I grew up wishy-washy liberal protestant, asyouknowbob, with exposure to charismatic/evangelicals though school. This is actually the first time I've seen anyone make a link between 'love the sinner, hate the sin' and 'rehabilitative justice' (or I think restorative justice was the buzzword I encountered most often), but... yeah. Especially in the watered-down, somewhat appropriative way the latter gets used by white liberals (my youth church network sure did love stories of restorative justice coming out post-apartheid South Africa and/or post civil war Rwanda).
I internalised a /lot/ of forgiveness oriented christian messaging: god forgives all and therefore so must we, etc. This, combined with your average Geek Social Fallacies, left me very vulnerable to abuse (actually by outsiders, not from people within the church, for whatever reason). My Worst Ex had previously Done A Thing That Is Bad, and prior to confessing this to me, spent plenty of time building up 'even your God couldn't forgive me' logic. Of course my God could! And he's not doing it ANYMORE, so... it would be unfair of me to walk away, right?
I don't think Worst Ex is in the category of 'abusers abusing for fun and don't care'. Some of the time it's obvious that he does care, and from outside observation he does seem to be a bit _less_ terrible now than he used to be. But that doesn't make him reliable, yanno? He probably IS rehabilitable but that's... a job for a professional shrink.
(And yet. No one is truly rehabilitable without community support. Humans don't work like that.)
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2017-11-02 08:42 am (UTC)I internalised a /lot/ of forgiveness oriented christian messaging: god forgives all and therefore so must we, etc. This, combined with your average Geek Social Fallacies, left me very vulnerable to abuse (actually by outsiders, not from people within the church, for whatever reason). My Worst Ex had previously Done A Thing That Is Bad, and prior to confessing this to me, spent plenty of time building up 'even your God couldn't forgive me' logic. Of course my God could! And he's not doing it ANYMORE, so... it would be unfair of me to walk away, right?
I don't think Worst Ex is in the category of 'abusers abusing for fun and don't care'. Some of the time it's obvious that he does care, and from outside observation he does seem to be a bit _less_ terrible now than he used to be. But that doesn't make him reliable, yanno? He probably IS rehabilitable but that's... a job for a professional shrink.
(And yet. No one is truly rehabilitable without community support. Humans don't work like that.)
TL;DR forgiveness rhetoric is a dangerous beastie