Forgiveness for Sins You Don't Know You've Committed

There's a person on one side, the word "God" on the opposite side, and a chasm between them labelled "sin." Image source.

I read this blog post by Sildarmillion, Reflecting on the Act of Praying after Learning to Submit, where she talks about her view of prayer (coming from a Muslim perspective). Here's one part that struck me, and I want to talk about it:

On a different but related note, I also notice that people are constantly praying for forgiveness. I often wonder for what sins they are asking for forgiveness. More often than not, people are seeking forgiveness just in case they unconsciously made any mistakes. But they are not taking the time to reflect and think about whether they really made mistakes, and what mistakes those were. If they made mistakes, they just want God to forgive them for it, without engaging in the difficult task of actually thinking about it. They might make the same mistake every day, and they’ll keep asking for forgiveness every day, without ever learning what that mistake was. This just does not feel right to me. If God keeps forgiving them for it everyday, isn’t that like being given a free pass?

Of course I believe in praying for forgiveness for something I know that I have done wrong. Praying for forgiveness is an important part of healing, repentance, and atonement. But, I take issue with asking for forgiveness for mistakes I may have made unconsciously. I am not saying I should ignore mistakes I have made unconsciously. I am saying the opposite. I am saying I should try to become conscious of mistakes I have made unconsciously. I can understand praying to become conscious of those mistakes so I can properly rectify them. But I cannot support the idea of asking for forgiveness without me having to do any reflection or introspection on what it is that I have done wrong. I don’t like the idea of asking for forgiveness for my unconscious mistakes, so that it’s just taken care off, taken off my books, and I never have to do the difficult work of dealing with it. Yet, we are encouraged to always ask for forgiveness for unconscious mistakes. I can’t get behind it.

!!!!! This is such a good point!

I grew up evangelical; here's what I believed about sin, as an evangelical Christian: Sin is a problem because it separates us from God, and ultimately the result is going to hell. All of us sin, so we are disgusting to God and we all deserve to go to hell. (Only perfect sinless people go to heaven- but there aren't any, except Jesus.)

So, in the ideology, if Person A hurts Person B, we should be concerned for Person A because now they have committed a sin and they're going to hell, oh no! This is, uh, so incredibly backwards and messed-up... Like how about we care about Person B, the victim? Doesn't the victim deserve our compassion more than the perpetrator? But in this kind of evangelical ideology, when people talk about sin, it's like the victims don't even exist at all. 

An extreme example would be when a pastor sexually abuses a child, and then a lot of Christians come to the pastor's defense, saying it's not a big deal and we need to forgive him because "we all sin" and "there but for the grace of God go I" (meaning, "it's only because of God's grace that I didn't end up sexually abusing a child", uh, WTF?). They see the abuser and they say "that could have been me" and so they want to forgive him quickly. Very interesting that they don't look at the victim and say "that could have been me" and prioritize helping the victim. Very interesting. 

This ideology doesn't care about victims. You have to care about the one who sinned, because they're in danger of going to hell, poor thing.

So when I was a child, I prayed for Jesus to forgive my sins so I wouldn't go to hell- and yes, I sometimes did pray for forgiveness for sins I had committed without being aware of it. I wasn't taught that you literally have to pray for forgiveness for each specific sin after it's committed or else you go to hell- like if you die at the wrong point in the sin/forgiveness cycle then you go to hell. Going to hell because of a timing issue. No, my church didn't teach that, but I think there are some branches of Christianity which do. (For example, some Christians teach that you go to hell if you commit suicide- because there's no opportunity to ask for forgiveness in between the "sin" and when you die.) But still, even though I didn't believe I was at risk of going to hell for any sins I committed unaware, I was still worried that God would hold it against me. (Who knows what kind of little things God would hold against me? That was the kind of god I believed in back then.) So sometimes I did pray to be forgiven for sins I didn't even know about.

(And I'm curious about how Muslims think about these concepts- there are likely some big differences.)

I'm ex-evangelical now. I don't pray, and I'm suspicious of the general concept of forgiveness. (I believe the person who did something wrong should try to make it right- but also the victim is NOT obligated to forgive them. But if it's some small run-of-the-mill sin, the kind of thing where Person A and Person B both occasionally sin against each other because no one's perfect, then they should forgive each other.) And I no longer define "sin" as "things God says are bad" but as "things that hurt people." So it's been a long time since I've thought about the idea of praying for God to forgive you for sins you don't know you've committed.

But what Sildarmillion says makes perfect sense, and I can't believe I've never heard anyone put it that way before. If sin actually matters- if it actually hurts people- then wouldn't it be very important to find out when you've done something wrong, and learn from it so you can make it right and not do it again? If you believe that you can just ask God for forgiveness for sins you don't even know about, and They forgive you, and it's fine, well that only makes sense if you believe sin is something God arbitrarily decided to be mad at you about, for no real reason. (And yes, when I was evangelical, that is the kind of god I believed in.) I submit to you that this is kind of messed-up.

And, I have an example: Racism. 

So, I'm white, I'm from the US- I have benefitted from white privilege and systemic racism. And I didn't know about it. In school we learned that slavery and Jim Crow were very bad but fortunately Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr solved those problems and now everyone is equal. And of course I did my best to treat everyone the same. But that's not enough. Systemic racism is very real, and harms people, and if you just wander through life unaware of it, benefitting from it, well, that's a sin. Now, I don't blame white people for that, and I don't think it means we deserve to go to hell or anything like that- but we need to learn about the reality of it, and do what we can to change society so people really do have equal rights. So no, it wouldn't be helpful at all if God just "forgives" you and lets you keep on going, completely unaware.

So it doesn't make sense, this belief that you need God to forgive you for sins you don't know you've committed, without any belief that it actually matters what those sins were and maybe you need to learn from them and not commit them again. What good does it do, if you don't even know what you did wrong? That would only make sense if you believe sin is just some random technicality that God holds against you.

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Related:

My Racist Personal Relationship with God

"Christians Aren't Perfect" When It's Convenient 

Yes, I Want Justice (A post about white evangelicals and #BlackLivesMatter)