The Metcalf Murder and The Pursuit of Justice
Three weeks ago, 17-year-old Austin Metcalf, a white, straight-A student and football star, was stabbed to death at a suburban high school track meet in Frisco, Texas. Karmelo Anthony, a black student from another school, had been asked to leave the tent of Metcalf’s team and refused. When Metcalf attempted to remove him, Anthony plunged a knife into his heart. The boy died in the arms of his twin brother.
The murder, which received relatively scant mainstream media attention, has provoked a torrent of online commentary, most of it centering on Metcalf’s father. In an interview just one day after his son was slain, Jeff Metcalf insisted that there was no racial angle to the crime, and that he forgave his son’s killer. Understandably, many observers struggled to believe that any father, overwhelmed by grief, could genuinely offer such immediate forgiveness. The killer had expressed no remorse, and even claimed, implausibly, that he stabbed the unarmed Metcalf in “self-defense.”
Anthony’s family are framing their son as a victim, and have raised over half a million dollars for his defense. They’ve subsequently moved into a fancy new rental home, allegedly to escape harassment, while mounting a public and inflammatory campaign in Anthony’s defense. And yet Jeff Metcalf, an evangelical Christian, continues to insist on forgiveness, despite facing harassment more intense than that targeting the Anthony family. Metcalf even had a SWAT team called to his door, presumably in an attempt to get him shot by police.
I can only imagine the agony Jeff Metcalf is suffering, and I don’t wish to judge any parent for their response in the face of such a loss. Nonetheless, Metcalf’s response raises important questions about the nature of Christian forgiveness and the double standards our culture imposes on victims of violent crime.
“Going on TV to forgive the murderer of your child, especially right after it happened, is about the worst advertisement for Christianity imaginable,” the pseudonymous account @Fischerking posted on X, echoing a widespread sentiment. “If you want to sink efforts at evangelism, this would be a way to do it.”
Yet, among Christians, the father had his defenders as well. Babylon Bee managing editor Joel Berry said that “If you claim to be a Christian and feel disgusted at a Christian brother’s radical, supernatural, otherworldly act of forgiveness, you need to examine yourself, turn to Christ, and ponder the possibility you aren’t really a Christian.” Or as Troy Frasier, Co-Creator of Revived Studios and host of Revived Thoughts, a Christian History podcast, wrote, “It’s absolutely disturbing that so many Christians see forgiveness like that father had as radical. This used to be something all Christians could support and celebrate. It’s what has always made Christianity different was [sic] our beliefs on forgiveness.”
And as popular podcaster Steven Crowder put it, “In what was likely the worst moment of his life Jeff Metcalf. . . chose to lean on God and forgive. Now let me ask you, let’s take race out of it, which kind of dad do you want to emulate?”
But Crowder’s defense of Jeff Metcalf unintentionally hits on the key problem: It is very hard to “take race out of it.” When 87% of Black-White interracial violence is black on white, according to FBI statistics, race is inherently part of the equation. While there’s no direct evidence that Metcalf’s murder was motivated by racial hatred (presumably what his father has in mind when he says the crime isn’t about race), it remains an instance of a larger societal problem, one that won’t be solved without addressing race head-on.
Our impulse to overlook race when the victim is white often stems from what pastor Joe Rigney calls “the sin of empathy.” While praising Metcalf for attempting to show that he was anchored in Christ even in the face of tragedy, Rigney said, “I think it does evidence a kind of catechism that’s that like the shape of it is influenced by the world.” Adding (quoting Chesterton) that “Mercy detached from justice grows unmerciful.” Other well-known Christian podcasters, such as Allie Beth Stuckey, made similar points about the case.
Pastor Andrew Isker put it more bluntly, calling Metcalf’s prompt forgiveness “a total subversion of ordered loves.” He continues,
The mental, emotional, and spiritual damage done to good people like this, where their decency is abused to show more compassion to murderers than justice to your own child is incalculable. To react this way after the life of your child—who was just about to embark upon manhood—was savagely snuffed out fills me with rage. Not at the man himself. . . .He’s saying what he has been catechized and trained to say over the course of a lifetime. But [at] the people that have abused the kindness and decency of men like him.
Unconditional forgiveness is encouraged in these cases in the same spirit that pastors are admonished not to get political, with “political” covering only things that offend the left. And it is encouraged not merely by cultural scripts, but by public officials. There is even a Justice Department “community relations service” that rushes in to keep the peace by feeding de-escalatory scripts to white victims (or their families) when racially charged crimes such as this occur.
Conversely, there were no loud public demands for George Floyd’s family to forgive Derek Chauvin or for Trayvon Martin’s family to forgive George Zimmerman. When family members of the black churchgoers slain by Dylan Roof publicly forgave him, secularists (and some leftwing Christians) actually criticized them for playing out a script allegedly written by whites to make blacks passive. But forgiveness that only goes one way isn’t truly Christian. It negates other virtues, such as justice and fairness.
While I have no reason to believe that Jeff Metcalf was coerced, or even guided, in his language, he has performed the role that society demands of white Americans in this situation with aplomb. Even assuming his intentions were perfectly sincere—and to that extent, faithfully Christian—Metcalf’s response still reinforces an unjust cultural script that mocks genuinely Christian forgiveness. How do we escape the double bind that society places us in?
Not only does Christ command his followers to forgive, but our own forgiveness is bound up with our forgiving of others. But just as Christ’s unconditional forgiveness does not preclude his role as judge, our forgiving of others does not preclude us from demanding legal justice, or from acknowledging the full cultural import of the sins committed against us. We should not allow Christian forgiveness to be co-opted as a tool for social control. One way of preempting such abuse is by refusing to minimize (that is, to falsify) the sins we forgive.
This requires courage. One of the church’s greatest current crises is the masking of cowardice by a false mask of virtue. Too often we appeal to empathy as a way to avoid speaking hard truths. Or we limit our forgiveness to only the most convenient political targets. Christian forgiveness is too powerful and transformative to be uncoupled from truth.
