An Act of Contrition

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is in a penitent mood. “I would like to say, humbly, I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics,” she said in an interview Sunday on CNN, where all normal, spiritually mature Christians such as Rep. Greene go to make their confessions. 

If Rep. Greene is feeling humble, she has a lot to be humble about. She is an embarrassing, self-aggrandizing vulgarian and a cancer on American politics. She is dumb and she is dishonest, if you will forgive my being plain here, and the people of her district in Georgia could get along just fine without her. 

She should let them. 

I mean this sincerely. Rep. Greene professes to put her Christian faith at the center of her life and American flourishing at the center of her politics. She has an opportunity to put those professions into action if she is sincere—as I will assume, arguendo, that she is, though I actually very much doubt it—about her regret over her contributions to “toxic politics.” 

Rep. Greene should resign her office and return to private life. 

A period of penance might be good for her. She should spend the next few years quietly in work, contemplation, and prayer, making such acts of contrition and reconciliation as she and her spiritual advisers deem appropriate. I have been to the megachurch she sometimes attends in the Atlanta suburbs, and, while the style of worship there is not for me (I get nervous when the hands of the laity are elevated above handshake level), that community and its pastor seem to me entirely sincere. 

Rep. Greene is a former Catholic, and, if she had remained in her baptismal church, I might suggest that she, being unmarried, join a religious community. But I am sure that her evangelical congregants have some kind of well-thought-out retreat system of their own, probably with much better coffee. Get thee to a nunnery, Rep. Greene, or whatever the Georgia megachurch version of that is.

Penance is an important part of the Christian life, and I have more need of it than most. No doubt I should avail myself of penitential opportunities more than I have. So, if I may speak directly to Rep. Greene, one sinner to another: Resign. The people who love you will not tell you this, but: You are not very smart and not very patriotic, and the people of your district will have no trouble finding a representative who can do your job better than you do. And, perhaps more to the point, you must know if you are honest with yourself that you are not very honest with everybody else. The nonsense you have peddled over the years is not mere hyperbole and conspiracy kookery and political rhetoric: Your business is, and has been, the business of lies. From QAnon to Pizzagate to 9/11 to school shootings, you have done little else but bear false witness in your position of public trust. And you have been no great shakes when it comes to a few of the other commandments, no? 

Resign.

Politicians and celebrities (increasingly the same thing) will do all sorts of things to signal contrition. They will go into treatment for addiction to sex or drugs or booze, they will enroll in therapy or anger management or take up a radical fitness program and talk about their embrace of “spirituality.” Bill Clinton, shamed by the intern sex scandal, called in the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a despised rival he had made a point of politically sidelining only a few years before, believing—not without good reason—that a hotline to the black clergy was what he needed. The one thing disgraced politicians will not do is walk away from a public role and do their penance as private persons living private lives. In some ways, there is more honor in being an old-fashioned impenitent Satan out of Milton—say, Roman Polanski—than in being a mewling, attention-hungry performance artist such as Harvey Weinstein or Rep. Greene or Kathy Griffin, who will do anything to stay in the game. 

The word “act” in “act of contrition” is not precisely the same as in “putting on an act,” something that Rep. Greene already has shown herself to be pretty good at. She should study the difference.

Rep. Greene has done some pretty bad things. No doubt she has done bad things as regards herself, her family, and her God, about which it is not my place to say very much beyond what I already have written. But she also has done some very bad things to her country, to its people, to its system of government, its institutions, its enjoyment of public trust, its governability, its credibility, its geopolitical interests, and its moral standing. She has been a servant of some pretty rotten masters, from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. When it comes to these things, public discussion is entirely appropriate. 

I am glad that she has made her modest apology. But I will not believe that she means it until she acts like she means it—which means acting like there is a standard of good and evil that is above and beyond political expedience. Her self-abasing worship of political power suggests that this is her idol, her true god. And it is impossible to take her at her word in the matter of her regret, inasmuch as she is a habitual liar.

And, so, for the sake of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s immortal soul, a suggestion—or three—from the closing line of T.S. Eliot’s “On the Difficulties of a Statesman”—

Resign. Resign. Resign.