JASPER, TX, 1998—It was a crime of horrific proportions. On an early Sunday summer morning, three white men picked up James Byrd Jr., a forty-nine-year-old black man, and, instead of taking him home as promised, drove to a remote country road where they beat him with a baseball bat, spray-painted his face, urinated and defecated on him, and then bound his ankles to a twenty-six-foot steel logging chain hooked to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him at high speed for three miles. The autopsy would later determine that Byrd was conscious for the first half of the rampage before his body hit a culvert, severing his head and right arm. The killers then took what was left of Byrd’s mangled body and dumped it onto the steps of a black church, where worshippers were to arrive for services in just a few hours.

Instantly, the world’s media descended. What kind of place was still fomenting this degree of derangement at the dawn of the twenty-first century? Thousands of Black Panthers swept in from around the country, urging Jasper’s black residents to arm themselves with guns. The Ku Klux Klan marched into the courthouse square with loudspeakers spewing poison. It looked all but assured that Jasper, a piney woods Texas town of eight thousand people, was going to burn.

But somehow, miraculously, it didn’t. Within two days of discovering Byrd’s body and arresting three suspects, local law enforcement knocked on the door of the Ministerial Alliance, an inter-denominational group of black and white pastors that had been meeting together for years. Would the Alliance serve as a unity task force, the sheriff asked, and take the lead in communicating each development of the pending trial to their congregations? Jasper’s terrorized townspeople would need a pastoral presence in the days ahead. The Alliance ministers agreed and immediately began organizing activities aimed at keeping the peace. They gathered for soul-baring discussions. They held a vigil at the county courthouse, attracting five thousand black and white residents to weep together and pray. They preached at one another’s churches. They organized a ceremony to tear down the hundred-year-old fence dividing the white and the black sections of the city cemetery. And their annual “Sing with One Voice” concert, which for years had sought to unite this town of fifty-four churches by celebrating one another’s different hymnodies, now culminated in the Alliance pastors singing in a circle together—a picture of Jasper the world so desperately needed to see.

The Alliance’s radical commitment to peacemaking wasn’t always popular. “I got a lot of flack from blacks and whites [for visiting one of the suspects in prison],” said Reverend Bobby Lee Hudson, pastor of Goodwill Baptist Church and the president of the Alliance at the time of Byrd’s death. “I said to them, ‘It’s not about black and white, it’s about human beings. God loves us for what we are. The only unforgivable sin is to say that there is no God.’”

Another Alliance member, Father Ron Foshage of Saint Michael’s Catholic Church, learned that the father of suspect John William King was going to have to sit through his son’s trial alone; no one wanted to be near the parent of such a disturbed man. Father Foshage chose to sit next to the murderer’s father in the courthouse up until the death penalty would be called, holding the man’s hand as he wept while chilling pieces of evidence were brought against his son by the lead prosecutor, himself a member of Foshage’s parish. “It was like walking a tightrope,” Foshage said.

Meanwhile, black churches were roiling. “The community was afraid that perhaps we might have a conspiracy in our city,” said the Byrds’ family minister, Reverend Kenneth Lyons, himself a leading member of the Jasper Ministerial Alliance. “We had to look deep within ourselves about our Christian teaching. . . . We had to come together as a community, and we knew it could not be just a black thing, it needed to be the whole community speaking out against this heinous crime.” James Byrd Jr.’s father came to every Alliance meeting, telling the pastors, “Our family is hurting, but we are not hating.” He and other family members publicly spoke out against retaliation. “That was a great help,” recalled Reverend Lyons. “All of their teachings down through the years gave them the stimulus to speak out as they did, because of their deep tie to their religious faith. If it had been another family who had no church upbringing it would have been a different situation. They were able to stand on their faith.” As a memorial anthology compiled by the Alliance members put it, “The Byrds dealt with their tragedy with a profound dignity, and in so doing they set the tone for the entire town and elicited the gratitude of its citizens.”

When Forgiveness Becomes Unforgivable

It is difficult to retell this story, not least for its horror. I have come of age in a generation that is adept at dissecting asymmetries of power; to express even an ounce of admiration for such acts of forgiveness feels taboo if not forbidden. We know so much about trauma patterns now, about sustained histories of abuse. We are rightly cynical of the ways in which stories of forgiveness can be manipulated to protect the ongoing schemes of evil without justice or accountability.

And yet, the story speaks to a yearning that no calculation of the law can fulfill. Everywhere I go, there is an ache for a set of cultural scales that measure more than the exchange of human power. People are fatigued with the never-realizable ideal of a future redeemed by cancel culture, shaming, and political movements devoid of love. We also seem stuck, more fluent in drawing therapeutic boundaries than tracing the cruciform arc of biblical liberation. In all the good tools we’ve gained to deal with our wounds psychologically, we seem to have buried the future-creating power of Christian theology.

Comment‘s winter issue attempts to bring these two domains into a delicate dialogue. We initially set out to understand why forgiveness has become so unsettled in our time and place. We pitched toward the systemic, wanting to understand the distinct yet equally passionate ways in which today’s Left and Right look on forgiveness with disgust, to probe the possibility of forgiving abuses stemming from institutional habit, to better understand what a just peace looks like in intractable contexts like the Middle East, to get clear on the pathways of reconciliation and healing when justice is also at stake. But what we wound up receiving, I think now providentially, was a slate of essays that are intensely personal, particular, cost-ridden, even holy. It turns out that forgiveness is both a private and a public act, the line between interior motivation and communal consequence blurry and difficult to discern. (Look for an exploration of privacy in its many permutations in Comment’s next issue.) Each essay here, by its hard-won testimony, delves into the inner workings of forgiveness—its pain, its mysterious compulsions, its tendency to creep up on us imperceptibly until it’s there, a gift that demands an answer. I trust something in the non-repeatability of these stories will call out to your own, challenging you, wherever you are, to risk a new beginning.

Note: Some of the Ministerial Alliance pastors quoted here, including Reverend Bobby Lee Hudson and Reverend Kenneth Lyons, are no longer living. Comment wishes to thank Father Ron Foshage for welcoming Anne to Jasper this August and sharing all that he could of Byrd’s murder and the aftermath, including dozens of archival materials, most significantly The Road to Redemption, which features interviews with the Ministerial Alliance pastors conducted by Ricardo C. Ainslie.