Public Confession: US/UK Perspectives

As the US election draws to its close, historian Susan Wise Bauer visits the RSA to discuss the culture of public confession, and to consider parallels between political, religious and public life in the US and the UK.

Professor Wise Bauer’s new book The Art of the Public Grovel, (Princeton, 2008) traces the history and theology of public confession in modern America, from Ted Kennedy to Bill Clinton. In the book, Wise Bauer analyses the careers of prominent public figures who have suffered a fall from grace, and explains why and how a type of confession that first arose among nineteenth-century evangelicals has today become the required form for any successful public admission of wrongdoing in the United States.

Given the predominantly secular context of British public life, what is required to rebuild a career of public service, following a serious transgression? What are the key differences in public attitudes on this side of the Atlantic to misdemeanours on the part of public figures and politicians?

Is there an art to successful confession or is genuine contrition and substantial reparation the real key to rehabilitation?

Respondent: Jonathan Aitken, Chairman of the Prison Reform Working Group, Centre for Social Justice