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The word apology initially meant "a speech in defense," and, as any parent will tell you, that's still what you're most likely to get when you ask a young child to apologize to a sibling. The Greek root survives today in the words apologia and apologetics, both of which can mean "a formal defense or justification" (The Apologia Project, for example, is dedicated to intellectual defenses of the Christian faith). Apology began to mutate in the late 16th century, shedding its sense of justification and beginning to bear regret and guilt, although it would be more than a century before the latter sense became the primary definition.

Today, politicians and other public figures tend to turn their apologies into apologetics. Evaluating former baseball player Pete Rose's recent autobiography and the statements of former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in the documentary The Fog of War, Bruck Kuklick writes in Christianity Today's sister publication, Books & Culture, "Each man owns up to past blunders, but each refuses to admit any character defect; and each tries, in different ways, to deflect serious criticisms." Both, Kuklick says, come across as self-serving and low on remorse.

Sometimes apologies seem defensive by their indifference to the severity of the sin. When Connecticut governor John Rowland announced his resignation last month in the face of a federal corruption investigation, he said only, "I acknowledge that my poor judgment has brought us here." Poor judgment, unlike pride and lying, isn't really a sin—only a mental malfunction—so it's easier for politicians to own up to. You could call it a kinda culpa. Beware the dodging going on when you hear "regrettable," "unfortunate," or "unacceptable" instead of "sorry." These words often try to turn apologies from acts of humility into acts of bravado. As linguist Geoffrey Nunberg notes, such buzzwords are "an elegant way of appropriating the indignation without accepting the blame."

By these standards, current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was downright candid when he told Congress in May, "To those Iraqis who were mistreated by members of the U.S. armed forces [at Abu Ghraib], I offer my deepest apology" (though critics saw his resistance to resignation and investigation as undercutting his claim to "take full responsibility"). President Bush was less forthcoming, telling Arab television that the abuse "reflects badly on my country" and "does not represent the America that I know." When asked by a reporter why the president didn't say he was sorry, White House spokesman Scott McClellan replied, "I'm saying it for him right now."

Apologies at such a high level are a delicate diplomatic matter. Bush emphasized to a gathering of Christian reporters, including one from Christianity Today, that his appearance on Egyptian television did not mean he was addressing the Arab world as a whole. "I said I am sorry for those people who were humiliated," he told the gathering. "But I never apologized to the Arab world." When asked by Larry King, "Why is it so hard for politicians … to say, 'I was wrong'?" former President Bill Clinton, who issued some kinda culpas in his day, replied, "I think they're always afraid of ridicule. They're afraid they'll be perceived as weak."

If politicians are reluctant to apologize, religious leaders seem eager by comparison. "As the only Anglican bishop to have publicly endorsed the Australian Government's case for war, I now concede that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction," wrote Tom Frame, in an article in the Melbourne Anglican that was reprinted in the Melbourne Age. He also said that, contrary to his earlier beliefs, Iraq did not pose a threat to the U.S., nor was it tied to Al Qaeda. Therefore, he wrote, "I continue to seek God's forgiveness for my complicity in creating a world in which this sort of action was ever considered by anyone to be necessary."

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July (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48