Whatever happened to repentance?
The phrase, “mistakes were made” is popular in politics, education, and in virtually any area where personal responsibility and sin used to be the reigning culprit. However, it does not take much to see why “mistakes were made” rather than “I have sinned” has become so popular. Someone has noted that: first, the sentence has no human subject. The speaker makes no reference to himself as in “I sinned” or “I broke the law.” As San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll translated it, “We acknowledge the existence of mistakes but have no knowledge of how they got there.” Second, the passive voice and the past tense distance the speaker from guilt; whatever might have befallen someone or something is water under the bridge. Third, it collapses the distinction between human fallibility and human culpability.
In other words, there is little or no distinction between lying and inadvertently recording the wrong phone number, i.e. sin and a real mistake. Personal responsibility is replaced with a series of mistakes, which are really no one’s fault, they just are.
As veteran New York Times correspondent, editor, and bureau chief John M. Broder put it, “Mistakes were made,” sounds “like a confession of error or even contrition, but in fact, it is not quite either one. The speaker is not accepting personal responsibility or pointing the finger at anyone else.” ((John M. Broder, “Familiar Fallback for Officials: ‘Mistakes Were Made'” New York Times Website, March 14, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/washington/14mistakes.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed June 10, 2008) )) This evasive expression stands in stark contrast to Robert E. Lee’s words to one of his generals after the Battle of Gettysburg: “[A]ll this has been my fault; it is I that have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it in the best way you can.” ((Frank Moore, The Civil War in Song and Story: 1860-1865 (P. F. Collier, 1889), 321))
In the 2007 book by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson entitled Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts ((Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007).)), Tavris and Aronson concluded that people have become “mistake-phobic,” and so they suffer moral paralysis. They become oblivious to their faults: “[W]e don’t change because we aren’t aware that we need to…” Furthermore, pride trumps repentance: “We see the admission of a mistake not as a sign that something needs to be fixed–even though such an admission often elicits the plaudits of others–but that we are weak.”
This “mistakes were made” mentality, and/or shifting blame is nothing new. It actually goes back to Adam who blamed Eve for his predicament, saying, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (Gen. 3:12).
This is the seed of the “therapeutic culture.” It grows whenever men, collectively, run headlong from responsibility.
Of course as bad as it is in politics, economics, and even personal relationships, it is exponentially worse with regard to salvation. If individuals lose the sense of personal responsibility, repentance is lost as well, and without repentance, a person cannot be saved from his sin and is therefore lost for eternity (Luke 13:3).
