The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America

By Susan Wise Bauer

Princeton University Press

352 pages, $26.95

We are living, writes Susan Wise Bauer, in an Age of Public Confession, now at least forty years in duration. Confession, she makes clear, differs from apology. Apology is easy (“I am sorry”), but confession is hard (“I am sorry because I did wrong”)— and Bauer is interested only in confessions involving predatory sexual transgression. With the exception of radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, the fallen in The Art of the Public Grovel are men. Bauer scarcely distinguishes between political and religious sinners, seeing them all as moral leaders called to abase themselves before their followers. Some can pull it off and continue their public lives; some cannot.

The list is a depressing commentary on the character of leadership in the recent era, rife as it is with egotists and even frauds. It runs from Ted Kennedy at Chappaquiddick through the televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart to Bill Clinton and Cardinal Bernard Law (who sinned by coddling the sinful among his priests). Poor Jimmy Carter gets dragged along for his ill-considered remark to Playboy about lust in his heart. And time ran out before Bauer could get to, for example, Senator Larry Craig and former presidential candidate John Edwards.

Bauer sees religious confessions as partly political, and political confessions as partly religious. “In Bill Clinton’s America,” she writes, “the intersection of Protestant practice, therapeutic technique, and talk-show ethics was complete.” She also discusses at length the differing developments of Protestant (public) and Roman Catholic (private) confessional traditions. This divergence made it all but impossible for Cardinal Law and Ted Kennedy to manage a successful public confession, while Bill Clinton, accustomed to the public acknowledgment of...

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.