Many of the spirituals that she sang were taken from the Biblical book of Psalms, often from passages that lament the conditions of slavery into which the people of Israel were taken. She sang at her friend Martin Luther King’s funeral. Harry Belafonte called her “the single most powerful black woman in the United States”.

Among her favourite hymns was ‘Amazing Grace’. I find it hard to hear her sing it without welling up. It is utterly beautiful and captivating. And the opening words are such a direct and powerful statement of the Christian doctrine of redemption:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind but now I see.

The hymn was written by John Newton. And John Newton was a slaver. Not in Edward Colston’s league, perhaps. But he captained slave ships, trafficking his human cargo to a life of utter misery, and he personally profited from the slave trade. ‘Amazing Grace’ is such an extraordinarily powerful hymn precisely because it was written by a man with such a shameful past.

Newton has become a kind of patron saint to those looking for some sort of redemption. It’s no surprise, then, that Rev Jonathan Aitken, the disgraced former Cabinet Minster and a previous guest on my Confessions podcast, co-authored a biography of the man. Even those of us whose sins do not add up to anything like Newton’s, recognise in his words the promise that we are not necessarily eternally imprisoned by the things that we have done wrong in our lives. Jackson understood this. “I sing God’s music because it makes me feel free” references freedom from imprisonment on a number of different levels.

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The contrast here with the developing moral consciousness of the contemporary culture wars is acute and, to me, quite frightening. For although something like the anger that feeds into the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue has a clear moral righteousness about it, it is not a righteousness that has been tempered by any sense of our collective need for redemption.

The new, highly secular ‘cancel culture’ represents an extreme form of righteousness that has all the moral power of a certain kind of protestant Christianity, but none of the basic scaffolding of redemption on which such Christianity is built. And morality without forgiveness or redemption is a frightening, persecutory business.

Part of the problem with the cancel culture of modern identity politics is that it makes the confession of sins so much more difficult to achieve. Or, to put that in a more secular idiom: how can we all confront the various forms of racism, sexism, homophobia and so on that we harbour within, when the consequences of any form of public admission are devastating and toxic?

There’s a sort of furious moral vigilantism that encourages its adherents to trawl through our public utterances — in order to condemn and shame us in the high court of Twitter. Against this digital shoaling of the mob, any protestations of rightful innocence are impossible to make, and the fear of being targeted makes any exploration or confession of our hidden failings terrifying to contemplate.

Cancel culture makes us hide in fear. It makes us publicly pretend we are better than we are. It turns us all into liars — and the more we fear the exposure of our failings, the more we point the finger at others in the hope of misdirecting the anger of the crowd.

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Hate the sin, love the sinner. This phrase is often trotted out in evangelical circles, and it has become too much of a cliché. But nonetheless it neatly summarises a kind of firewall that developed in some Christian circles to stop legitimate anger at injustice spilling over into some kind of endless personal attack upon the perpetrators. And it enables us to explore our own failings so much more easily.

The problem is that, under Christian culture, we used to believe that wrongdoers would get their ultimate comeuppance when they faced the divine after death. From such a perspective the final administration of justice would be carried out by the ultimate righteous judge who knows all the secrets of our hearts.

But this God is now dead in popular culture. And so the consequences of our moral failings have to be reckoned with in this life — otherwise we would get away with them without any sort of censure. In other words, the God that would judge us all with fairness and kindness has been replaced by the high court of the digital trial. And once sentence has been passed, there is no coming back, ever. That is what it is to be cancelled.

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I don't miss the nastiness of the Left

By Giles Fraser

In 2007, down a small alley off Fenchurch street in the City of London, Archbishop Desmond Tutu unveiled a sculpture to remember and acknowledge the evils of the transatlantic slave trade. This site was chosen because this is where John Newton had his parish after he became an Anglican clergyman. And it was here that he came to influence fellow evangelicals like William Wilberforce and the whole abolitionist movement. The base of the sculpture is an ambiguous structure that can either be read as the pulpit from which Newton preached his sermons against slavery, or as a slave auctioneer’s podium.

This is one work of public art commemorating a former slaver that I presume will not be targeted by those seeking to pull down other structures. Though if #ghandimustfall can trend on Twitter, and if a statue of Churchill can be graffitied — a man who, whatever his undoubted failings, was instrumental in the defeat of one of the most murderous and racist regimes the world has ever known — then no amount of redemption is sufficient in the eyes of our new guardians of public morality to blot out our past offences.

Sure, there are many statues of dead white men with blood on their hands that I would not lose sleep to see the back of. And who of us didn’t cheer when that statue of Saddam Hussein was smashed to the ground?

But nonetheless, without some sort of secular equivalent to personal redemption — and I don’t know what that would be — those who recognise themselves as “a wretch” will look nervously at this crescendo of moral righteousness and begin to fear that one day the same people will come after us too. Indeed, without the existence of redemption we should probably all be afraid of vigilante moralism.

“Without the support network that I have, I am not sure I would be here to tell the story, to give this interview today” a noticeably subdued looking Maugham told the nation, who then compared himself with the television presenter Caroline Flack. Flack had taken her own life having suffered an avalanche of hostile publicity after being charged with an assault on her boyfriend. Maugham was suggesting he too had contemplated something similar after falling vertiginously from EU defending ‘hero’ to cross-dressing fox killer.

Thank you for @BBCr4today for inviting me on – at 7.40am – to discuss how it feels to be at the heart of a media hatestorm. https://t.co/K19e4qzOfn

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) March 9, 2020

Spiked immediately called out his ‘shameless hypocrisy‘. And yes, hypocrisy there was. Maugham hasn’t been shy of orchestrating a social media pile-on himself, and used all his considerable legal clout to pursue young BeLeave founder Darren Grimes though the courts with all the sympathy of a chasing pack of hounds.

The instinct to say that Maugham deserves all he got is undeniably powerful. He had it coming. I know why people feel that way. But something else needs to be said here too, something about the redemptive power of disgrace. Maybe that sounds too grand, too theological; but I have met quite a number of disgraced people in my time, and I find that their experience often changes them very much for the better. The charge of hypocrisy no longer quite sticks.

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I received an unsolicited communication from a well-known book publisher the other day. We are thinking about commissioning a book on hypocrisy, it went, and we thought you’d be the perfect person to write it. I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended.

But they were correct to guess that this is a subject that fascinates me, not least because the whole question of hypocrisy focuses attention on that gap between how we present ourselves publicly, and the reality of our actual lives. This gap exists even in the most apparently morally punctilious among us — perhaps especially so. Yes, for some of us the gap is negligible. But, for others, the elastic that holds together the public and the private is stretched to near breaking point. Perhaps this is why many unconsciously long to be exposed, the tension unbearable, the release longed for. Lies are a weight to carry. And there is often much relief in being able to lay down the burden of deceit.

A new series of Confessions begins again next week. And this seems like a good point to take stock of what I have learnt, not least as it applies to the very notion of confession and what sense it might make in a generally post-religious world. The Confessions title is a bit of a tease, of course. Yes, some guests have made personal revelations. I won’t ever think of Bondi Beach in the same way again after Iain Dale’s account of an encounter there. But though this kind of stuff is fun, it is absolutely not the point of the podcast.

What we can learn from the disgraced

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Partly, Confessions is a way of exploring interesting people’s big ideas. What also fascinates me about my guests, most of whom live under the bright sun of public gaze, is how they negotiate the relationship between what they profess and who they are. And this is tricky territory, not least because the public gaze is often unspeakably cruel, wanting to expose and punish people for tensions that exist within their own lives.

A number of Confessions fans have challenged me that I am insufficiently robust at interrogating those contradictions within the lives of my guests. Partly, this is because I do not believe I have earned the right to do so. I am a priest first of all, not a journalist. And the role of self-appointed public prosecutor is not one I have any appetite for. Indeed, I rather despise the species of journalism that exposes, with mock horror and fake surprise, the fissures upon which all human life is precariously poised. And its talk of ‘morality’ is mostly a cover for cruelty.

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By Giles Fraser

Most of us do not have bodies buried under the patio so to speak, and we are not all pretending to be something else. The words attributed to the former Times foreign correspondent Louis Heren, “When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself, why is this lying bastard lying to me”, represents an approach to the search for truth that presumes the worst of human beings. And this distorts the fact that most people are trying to do the right thing, however compromised we may sometimes be. Nonetheless, the human condition is richly variegated, and the different parts of our lives don’t always fit neatly together.

In other words, the exposé doesn’t necessarily tell the whole truth. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in his Letters and Papers from Prison (arguably, the holiest book of the 20th century) there is a certain journalistic model which insists that it is only when a prominent person is exposed in their underpants or bath that the truth about them is revealed. This is often terribly misleading. The truth of a human life is often far more open to view when it is laid out as an extended narrative, as a life lived; it is just as much a horizontal phenomenon as a vertical one.

And, I hope, this manner of approach — my manner of approach — elicits the sympathy of the audience as much as it generates fresh perspectives. It is particularly pleasing when a listener describes their surprise at discovering how much they identify with someone with whom they thought they had little in common. This too is the bearer of truth, and one that challenges the audience as much as the guest.

This week we recorded Rev Jonathan Aitken’s Confession. Aitken was a former Conservative minister who served a number of months at Her Majesty’s pleasure after perjuring himself on oath (and on the Bible) after lying about who paid his hotel bill at the Ritz in Paris. Doubling down in his denial, Aitken famously took the Guardian to court: “If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent a twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play, so be it.” Aitken, of course, was lying. But the Guardian’s exposure of his deception, though absolutely the correct thing to do, was only the beginning of the story.

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The Reverend Jonathan Aitken now takes confessions himself, sometimes in Pentonville prison, where he serves as a chaplain. And I suspect that he is just the sort of person the lags are queuing up to confess to. After all, what better person with whom to share one’s sins than a man who knows a thing or two about having been there himself. Someone who can speak about judgment without being themselves judgmental — isn’t that precisely what we want from a confessor?

This is not supposed to be any sort of defence of Jolyan Maugham. I have used his example to speak in generalities. But if you can filter out that shrill cry of hypocrisy for just a moment, there is often a kind of wisdom that accompanies disgrace which we all might benefit from listening to.

I find the disgraced generally kinder people: more forgiving. Wouldn’t it be something if Maugham could find it within himself to say sorry for his own persecutory behaviour? But it’s more than this. Disgrace tends to release people from the hypocrisy-inducing effects of personal ambition and excessive self-regard. And the experience of disgrace allows people to finally come clean about who they really are. “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found” wrote the psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott. That perfectly describes the dynamics of confession.

Remember the game of hide and seek you played as a child? On the one hand, you don’t want to be found – that is the point of the game. But also, nor do you want people to give up looking for you — not caring enough to come and find you. In psychoanalytic terms, hiding is a strategy of protection. And an understandable one given the threats that exists out there. But not being found is worse. This is the territory that the confession inhabits. It is all about the tension that exists between wanting to be recognised and yet feeling there is something unbearable about this too.

In public life, this tension is exacerbated by the heightened threat of public opprobrium for transgression. And so public figures are obliged to negotiate an exaggerated version of hide and seek, and in their struggles with this game they reveal in bold a similar tension that is at work within us all.

You may call it hypocrisy. I call it being human.