Lessons in Grace from Charleston as America Turns 250

America's 250th birthday came and went on July 4, 2026, and I have been thinking since then about which stories the country chose to tell about itself and which ones it quietly left out. One piece that stayed with me was Chris Crawford's reflection at Interfaith America, written after his pilgrimage to Charleston, South Carolina with the Faith and Politics Institute. His subject is grace. I want to take that subject and walk it a little further than a news response usually goes, because I think Charleston asks something of anyone who cares about how people live together across deep difference.

Why does Charleston matter as America turns 250?

Charleston is a city where the country's best claims and its worst facts sit within walking distance of each other. The Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, and the 250th anniversary of that date was July 4, 2026. Charleston was also a major port in the slave trade, the site where the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and the home of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the oldest Black congregations in the South.

A birthday invites a certain kind of storytelling. We reach for founding documents and the language of ideals. A pilgrimage to Charleston does the opposite: it makes you stand where ideals were betrayed and ask what a country does with that. In my view, that is the more honest way to mark an anniversary, and it is the reason the Faith and Politics Institute, which has long organized bipartisan pilgrimages for members of Congress, builds its work around visiting places rather than debating positions.

The word "pilgrimage" matters here too. A conference asks you to bring your arguments. A pilgrimage asks you to bring your attention. You go somewhere heavy and you let it be heavy before you try to do anything about it.

What happened at Emanuel AME Church in 2015?

On the evening of June 17, 2015, a young white man named Dylann Roof sat for about an hour in a Wednesday night Bible study at Emanuel AME Church and then opened fire. Nine people were killed: Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson. Pinckney was the church's pastor and a South Carolina state senator.

The church itself carried history that the attacker may or may not have known. Emanuel AME was founded in 1816, and after the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822 the building was burned and the congregation was forced to meet in secret for years. In 2015 a congregation that had survived that long was gathered in prayer when it was attacked, and it was Black Charlestonians who were asked, once again, to absorb the violence and decide what to do next.

Roof was later convicted in federal court and sentenced to death in January 2017. The legal story is settled. The story I find more instructive is what happened two days after the shooting.

What does grace look like in practice?

At Roof's bond hearing on June 19, 2015, family members of the victims were given the chance to speak to him by video link. Several of them did something that startled the country. Nadine Collier, whose mother Ethel Lance had been killed, told him she forgave him. Anthony Thompson, the husband of Myra Thompson, offered forgiveness and urged Roof to repent and give his life to Christ. Others spoke through tears of their anguish alongside their faith, and none of them pretended the loss was small.

A week later, on June 26, President Obama delivered the eulogy for Clementa Pinckney in Charleston and sang the first verse of "Amazing Grace." He spent much of the speech on the word itself, calling grace a free and unmerited gift. That framing is useful because it separates grace from the things we usually confuse it with.

I have come to think grace is the most misunderstood word in public life. People hear it and assume it means letting someone off the hook, or being nice, or putting a good face on a bad situation. What the families in that courtroom did was nothing like that. They named a murder, they grieved out loud, and they still refused to let hatred have the last word about who they were. That is a much harder thing than politeness, and it is also a much harder thing than agreement.

How is grace different from tolerance, forgiveness, and reconciliation?

These words get used as if they were interchangeable, and in public conversation they rarely are. I find a simple comparison helps, especially for groups trying to figure out what they are actually asking of each other.

The last column is the one I would underline. Grace and forgiveness can be offered by a single person in a single moment, which is part of why they are so striking when they appear. Reconciliation takes two parties and a long time. The families at the bond hearing offered grace without anyone being able to promise reconciliation, and I think that distinction explains a lot of the arguments people have afterward about whether such gestures "worked."

I wrote earlier about why surface-level civility is not enough, and Charleston sharpens that point. Tolerance would have been a perfectly respectable response to the shooting, and nobody could have faulted a community for stopping there. What those families offered went past tolerance into something that costs the giver a great deal, which is part of why it carried the moral weight it did.

Did grace change anything in Charleston?

This is the question I most want to be careful with, because it is where grace stories tend to go wrong. It is tempting to tell the Charleston story as a tidy redemption arc, and the evidence does not support one.

Some things did change. On July 9, 2015, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley signed legislation to remove the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds, and the flag came down the next day, July 10. That was a concrete political result in a state where the flag had flown for decades, and it followed directly from the attention the shooting brought.

But grace did not undo the killings, it did not end racism in South Carolina or anywhere else, and it was never the families' job to fix the country. A number of Black commentators and some of the survivors themselves have said plainly that the public celebration of forgiveness can become a way for everyone else to feel better while the underlying injustice stays in place. I think that criticism is fair, and any honest reflection on Charleston has to hold it next to the beauty of what happened in that courtroom.

So here is the tension I keep coming back to. Grace given freely is a gift, but a society that expects grace from the people it harmed has turned a gift into a debt. The lesson, I think, is not that victims should forgive. It is that the rest of us should be moved by those who do, and should then do our own work instead of waiting for them to do it for us.

What does this mean for communities practicing civil dialogue?

Most of us will never be asked to forgive a murderer. We will be asked, repeatedly, to sit across from a neighbor, coworker, or relative who holds a political or moral view that feels like an injury to us. The scale is different, but I think the shape is similar, and Charleston offers a few things worth carrying into those smaller rooms.

Name the harm before you offer the gift

The families at the bond hearing did not skip the grief. Their grace was credible because it sat next to honesty about what had been lost. In dialogue groups I have seen the opposite move go badly: someone rushes to peace-making language before the other person has been heard, and the rush reads as dismissal. Naming the harm first is what makes grace sound like grace instead of avoidance. The practice of reflective listening, which I explore in the three tiers of mirroring, exists to make sure the person feels accurately heard before anything else is asked of them.

Separate what you extend from what you require

Grace does not depend on the other person changing, and that is what makes it unusual. In a community, this means you can decide how you will treat someone without making your decency conditional on their agreement. It does not mean you stop disagreeing. It means the disagreement happens inside a relationship you have chosen not to abandon.

Expect it to cost something

I think a lot of civility programs fail because they promise that good behavior will be comfortable. Grace is not comfortable. It asks you to hold your anger and your generosity in the same hand, and anyone who tells you that is easy has not tried it.

Do not outsource it to the wounded

The most important caution from Charleston is that grace cannot be demanded. Groups that want to practice forgiveness should be especially careful about who they are asking to forgive whom. If the burden always falls on the same people, the practice has become a tool of the powerful, which is the opposite of what it was meant to be.

Why does a pilgrimage teach what a debate cannot?

I keep returning to the form of the Faith and Politics Institute's work, because the form seems to matter as much as the content. Taking people to a place, having them hear from those who lived the history, and giving them time to sit with it before they speak is a very different experience from a panel or a hearing. It slows people down.

That connects to something I believe about dialogue more generally. Most of our public conversation is built for speed and performance, which means it rewards the quickest rebuttal. Grace needs the opposite conditions: silence, presence, and a willingness to be changed a little by what you hear. I have written about how pauses transform conversations, and I think a pilgrimage is a way of building a very long pause into a political life.

There is also something worth noticing about who goes on these trips. Members of Congress are people whose daily work rewards performance and punishes vulnerability. Putting them in a church where nine people were murdered, with no cameras demanding a talking point, gives them a chance to be a person first. Whether that carries back into votes and negotiations is a fair thing to wonder about, and I do not think anyone can promise it does. But I would rather have leaders who have stood in that room than leaders who have only read about it.

What can ordinary readers take from Charleston at 250?

A 250th anniversary is a natural moment to ask what kind of country we want to hand to the next generation. I do not think the answer is a more flattering story. I think it is a more complete one, told by people willing to stand in the uncomfortable places and let those places teach them something.

For those of us who build or belong to communities, whether a congregation, a neighborhood group, a workplace, or a family, Charleston raises a practical question. What would it look like for your group to be able to hold both its ideals and its failures in the same conversation, without needing to resolve the tension quickly? In my experience the groups that can do that are the ones that last.

I do not know exactly what Charleston's lessons will mean for the next 250 years. I do know that nine people were killed at a Bible study, that their families answered with something the country is still trying to understand, and that the right response to that is probably not a conclusion. It is an open door, and a willingness to keep walking through it.

Last updated: 2026-10-24

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston?

On June 17, 2015, a gunman attended a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed nine people, including pastor and state senator Clementa Pinckney. The attacker, Dylann Roof, was later convicted and sentenced to death in federal court in January 2017.

What did the victims' families say at the bond hearing?

At the June 19, 2015 bond hearing, several family members addressed Roof directly. Nadine Collier, whose mother Ethel Lance was killed, told him she forgave him, and Anthony Thompson, husband of victim Myra Thompson, also offered forgiveness while urging him to repent. They spoke about their grief openly as well.

Is grace the same as forgiveness?

Not quite. Grace is goodwill extended without being earned, while forgiveness is releasing a claim of vengeance against someone who harmed you. Neither requires trust or agreement, and neither is the same as reconciliation, which needs effort from both sides over time.

Why does the Faith and Politics Institute organize pilgrimages?

The Faith and Politics Institute takes groups, including members of Congress, to places of historical significance so they can listen and reflect together before debating. The approach treats shared experience of a place as a foundation for conversation across political divides.

How can groups practice grace without excusing harm?

Start by naming the harm honestly and making sure the affected person feels heard. Then extend goodwill without making it conditional on agreement, and take care never to place the burden of forgiveness on the people who were wronged.