Yet we often speak and treat each other as if each of us is the sum of all our past beliefs and actions, nothing added, subtracted, or transformed. Elizabeth Warren, for example, long ago rejected her Republican heritage to become a leading progressive voice in this country. But in the 2020 presidential campaign, her past was thrown at her by people who saw it as a stain that wouldn’t be washed out — or at least saw it as data to use as a weapon because they favored other candidates.
The left has many supporters of the abolition of prisons and advocates for the reinstatement of those who committed crimes, but that generosity doesn’t always extend to people who said something that was considered acceptable at the time but is no longer so.
Conservatives have their own version of this claim that to fall from grace is to fall forever. When Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York last year gave a sermon on Dorothy Day, the social justice activist and Catholic convert who founded the Catholic Worker Movement, he thought it appropriate to declare, “she would be the first to admit her promiscuity.” to give.” “Promiscuous” seems a harsh and imprecise word, and one that insists on her early life as a hindrance to any consideration of her selfless heroic later life.
Perhaps part of the problem is the passion for categorical thinking or rather categories as an alternative to thinking. Some people evolve and change as dramatically as caterpillars turn into butterflies. Some might as well have been carved out of granite, with all the beliefs and values that launched them throughout their lives. Some get better, some get worse, some stay the same. Some shift as a result of societal changes, others for individual reasons and individual effort. Recognizing this means thinking about every case and also recognizing that sometimes we don’t know enough to make a judgment.
Sometimes we do. Take Angela Davis. Her autobiography, written when she was a young woman fresh out of prison in the 1970s after being cleared of all charges, has just been reissued. Her description of her time in prison in New York City is harsh about the lesbian relationships she witnessed. “I was a product of my time,” she said recently. “And it’s very, I must say, inspiring to see how far we’ve come, not just in the way we talk about sexuality, but in the way we talk about gender and the way we’re constantly using binary notions of challenging gender. And all these transformations are a result of people’s dedication to the struggle.”
dr. Davis, who has long had a female partner, attributes a collective process to her individual evolution. It’s a bold admission, and also a rare one, both in acknowledging past failings and in acknowledging that broad social processes have changed her mind. Many overlook that they are the beneficiaries of historical processes, assuming they changed as individuals. That instinct often goes hand in hand with a willingness to judge people who existed before those processes, challenged old assumptions, and offered new views and values.
Jewish culture, as my friend Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg points out, has clear processes of redemption and restoration, unlike the mainstream of our society. Christianity pays more attention to forgiveness of victims, and the traditions of penance and confession are more concerned with making things right with God than with those who have harmed them. There are some new models, the most important of which is restorative justice, but for them all to work, we have to believe in the possibility of transformation – and embrace the uncertainty it brings: people can change; some have; some falsely claim to have done so; some will or may not or will relapse. Claiming someone hasn’t changed might be just as untrue, but maybe it feels more like certainty and certainly requires less trust.