A Tradition of Confessions That Don’t Come Clean

When St. Augustine sat down to write his “Confessions” near the end of the 4th century, he unwittingly created a best-selling formula for future sinners to follow. The saint’s intimate, anguished admissions of bad behavior--from trashing a neighbor’s pear tree to cohabiting with a concubine--set the benchmark for such later transgressors as Jean Jacques Rousseau and Leo Tolstoy.

Sixteen centuries later, when Rep. Gary Condit sat down with ABC’s Connie Chung to discuss his role in the Chandra Levy affair, he was faced with a very different confessional paradigm. It’s a template that dates back in American pop culture to the advent of true-romance periodicals near the end of World War I.

But it didn’t reach its apex (or nadir, some might say) until the television era. Richard Nixon was its founding godfather, Gary Hart its most hapless pupil and Bill Clinton its smoothest disciple.

This new confessional model, some would argue, isn’t about revelation or inner transformation, much less about old-fangled repentance or seeking forgiveness.

Instead, it’s a perfunctory, carefully choreographed ballet of ritual public humiliation and contrition that often fails to yield fresh insights or even an acknowledgment that any particular misdeeds were committed. Lately, it has become a way for a wife-beating pro athlete, a drug-addled Hollywood star or a politician to come forward and fess up without actually fessing up.

“It’s a form of public theater,” said social critic Wendy Kaminer, a columnist for the American Prospect and author of “I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions.” “People understand what the motions are that you’re supposed to go through, and I do think a lot of the script was written by the recovery movement 10 or 15 years ago.”

On Friday, as pundits sifted through ABC video clips, the consensus seemed to be that a stonily defiant Condit had sidestepped Chung’s most probing questions while denying that he had played any role whatsoever in the Washington intern’s May 1 disappearance.

“I’ve not been a perfect man and I’ve made my share of mistakes” was the closest Condit came to what might be called penance during the 30-minute interview. In theatrical terms, Condit denied his audience the experience of catharsis, the ritual purging of emotion that Aristotle deemed necessary to the fulfillment of tragic drama.

His performance was in marked contrast to that of President Bill Clinton, who, after initially dissembling about his relationships with Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky, later seemed eager to apologize and plead to be taken back into the fold. By at least seeming to repent, he was able to salvage public support and hold onto the White House for the remainder of his term.

Conversely, Condit on Thursday continued to blame the media for hounding him and his family with “innuendo” while casting himself in the role of a victim. “I guess people were expecting one of these big confessional spectacles, and instead they got this guy who was belligerent and hectoring and evasive,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford University linguist and occasional National Public Radio commentator.

Said Kaminer: “I would never have predicted the performance that we saw last night. I couldn’t imagine why he bothered doing it.” Even putting aside “the expectations people have of confession and contrition and seeing an Oprah moment,” she added, Condit’s approach made no strategic sense. “If you’re not going to say anything, if you’re going to stonewall, then why go on after you’ve set up expectations?”

Expectation and visual representation play important roles in the new TV contrition, which is less concerned with truth than with truth’s appearance. It’s less about whether someone is actually being sincere than about how convincingly sincerity can be portrayed. Typically, nothing in this ritual--from the tightly controlled question-and-answer interview format to the color of the confessor’s neckwear--is left to chance. The dynamics and rules of this morality play have become so generic and predictable that a significant disclosure or real moral reckoning is unlikely, and may even be impossible. Consequently, such confessions have a high voyeuristic appeal because what remains to fill the void is the chance that a few titillating details may leak out.

“When you think of Augustine’s confessions, they’re remarkably opaque in terms of detail. He’s humbling himself and the confession is made to God, who will provide forgiveness,” said Nicolas Mills, professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of “The Triumph of Meanness: America’s War Against Its Better Self.” “Here, the interviewer is in the position of God, but it’s a God who doesn’t have the power to pardon or to understand, but only to broadcast. So of course the person confessing is immediately on the defensive. Imagine a priest after you confessed saying, ‘Yuck, that’s really gross,’ or, ‘How could you do that?’ But that’s exactly what the reporters are all doing.”

Confessional pop culture probably started when health and fitness booster Bernarr Macfadden began publishing True Story magazine in 1919, said the Rev. Martin Marty, an emeritus professor of divinity studies and religious history at the University of Chicago. The magazine’s stories of wrongdoers who eventually were redeemed were so successful that they spawned endless knockoffs.

Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News Channel talk show host, dates the phenomenon’s televised beginnings to the Watergate hearings, whose confessional theatrics served as “the primer for all American politicians.” But he thinks even the no-confession confession may soon be passe.

“It doesn’t work anymore, because now the agenda is not set by the confessor; it is set by a media that is on the air 24 hours a day that has to fill time with talking heads that are going to come in and shred you if they don’t like what you’re doing,” he said. “No longer can you go on Barbara Walters, do your mea culpa and go home.”

Still, the search for public absolution isn’t likely to go away. Mexican-born artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena said he discovered its power in the mid-1990s while touring the United States with an installation-performance artwork titled “The Temple of Confession,” in which visitors were urged to confide their darkest secrets to actors who functioned as surrogate priests. Television adds a new dimension to confession, Gomez-Pena said, because Americans look to TV to validate the reality of their experience.

“So this has created the culture of performing the confession. Whether the confession is real or not becomes secondary. So in a sense we are talking about the spectacle of the talk show confession. So it needs to have a spectacle value--the more outrageous the better, the more shocking the better, and whether it was real or not is beside the point.”

It was this point that Condit failed to grasp. In contrition TV, the penance for errant politicians isn’t 20 Hail Marys, but 10 insinuating minutes on “Larry King Live.”