COMMENTARY: Confession Still Good for the Soul, But It’s Bad for Your Career

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) In the original spirit of Advent _ penitence, not shopping _ I could suggest we all confess our sins. Imagine the good it would do us to confess the sordid side of our adolescence, poor decisions made at college, slacking off at work, stupid petitions signed, harsh words spoken, […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In the original spirit of Advent _ penitence, not shopping _ I could suggest we all confess our sins.

Imagine the good it would do us to confess the sordid side of our adolescence, poor decisions made at college, slacking off at work, stupid petitions signed, harsh words spoken, bizarre ideas tried and found wanting, plans abandoned, promises not kept, bills paid late, creeds mouthed without conviction, and votes cast without forethought.


Oh, the weight we could shed!

But where? Your e-mail and computer files can become public fodder, as is happening now with data that Google has turned over in a North Carolina murder trial. Prosecutors have figured out how to pressure journalists into revealing sources. Opponents of abortion steadfastly deny any right of privacy. Government wants even more authority to break down the barrier between public and private, between political and personal.

If you decide to get honest about your past, forget about running for public office or trying for promotion. Your competition will scour your past for material to use against you. What should be a simple matter _ I made mistakes and learned from them _ will sound lame in bright lights. You would be well advised to deny everything, avoid all risks, shun new ideas. Better to hide failure than to learn from it.

Be careful, too, about admitting mistakes to your spouse. They could reappear in divorce court. Same with flaws in production, errors in performance, doubts about a business proposal, second thoughts about anything _ keep it to yourself, don’t write it down. The surest way for a competitor to slime you is to quote your own words against you.

Problem is, if we can’t take risks, how do we grow? If we can’t learn from failure, how do we acquire wisdom? If we can’t trust anyone with our depths, how deeply can we live? If we can’t admit mistakes, how can we move on from them? If an apology becomes an actionable admission, who will apologize? If doubts are treated as signs of weakness, nuances as signs of “fuzzy thinking,” and reassessments as signs of ignorance, who will dare to assess reality and to rethink?

It seems safer to have a clean record than to demonstrate any of the messiness that one normally accumulates in reaching maturity. Better to be unwise and bland than to show the scars of having lived. A “wounded healer” might be a better pastor, but the unscathed get hired.

So it is that we get a Supreme Court nominee whose singular asset was a record that was non-existent and therefore unblemished. Now a substitute nominee is twisting in the wind over the unremarkable experience of having said 20 years ago what prospective employers wanted to hear.

This makes for good political theater. But put alongside other losses of privacy and the bizarre “stickiness” of everything one ever did, the risks of public existence become overwhelming. No wonder the best and the brightest no longer ask what they can do for their country.


The issue isn’t the mountains of data we preserve. It is our unwillingness to value lessons learned the hard way, or depth born in suffering, or relationships grounded in forgiveness. The lines that self-doubt, second thoughts, suffering and carnage etched into the face of Abraham Lincoln would make him unelectable today.

If the private is nothing more than the not-yet-public, our souls could wither from lack of confession, our intellects stagnate from lack of challenge, and our relationships remain shallow. And if admission of mistakes and rethinking of policies render one unfit for public life, how will we have wise and honest leaders?

MO/JL END RNS

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Tom Ehrich, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!