The Dangers of National Repentance

I recently read an essay by C.S. Lewis, “Dangers of National Repentance”, which seems as timely today as ever. He notes that “the first and fatal charm of national repentance is … the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing – but first, of denouncing – the conduct of others.” This surely applies to many “apologies” offered by public figures, institutions, and of course individuals using social media.

What repentance is

Westminster Shorter Catechism gives the following definition of repentance.

Q. 87. What is repentance unto life?

A. Repentance unto life is a saving grace, whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin, and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God, with full purpose of, and endeavour after, new obedience.

True repentance is about grieving over sin that is in some way something we find personal guilt in.

Even when we find in the Bible Israel engaged in corporate confession (e.g. Ezra 9-10, Nehemiah 1:4-11; Daniel 9:3-19) those who do so still retain a sense of a shared responsibility. As Kevin DeYoung says: “the people were as a whole marked by unfaithfulness, and … the leader himself bore some responsibility for the actions of the people, either by having been blind to the sin (Ezra 9:3) or by participating directly in the sin (Neh. 1:6; Dan. 9:20). Culpability for sins committed can extend to a large group if virtually everyone in the group was active in the sin or if we bear the same spiritual resemblance to the perpetrators of the past.”

When “National Repentance” becomes moral theatre

But too often repentance today tends not to be so much out of a sense of personal responsibility but a self-righteousness that those repenting are better than their forebears. Doubtless there are apologies made from genuine contrition (e.g. after the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse). But others use their apologies to distance themselves from past generations, even as they might use the word “we” to include themselves.

It happens when heads of sporting institutions apologise for historic “racism”. It happens when church leaders of the more progressive kind apologise for perpetrating homophobic doctrine. It happens when individuals in various public forums apologise for the abuse perpetrated upon minority groups. They might use the language of shared guilt, but what they often mean is that they are not to blame, but our unenlightened fathers back then and certain sections of the community now who share their regressive views.

But it is the attitude of the heart that is most important of all. As C. S. Lewis says:

“Is it not, then, the duty of the church to preach national repentance? I think it is. But the office—like many others— can be profitably discharged only by those who discharge it with reluctance. We know that a man may have to “hate” his mother for the Lord’s sake. The sight of a Christian rebuking his mother, though tragic, may be edifying; but only if we are quite sure that he has been a good son and that, in his rebuke, spiritual zeal is triumphing, not without agony, over strong natural affection. The moment there is reason to suspect that he enjoys rebuking her—that he believes himself to be rising above the natural level while he is still, in reality, groveling below it in the unnatural—the spectacle becomes merely disgusting.”

We should not find genuine attempts to right wrongs of the past repugnant if done with a spirit of contrition and genuine respect and affection for our forebears. What we should find repugnant are attempts at trying to do so out of smug self-righteousness that we are better than our forebears, casting ourselves as both the virtuous “penitent” and virtuous “saviour” to save today’s woes.

A diagnostic question: does it cost me anything?

As Kevin DeYoung also reminds us, we should be mindful of the costliness of repentance in assessing whether it is genuine or not:

“It also bears mentioning that public apologies are more or less appropriate based on whether their cost is mainly to us or mainly to someone else. When someone steeped in Southern Presbyterianism apologizes in tears for the sins of the nineteenth-century Presbyterians he grew up revering, that costs something. When college kids who have never been tempted in their lives to idolize Richard the Lionheart set up confessional booths on campus to apologize for the Crusades, that costs next to nothing. One is a public expression of personal lament; the other is a personal expression of public virtue (of our own) and public accusation (of others).”

Questions worth considering before making public apologies

Am I confessing sins I personally share in, benefit from, or continue?

Does my “we” include me in blame, or only in virtue?

Would I say this if it cost me social capital?

Do I speak with affection for my forebears, or with contempt?

Am I more eager to denounce than to repent?

For further reading:

Lewis, C.S. “Dangers of National Repentance.” In God in the Dock, 205-8. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

1970.

DeYoung, Kevin. “How the Bible Talks about Corporate Responsibility and Repentance”, https://clearlyreformed.org/how-the-bible-talks-about-corporate-responsibility-and-repentance accessed 10 May 2026.

– Bryan Kim