Casual forgiveness
Apparently, a little Christianity can be a dangerous thing.
The American Bible Society has just released some fascinating research on forgiveness in their State of the Bible 2026 Report. They divided American Christians into three groups: “nominal”, “casual” and “practising”. By this they mean nominals are people who call themselves Christian but are a bit like Rabbitoh’s fans who wear the top but never show up to a game, casuals are people who attend church at least monthly but don’t strongly agree that faith is important in their life, with practicing being people who attend church at least monthly, adhere to a biblical tradition and strongly agree that faith is important to their life. While I’d quibble with the categories (and the spelling of practicing) the results are intriguing.
The group having the hardest time with forgiveness wasn’t the nominal Christians, it was the casual ones. 38% of casual Christians said they struggled to accept themselves after making a mistake. 19% believed they had done something that even God couldn’t forgive. Among practicing Christians, those figures fell to 23% and 3% respectively.
The Cost of Half-Hearted Faith
Which is interesting. Obviously, this is a survey, not a lab result. It can tell us there’s a relationship, but not exactly what causes what. But let me offer an hypothesis:
The news about Jesus is regularly described in the Bible as like a sword and one of the things I take from that is it’s sharp. It is exceedingly good at popping our self-congratulation bubbles. Talk of sin and judgment is a regular theme of the scriptures and it is utterly alien to our western mindset. If you get that far into Christianity, you can acquire a rich vocabulary for feeling guilty.
But that isn’t the gospel. At the centre of Christianity isn’t simply the announcement that you have done wrong. It is the announcement that God has done something about it.
“In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting people’s sins against them,” Paul writes.
Perhaps there is a particularly uncomfortable place you can occupy where Christianity has taught you to recognise your guilt, but hasn’t yet persuaded you to trust in God’s grace. You know enough to realise you need forgiveness, but not enough to believe that forgiveness could really be for you.
And Christianity at that dosage is miserable. The researchers found something else too. People who struggled to forgive themselves reported much higher levels of stress and loneliness. Those who had experienced God’s forgiveness were also much more likely to forgive other people.
Which makes sense of something Jesus keeps doing. He doesn’t merely tell people to be more forgiving. He fills their hands and pockets with forgiveness first.
The Christian life isn’t meant to be an increasingly successful attempt to convince God that you’re worth keeping around. It begins with the news that, in Jesus, God already knows our worst and has moved towards us anyway.
Perhaps that’s why forgiven people become forgiving people.
grace and peace,
Steve