Whether you are a politician caught carrying on with an intern or a
minister photographed with a prostitute, discovery does not necessarily
spell the end of your public career. Admit your sins carefully, using
the essential elements of an evangelical confession identified by Susan
Wise Bauer in The Art of the Public Grovel, and you, like Bill
Clinton, just might survive.
In this fascinating and important history of public confession in modern
America, Bauer 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--even
when the wrongdoer has no connection with evangelicalism and the context
is thoroughly secular. She shows how Protestant revivalism, group
psychotherapy, and the advent of talk TV combined to turn
evangelical-style confession into a mainstream secular rite. Those who
master the form--Bill Clinton, Jimmy Swaggart, David Vitter, and Ted
Haggard--have a chance of surviving and even thriving, while those who
don't--Ted Kennedy, Jim Bakker, Cardinal Bernard Law, Mark Foley, and
Eliot Spitzer--will never really recover.
Revealing the rhetoric, theology, and history that lie behind every
successful public plea for forgiveness, The Art of the Public Grovel
will interest anyone who has ever wondered why Clinton is still popular
while Bakker fell out of public view, Ted Kennedy never got to be
president, and Law moved to Rome.
