What is “public confession,” and what is its relation to the practice of sharing one’s testimony? When and how does sharing a testimony verge into public confession? Why does public confession have to be “public,” and what concerns does this raise? In this second of a two-part pair of episodes, Dan explores these and other questions.
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Axis Mundy You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
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Hello and welcome to It's In The Code, a series with the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller.
I am professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with all of you who are listening, as always.
Before going any further, I just want to begin by thanking all of you who support us, those of you who, as I always say, sort of suffer through the ads, those of you who are patrons and support us financially, those of you who contact us.
And again, I always welcome your contact, Daniel Miller Swedge, danielmillerswajatgmail.com.
Feedback about this series, anything else related to the podcast.
We couldn't do it without you, and so I say thank you to all of you.
Before diving into this week's episode, I also want to just remind folks that Sarah Mosliner's seminar is kicking into gear.
If you're interested in that, check out Straight White American Jesus dot com and find the information.
Would love for people to be involved in that.
Looking at purity culture, relations to nationalism and race and issues like that.
Again, Sarah is one of the foremost experts on these topics and really does a phenomenal job.
So if that's something of interest to you, please check it out.
All right, diving into this episode.
Probably have more to cover than I probably should.
Last episode, I looked at the concept of testimony, of giving somebody's testimony, of sharing one's testimony, of what this language of testimony is.
And we talked about how a defining feature of testimony is its publicly shared nature.
I talked about it as this kind of highly stylized discourse, typically given in public, where you sort of share this story about who God is, what God has done in your life, and so forth.
And I noted there that that publicly shared nature of testimony means that it can play a number of different social roles.
But I also suggested that it can also bleed into the phenomenon of public confession.
I promised to talk about this in this week's episode, and so that's our focus.
This is sort of a continuation of that theme, a transformation, if you like, that can occur, a shift that sometimes can be subtle, sometimes it can be very pronounced.
From testimony to public confession.
And public confession isn't a universal feature that I'm aware of, and I'm happy to hear from folks if your experience is different, or if there are denominations or traditions that maybe I'm less familiar with, sort of from the inside, as it were, where this is a sort of public Routine kind of practice.
But public confession typically, I think, is not a universal feature in any particular denomination.
And while Christian traditions in which the public sharing of testimonies, and again, not all Christian traditions sort of feature testimonies in the same way, But those that do, I would think, would be logically more likely to feature public confession.
But even within those traditions and those congregations, I would say it's not a typical practice that I'm aware of.
And again, I'd be happy to hear otherwise.
I do have experience with this, with the phenomenon of public confession.
I'm simply saying that I don't think that it's sort of a routinized, every day or every Sunday kind of practice and traditions that I'm aware of.
But what is public confession?
Well, what I have in mind is the practice Whereby individuals within a congregation come up before the congregation and publicly share, just as they were at the testimony, but here what they are publicly sharing is an admission of wrongdoing.
This is always going to be something of an ethical nature.
It's not usually simply something sort of doctrinal or esoteric.
It's usually a moral failing of some kind.
And very often, though not always, but it might be hard to find very many exceptions to this, It's often of an explicitly sexual nature, right?
And it's not unlike what you'd be familiar with sort of within popular culture.
Over time, we've become more familiar with sort of high-profile entertainers or business leaders publicly acknowledging moral lapses or missteps.
And they've kind of gained, I think, a higher public profile in the ongoing wake of the Me Too movement.
For example, if you've observed American popular culture, you've seen a secular analog, as it were, of this phenomenon.
As I said a minute ago, I've experienced this phenomenon of public confession.
I've seen it take different forms.
I've heard of it taking different forms.
I've seen voluntary unscripted and unplanned incidents where somebody will simply ask to come up and share a word or go back and listen to the episode about sharing a word, sharing a word with the congregation, and then they actually end up sharing About a moral failing.
One of the most awkward experiences I ever had.
I was a college student at a conservative Christian college in Oklahoma, and we would go and visit different churches on weekends.
It is the proverbial buckle of the Bible Belt, so there are a lot of different churches.
We went to this one, I think it was a non-denominational church, Not huge, but really energetic, and several college students went there and so forth.
And this person gets up—actually, I think it was the worship leader who was a layperson, so not a pastor of the church—who confesses their sort of
On the spot that he's having an affair with another member of the church who is also present and the whole service kind of ground to this awkward halt and the pastor like grabs this guy and takes him off to the side and wants to have a chat.
Anyway, it was it was really weird.
But that was a voluntary kind of unscripted unplanned incidents of public confession.
I've seen instances where a congregant was compelled to publicly share misdeeds, sort of under threat of expulsion from the church.
The tradition I grew up in, and we've talked about this some on the podcast, I think is most evangelical traditions.
Don't have a mechanism for what a Catholic might call excommunication.
They're not that hierarchically organized.
You can't expel them from a denomination.
But there is a practice in some of these, and this for me was an experience in the American South of what was known colloquially as churching or churching someone.
Which was exercising so-called church discipline, which was essentially excommunication from an individual congregation.
And so I was involved in an incident where somebody close to me had had an extramarital affair and was compelled under threat of being, you know, sort of kicked out of the church.
to publicly confess that this had happened before the congregation.
I've seen instances where the sharing of public confessional was part of a broader testimony service, so a special service built around testimony, but also included a time where people would come up and share these moral lapses.
There, it was more stylized and a little bit less heavy.
They weren't Usually sharing like big earth-shattering things like, you know, extramarital affairs and stuff.
They would talk about, you know, continuing to really struggle with greed or with, you know, this or that or the other.
So it fit a little bit more in that kind of standard testimony model, but it bled into the practice of public confession.
Those in a certain generation might be familiar with something like the example of And televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart, who offered tearful confessions of wrongdoings in which they've been caught.
And if people want to Google this, they can, if you're not familiar with it.
Again, if you're of a certain generation, my age and older, certainly, you might remember Jimmy Swaggart, you know, full of tears, tearfully professing to his congregation that he had fallen into sin and so forth, right?
And again, that context is usually not as unscripted as it might look.
It's usually an effort to avoid kind of institutional or congregational discipline or to head that off, or it can be a condition of continuing a ministry or whatever.
And of course, in all of these things, in the age of social media, the public nature of public confession takes on a significantly different nuance.
So public comes to mean something different.
Public confession used to just mean the people there in that service would see this.
At the time I was at this church as an undergrad, there was no live stream.
Probably the service was recorded, but it wasn't broadcast, I don't think, anywhere.
So public meant, you know, everybody who was there heard this.
Um, public now, of course, can mean that the world and anybody who follows somebody on social media can hear it.
Okay.
So that's what I mean by public confession and how does it relate to testimony?
I think it's important to understand, going back to their prior episode, that in Christian terms, the way the Christians will talk about this, that falling under conviction from God, which means coming to an acknowledgment of God's condemnation of one act, that God has quote-unquote convicted one that something they've done was wrong.
In other words, God has made them feel guilty for doing something that they should feel guilty for.
Falling under conviction is understood to be a part of faithful Christian life.
Part of being a good Christian is being responsive to the times when God, kind of speaking as your conscience, tells you that something was wrong.
And sharing this sense of conviction, being honest about this, is a part of sharing one's account of God's working in your life.
And that was the heart of testimony.
So public confession understood in these terms is a form of testimony.
That's the connection.
But testimony is also only one dimension of public confession, and this is what I think is really important.
Because just as testimony can play lots of different social roles, so can public confession.
It can be a sort of honest acknowledgment of fault where one ought to acknowledge fault.
It can be a means of reconciliation, of being reconciled to the congregation or to one significant other.
It can play a lot of social roles.
But it also has its origins in what Christians coming out of a New Testament tradition refer to as church discipline.
There are passages in the New Testament that will talk about correcting and rebuking members of the congregation and so forth, and this is what we mean.
It's what people mean when they talk about church discipline.
It means that the public confession has an explicit disciplinary function.
And this disciplinary function is where I think the coercion that can attend practices of testimony, we talked about that in the last episode, how it can lead toward coercion and control.
This is where those issues of coercion really come back to the fore.
Every community of any degree of complexity needs what we might call disciplinary measures.
We don't usually call them that.
But they're going to need mechanisms for maintaining the standards of the community and so forth.
Anybody who's a parent or has been a family member with other family members, especially kids, understands the role of having to exercise discipline and shaping people and so forth.
Okay, fine.
But questions always have to arise as to what the purpose or aim of purported quote unquote discipline is.
Why are we exercising the practice of discipline that we are exercising?
Within a Christian context, the stated aim will always be the spiritual development and welfare of the individual, that somehow the discipline is for their spiritual benefit, as well as for the benefit of the community.
And recognition of wrongdoing, practices like confession, they've been long established Christian practices for centuries because of this.
And the more high control a particular congregation or tradition is, I think the more pronounced the need for these practices might be, or the perception of the need for these practices.
Fine.
Whatever.
Okay?
But there's also a lot of other work that is often done through public confession.
And for me, the big issue that arises here, or the red flag, every time I hear about public confession is specifically the public nature of it.
It's one thing to say that somebody in the congregation needs to be aware of what they've done or acknowledge it or whatever, and that they may need to be reconciled to the community or somewhere else, and the church may have a role in this.
And it's one thing as, say, a pastor or a church elder Or a body of elders or representative group within the church, whatever, to have to sit down with somebody behind closed doors and privately and have a conversation about things in their life or what's been going on or a violation of standards or whatever.
And I have been a pastor and I have had those conversations with people.
People in other parts of your life shall know this.
If you're a manager, if you're a supervisor, if you oversee others, you will know that you've had to have conversations sometimes behind closed doors and deal with violations of say, work policy or ethics or something like that.
You might've had to let people go, but you don't sort of parade them in front of all their other employees and make them tell them all in detail what they did and sort of have that public component.
And that public component to me.
is where there's often a red flag.
And even here, it's complicated.
We've encountered lots of recent instances where we feel confession should have been public, or at least transparent.
Think of all the clergy abuse scandals that have gone on, and the criticism is always that things were kept quiet, that they were handled behind closed doors, and so on.
But most examples of public confession are not about that.
They're often the result of a demand by clergy and other church leaders, leveled against members of the congregation, that they have to publicly share something about their life, a moral shortcoming or a moral failing within their life.
And the question of why these need to be public has to be asked.
And the reason is, the question that arises is, is it truly necessary for the correction or even the quote-unquote rebuking, that's the biblical language of the individual, the individuals involved, or is it aimed at something else?
And many times the answer is no, it's not really about helping the individual.
It's not really about their benefits.
The aims, almost always, are social control at the cost of the individual involved.
That's why it is such a red flag for me when I hear stories of, let's say, coerced public confession or requirements of public confession, or why, even as a teenager, I would squirm in my seat when somebody was brought before the congregation to have to share some moral failing.
Because it didn't seem, it didn't feel like the aim was the benefit of that individual.
It felt like it was social control at the cost of that individual.
And particularly within high-control religious environments, and this is where this is most likely to happen, within those high-control environments, public confession is not an aid to the congregant.
It's intended as a form of public punishment.
And again, we're familiar with this.
Oftentimes the outing, as it were, of sexual predators and others in the Me Too movement is aimed at a kind of public punishment.
And I don't think I have a problem with that.
I do have a problem at the micro level when this occurs in congregations.
And again, the moral failings are often not at that level.
They are not harming others in the sense of being a predator or so forth.
It's something else.
So the person who has had the moral lapse or whatever is held up as, for example, a kind of cautionary tale for the rest of the congregation on what can happen to others if they are not vigilant, if they stray from the path of God.
The function of the public confession Can also then be the reinforcement of the identity of the community, but it's a sense where we build community identity by ostracizing or humiliating or punishing those among us who maybe are viewed as having strayed or not walking the line or not doing what we think they should do.
The person making the confession is marked publicly as an object of shame.
You can think of like a classic story like the Scarlet Letter.
It's that, but in a contemporary key, right?
The person who makes the public confession becomes an object of shame or condemnation or ridicule or a second-class citizen within their congregation, despite all the language of reconciling them and accepting them back and so forth.
They become the other within the congregation, whose only role then is to reinforce the group identity of the rest of the congregation.
They also come to be perceived as a kind of internal threat to other members of the congregation who might be tempted to follow their path, so they're often sort of shunned or ostracized.
There can also be, and this is one of the most disturbing pieces of public confession, there's often a frankly salacious intent or feel to public confession.
As I say, the confessions are often about sexual misconduct, and too often they are required of women.
who have to make confession because male church leaders have proclaimed this necessary.
And there's a kind of salacious intent here, a salacious interest in hearing the sordid details of what people have been involved in in their personal lives and these moral lapses.
And I think here it becomes part of a A larger dynamic within high-control religious environments where there often seems to be a really unseemly but telling fascination or focus on precisely those things that are deemed morally wrong.
It's the kind of thing where in some of these contexts, you'll hear more about sex and quote-unquote sexual sin and pornography and things like that in church than you will in the supposedly evil, fallen, secular world.
A kind of, again, just a salacious fascination with These wrongdoings, especially of a sexual nature.
And some of these churches and their leaders feel just obsessed with talking about and speaking about that which they say is morally unspeakable, and putting people on display who they can simultaneously blame and kind of externalize their own sins upon, while also fulfilling this creepy, salacious desire For information and sordid details.
And this is often a part of public confession as well.
And for me, again, even as a teen in some of these contexts, just being profoundly uncomfortable with this.
So that's this notion of public confession.
I don't know that there's a lot more to decode there other than what I view oftentimes as a kind of doublespeak between what churches will say is the purpose of these, the defense of bringing somebody up and making them share these kinds of sort of details, and what I think is the actual practice and the effect of people within that congregation.
I will say this, if A basic fundamental tenet of a pastor or other church leader is that part of their role is to care for the souls of those, so to speak, in their congregation, to seek to be redemptive, to bring about redemption in their lives.
I will say that acts of public confession, for me, are rarely ever redemptive.
They may play other roles.
They may play punitive roles.
They may play roles of vengeance.
They may bring about a sense of vindication for people who've been wronged in different ways.
All of those roles can be played, but I think that they're rarely, if ever, truly redemptive.
And I think that that is something that within a context of a religious community that claims redemption as its purpose is a really telling So again, public confession is perhaps not something that everybody listening will have experienced.
I know some of you have.
I have heard from some of you, again, in my practice with the religious trauma coaching.
Again, I'm a coach with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
I have clients who have dealt with this, both being called upon to confess publicly, but also having seen these kinds of confessions, having the same kind of concerns and effects that I've had.
I know it's not something everybody will have practiced.
It's not something that I think is formally codified in most worship practices.
But where it is, it's not a big leap from practices of testimony.
It is a form of testimony.
In some ways, it plays the same role or is intended to play the same role as testimony.
But I think when we get to the notion of public confession, it is a ripe planting ground for coercion and exploitation.
I think some could argue that by the time you ever have the call for public confession, you are already across the threshold of coercion and a very problematic model of social control, especially, as I say, for women who I think are sort of disproportionately affected by these practices.
Have to wrap this up.
Once again, I want to thank everybody for listening.
Please keep the ideas coming.
I respond to the emails that I can respond to.
I know I don't respond to all of them.
I do look at them.
I do value the insights.
Daniel Miller Swag, Daniel Miller SWAJ.
I do also want to continue putting out a plug for the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
I know that these episodes resonate with a lot of folks.
I know that they bring up a lot of issues.
I know that for a lot of people, they do have trauma tied into some of these topics that we decode.
If that's you, check out the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
It can be a tremendous resource.
Until next time, I want to thank everybody for listening.
All of you could be doing something different than listening to me right now.
