Exposing the Modern Art of the Public Grovel

By: | Times-Dispatch
Published: September 14, 2008

BY TODD CULBERTSON Abook titled The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America promises a lot. Susan Wise Bauer delivers.

The holder of a Ph.D. from William and Mary and a professor there, Bauer gives readers a history of apologies and confessions by prominent Americans from Grover Cleveland -- Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?-- to Bill Clinton, Bernard Law, and the art's more recent practitioners.

Her early pages explain the difference between confessions and apologies. Confessions probe much deeper (and should) and are much more difficult to master. Apologies often inhere in confessions. Apologies are more facile, and do not automatically include confessions. A person can apologize for things he or she did not do.

Bauer places her theme in religious and cultural context. "The path from confession as a private act to confession as public ritual stretches from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 all the way to Oprah Winfrey." Individuals once confessed to priests; the exchange enjoyed the protections of confidentiality. Now they confess to constituents and television audiences.

Entertainment not only expects confession but demands it. This marks a triumph of the therapeutic dispensation associated with Oprah and her pioneering predecessor, Phil Donahue. Public confession also reflects America's evangelical strains, Bauer argues provocatively and perceptively.

She proposes reasons for the failure of Edward Kennedy's post-Chappaquiddick statement (he never recovered his chances for the presidency) and the ultimate success of Bill Clinton's post-Lewinsky statements (he left office with record-setting approval ratings).

The chapter on Cardinal Law, Catholic archbishop of Boston, proves particularly enlightening. Law bears immense personal and professional responsibility for the sexual predation scandal in his diocese and church. He failed to protect innocents who trusted priests as shepherds. His public response to the crisis reflected a subsequent failure to understand contemporary rituals.

In many respects the Roman Catholic Church has become Protestantized. Americans harbor a distrust of hierarchy. The Pilgrim fathers and mothers may have planted congregationalism in the nation's genetic code. Read Bauer for the details.

The proliferation of public confessions cheapens them, of course, but that's not the point. The purpose is to show that the miscreant -- formerly the miserable sinner -- is one of us, maybe a little worse but certainly no better.

The person making the confession often wants to avoid genuine accountability as well (see Clinton, for one). Britain's Profumo Affair set a more admirable example. Disgraced by a scandal involving sex, spies, and lies, John Profumo, a prominent Tory politician, resigned from public life and for more than 30 years devoted himself to charitable work in London's distressed neighborhoods. His duties included cleaning toilets at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house. The consequences of America's celebrity-like confessions seem more likely to include book deals and gigs as motivational speakers.

Bauer concludes:

"American democracy is not essentially evangelical but American evangelicalism is essentially democratic, so that its rituals translate seamlessly into rituals of American public life. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, huge numbers of Americans who would never identify themselves with Protestantism, let alone its evangelical forms, have unconsciously accepted not only the form of the confession but the religious language of the holy war that accompanies it."

Many will find the argument persuasive, if not necessarily comforting or pleasing.
Todd Culbertson is editor of the Editorial Pages of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Contact him at tculbertson@timesdispatch.com.