Defining a shift estimand on forgivingness without domesticating forgiveness: Comment on Cowden et al.

This commentary responds to Cowden et al.’s (2026) careful epidemiologic study of the population-wide changes in well-being that might follow from two explicitly defined “shift” scenarios applied to a three-item forgivingness measure. I value the paper’s candor about its counterfactual aim: it is not asking whether forgiveness is good in the abstract, but what could plausibly happen if the distribution of measured forgivingness were moved in specified ways. I argue that Cowden et al.’s (2026) methodological clarity surfaces what remains ethically and theologically decisive. In Christian thought, forgiveness is not simply an emotion-regulation technique or a general prosocial disposition; it is a demanding practice formed by grace and ordered toward truth, justice, mercy, and (where possible) repair. When we compress that “thick” practice into a several-item scale for administration in population surveys, we risk treating qualitatively different moral realities as interchangeable. This thinning is subject to the same critique when applied to intervention: a shift estimand tells us what might follow from a distributional change but not how to bring it about; and different ways of cultivating forgiveness may not be morally or practically interchangeable, even if they produce the same numerical shift. While the rigor Cowden et al. (2026) bring to this literature is commendable, the remaining challenge is to connect distributional shifts in forgivingness scores to the concrete practices and communal disciplines that form forgiveness as a moral reality rather than a psychological technique.