Explainer

Confession

Creed

14 June 2023

6 min read

Sorry seems to be the hardest word

We all find ways of not simply saying sorry. Not just former prime ministers. Graham Tomlin unpacks why it’s getting harder to say sorry in our culture.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A politican stands holding a bible, in front of a committee room table. Behind him an audience waits expectantly

Boris Johnson prepares to give evidence to the House of Commons Privileges Committee.

Why is it so hard to say you’re sorry? Over recent weeks we have watched the story unfold of Boris Johnson and the Downing Street parties, his disdain towards the Privileges Committee report suggesting he misled parliament, and his resignation as an MP, insisting he was the victim of a witch-hunt rather than saying he had made a mistake and owning up.

And it’s not just Conservative Prime Ministers. Tony Blair has never quite come clean to say it was a mistake to lead the UK into war against Saddam Hussain on the basis of faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

Church leaders don’t escape either. Too often in the past, abusers have been shielded and moved on, and when the avoidance is revealed, ways have been found to avoid simply saying sorry. And then we all know the kind of apology that goes “I’m sorry you feel that way” which of course is not an apology at all.

Saying sorry has always been difficult, but our culture seems to make it even harder. We may not conduct literal witch hunts any more, but we do metaphorical ones.

Confession is difficult. Try it sometime. Next time you make a mistake, resolve to come clean before your friends, your spouse, your partner, your team at work. Confess your sins. Not straightforward, is it? If you find it as hard as I do, then join the club.

Saying sorry has always been difficult, but our culture seems to make it even harder. We may not conduct literal witch hunts any more, but we do metaphorical ones. If you are found out to have said the wrong thing, admit you have changed your mind, or that you made a horrible mistake, you are likely to get accused of inconsistency, cancelled on social media, sacked from your job, vilified at the court of Twitter. It could mean losing your reputation, your job, your friends and, well, everything.

A line of books have come out in recent times, pointing out that we live in one of the most censorious of cultures. Andrew Doyle wrote a book called The New Puritans, arguing that identity politics and the social justice movement has spawned a quasi-religious form of cultural revolution, driven by claims to moral purity and tolerating no dissent. Similarly, Noah Rothman wrote The Rise of the New Puritans, identifying progressivism as a movement whose primary goal is to limit happiness.

They had a strong notion of divine grace which interrupts normal human processes, unlocks hard hearts and kindles new desires in twisted souls.

Yet perhaps the problem is not so much that we have become too much like the post-reformation Puritans, but that we are fundamentally unlike them. Puritans were a group of Protestants who first emerged in the 16th century, who wanted to ensure that Reformation in England was carried out thoroughly, broadly according to the agenda of John Calvin in Geneva, and not (as they saw it), half-heartedly. The word ‘Puritan’ was in fact invented by the group’s enemies, accusing them of a joyless obsession with purity, an insistence on keeping rules, confessing sins and avoiding pleasures. As always, caricatures tell half, or less than half, of the truth. Of course there were censorious and frowning Puritans, but they also had a profound and ambitious notion of grace and goodness alongside a nuanced moral ecology that we have largely lost.

The Puritans had a strong notion of the nexus of sin, confession, grace, forgiveness, absolution and the possibility of moral reformation. If your conscience tells you that you had done something wrong, you had best confess it sincerely to God (and possibly to other people as well), which would be followed by the promise of divine forgiveness, which in turn had the potential to bring about a deep change of heart and habit, so that the fault was not repeated again. They had a strong notion of divine grace which interrupts normal human processes, unlocks hard hearts and kindles new desires in twisted souls.

Now we have lost most of this. If you confess a sin in public, you are very unlikely to receive absolution in the court of Twitter or public esteem. The passing of time may mean people forget what you did and enable some rehabilitation, but forgiveness? Never. And if you think the likelihood of forgiveness is remote, what is the incentive for confession? You might as well brazen it out, pretend you’ve done nothing wrong, deny all charges, as the alternative is to see your career go down the tubes.

Moreover, we don’t tend to believe moral change is possible. A leopard never changes his spots, we say with a knowing look. Ex-offenders find it hard to find jobs with a criminal record behind them, and disgraced politicians are unlikely to find a way back into public life.

We are creatures capable of deep cruelty, malice and selfishness, but also that we are capable of kindness, grace and true humility - that spiritual and moral change is possible.

Now of course there are good reasons for our nervousness about this. Someone with a weakness for booze, sex or vulnerable children might never lose that tendency, and it’s often better to be cautious than to allow an abuser to abuse again. Yet at the same time, Christian moral theology has always held together in some tension a savvy awareness of the depth of human fallibility and self-deception, with a belief in the possibility of deep spiritual and moral change. Christian faith paradoxically holds at the same time the most pessimistic and the most optimistic view of human nature – that we are creatures capable of deep cruelty, malice and selfishness, but also that we are capable of kindness, grace and true humility - that spiritual and moral change is possible. It’s not always easy to spot the genuinely reformed character from the charlatan, but that is where wise discernment and character judgement comes in, holding the tension between naivete and cynicism.

Back in the day when more people went to church, they at least once a week had an occasion where they were invited to reflect on their sins of the past week, to confess them and receive absolution. That pairing is perhaps the key to the whole thing, and why saying sorry is so hard in contemporary life – because we have not only lost the ability to say sorry, we have also lost the ability to forgive.

Of course, it’s possible to go through the motions in church of saying you are sorry for your sins. It can be a means of ‘cheap grace’ as the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to call it. But we are creatures of habit. Being forced to think back over the past week, the time you spoke to your kids in a harsh way, told a white lie to get out of trouble, or forgot to phone someone who needed help because you were just too busy, somehow alerts you to your own inner mess. Add to that the promise that a heartfelt confession will be met with the pronouncement of genuine pardon, then it makes it just a little easier to say an abject apology to someone else when you need to, not evading the truth, not excusing yourself, just saying you messed up and got it wrong, because you know what’s coming afterwards – forgiveness.

The dynamic of confession, forgiveness and the possibility of moral change doesn’t take away the need for shrewd judgement of character, but its loss arguably makes it much harder for us to say we are sorry, and are truly repentant.

Politicians, pundits and other public figures may find it hard to say sorry. And we are perhaps right to expect them to do so. But unless we learn how to forgive, then we will reap a harsh society where ‘sorry’ is not just the hardest, but the rarest word.

Interview

Creed

Mental Health

Trauma

21 August 2025

17 min read

When the answers run out: Kate Bowler on faith, fragility, and the beauty of uncertainty

Kate Bowler in conversation with Graham Tomlin.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A woman sits and smiles in front of her bookcase.

This interview is an edited transcript of the Seen & Unseen Live event.

Graham

Kate Bowler is a four-time New York Times bestselling author. She's an award-winning podcast host and also an associate professor of American religious history at Duke University. She's the author of a number of books, including Blessed, a history of the American Prosperity Gospel. And they're wonderfully titled - The Preacher's Wife; The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities.

And you may know something of Kate's story, she was unexpectedly diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the age of 35. And then out of that, wrote the New York Times, bestselling memoir. Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies That I've Loved, and her latest book, Have A Beautiful, Terrible Day. Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, And in Betweens. Kate hosts, the award-winning podcast Everything Happens.

We were just talking about students and teaching. What do you teach your students? You say American religious history? Is there a kind of theme? And how do you go about teaching your students? How does that work in your setting?

Kate
Sometimes they make me do the Puritans to Trump sort of lectures which I enjoy, but I think the heart of what I love is to talk about American religious myth making. What stories animate their accounts of how to live a good life. Most American stories end up being iterations of that and some pretty classic themes of righteous individualism, of wanting only good things because God is good, a sense that all things can be conquerable. So, it's got this intense agency to it.

I end up doing a history of American theodicies, explanations of evil. It mostly ends up being storytelling about whether people believe that they deserve the lives they got. It's a privilege to do it, especially at a divinity school. These are going to be people who are in the forefront of helping people interpret and explain their pain.

And I guess that's something about America, isn't it? Because America was born out of this hopeful sense of people leaving the terrible strictures of Europe, and going off to this free new land, and so on. So, I suppose it had sort of hopefulness and positivity built right into the beginning, didn't it?

It does. I also really just enjoy civic virtues, in general Canadian civic virtues. The Americans ones are, of course, the pursuit of happiness. Canadians have peace, order, and good governance as their primary civic virtues, which always makes me laugh. It's just so polite and so reasonable. But Americans are hoping fundamentally that they can become. The kinds of people that can conquer a fickle market, who can overcome any sort of structural evil, can be winners in a culture that doesn't ever really try to explain away inequality. It attempts to create the kind of people who can navigate it.

And you started out by studying the prosperity gospel, didn't you? And particularly within the United States. Is that right? The kind of idea that God wanted good things for you. You've been talking about that already, and when you did that study, what did you expect to find? And what did you find when you did that research?

Well, the very first time I bumped into the prosperity gospel I was in my hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is right in the middle of Canada, and we have only one fast road, and they had put up a traffic light. So, I was in a terrible mood. Then I saw all these people pouring out from what I thought was a factory that was running on Sunday morning, and then I thought, oh, no, I believe these are churchgoers. Oh, no, that factory is a church, and it turns out that was Canada's largest megachurch that was run by a man named Leon Fontaine, who had just been given a motorcycle by his congregants, and then rode it around on stage, and I thought, no, that is for Americans. I was so insistent on the idea that a story of health, wealth, and happiness was exclusive to an American cultural narrative.

I think I was 18, maybe 20 when I first bumped into it, and then I spent my entire twenties wasting my youth interviewing televangelists in Canada and the United States, trying to understand why it was so deeply American, and also why it was so infinitely exportable and ultimately discovered that there was something very deeply humbling about studying a movement of infinite spiritual expectation. It taught me that we all want to be able to comb through our own biography, to know whether we have any evidence of God's love, special appreciation connection to us, but also that even when we think that we don't have a prosperity gospel in our own lives. We probably do.

You're talking there about the the kind of desire can control outcomes a little bit. It struck me that I think the very first reflection you got in your book, which is called Have A Beautiful, Terrible Day, which is whenever everything is out of control, is that the sort of big theme that you found with it - the desire to control? And I guess that's something you've experienced in your own life, that sense of not being able to control things?
And one of the books I've been reading recently is this one by Hartmut Rosa, called the The Uncontrollability of the World talks about how a world in which everything has been planned and controlled would be a dead world. It's the uncontrollable things that kind of make life kind of interesting, when snow falls and you can't control it, or a sports game that you can't predict the outcome of. Do you think there's something in that? That we try to resist?

I am committed to resisting. I mean, if I could arrange some sort of consumer feedback to our Lord and Saviour, I would suggest that I would be given more control over my circumstances. I guess it's been a question that is really at the heart of so much of my both academic and spiritual interest is, what do we do now, when we feel ourselves confronted by all the things we can't control. Typically, the things that we can't control can do two awful things. One, they seem to preach the story of a God who is cruel and and just doesn't care. That can't possibly care enough to want to confront the evil that overwhelms. Because suffering isn't just like cosmetic change. It's just an avalanche that that sweeps everything away. And then in the face of that we don't know how to say what my friend Tom Long, who is a wonderful preaching professor at Princeton, says. He likes to say there's always two preachers at a funeral. There's the body. But what can tell a story that is bigger than death? So, I think that's the first thing - that suffering, of all the things that are uncertain seems to tell us something about God that isn't true.

I think the other thing, and maybe this is just especially the marketing for women. But when I began to be an unlucky person, I began to feel the sting of a very distinct kind of shame. I felt that it was not just circumstances, that there was something about me, something about my failure, something about my unlovedness. One of the first thoughts I had when I got my diagnosis was, well, of course it's me.

And that is an awful lie that buries itself somewhere in our hearts. But I think uncertainty can have this effect - we end up holding the blade on the wrong side, and it just it always feels like uncertainty. We sort of plunge it right into our chest. So, I think I think uncertainty in general, it's every wave and we have to learn to navigate, but mostly it feels like an affront on our essential goodness.

And how did you learn to manage that uncontrollability? There's a tendency in many of us to try to control everything, and we want to have everything sorted and ordered. And then you kind of get to the point where you realize can't do that. Then the temptation is to be just overwhelmed by it, and to feel there's nothing I can do at all. How do you navigate that sense of being out of control?

One of the American cultural diseases, she can say lovingly, is, they are high on what I like to consider is ‘everything is possibleism’. And so then, in the face of uncertainty, or confusion, or despair, or undoing, then the great fear is that you swing right into ‘nothing is possibleism’ and a kind of despair and nihilism. And I'm very interested in every, especially religious tradition that that helps us cultivate an experience of limited agency like, how do you find that space, spiritually, emotionally, communally, of what is possible today? And I've really, I've really struggled with this over the various intellectual and sort of seasons of illness in my life. In Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day I wrote these little snack size reflections, because I was in a period of so much chronic pain that I really just didn't even have brain space for more than an hour and a half a day. So that became an exercise in trying to still allow myself the joy of creation. Because isn't it so wonderful when your brain goes somewhere, and pain is so boring. And I mean talking about pain is so boring, telling it to your friend for the 200th time, like we are all over it.

So, I just was trying to practice the experience of limited agency, even if for the other six hours I would have to lie in the bath and take pain meds. But I've realized over and over again that trying to find that soft space is a place where I can re-experience, humanity, love, and really just the weird, wild gifts that God gives us. Even when life falls apart.

If anyone's watching this and hasn't found a book yet, I really do recommend it. It's a wonderful thing. It's got lots of different kind of poems and meditations and prayers, and it's got titles for when things are falling apart, when you screwed up, when you're in pain, when life feels incomplete, things like that.

I'm a huge bummer, Graham. Thank you. I think it's so funny. I think it's because we grew up Mennonite, and we love our version of like Saily Bread, and like the tiny little booklets, and all of them were very sweet and very precious moments. And then in my version, it's like, when you're worried you want to eat your own arm, you hate your life so much. So, I do kind of prefer them for the rawer times.

Coming on to how Christian faith helps you navigate those, one thing that struck me as I was reading through it is there's a difference between, one of the common approaches to suffering you get in the modern world, which is the stoic idea that you just sort of grit your teeth, you can't control what's going to happen to you, but you can control your own emotions.

That's such crap, isn't it?

It’s pretty common, isn't it? You get that sort of sense of stoicism, these days there are stoic podcasts and books. What do you see is the difference between that and what Christian faith says to on how you navigate these really difficult periods of life?

I want to say specifically that what I truly believe is crap is the phrase, the argument, ‘you might not be able to control but you can control how you respond.’ I mean, anyone who's been unexpectedly stabbed with a needle knows that that is fundamentally not true. And the reason why I am so sensitive to it is, you know, as somebody who’s had a public cancer diagnosis, I see how quickly the cultural narrative is so intense, I've seen every single person who suffers is lined up to give that response, because what everybody wants to know is, well, just tell me that there's an escape hatch on the other side of it.

Modern stoicism is - and when I say modern it did not have a Renaissance until the 2010s, which is wild - in part a result of an incomplete theology of masculinity that has been available, and it has become a way to explain specifically to men that there's an almost natural impassivity that is theirs should they claim it, And that in the face of chaos, global and personal, that there's a higher path. Stoicism is always, of course, stripped of its original cosmology, refitted with self-help techniques. But what I really object to, which is at the core, is a story about control.

Emotional management is, of course, a therapeutic good. But, man, we're 50 years into the therapeutic paradigm. It makes me want to add the word dude at the end of that sentence. We are 50 years into the therapeutic paradigm, and we have not yet found a way to control our emotions, and that is because, as spiritual creatures we are always, we have this ache, we have this soul-cry that Augustine named so beautifully. We have a spiritual restlessness that no kind of emotional management strategy can overcome, and because it it is meant to be satisfied fundamentally by our love, our love of God, our love of others, and frankly, an unsolvability that tells us that we are an incomplete story. If we could be a complete story, I don't know if we really should be religious at all. Frankly, I really would. I would probably do other things with my time.

It does seem to be something about desire at the heart of this. The Stoic response is to just slightly repress your desires, keep your desires under control. It is offering a sort of sense of control. Or Christian faith is actually about redirecting your desires to something that is bigger than yourself and more powerful and beautiful than you are. And so whereas sort of stoicism seems to say, just control your desires, Christianity in some ways almost says let your desire for God grow as you go through this.

But I was wondering a little bit about prayer, and how prayer works for you in times of real struggle? I often seems to me that when you go through really difficult times, the time when you kind of feel you need to pray, is often the time it's hardest to do so. Do you find that? What role prayer plays for you in moments of uncontrollability, of the sufferings and struggles of life. What role does prayer play for you in that?

This stoicism to prayer thoroughfare is a perfect continuity of the argument. Stoicism, and I mean just living inside of the precarity of this world, reminds us again and again that life requires so much more courage than we thought. Maybe we were convinced along the way that prayer also doesn't require courage just to get to that place of spiritual honesty again, I mean especially if you feel like your prayer was supposed to follow a different template. Whether it was always supposed to very quickly move from brief needs, long descriptions, great thankfulness. That's the classic three-parter, but most often are our honesty requires us to be incomplete before God. I mean utterly, or angry or unknowing. Maybe this gets back to your certainty comments at the start about like, how do we manage such enormous uncertainty? Do we imagine prayer as a strategy for certainty? And if we're hoping it's that, we might be we might be unsatisfied. I just know that when I pray honestly that when I'm in a really terrible season, my prayers sound more like it's 2am. And I'm the sort of self who is buying things on Amazon and wishes I could call people and say things and cannot be trusted. Those prayers sound something like, help me! Help me! Save me, make them come back. Make this stop! Those are necessary, deep, guttural cries.

My 2pm prayers, I've got Trinitarian round-outs. I've got sophisticated nuanced theology. I'm quoting here and there.

Both are reflections of how much we're not even entirely known to ourselves, except that we find ourselves unfolded by our circumstances.

Pressing into how you deal with enduring pain. You talk very movingly about what it's like to go through really quite searing pain that just doesn't go away. And you have to kind of deal with it. Here in the UK we've been having a debate over the last few months about assisted dying. Which is a route out of pain for some people towards the end of life. Did you ever experience the temptation to that? Or has your experience helped you reflect upon that kind of route that our society is offering people at the moment? Can you end this by ending it all.

Canada's been having similar and terrible debates with terrible consequences. I think one of the great worries, especially with North American theologies of the self, is that the suffering, those who suffer are inherently less valuable because we are not the worker self. We're not the productive self. We're simply the the feeling and the limited and the precarious self.

What really worries me, especially with some of these exit interview for people who apply for euthanasia in Canada, is is quotes like ‘It's not that I don't want to die it’s that I can't afford to live’, because so many of the things that relieve pain are frankly so expensive and so off insurance. Any discussion about pain and assisted suicide are also just always, at least in North American context, conversations about who is valuable and whose pain is insurable.

I know that one of the major differences that I've had in my own life between a self that was in so much pain I could barely function to this version, is that I could pay for my own treatment. I feel overwhelming compassion for all those who feel like they will suffer without end because there are no social services to alleviate it.

I've been in a situation where I'm so desperate to live that I have not fundamentally experienced despair that has a telos to it. I've experienced despair at times in which I feel my own helplessness.

I had a lovely interview with Dr. Catherine Mannix. She developed a cognitive behavioural therapy therapeutic approach inside of palliative care in the NHS. And it was really it ended up being a way to talk about how do you experience control inside of that much suffering. Her books are about people who thought that they would want to die in that much pain. In these little case studies, I found her description to be so deeply Christian. What she was arguing was that even in the midst of deafening pain, that helping people find a small, soft place of narrow choice and meaning-making could reinfuse their lives with such purpose that otherwise our culture would erase. I just wish that everybody that inside of our conversation about when pain is too much, had a little bit more of that place of gentle possibility.

One of the phrases that that really struck me as I was reading your book is that ‘we are united by our fragility.’ The implications seem to be that that's actually what we have in common. The fact that we are fragile or incomplete, in your language from earlier on. It got me thinking about how that might change the way we think about each other and community and relationships, and maybe even church. What that difference would it make if we actually thought that was the centre of what we have in common, our fragility. Do you have any thoughts on that?

At heart, I'm an anti-culture warrior. In this time of increasing binaries our democratic structures or any kind are fragile, especially in the United States, the big tent umbrellas of denominationally or otherwise. I do think it is important for us to sort of spiritually land on what we think makes us all deeply the same. I know that when I started down this path there was a lot of humiliation because I was treated as disposable by the healthcare industry. I was truly humbled by it. In suffering you are laid low and there's a little key in that that I found that I've never wanted to give up. IT is that the second I knew I suffering, I could see it so much more easily in other people. And that I could know that a broken heart is an open heart. If you can keep that at the at the centre of of a story about our difference Ihave just found it easier, easier on Facebook, easier at family gatherings, just easier. We have a contingency that we're all grappling with, and we can't always see it on each other's faces. But if we know that we all are so worried that we're wearing a sweater and someone's going to pull a thread and then there we are, naked to the world. I think I know that it inculcates a deep feeling of humanity in me.

There’s something about approaching another person with that thought of I'm fragile and kind of so are you. Especially it's not that terrible if you see my fragility, and maybe I begin to look for the fragility and the other person, and that makes that person that much more approachable somehow, and a bit more human. This militates against the idea of going to everybody else and trying to give to give out this image of being complete, and I've got everything sorted, and I know all the answers. The kind of image we try to present of ourselves.

I think I think invulnerability is exhausting, and we could just cut ourselves some slack.

Find out more about Kate

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