“Have you heard of the word ‘grace’?” I gently asked my son’s 10-year-old neighborhood friend.
She knows I’m a minister but not what a minister does. Maybe she sensed my pastoral-care energy because she often stepped away from playing Minecraft or riding scooters to share her latest troubles. This most recent time, she told me she was going to stop being friends with a classmate who cheated at handball.
Beyond the occasional Christmas or Easter service, her family didn’t go to church. And, come to think of it, nor did many of our other friends and their children. Roughly 70 percent of Americans belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque for decades before membership began declining around the turn of the century and fell below half for the first time in 2020, according to Gallup.
As religious institutions continue to recede, they leave behind a rich vocabulary that addresses something both ordinary and enormously difficult: We hurt one another, we fail one another, but we still have to figure out how to live with one another. What happens to society when our moral vocabulary becomes too small to repair our relationships?
I described grace in a way my son’s friend could understand: Grace is when we make a mistake and the other person chooses to keep loving us. Love and forgiveness feel like a really big present, something we didn’t deserve. And then we get to extend that same gift to others. She looked stunned, in a good way.
I didn’t go on to explain other good words that have withered into shells of their former selves. Repentance, for instance, doesn’t mean groveling. The Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, comes from the biblical Hebrew verb shuv, meaning “to return” or “to turn back,” and paints a picture of turning around in one’s tracks, a course correction.
Or mercy, which has a biblical Hebrew equivalent that shares a root with the word for womb, conjuring the sensation of being held even as we suffer. Or sin, which has been defined as depravity but isn’t. The predominant Greek word for sin in the New Testament means missing the mark, like an archer. Isn’t this a relief? We’re not fundamentally flawed. We do miss the mark, though, and when that happens, we can pick ourselves back up and try again.
Then there’s my favorite: humility. The Hebrew word evokes a sense of our proportion in relation to God’s majesty, like grains of sand upon the vast shores of creation. How many times have I gotten swept up in an argument with my husband, only for one of us to ask, “Could we just, for a moment, entertain each other’s perspectives?”
That simple question, propelled by humility, can move us to forgive, a word whose biblical equivalents in both Hebrew and Greek suggest the lifting or releasing of a burden. And this leads us to reconciliation, whose Greek word in the New Testament means exchange. Exchanging the need to be right for the desire to understand; exchanging what’s broken for repair.
These words are still used today, though their deeper meanings have faded from our collective understanding. In their 2006 book, “Saving Languages,” the linguists Lenore Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley, specialists in language endangerment and revitalization, argue that when a language erodes or disappears, we lose more than just vocabulary; we lose entire cultural worlds that house those words: ways of relating, values and local knowledge. In this case, the lost language is the Judeo-Christian vocabulary of morality.
What has replaced religious language for moral guidance? Professors Grenoble and Whaley observed that smaller languages tend to become displaced by those with greater political, economic and social power. The language of law and public justice — accountability, rights, reparation — has become the dominant framework through which many of us structure our relationships. What is fair? What am I owed? What are others responsible for?
The rise of neoliberalism in the late 20th century, and with it a growing familiarity with the logic of the marketplace, has also shaped how we relate to others. Scholars have described this as the “economization” of the social. The language of investment and return, cost and benefit, what one gives and what one is owed threatens to overtake private domains like our marriages, friendships and the schoolyard. It is little wonder, then, that “grace” has fallen out of our everyday vocabulary.
Grace, by definition, interrupts the logic of exchange. It is a gift freely given rather than earned or traded. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the language of the law and the marketplace, it is insufficient to the task of capturing how we seek to treat and be treated by others.
Words like equity and redress are indispensable, and we need them to name harm, protect the vulnerable and enable economic cooperation. But even in the Bible, both Jesus and Paul taught that secular courts are a last resort, and conflict should ideally be resolved with the moral resources of their tradition.
The theologian Miroslav Volf has spent much of his career bringing the power of spiritual language to bear on the secular world and even on the scale of global conflict. Dr. Volf was a young professor teaching in his native Croatia when war broke out across Communist Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, forcing his theological thinking to reckon with the ethnic cleansing and mass displacement of his people. The city where he taught at a seminary came under attack, and he watched the explosions from exile.
It was against that devastating backdrop that his scholarship began to focus on forgiveness and grace. Reconciliation, he discovered, required more than political settlements and the pursuit of justice through law. It demanded a conversion of the heart.
Our hearts must be willing to see those who hurt us as more than the sum of their errors, with stories and circumstances we may never know. Impossible as this may seem, we draw upon the boundless love of God, who never tracks our wrongdoings or holds them against us.
Spiritual language also helped foster reconciliation beyond religious boundaries in post-apartheid South Africa. In 1995, just one year after apartheid ended, South Africa established its Truth and Reconciliation Commission — a public process for victims to testify, perpetrators to acknowledge their actions and the nation to confront its history of human rights abuses. The commission was a state-created institution, established by law after apartheid, but its chair was the Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Archbishop Tutu did not hide the source of his moral imagination. He opened hearings with prayers and hymns, wearing his archbishop robes. He wove the language and practices of mercy, repentance and forgiveness into the commission’s proceedings.
Together they helped broaden the questions the nation was asking. Not just “Who committed what crime?” and “What do they deserve?” But also, “How do we tell the truth about what happened and build a new future together?”
This is the reversal I’m interested in: not the language of law traveling inward until our marriages and friendships resemble courtrooms, but the cultivation of a spiritual vocabulary within our intimate moral lives and faith communities rippling out into the public sphere.
The words themselves are not magic. American public life offers plenty of evidence that people can speak fluently of grace and mercy while remaining deeply adversarial toward those they perceive as enemies. Christian words can serve as a sacred veneer for agendas driven by the logics of law and the marketplace.
The recovery I am arguing for is not merely lexical. It’s formative. One of the central insights of Professors Grenoble and Whaley is that a language cannot be revitalized merely by preserving words in dictionaries or teaching them in classrooms.
Languages need habitats. They need stories and songs, rituals and practices, communities in which we hear them spoken and enacted from generation to generation. That’s the key indicator of whether a language will survive: Are the children actively speaking it on their own?
And, gosh, do I pray that my kids are formed as people who extend grace of their own accord before demanding what’s due. Christians hardly have a monopoly on language that enlarges the human heart. Buddhists have developed practices around karuna (compassion) and metta (loving kindness); Hindu traditions have long reflected on ahimsa (nonharm) and kshama (forgiveness and forbearance); Islam has a profound language of rahma (mercy) and tawbah (repentance or turning back).
These are not interchangeable concepts or different versions of Christian words. They arise from distinct contexts and testify to a shared truth: Diverse religious communities have accumulated remarkably sophisticated vocabularies across the centuries for what human beings can do when we hurt one another.
As formal religious participation declines, those of us who remain inside these traditions don’t need to force people to attend church or force our congregations to go back to “the way things were” — a phrase I hear much too often. The more generous way forward is to tend to the ancient wisdom entrusted to us, kindle it within ourselves and our families and then continually offer it, without coercion, to the common good.
Last month, I was exchanging emails with a friend from college. We met when we were both evangelicals; our friendship was forged inside that world. Neither of us lives there anymore. I moved toward a more progressive Christianity that is L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+-affirming, reads the Bible within its historical and literary contexts rather than literally, and honors the paths of other religious traditions. She has come to describe herself as agnostic.
We connected over how strikingly our belief systems had morphed. Then she told me, with some pride, that her daughter didn’t even know what a Christian was. I understood the pride. I understood what she had escaped and why she wanted to spare her daughter the parts of Christianity that constrained us. I had no desire to tell her that her daughter needed to become Christian.
Still, there was an ache in my chest. Oh, she may never learn what grace means.
Lydia Sohn is the author of “Here: A Spirituality of Staying in a Culture of Leaving.”
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