Penance and punishment for the canceled

Think for a moment about public figures who have been “canceled.” I don’t mean instances of reckless or unjust “cancelling.” I mean men and women who are guilty of the accusations, who caused scandal by their foolish or harmful or wicked actions, and who received some combination of social, professional, financial, and legal consequences as a result of their actions. I’m thinking of pastors, professors, actors, artists, musicians, comedians, and politicians. They are guilty, they know it, they admit it, and they suffer for it.

Here’s the question. What is the appropriate punishment for such people? What severity should characterize it, for how long, and why?

The public conversation on this topic is fuzzy at best. Critics and pundits quickly resort to the passive voice, to mention of how “some people feel,” to the “challenge” and “struggle” and “questions with no answers,” always with the kicker that the author finds him- or herself made “uncomfortable” by the whole subject. This amounts to one long dodge. No one, at least no one that I can find, is willing to say what would actually qualify as appropriate penalties or penance for a guilty person; or, alternatively, that no penalty or penance is possible in this or that case.

I don’t imagine that society as a whole could reach anything like consensus on this question. But for those of us who think and write about it, we could at least find some shared analytical ground on which to discuss it. To be sure, the punishment has to fit the crime, which means that every case is different. Nevertheless, for all cases, there is a range of possible penalties and modes of penance available to both official authorities and the populace in general. Assuming none of us wants the guilty canceled publicly tortured (a punishment many societies have employed!), I came up with twenty possible consequences for a public figure caught having done something wrong. They range from least to most severe, more or less; they distinguish temporary lengths of time from permanent consequences; they are not all mutually exclusive. Here’s the list:

1. A formal apology

2. Time away from the Eucharist

3. Time away from the spotlight

4. Time away from one’s job, post, or profession

5. Time away from a position of leadership

6. Time away from one’s family

7. Time away in a medical, therapeutic, or monastic institution

8. Being fired

9. Being blacklisted

10. Permanent formal banishment from one’s profession

11. Permanent formal banishment from any type of public role

12. Permanent public social shame

13. Permanent financial destitution

14. Permanent legal separation from one’s spouse and/or children

15. Permanent sentence to a medical, therapeutic, or monastic institution

16. Exile from one’s homeland

17. Prison for a time

18. Prison for life

19. Capital punishment

20. Suicide

Here’s why I think this list is useful.

First, it names aloud the range of possible punishments a society might inflict on a person guilty of some social wrong (not always a crime, legally speaking; usually a sin, theologically speaking). This list addresses society and each of its individual accusers: Which do you want for the guilty? Which is just? Which is not?

Second, the list clarifies that penance and punishment come in a variety of forms. Sometimes it’s mild; sometimes it’s extreme. Sometimes it’s tacit; sometimes it’s official. Sometimes it’s temporary; sometimes it’s permanent. Again: Which should apply in such-and-such case? What reasons or criteria are at work?

Third, the list shows the stakes involved. Options 6-20 are all personally devastating, even if some of them are temporary. No one wants to suffer them. In truth, no one wants 1-5 either. They’re all awful in one way or another. So we shouldn’t minimize the suffering involved. In particular, folks who reject the concept of retributive justice should be careful about which, if any, of these penalties they endorse—for any kind of wrongdoing—and why.

Fourth, the list contains an ambivalence. Namely, are these penalties to be inflicted on the guilty because they deserve it? Or are they forms of public penance by which and through which the guilty are absolved, socially or legally, of the guilt and debt they have contracted by their wrong? In other words, if a guilty man consents dutifully to whichever of these punishments his institution or society deems just, is he thereby relieved of his social burden? May he thereupon reenter whatever form of professional, political, public, or ecclesial life he formerly led—with a clear conscience and a reasonable expectation of being treated like anybody else? Or is the scarlet letter an indelible branding? Is the scorn and shame justly cast on a guilty woman hers, by rights, forever? “Till death do us part”?

This last question is not quite the same one pundits and critics like to ask. They tend to ask, “How much time away is enough?” And they invariably report—without exception, in my reading—that the time away is never enough. Yet they cannot specify how much longer would have made it sufficient. Their discomfort endures.

The problem here is not that some of us sometimes sense that a person should stay away indefinitely. It would be perfectly just, in some cases, to apply penalties 8-12 above. Being an actor or a comedian or a senator or a priest is not a right; it’s a privilege. I’m more than willing to believe that there are actions that permanently, not temporarily, disbar one from any of these or other public professions.

No, the issue is not whether some people do “return to the limelight too fast.” Plainly some do. The issue is whether we possess collectively a concept, not to mention a coherent practice, of public penance, whereby we would say in certain cases that a guilty person paid his dues or suffered long enough or needn’t hide in the shadows forever. That criminality and sin need not, in some cases at least, render a person unclean for life. That the guilty can reemerge from their shame, without fear of further or constant shame—even and especially when that shame was valid and deserved, not coerced or false or merely imposed from without.

As many have noted, we need an account of public and social forgiveness. But in whatever discursive context we find ourselves in—social, moral, legal, civil, religious—forgiveness follows contrition and justice both, and the price of justice is often steep. What should the guilty pay? What do they owe? Will we receive them anew once the ledger is clean? Those are the questions we need to be asking. Speaking clearly about penalties, punishments, and penance is one step toward answering them.