, I must again admit that I have never felt anger toward Dylann—shock, numbness, and deep despair at my wife’s sudden and brutal death at his hands, yes—but not anger. I know if I allowed myself to feel intense anger, the fiery rage inside me would complicate my decision to forgive Dylann, making me want to do something drastic about the murder, to seek revenge. If I focus on anger, the fury in my heart and mind will cloud my judgment about biblical forgiveness. If I ever feel anger at Dylann, even for one second, I instinctively and immediately let go of it, refusing to allow uncontrolled wrath to consume me, giving Dylann Roof yet another victim of his hate crime.
The Enormous Cost of Forgiveness
I am also hearing some critics of forgiveness say that black people forgive a white person’s intentional hateful acts because, like past slaves who fear further violence at the hands of white masters, forgiveness proves a way to protect themselves.
If that theory is true, doesn’t that make forgiveness cultural rather than biblical, a kind of ethnic ritual in America that “functions to atone for the past racism . . . or in an attempt to provide African-Americans a way to move forward and acknowledge historic and recent racial pain”?39
One African-American writer strongly believes that cultural, ritual forgiveness and forgetfulness allow “racism or white silence in the face of racism [to] continue to thrive.”
She writes, “We [black Americans] have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, micro-aggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.”40
Many believe that “in a culture of ritual forgiveness and forgetfulness, no one is called to account for historic deeds done against others,” a way that seems to “absolve America of its violent history of racism.”41
Some argue that this type of cultural forgiveness is based on weakness, not strength, and that “by forgiving racist crime so quickly and easily, black people cheapen their forgiveness.”42
I don’t agree. The forgiveness I expressed to Dylann Roof at the bond hearing just two days after the shooting was not based on anger, weakness, cheap forgiveness, or fear of future violence toward me. My forgiveness came quickly, but certainly not easily. Forgiveness was not an easy fix, nor was it easily offered or easily lived. And I did not forgive Dylann because society and the church expected me to pardon him. It cost me something to forgive Dylann Roof.
I agree with a black pastor in Phoenix, Arizona, who wrote, “When someone chooses to forgive, we are watching someone pay an enormously heavy and personal cost, . . . It requires daily ‘working out’—a daily willingness to look at the scars of injustice and choose to press deeper into grace instead of turning back toward anger and revenge.”43
What is grace? It is the free and unmerited favor of God, as manifested in the salvation/redemption of sinners, the forgiveness of sins, and the bestowal of unearned and undeserved blessings.
Let me stop here and clarify the word anger. Anger isn’t always a negative emotion. Constructive anger, used in the right way, can bring justice to felons and can motivate people to help stop hate crimes. It can also call for a nation to seriously rethink the FBI’s too-brief three-day gun-waiting period, a commonsense move that will lengthen the gun-waiting deadline, allowing the FBI a more workable timetable and possibly keep dangerous weapons out of potential killers’ hands.
Anger is like fire. It can warm your home or destroy it. It all depends on how it is used.
I am reminded that Jesus himself used constructive (righteous) anger—and a handmade cord whip—to empty and cleanse God’s temple of money mongers who were intent on scamming the praying populace and making a quick buck.
“Get these out of here!” He shouted, referring to their cattle, sheep, doves, and coins, while overturning money exchange tables and scattering profits. “How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!” (See John 2:12–16.)
Surely it was constructive anger that motivated prosecutor Doug Jones to reopen the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church massacre case that killed four Sunday school girls. After the 1963 bombing, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, “not exactly a proponent of the civil rights movement,” sealed the files, ensuring that a court couldn’t use the documented material as evidence to prosecute the attackers. But Jones successfully convicted two Klansmen, Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, in 2001 and 2002 respectively, almost four decades after the hate crime.44
Apartheid in South Africa
The racial violence and hate crimes in Birmingham and Charleston remind me of how black South Africans suffered between 1948 and the early 1990s during apartheid (“separateness”). When I read the biography of Nelson Mandela, I felt great admiration for his God-enabled ability to forgive South Africa’s past hate crimes. During Mandela’s lifetime, South Africa had its own rigid Jim Crow laws segregating black Africans from white society and denying them the right to vote or live in certain areas. In 1948, the National Party won control of the government and codified the nation’s long-present segregation and inequality into the official, rigid policy of apartheid.45
Objecting publicly to the nation’s dark time of apartheid, Mandela was tortured and imprisoned for twenty-seven years. His release came in 1990, a time when South Africa embarked on its journey to full democracy.
Many of his angry black devotees felt betrayed when Mandela called for black Africans to forgive and reconcile with their white enemies instead of seeking revenge for the decades of unjust violence and pain they experienced at the evil hands of apartheid.46
I also admire Desmond Tutu, a contemporary of Mandela and former archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, who suffered horribly during apartheid. He, like Mandela, called for equality, the end of apartheid, and forgiveness.
Desmond Tutu considered forgiveness a gift to the forgiver as well as to the perpetrator, stating, “It would be grossly unfair to the victim to be dependent on the whim of the perpetrator. It would make him or her a victim twice over. The gift has been given. It is up to the intended recipient to appropriate it.”47
Tutu also gave a specific formula for forgiving hate crimes, asking South Africans to, first and second, tell the story and name the hurt, saying that in order to forgive one must “admit the wrong and acknowledge the harm.” For the third and fourth steps, he encouraged the victims to grant forgiveness and then either renew or release the relationship.48
“Offering forgiveness prevents us from being destroyed by a corrosive resentment,” he stated. “It helps us grow in being magnanimous.”49
Called to Forgive
I forgave Dylann because I was called to forgive. I believe forgiveness “recognizes that the love of God is more powerful than white racist hatred.”50
When I made the conscious decision and commitment to forgive Dylann Roof, my forgiveness meant that Dylann would not be allowed to control my life forever. My decision came from God’s strength, not from my human weakness.
A reporter for the Washington Post, writing about forgiveness in light of racial hate crimes, commented, “The extraordinary act of forgiveness might remind us that the nation’s most historically oppressed group does a better job of doing what we all say we want most: being decent and human, even when it seems impossible.”51
No doubt, again and again I will be asked the question, “Does biblical forgiveness require ‘forgiving the debt’ when the vicious crime is complicated by centuries of deep racial hate, violence, and cruel injustices? Does our heavenly Father really expect us to forgive such horrifying hate crimes?”
Again, my answer is an unequivocal “Yes, God does.”
My forgiveness of Dylann Roof, even though complicated by layer upon layer of racial cruelties over past centuries of slavery, came not as a historically required or oppressed/oppressor-expected offering.52 And it was certainly more than my trying to be “decent and human.” My forgiveness stemmed directly from the teachings of Jesus Christ, and came as a merciful gift from a fellow sinner who had been forgiven by God’s grace and mercy. I offered my forgiveness unselfishly and generously to an unrepentant young racist, whom I hoped with all my heart would also ask God for His mercy, grace, and forgiveness.
Scripture tells us that God can forgive those people who repent, putting their faith and trust in Christ for their salvation—even a murderer! After all, He forgave the Apostle Paul, a first-century domestic terrorist who murdered Christians just because they believed in Christ. Surely Paul’s evil acts and hate crimes were designed to strike fear and terror into the Christian community. Paul stood on the sidelines when Stephen was stoned to death, proudly giving his approval (Acts 22:20). When Paul gave his sinful life to Christ, however, God forgave him, redeemed him, and then used him mightily in His kingdom work.
“None of us deserves God’s forgiveness . . . we all have sinned. . . . But the good news is this: God loves us, and Christ came into the world to save us. When we repent of our sins and receive Him into our hearts, God has promised to forgive us—completely and fully.”53
Surely no one, not even Dylann Roof, is irredeemable.