Sexual Scandal and the Rise of Public Confession

W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2007 The art of the public grovel: Sexual scandal and the rise of public confession Susan Wise Bauer College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons, Religion Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Bauer, Susan Wise, "The art of the public grovel: Sexual scandal and the rise of public confession" (2007). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623323. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-nc99-ny34 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Scandal and the Rise of Public Confession Susan Wise Bauer Charles City, Virginia Master of Arts, The College of William and Mary, 1994 Master of Divinity, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1991 Bachelor of Arts, Liberty University, 1988 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the College of William and Mary in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy American Studies Program The College of William and Mary May, 2007 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3268797 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 3268797 Copyright 2007 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPROVAL PAGE This Dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Susan Wise Bauer Apprqvftd by the Cprnnn|jttee, Ap 007 \ i k Committee Chair Associate Professor Maureen Fitzgerald, American Studies and Religious Studies The College of William and Mary Professor Susan Donaldson, English The College of William and Mary Associate Professor Chandos M. Brown, American Studies and History The College of William and Mary A. Professor Mark Noll, History University of Notre Dame Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT PAGE Between 1969 and 2002, three American politicians (Edward Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton) and three ordained clergymen (Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Cardinal Bernard Law) made public confessions of wrongdoing to national audiences. These public confessions reveal that Protestant religious culture, particularly the neoevangelical culture of the twentieth century, had changed the expectations of many who did not consider themselves within neoevangelicalism’s sphere of influence. By tracing the historical development of public confession from its medieval roots to its use in twentieth-century entertainment programming, this dissertation shows that Protestant confessional practice affected both secular American political discourse and American Catholic expectations. Examination of these six confessions further shows that, in order to survive the ordeal of public confession, leaders must identify themselves with the weak and dispossessed, place themselves on the right side of a holy war against evil, and give followers the power to take part in the cleansing ritual of forgiveness. This study concludes that, by the end of the twentieth century, Americans who were neither Protestant nor neoevangelical had nevertheless come to expect a Protestant ritual of public confession from erring leaders, and also demanded a role in the task of forgiveness and restoration. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction 1 Chapter One. The Early Days of Scandal: Refusing to Confess 18 Chapter Two. Confessing More than Once: Confession Goes Public 53 Chapter Three. Confession Goes Live: The Fundamentalist Takeover 99 of the Airwaves Chapter Four. An Evolving Expectation: Public Confession, 144 Edward Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter Chapter Five. The Holy War Decade: Choosing Sides 174 Chapter Six. Success and Failure: Bill Clinton and Cardinal Law 217 Conclusion 281 Postscript. Will Ted Haggard Rise Again? 284 Works Cited 290 Appendix I. Edward Kennedy’s Confession 307 Appendix II. Jimmy Carter’s Confession of “Lust in My Heart” 310 Appendix III. Jim Bakker’s Original Confession 312 Appendix IV. Jimmy Swaggart’s Sermon of Confession 318 Appendix V. President Clinton’s Statements and Confessions 322 Appendix VI. Bernard Law’s Apologies 341 Vita 357 i Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Introduction On the evening of August 17,1998, Bill Clinton faced the American television viewing audience with an embarrassing admission. Despite earlier denials, he had indeed been having sexual liasons with a White House intern twenty years his junior. “I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate,” he said. “In fact, it was wrong.... I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.” He regretted it even more in December, when the House impeached him for perjury. But two months later, the Senate voted to acquit him. His approaches to conservative Protestant ministers before and leading up to a White House prayer breakfast succeeded in garnering him public expressions of support from superstar pastors Gordon MacDonald and Tony Campolo, among others. He left office with a 65 percent approval rating, higher than any other departing president in history; five years later, another poll found that he was not only more popular than the sitting president but was considered more honest.1 His autobiography, released in 2004, sold more than 400,000 copies in hardback; he won a Grammy for the audiobook version, which he read himself. In 2006, he received several different honorary 1 CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, Jan. 5-7, 2001; Opinion Research Corporation Poll, May 5-7, 2006. Archived by CNN at http://archives.cnn.eom/2001/ALLPOLITICS/stories/01/10/cnn.poll.clinton and http://edition.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/12/bush.clinton.poll/index.html. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 doctorates, as well as the Fulbright Prize for International Understanding. In that same year, Hillary Clinton’s staff told the Atlantic Monthly that the ex-President was encouraged to stay away from his wife’s fundraising events, since it was impossible to keep media attention away from him and on the Senator. Four years later, an entirely different sort of confession unfolded in front of a much less receptive crowd of listeners. On November 3, 2002, Cardinal Bernard Law faced his congregation at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and told them, “I did assign priests who had committed sexual abuse....I acknowledge my own responsibility for decisions which led to intense suffering....I ask forgiveness in my name and in the name of those who served before me.” But this confession did not redeem Cardinal Law in the eyes of either his flock or his colleagues. A public call by other priests for Law’s resignation forced him to step down, just four weeks after his Holy Cross confession. He also resigned his position as chairman of the board of The Catholic University of America, left the United States, and moved to Rome. Taken together, Clinton’s confession and Law’s resignation signal the final stages of a massive shift in the practice of public confession. As late as 1884, presidential candidate Grover Cleveland could avoid publicly confessing the sexual indiscretions that had produced an illegitimate child, and still win his election; as late as 1926, Protestant evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson could refuse to admit to her national audience that she had spent two weeks living in a beach bungalow with her married sound engineer and still keep the loyalty of thousands of followers. But by the end of the twentieth century, a wider and wider segment of the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 American public expected that sin would be followed by public contrition. The verbal confession of sin had become first and foremost a horizontal act, a levelling device that rebalanced the relationship between leader and followers. Terms and definitions The evangelical preaching of earlier centuries poured the foundation for much of American Protestantism. However, in the early twentieth century, a vocal subset

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