C.S. Lewis’s essay on the Dangers of National Repentance, which appears in the collection The Grand Miracle, examines the then-fashionable movement to “repent” England’s sins and to “forgive” England’s enemies:
Young Christians especially… are turning to it in large numbers. They are ready to believe that England bears part of the guilt for the present war, and ready to admit their own share in the guilt of England… Most of these young men were children… when England made many of those decisions to which the present disorders could plausibly be traced. Are they, perhaps, repenting what they have in no sense done?
If they are, it might be supposed that their error is very harmless: men fail so often to repent their real sins that the occasional repentance of an imaginary sin might appear almost desirable. But what actually happens (I have watched it happen) to the youthful national penitent is a little more complicated than that. England is not a natural agent, but a civil society… The young man who is called upon to repent of England’s foreign policy is really being called upon to repent the acts of his neighbor; for a foreign secretary or a cabinet minister is certainly a neighbor… A group of such young penitents will say, “Let us repent our national sins”; what they mean is, “Let us attribute to our neighbor (even our Christian neighbor) in the cabinet, whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy.”
The explicitly Christian language disguises how little has really changed:
All Christians know that they must forgive their enemies. But “my enemy” primarily means the man whom I am really tempted to hate… If you listen to young Christian intellectuals talking, you will soon find out who their real enemy is. He seems to have two names — Colonel Blimp and “the businessman.” I suspect that the latter usually means the speaker’s father, but that is speculation. What is certain is that in asking such people to forgive the Germans and Russians, and to open their eyes to the sins of England, you are asking them, not to mortify, but to indulge, their ruling passion.
David Foster calls this passage the two-by-four, right between the eyes:
The communal sins of which they should be told to repent are those of their own age and class — its contempt for the uneducated, its readiness to suspect evil, its self-righteous provocations of public obloquy, its breaches of the Fifth Commandment.
David Foster’s take is that “liberal guilt” is a myth:
Many “progressives”… have uncritically and without reflection adopted the ideas and values of “their own age and class” — and, while doing so, they have congratulated themselves on their courage and independence of thought. Thus, they can enjoy a great feeling of righteousness without running the risk of condemnation by those whose opinions really matter to them.