God Forgives. I Don't. Unless I Have To.

God's strength must look different than our own, or why asking for it?

I’d never heard of Jake Bequette until a few days ago, when an easily dunked upon tweet of his was thrust into my timeline. This Arkansas Senate candidate somehow came across a video of an Atlanta man forgiving his son’s murderers, and promptly started filling his diaper about it. 

“This is the result of an emasculated, broken culture — and I don’t care how many people get mad at me for pointing it out,” he declared, prophetically. “He’s making excuses for his son’s murderers (‘we don’t know their story’) with absolutely no context. That’s not Christian strength — this man is afraid.”

I probably don’t need to point out any of the problems here. The sickness in a tweet like this opens itself up organically, layer by layer. Like so many bad posts, it’s as stupid as it is evil, making it hard to know how you even push back. Jakes Bequette either has negative zero moral imagination or negative zero Christian understanding, so what exactly does one even appeal to in a debate? 

It wasn’t until I saw a followup post of someone trying to defend Bequette’s take that I started thinking on the issue a little bit harder.