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

Belief

Books

Creed

28 August 2025

15 min read

Marilynne Robinson: “an ordinary person is as metaphysically amazing as Julius Caesar”

The self-confessed daydreamer and slacker talks with Graham Tomlin

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of best-selling novels including Housekeeping, the winner of the Hemingway Award, and Gilead, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written numerous non-fiction works, including her most recent book, of which the New York Times said: ‘Reading Genesis is alive with questions of kindness, community and how to express what we so often struggle to put into words’. Rowan Williams has described Robinson as "one of the world's most compelling English-speaking novelists".

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

Graham
I've got a number of your books on my table here. I've got my copy of Gilead, Housekeeping. I've got Jack, all the novels. I also have a whole series of other books of essays you've written, like When I Was A Child I Read Books and The Givenness of Things - I love that title. You write a lot of different things, but you're primarily known as a novelist, and I wanted to ask how and why you became a novelist. Did you always want to write stories? Was that always part of your kind of your mind? Was it made up when you were a child growing up? Was storytelling always part of your life?

Marilynne
You know I have very vague ideas about that. I was encouraged by teachers, and so on, to feel that I could write well. That if I made a choice I could follow up on it. I took a writing class in college, a workshop. I felt I had come to Brown [University], which is in Rhode Island, from Idaho - which is definitely not in Rhode Island! I listened to people talking about the West, basically where my ancestors had settled, and it reminded me of how differently I experienced it than the way that people talked about it. So, in a way, I wanted to create a West as I felt it as a child. Especially with the importance of women in that culture, which was very great. It gave me an opportunity to just recover the sense of the strange loveliness of a very wild place, and this richness of being there. So that was my first try at fiction.

Talking about Gilead for a moment, which is the first novel of yours that I read and probably the one I still enjoy the enjoy the most. It's always struck me it's a kind of unlikely novel to become very well known. It's the story of an elderly pastor writing a long letter to his son. It's a book in which, in one sense, not many things happen. It's doesn't have big plot changes. It's not set against seismic events in history like a war or an earthquake, or a disaster. It's small-town America, quite local in many ways. Was it a real surprise to you that it became so popular? Why do you think people resonated with it in quite the way that they did?

You know, those are the kinds of questions that I hesitate to ask myself. I feel as though the ordinary with which I am identified is extremely rich, and it has a very important place in any life. An ordinary moment in its own way is sort of metaphysically unaccountable as the most spectacular moment at least as we perceive these things. An ordinary person is as metaphysically amazing as Julius Caesar. I mean, there's no point pretending that we can make gradations of interest, I think, among people. And, if I have one aesthetic banner that I fly, basically, that's it. That anything that is looked at closely, and with an eye to the fact that the beautiful is sort of the signature of reality, there's everything to be done there.

There’s a sense that everything matters, even the small things are of real significance if you look at them closely enough. And that's one of the things that comes out of the book. And rereading it recently, that focus on ordinary things came out for me. Maybe because I was aware of some close friends who died recently, the theme of death also struck me. It's a novel that is kind of anticipating death. It's about an elderly man, 76 years old, who thinks he's probably going to die soon, writing a letter to his son. Did you sense that it was a meditation on death when you were writing it?

Well, I started it simply because I had a voice in my head, and the voice in the head was saying, you know I'm going to die soon. That was the the situation of the voice that was central to the novel for me. And so it necessarily became a meditation on death, whatever death is - the cessation of life in any case. Which is a profound retrospect on things that seem trivial as we pass through them, and are amazing in retrospect, just voices and gestures, and other people.

One of the lines that stays with me from the book is one from John Ames, the main character. He says something like: ‘I've been trying to think about heaven. But I found it quite difficult to do so. But then again, I wouldn't have been able to describe this world if I hadn't spent the last 70 years walking around on it’. Has writing the book helped you think about death in a different kind of way? As we get older, I suppose it becomes more part of not our experience, but of our anticipation. Do you find you think about these things more?

I think that one of the things that's wonderful about writing novels or poetry is that it makes coherence, it puts things in relation to each other. It lets you explore your mind and understand what you read and what you are attracted to, and all the rest. I think that just the fact of writing has sort of transformed my ideas of both life and death. The need to make them, as it were, palpable or visual in one's own imagination. You have to make choices in terms of what is beautiful or what matters, So, yes, my sense of death is no doubt very much modified by having written that book and also my sense of being alive.

The other book I wanted to talk about is your latest book, Reading Genesis. It a bit of a departure for you. You've mainly written novels, essays and books of cultural commentary. You suddenly find yourself writing a book about a book of the Bible. What led you to do that? Why did you focus on Genesis rather than one of the Gospels, or the Psalms, or any other book within the Bible?

Genesis establishes so much that becomes an assumption for the rest of the Bible. It establishes the basic metaphysical circumstance of humankind in relation to God. You find it echoed everywhere. It's so basic to the whole literature that the fact is that it is very much underread and it's been exposed to centuries of criticism that was very condescending to it, as if it were a primitive literature when, of course, ancient people were capable of extremely sophisticated thinking and perceiving. I thought that in order to clarify anything subsequent to Genesis, you had to clarify Genesis. It seemed to me as if it functioned so beautifully in terms of self-referential qualities, structure, the argument was there to be made. it's not recherché or anything. It's in the text that it is literary and that certain meanings are developed by literary methods through the course of the of the book.

How did you find coming at it as a as a novelist? Most books I've read on Genesis have been technical commentaries by Biblical scholars who've researched the history of the times, and the texts around it. You come at it as a storyteller, as a novelist. Did that give you an advantage in telling the story of Genesis, looking at again, or a different angle than you'd find in many of the commentaries?

I have my limitations. I looked at it, of course, in the way that was natural for me to look at it. But I felt as if it was badly treated by critics. I asked a friend of mine, a theologian, if people still used JEDP, the old 'documentary hypothesis'. He did a poll of people that he knew that wrote in the area, and one of them said any self-respecting scholar uses the documentary hypothesis. So, I thought, well, that's not me, you know. I'm not a scholar. The documentary hypothesis is very old at this point and however many ways it's been modified its impact is essentially the same. It makes the text incoherent in its most crucial parts.

This is the hypothesis that breaks it down into different sources, and tries to identify which part of the book comes from J, or E, or D, or P?

Yes, exactly, exactly. And they question the reality of Moses, but they believe deeply in J or D. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous, and they proceed as if they were a kind of documentary evidence that really does not exist. So, I thought the fact that scholarship has been manacled to this one theory for 150 years does not oblige me to be shackled to it also.

If you ask the average person their view of the God of the Old Testament they might imagine a kind of vengeful, capricious, angry character who smites people because he doesn't like them. Yet your depiction of the story seems to say, actually, no it’s God who is faithful and good and patient. It's the humans in the story who are angry and vengeful and capricious. You're turning that on its head. Some people may not be convinced by that, and are still wedded to this idea, that that the God of the Old Testament is this vengeful character. How do you respond to that when you read people who depict God in that way?

This is a very ancient thing, this making the sharp distinction between the God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament, giving Moses horns and all the rest of it. This is dualism, it's a violation of the assumptions of monotheism. which I think are very beautiful and important. I'm very ready to defend monotheism, but in any case, I think that if there's a punitive structure in the narratives of the Old Testament, what they are telling us is that most of the world's evil is created by human beings and there are certain points at which it becomes intolerable under almost all circumstances. The evil that is insupportable is violence against human beings. It is the tendency of human beings who are images of God to act revoltingly badly toward human beings who are images of God. If you think of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, war and famine and plague, and so on, all of these things are humanly created in the vast majority of cases, perhaps every case, and I think it's an evasion of of the fact of human moral competence to say that you know God is to blame for the violence that we do.

And letting ourselves off the hook by doing that....

Yes, exactly.

You make quite a contrast between what the Book of Genesis says about humanity, for example, and some of the Babylonian myths of the time, similar creation stories like the Gilgamesh epic or the Enūma Elish. You contrasted them because they seem to give a very different understanding of humanity from what you get in in Genesis. Why does the view of humanity in Genesis have much more nobility and grandeur than these other origin stories?

Well, the idea that human beings are images of God, that is utterly Biblical. There is nothing to compare with it. Human beings are made in the Babylonian myths to do groundwork basically, to spare gods having to do work that would fall to them because they lost the war among gods. A certain number of people are created. They are not named. They are no objects of any god's devotion or anything like that. Brilliant as the Babylonians were, they're not assumed to be a creation of the status of an Adam. ‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ The way that Genesis sets up, so that the beginning is this wonderful explosion of being, and at the end is this human being that reflects it all basically, that is the adequate second presence in this amazing moment. And you find that picked up in the Gospel of John. That's just very beautiful, and I know of nothing that is comparable to it in any way. Certainly not myths that were current in antiquity. Certainly not in our very declined anthropology since then.

Genesis probably is one of the most influential books in the whole of Western intellectual history, given that it's given us a whole language for thinking about the way the world is, the way we are, who God is, how we relate to one another as human beings, how human society works. Would you pick out other themes or ideas apart from that anthropology, that you think were revolutionary in the Book of Genesis?

One of the things that is amazing about it is that the people upon whom God's attention rests are very ordinary people. Abraham is not a king, or a magnate, or anything like that. He's just a wandering herdsman. The idea that the whole of history and meaning can rest on the person of someone who would have seemed quite unexceptional to the people around him as he lived. That means any of us. That's a way of re-understanding the fact that the Adamic figure at the beginning of Genesis is simply humankind. You know the grandeur and the the ordinariness are simultaneous.

The significance of each individual as a significant moral actor within the world.

Yes, exactly.

So, if Abraham has had such a role, then you and I can. And everyone listening to this or reading this conversation can do the same.

And assume that we do it. One of the things that I think is very clear historically is that people are morally competent, for one thing, and then deeply consequential. When you have an election and you make a very appalling choice, 51% of the individuals in the United States made that choice. They truly did. We can't hide behind the idea that what we do does not matter, that we're minor figures, and so on, that God knows what the ultimate consequences of these kinds of things might be. :

In writing the book, did you find yourself reflecting on the kind of current situation in America and what was going on in it? You were writing it before the recent election, but did it have any reflections for you on where your nation is right now?

Well, it necessarily has reflections on history in general, because it is about what human beings are, and how things happen among them. I would not have anticipated anything of our present circumstance, even a re-election of Trump. This is horrifying, astonishing.

I want to ask one more question. I was reading recently one of your essays, and I think it started with the line ‘I reached the point in my life when I can see what has mattered’. I wondered if you wanted to reflect back on your life as a as a novelist, as a writer, as a thinker, as a Christian? What do you find has mattered more as time has gone on, and what has mattered less? What are the things that really do matter for you now, as you look back and you see what has mattered?

I have found out how important teaching was to me. No doubt you know things become radiant in memory. I think I enjoyed the interaction of my life, and my mind, and my literary interest in that particular moment more than I've ever done in any other circumstance. One of the most important things to me was my first experience writing Housekeeping when I was in isolation more or less. Trying to remember things that had happened two decades earlier, experiences I had had, and finding out in those circumstances that I remembered them, that I knew what kind of flower bloomed, in what place, at what time, that my memory was much more active and alert than I think my conscious attention was. I found out that from that that I had lived a much broader life, a much more intense life than I realised. I would never have known that if I hadn't made the kind of demand on myself that writing that book made, writing any book makes really, but fiction especially, because you're trying to conjure a sense of reality. Even from the point of view of when I talk to my students, I say, don't imagine that you know your mind. It is much larger. There's it's almost another life beside your life. The finding that out was just incredibly important to me, not just because it helps me write, but also to find out something about what I am as a human being.

Linking that to the previous point about the the significance of each individual as a moral actor, it also maybe says something about that each of us lives much richer lives than we think we do.

Absolutely.

Maybe memory brings those things to the surface in a way that that we don't often recognize?

Exactly, and that we don't normally access. I was in a kind of an extreme situation, trying to remember Idaho while I was living in France - kind of an eccentric project. It's finding the place at which the past is evoked in the mind. Very powerful.

I'm noticing the things that otherwise you might not see which is, again back to the point about the ordinary, the ordinary being significant.

Yes.

Are there things that seemed very important to you when you were younger, that now don't seem quite so important?

You know I think of myself as a sort of a slacker. I think I have friends who could affirm my view of things as a slacker. I've always enjoyed just simply being in my own head. To the extent that it's a distraction for me. I know people who have lives like mine, who are much more productive than I am. Where did my time go? Well, daydreaming, thinking, watching, just being in my head. I was told when I was a student when I was in high school. that I should give myself a mind that I wanted to live in because I would live in it for the rest of my life, and I did that, and I have done that. And you know it's been a great pleasure, finally. Maybe I should have done more!

Well, the the daydreaming has been a very beneficial thing for the rest of us who've been able to read some of the product of that daydreaming. So, we're very grateful, Marilynne. Thank you.

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