Session 6: Religious Dimenisons

2nd Global Conference

Friday 13th March – Monday 16th March 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Political Apologies: Re-covenanting the Nation
Danielle Celermajer
Asia Pacific Masters of Human Rights and Democratisation, University of Sydney, Australia

Starting in the last two decades of the twentieth century and into the present, the political apology has joined the repertoire of strategies that nations adopt to deal with violations in their past. Commentators have dismissed the collective apology either as a category mistake, which inappropriately attributes to the collective capacities unique to sentient individuals, or as a superficial and cynical rhetorical act; and yet it has continued to proliferate as a novel form of political action and resonated strongly in societies where it has been deployed. To understand the significance of the political apology one must, this paper argues, distinguish collective from individual apologies and recognize the distinctive work that they do.

To uncover the significance of collective apologies, one needs to look to the practice of collective apology in Judaism and early Christianity. In these contexts, collective apologies were primary, not derivative acts, and understood to play a critical role in dealing with systematic transgressions. In the religious context, wrongdoing was not understood solely as the outcome of an individual’s failure to respect societal norms or laws, but also as a collective failure to sufficiently uphold and protect the norms that orient individual action. In this sense, recognizing the contribution of the collective to wrongdoing and responsibility was not an alternative to attributing responsibility to the individual, but rather an acknowledgment that even as individuals act, they always do so within a broader normative context. What the political apology provided was a mechanism whereby collectives could re-covenant to core normative principles with a view to strengthening their status as living norms.

Contemporary political theory has been resistant to recognizing the link between practices in the sphere of religion, particularly pre-modern religion, and those in contemporary liberal and secular polities, but this resistance has impeded our recognising the contribution that the religious background of apologies can make to our correctly interpreting the contemporary practice. In fact, when one examines how and where apologies have been deployed in contemporary contexts with the religious trope in mind, one can see that their attention to the collective societal dimension of responsibility provides a much needed supplement to liberalism’s unique emphasis on individual responsibility. Moreover, the quality of political apologies as performative acts or public rituals is illuminated by setting them against their religious history.

Admittedly, arguing that the contemporary political apology has migrated across from the sphere of religion places the burden on us to explain how they can be compatible with the normative demands of secular liberalism. Indeed, secular liberal political communities have largely defined themselves in contra-distinction to pre-modern religious political forms, with their collectivist ontology, emphasis on ritual and thick absolutist norms. This paper argues that a more sophisticated analysis both of religious practices and contemporary liberal communities reveals that the dichotomous categories we have used to classify the two realms are inadequate to either. The political apology, operant in both spheres, is indicative of a far more complex understanding of responsibility, and one that demands that dealing with systematic wrongdoing requires that we attend both to the responsible individual and to the society that sanctioned the norms on which she acted.

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“Forgiveness becomes possible only when it is replaced by willingness; it results less from effort than from openness” (Kurtz and Ketcham, 1992, 216).

This paper offers an overview of the shifting sociological landscape of religion in modern Ireland; the secularisation of society and the privatisation of Irish people’s religiosity is considered as a background to exploring the meaning that Irish people now attach to considerations of sin, guilt and forgiveness. Traditionally, Irish people’s sense of self was governed by strict adherence to the teachings of the Catholic Church; fear of an external all powerful and punishing God was the locus of people’s internal control and constraint (Kearney, 2003); fear of meeting one’s maker on the day of judgement was carried as a constant guilt and shame drove Catholic Irish to confession where sins were scaled against a system of penitence (Inglis, 1998; 2008).

While sin and guilt have lost parlance in the face of the fall of the church and fewer people attend confession, forgiveness has continued to gain much attention. Public apologies from abuses in children’s homes to peace and reconciliation processes all place forgiveness as the central process of moving on; forgiving and forgetting. Yet, forgiving is a complex process, according to Kurtz and Ketcham (1992) forcing forgiveness only gets in the way of the process. Forgiveness for them is Spiritual: it is one of the realities that cannot be willed into being. Likewise Derrida (2001) sees the concept of forgiveness as needing to be rescued from all attempts to rush closure in an attempt to keep open to the spiritual, divine and mysterious character of genuine forgiveness.

Sin, guilt and shame were central to the Irish psyche. Confession, penance and mortification were the means of absolution. The central question in this paper is how – given the shift away from external forces of control and judgement towards a more fluid and relative post-modern analysis good and evil – Irish people now manage feelings of sin, guilt and shame in their search for forgiveness?

The paper explores this question in some depth by offering an analysis of a sample of eight Irish men who have had experience of abortion. These men were part of a larger qualitative study of 45 heterosexual Irish men of various ages and backgrounds who were interviewed in regard to how they practiced their sexuality and experienced unplanned and crisis pregnancies (Ferguson and Hogan, 2007). While the eight men in this sub sample were all self selecting and of different ages with very different experiences and relationships with the formal Catholic Church they all wanted to tell their story of how they carried a sense of guilt and shame about the abortion; a typical traditional catholic Irish reaction to the grave sin of abortion. Their narratives of abortion experience can be read in relation to how their sense of self is still – even in a post modern and maybe post intuitional Catholic Ireland – governed by key constructs of sin, guilt and shame as well as the healing power of confession and forgiveness.