Charles Foster’s article of last week on the topic of Iwerne on this blog has had, we hope, a wide-spread impact. Its influence has extended to the States where it was featured on the conservative blog, Anglicans Ink. I would like to think that one comment on Twitter from a member of the Church of England General Synod, Sue Booys, is shared by others. She stated in her comment the following: ‘Excellent article, much to ponder and a really helpful insight into past questions about something I was always vaguely aware of, rather anxious about and couldn’t understand. ‘
This comment could of course be attached to any of several themes in the article. Rather than speculate about which idea or theme created insight from the article for Sue, I want to share something of what the article did for my thinking. I want to consider what I think about the role of women in the church and how their presence or absence within the institution has created some of the problems that the Church now faces.
In his article, Foster described to us in summary the origins of the Iwerne camps. They were the brain child of E.J.H.Nash (Bash) in the 1930s. Bash had the idea of bringing together young men from top public schools so that they could be won for Christ. Then, through their potential leadership in British society, the whole population could be also brought to the Christian faith. Foster drew attention to the exclusivity of these camps. Bash’s invitation to attend was extended only to certain elite schools representing only the male sex. In this way he was inevitably promoting a version of Christianity which was heavily imbued with the culture of the all-male Public School. The decade when Bash began his work was a very different one from today. Political thinking was to a considerable degree polarised into two camps. In Britain there were many who were fascinated by the Stalinist attempt to build up the Soviet Union while others were attracted to the fascist states of Europe. The word fascism did not have such heavily negative connotations before the war. The word implied order and obedience to a leader, together with a readiness to surrender freedoms in order to defeat what was seen to be the anarchy of democracy. Fascist leaders could and did appeal to many among the aristocratic classes in this country. These were the same social groups that were well represented in the early Iwerne camps.
The Iwerne model of training boys for future Christian leadership took, we would suggest, at least some of its inspiration from the contemporary emergence of Hitler Youth and German fascism. The same quasi-military structures present in Italy and Germany, the emphasis on obedience as well as a clear ideology beyond discussion – these were all present. Militarism is of course a solely male phenomenon. Other typically male attitudes were found in the camps, just as they existed in the schools the boy campers came from. The most obvious aspect of both schools and camps was the total absence of the female sex. Even if the male exclusivity at the camps is no longer in operation, the current generation of ex-Iwerne Christian leaders have all been deeply imbued this all-male culture. This is the one that Foster claims has led in many cases to severe emotional impoverishment and a failure to flourish as full human beings.
How does the presence of women change things within institutions like the Church? The question perhaps might be asked in a different way. What happens to gatherings of men when women are excluded? No doubt there are many answers to this question and my female readers will want to add their own insights. Speaking from my own limited experience of a succession of male only environments, I can point to the way that power games are common, with some strong ‘alpha-males’ striving to be dominant over all the others. Hierarchies are quickly established. The weak are either pushed to the bottom of the pile or excluded altogether. These are not inevitable occurrences but the typical desire among many males is to control others rather than be controlled themselves. Of the many all-male cultures that exist right across the world, we might claim that the experience of a British all-male public school is fairly archetypal. To some extent the struggle for dominance and power is acted out through prowess on the sports field and by adopting leadership roles as prefects. When women come to be added into the mix, it is far more difficult for this hyper-competitive culture to remain intact. Foster’s description from the 80s of young women in Laura Ashley dresses on the edge of the camps represented the old subservient picture of women to men. Their role was to be noticed by one of the campers and perhaps help to form a new dynasty of future campers. This was a vivid picture. Clearly at that time these women were not expected to have any real influence in this male testosterone driven world of Godly power that existed among these bands of Christian warriors.
Without wanting to indulge in generalisations about male/female roles, I feel that it is correct to say that things will always be distinctly different when women are present within an institution. The hierarchical assumptions of male superiority no longer remain unchallenged. A common feminine instinct to care for and notice the under-dog also comes into play. Women find it much more difficult to abandon people and write them off. We speak about the female instinct to mother and protect the weak. If such an instinct is indeed a normal quality of the female sex, then the ruthlessness and power competition of men-only environments is going to be softened at the very least when women are present in any numbers.
The situation today is that many of the Church cultures or institutions that once created damage and stunted emotional growth among Christian leaders may now belong to the past. Women are now allowed to soften and mitigate the worst effects of the Nash/Fascist/Right-wing cultures that Foster (and many others) knew. We can look forward, eventually, to a new more compassionate rounded generation of Church leaders. But, for the time being, the die-hards in the Church who embody reactionary values are still with us, exercising considerable influence in the Church. The problem can only really end when such attitudes are identified and expelled or, more likely when they disappear because those who hold have them simply retired or died. Back in the 19th century it was said that medicine could only advance when the power brokers who decided what was ‘correct’ treatment had literally died and quitted the scene. There was no protocol for arguing the case for a new treatment because that was not the way the institution worked. The adage, which can apply to any institution, says quite simply ‘while there is death, there is hope’.
Those of us who identify with the suffering of survivors of Church sexual and spiritual abuse are also looking for a revolution of attitudes among those who hold power in the Church. It will come in the end because leadership will reflect eventually the male/female wholeness. This wholeness turns its back on the male only value systems that have infected and damaged the whole Church for so long.
Some precision on the dating of going mixed. The Oxford Christmas Conference was mixed in 1982 and likely for some time before that, since there was not one for boys and one for girls but one in total. The main summer camps were mixed in 1986 (not in the sense that schoolgirls came but in the sense that uni-age senior campers were of both genders), but I think that was something rather new. 1986 would have been the first year after David Fletcher left as main leader, and was during a sort of interregnum before Iain Broomfield was established as sole head. (By the way, if anyone is looking for cult leaders, the warm and kind David Fletcher is a hilarious mismatch for that role, and the self-effacing courteous Iain Broomfield likewise or even more so.)
Of course the females were in the backgrounds of the male camps. This must have been for sinister reasons?? Only one or two angles have so far been looked at here, but several others can be provided. Here I am having to repeat points already made. (1) The girls already had their own parallel camps which for quite a while were at Motcombe, Dorset, though they had other locations. (2) Having girls around would for obvious reasons have made the camps totally different from the boys’ point of view. (3) It would have meant they could not concentrate so fully and undistractedly on the large-scale life issues that it would be good and necessary for them to confront. None of us does justice to the importance of getting fundamental life issues right, or ever seems to have enough time to do them justice. (4) It would have meant mixed sport and activities and changing rooms, something unusual for that age group – not at all normal for school or university. How is that brought about on the campus of a boys’ school? (5) It would have meant that the camp environment was not the school environment gender-wise, which would have been unnecessarily disorientating when you want people to be able to relax in familiar situations. (6) Anne Atkins was quite right that there is everything good about natural and normal girl-boy interaction, and in an ideal world that would’ve been how the camps were run – but not everyone was as ‘free’ and wholesomely uninhibited as AA. So there is a time and a place; there would be risks. (7) How could wives not be present? Would it be better for husbands to leave them for the week? Or would it be better for wives to be present and do nothing. (8) Women did all the chores? Tell that to the univ-age senior campers.
They may have been normal innocent people and *liked* wearing Laura Ashley dresses. Another felony?! One can think of worse.
Power struggle? Yes at public schools. Less so in Christian environments where people were more averagely considerate. So one’s impression would have been of the diminution of the power syndrome when compared to school, not its importance.
Fascism? There’s a danger any boo-group will get compared to Hitler within 3 moves (Fawlty,…
“It would have meant mixed sport and activities and changing rooms, something unusual for that age group – not at all normal for school or university.”
I’m either misunderstanding, or this isn’t actually true is it? There are plenty of co-educational establishments, and it’s perfectly possible to have mixed activities without (presumably) ‘mixed changing rooms’.
It’s only true if you restrict your consideration to establishments of a certain type, but that’s part of the problem, isn’t it?
Yes – Clayesmore was mixed from the mid70s. I had imagined it to be single sex for longer. So it would have been fine for female facilities.
But you don’t get the point. I made 8 points of which you did not address 7.
If one already has parallel male and female schools ministries in Dorset, does the male go mixed or the female go mixed? One can think of simpler alternatives, namely if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. One is getting the impression that people are hunting for small things to criticise, too small to be of much import, which suggests that they are desperate to criticise something. More is that criticism leavened with the slightest praise (or in the worst cases the slightest first hand knowledge) – which normally suggests bias. In my comments I have not always been uncritical. Now to the other 7 points….
For ‘more is that’ read ‘nor is that’
I spent 15 years as part of Newfrontiers a complementarian church that had Male-only eldership as it’s leadership model.
Looking back having been part of three different churches in the movement, we had 7 occasions over the 15 years where one of the male elders disagreed to point where one of them resigned (or was sacked) and left the church shortly after. We even had an eldership split disguised as a church plant. There was an unwillingness to resolve and work through issues combined with no recourse from congregation – (all power was in the hands of the elders with no PCC’s or church meetings with votes). I wonder how different it may have been if they weren’t complementarian? (or had other limits on their power)
Male = problem, female =solution is clearly equally sexist to male = solution, female = problem. By pondering that point one can see just how sexist (or otherwise) it is. And it has been precisely in the period when that attitude is the Zeitgeist that Christians (who ought to be able to be counter cultural and independent thinkers where required) jump on the bandwagon. One cannot know from inside what it is like to be and think like the other gender. So there is a temptation to view one’s own gender as the norm and the other as deviance. That is by definition a self-centred attitude.
Notably, it is only when the Zeitgeist is so against such things that people started talking of boarding school syndrome etc.. If boarding school had been truly unambiguously bad from all angles, then such talk would go on in all ages – but in truth it is determined by the nature of the Zeitgeist.
There is a danger that, if the present trajectory continues, before long we will have people saying ‘I was damaged by the harsh discipline of my parents forcing me to wait before I opened my Advent Calendar windows / Christmas presents (delete as appropriate)’.
Christopher this not about are men or women right or wrong, but generations of structural and institutional inequality and oppression, well evidence by decades of rigorous research. And quite frankly I find your comparison of advent calendars in the context of a blog about emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual abuse offensive and gas lighting
If something is the end point of an existing trajectory (assuming that trajectory does not change, which it may) then that means it is a point which we have not reached yet.
There is therefore no ‘comparison’, because the present point on the trajectory is by definition not as bad as the projected end point of the trajectory.
There is a serious discussion to be had about the feminisation of culture and whether or not this is sexist. Also about whether children are sometimes being over coddled and about why students have thought they need safe spaces. Constantly acting in practice as though the feminine was the answer and the masculine was the problem is not only unequal but is not the answer either. The answer is for everybody to be able to flourish. And to realise that most worthwhile things in life were not achieved without discipline and hard work.
The philosophy that effectively treats a whole gender as the enemy far too often (the opposite of the friendship model that most sensible people hold to) has been allowed to become mainstream, at a large human cost.
Great article though Stephen. I do hope that the greater involvement of women will change the church culture. Certainly I have met many brilliant lay and ordained women working hard to change their bit of the church. Having bashed my head against the brick wall of church hierarchy for decades, forgive me if I am a little cynical about the old boys network releasing their hold any time soon
The current generation of men “in charge” were brought up in the 50s, as I was I. Most of us, men included, changed with the changes in society. But there are many who haven’t changed all that much. Outside the church, too. And there are quite a few who hanker after a “golden age” that never existed. It’s as if you could bring back a simpler, better time by putting little boys in shorts, blazers and silly caps. The church is old fashioned, which can be nice. But not so much if girls and women can only do what they were allowed to do in the 50s!
There are not 2 options (50s or post-50s) as is here suggested; the truth is different, namely that there are limitless options of which we, if we are sensible, choose the best. Second, 50s is not an option anyway in ages that are not the 50s. What is an option, in fact the best option, is to choose the best features of all ages and cultures. It is frequently open to us to do so.
Anyone who changes with the changes in society sounds like they are merely reactive and a follower, without evidence of independent thought nor of avoiding the tendencies to jump on bandwagons, to be afraid of being in a minority, and to blow with the wind. The people one listens to are the ones who shape the culture. People who follow trends are ten a penny.
The idea of a golden age that never existed is a further oft repeated cliché. Some ages and cultures were and are substantially more golden than others. Secondly, usually the people who are said to want and believe in a golden age never even mentioned a golden age!
As for the changes in society in question, of course we should want a society where far far more families break up, and where numerous other things worsened by some 500%+, as has been detailed e.g. in What Are They Teaching The Children? – with the sexual revolution.
Anyone knows that these are large backward steps. To a child that would be obvious.
The idea is that one should conform to present trends, if I read you right. So-When in the 50s act like the 50s, when post50s, act post50s. Conformity is bad for Iwerne, good for everyone else? Or is blind conformity always a questionable thing, as I think it is? My view is that conformity to good (not fashionable or unfashionable) things is good, and that conformity to bad things is bad. A truism.
Thank you for this (and for Mr Foster’s piece). As an aside, it is worth noting that on the the Iwerne camps were, in the 1930s, cheek-by-jowl with another distinctive youth-orientated movement for spiritual regeneration, which was led by Rolf Gardiner of Springhead (which formed part of an estate he inherited from his compose-uncle Balfour Gardiner). There is a memorial to Rolf in the south aisle of Fontmell Magna church, a short distance to the north of what is now the Clayesmore School.
Rolf was the son of the very distinguished Egyptologist, Alan, and the father of the famous conductor, John Eliot. He is now best known for helping to establish the Soil Association (with the journalist H. J. Massingham of Long Crendon, Bucks, and Viscount Lymington, of Farleigh Wallop, Hants, both prominent on the extreme right). It was Rolf’s ambition to take the supposedly vapid, morally degenerate and enfeebled British youth of the 1930s back to the land by means of work camps, folk dancing, rural crafts, rambling, etc. This led him from the pseudo-Amerindian Kibbo Kift Kindred to the rather more ominous Teutonic Bunde. His goal was a deep moral and cultural amity between Teutonic nations, of whom the English were supposedly one, leading to the establishment of an ‘interlocality’ – a federation of north-west European peoples who would constitute a bulwark against the hated Soviet and Slavic threat. By 1933 he was writing gushing letters to Goebbels and Darre (he also publicly approved anti-Jewish pogroms), and Nazi agronomists visited Springhead in 1936.
It would be interesting to know what, if any associations, there were between the youth groups associated with Springhead and the ‘Bash’ camps, only a few minutes away. It might well be a libel of Nash to suggest that the Bash camps were inspired by Gardiner or vice versa, but there were perhaps certain parallels. However, other strands of English evangelicalism did sail close to the Nazi wind in the 1930s – for example, Frank Buchman, the pioneer of the Oxford Group (and Moral Re-armament), though an American, attended the Nuremberg rallies; it was through the intermediation of Julian Thornton-Duesbery (of Corpus, and later master of St Peter’s) and other Oxford evangelicals that Buchman’s ideology gained traction in Britain.
I should end by mentioning that I am not certain whether Rolf Gardiner ever really atoned for his fascistic politics, but in certain respects he made noteworthy contributions to public life. However, his career is indicative of certain uneasy associations between political ecology and the far right.
That is a fascinating piece of history. On a minor point, I am aware that other camps employed the ‘commandant’, ‘adjutant’, ‘officers’ etc military language or similar, e.g. the Elim camps which would probably have been on the IoW. I expect it was standard for the day.
“Then, through their potential leadership in British society, the whole population could be also brought to the Christian faith.”
One would have thought that the failure of both these things to occur would have prompted some reflection, but that it did not is in itself an indictment of the culture of this particular evangelical sub-group.
Shame on them that still there are some nonChristians left in the country?
But how about the other angles:
-Did they do their best to get towards so high a target (where is this target of converting all Britain spoken of by the way?)?
-Had they had any other target, that would have meant that they were content for some to remain unconverted – which would not have been the best end result for them, and would also have been negative thinking. Christians by definition want that all people should be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.
-Did they produce some of the largest churches along the way? Are they still doing so? Some of the most fruitful school ministries? Are they still doing so?
-Where do they rank in the UK conversion-success stakes among different ministries?
-Where do their critics rank? Criticising from the sidelines ‘is’ much more fun than getting stuck in. Even if not more fun, it is certainly easier.
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