Dana White and the Parody of Confession

Dana White, the head of the UFC, got caught hitting his wife on camera, and then he went on TMZ to talk about it and confess. This follows a similar pattern to things I have seen over the past couple of years, especially with the racial issues in the public eye. There is a sort of parody of confession that takes place, but it is deeply confused.

First, it looks like confession. Someone will do something bad, and then they have to make their rounds on podcasts, The View, and various public forums. While they are there, they have to do things we traditionally associate with confession: describe what happened, explain why they did it, and offer some kind of remorse, communicating how bad they feel about it.

A Malformed Copy

The interesting thing about all of this is that it is a parody. For the longest time, the Christian faith has had a specific structure for confession. This is an architectural feature of the Christian worldview and life: if you are a Christian, you are regularly analyzing and practicing the rituals of confession. Whenever you have a secular copy or parody of the real thing, it is always malformed. And here, it is malformed in at least three ways.

First, it is malformed regarding the nature of the act itself—the sin. When people do something wrong in the world today, there is no real understanding of what it actually is, namely sin. You have public figures who possess a sense that something went wrong, but they lack a framework to understand it. Dana White, for instance, went on air to talk about what happened and said things like, “I don’t know. I don’t know why I did it.”

Well, we know why he did it. He did it because he is sinful, just as we all are sinful. Of course, in one sense we all feel that impulse; when we say, “I don’t know why I did it,” we mean, “This is very out of character; this is not what I normally do.” But for the Christian, at the heart of it, we understand that we have a sin nature. We slot our actions into that reality: Why did I do that? Because I am a sinner. Yes, I am being sanctified by the Spirit, but I am still a sinner. We understand the structure of sin, with virtues and vices and their natural tendencies. When someone sins, it is not surprising; we recognize, “Ah, yes, that was wrath,” or “Ah, yes, that was gluttony.”

The Absence of Forgiveness

The second way this parody is malformed concerns the end of the process: redemption and forgiveness. That is entirely unclear when public figures make their circuits. They go out, people demand that they retell the story and express remorse, but at the end you have to ask: what is the actual goal of this conversation?

In Christian confession, the goal is forgiveness—the redeeming of the situation and the transforming of the sinner. In these public spectacles, there is nothing like that. It is merely that the public needs to see if the offender is remorseful enough, and then people decide, “I guess they’re okay.” But there is no real forgiveness. There is no embrace, no clear “I forgive you; you are forgiven, and now you can move on.” There is just a vague sense that maybe they are acceptable and maybe they are not, depending on each individual onlooker. There is no objectivity to the outcome.

The Problem of Public Confession

The third malformed aspect is the context. In Christian confession, you confess to God first, then to the person you sinned against, and in some traditions, to your pastor or priest. All of these are small, private meetings. There are occasionally reasons to publicize sins, but the normal, healthy structure of confession is private.

Today, celebrity confessions are carried out entirely in public so that everyone can register their little opinion about them. But Christian confession is intended to rebuild souls and rebuild the world so people can move forward. It is not designed so everyone can weigh in with their personal verdict. There needs to be a definitiveness: “I am sorry, I sinned against you, it was evil. Will you forgive me?” “Yes, I forgive you, and God forgives you.”

Part of the reason for privacy is to avoid inculcating gossip, which simply poisons the waters and sends tributaries of sin out into the culture. The goal of confession is to build up the body, not to spread those destructive tributaries into the world.

Watch the original episode.