The Grace of Being Wrong.

Public life has lately offered a familiar spectacle: leaders making sweeping claims, supporters defending them, and facts becoming secondary to loyalty. Commentators have examined this dynamic not only for what it reveals about politics but also for what it reveals about us. Why can acknowledging a leader’s error feel like acknowledging our own?

The longer we have defended a position, the more expensive changing our minds becomes. We have argued with friends. We have spoken publicly. We have defended people whose behavior made us uncomfortable. Perhaps relationships have been strained or broken. Eventually we are no longer reconsidering a proposition. We are reconsidering ourselves.

People often rationalize their decisions rather than endure the discomfort of saying, “I was wrong.” Political identity intensifies the difficulty when changing one’s mind also seems to vindicate people one has regarded as opponents.

Christians recognize the problem.

We have another name for the practice of discovering that we have been wrong.

We call it repentance.

The Greek metanoia is commonly translated “repentance,” although its associations with a changed mind are suggestive. Christianity assumes that human beings can discover that the way they have understood themselves, their neighbors, and even God requires revision. “Repent, and believe in the good news,” Jesus announces in Mark’s Gospel. Christianity begins not with the proposition that faithful people are those who have always been right, but with the possibility of turning around.

Yet Christianity also knows something that our political culture frequently forgets.

Repentance is impossible without grace.

Imagine someone who has spent years defending a politician, party, movement, or cause. Then something happens. Perhaps there is no dramatic revelation. Perhaps doubts simply accumulate until the old explanations no longer work.

What awaits that person if they say so publicly?

Often the answer from one side is betrayal.

And from the other side: “We told you so.”

Those are surprisingly similar responses. Both make changing one’s mind costly. One threatens excommunication for leaving; the other demands humiliation before entering.

The Christian tradition offers a different grammar: confession, repentance, and absolution.

Confession says: Tell the truth.

Repentance says: Turn around.

Absolution says: Your failure is not the final truth about you.

Remove confession and we have denial. Remove repentance and confession becomes performance. But remove absolution and something essential disappears. We have created a moral universe in which people can tell the truth about themselves only at the price of being permanently defined by what they confess.

Perhaps that helps explain something about our present political culture.

The problem is larger than any one leader or movement. Political scientists have long observed that citizens frequently interpret information through partisan identities. Political allegiance can function as a social identity, shaping how people evaluate evidence and whom they trust. The current moment may provide an unusually vivid example, but the human tendency involved is not the property of one political party.

Christian theology should make Christians particularly suspicious of imagining otherwise.

The confession in the Book of Common Prayer does not begin, “They have sinned against you.”

It begins, “We confess that we have sinned against you.”

The pronoun is significant.

Christian confession denies us the comforting possibility that repentance is principally something other people need to do. The Church is not supposed to be the gathering of those who correctly identified the sinners. It is a community constituted by people who repeatedly acknowledge that they themselves require mercy.

There is another theological claim underneath this.

Christians can afford to be wrong because being right is not the foundation of Christian identity.

Baptism is.

If my deepest identity depends upon my political judgment, then evidence that my judgment was mistaken threatens me at the deepest level. I must defend the judgment in order to defend myself. If my belonging to my community similarly depends upon maintaining the judgment, reconsideration threatens not merely embarrassment but exile.

But Christianity makes the astonishing claim that the self can survive confession.

Peter can become the apostle who denied Jesus.

Paul can become the apostle who persecuted the Church.

Augustine can write the story of his disordered desires and call the book Confessions.

Their failures are not erased. Something stranger happens.

They become tellable.

The past can be narrated truthfully because it no longer possesses absolute authority over the person telling it.

This may be one of the Church’s neglected contributions to our political moment.

We understandably speak about the need to confront misinformation, hold leaders accountable, resist injustice, and tell the truth. All of that matters. But a society also needs places where changing one’s mind is possible.

We need communities in which someone can say, “I believed something that wasn’t true.”

Or, harder still, “I defended something I should not have defended.”

And then discover that there is life after the sentence.

This does not mean pretending that choices have no consequences. Absolution is not amnesia. Repentance may require restitution, changed behavior, repaired relationships, or patient rebuilding of trust.

Grace is not the declaration that nothing mattered.

Grace is the declaration that failure need not have the final word.

That distinction may become increasingly important as people encounter neighbors, friends, family members, and perhaps themselves reconsidering commitments once held with great certainty.

The temptation will be enormous to say, “We told you so.”

Sometimes we did.

But Christianity has something more interesting to say.

Tell the truth.

Turn around.

Come home.

The question for churches, then, is not simply whether we have spoken prophetically enough about the failures of our political culture. It is whether we have created communities in which people can afford to repent.

Because one of the most powerful forces sustaining any rigid loyalty may be the fear that there is nowhere to go once we admit that we were wrong.

The Christian answer to that fear has a very old name.

Absolution.