On Sunday, the preacher at my village church started with a question.  ‘What makes you angry?’  She was seeing a link between two of the readings for the day, the story of a disgruntled angry Jonah and equally upset workmen in the vineyard story.  Those who ‘had borne the heat of the day’ were receiving the same pay as those who had only worked one hour.  The problem for me, when a preacher starts with a provocative question, is that it may set me off on a line of thought which stops me giving proper attention to the rest of the sermon.  This happened on Sunday.

What makes me angry?   One of the main things that upsets me is the injustice that I see when powerful people abuse their power to the detriment of others, especially the weak.  In the context of this blog site, I also realise that it is the anger I feel on behalf of the abused that fuels me with the energy to go on writing about this topic.  Anger of this kind has the power to do positive things, even bringing about change.  I hope the anger can be, in a small way compared to the anger felt by Jesus when he chased the money-changers out of the Temple.   He also showed real anger against the Scribes and Pharisees at various other points in the gospel narrative, especially Matthew 23.  So, Jesus seems to approve of anger that results in the furthering of the cause of justice, goodness and transparency.  The Psalmist said ‘Be angry but sin not’ and this reminds us that the motives for feeling anger must always be open to being questioned.  We have to ask, for example, whether the anger we may feel is an example of selfish petulance.  There will always be a need, in other words, to challenge our motives every time we feel anger being stirred up inside us.  Is this really righteous anger or possibly something selfish and dark?

The blog gives me opportunities to think out loud about the misuse of power in the Church, whether it is the power exercised by an individual or that of the wider organisation.  What is going on when an individual plays power games and abuses another person is somewhat different from the processes involved when an institution misbehaves.  Those in charge of an organisation can abuse, not only by direct activity but also through neglect.  If, for example, the institution does not follow up complaints against its own employees who are accused of abuse, it is itself contributing to an intensification of a victim’s experience of abuse.  Of course, there can be false accusations from which the institution needs protection.   More often, though, what we are witnessing is the natural tendency of an institution to act in a way that preserves its interests, whether reputational or financial.

The focus of this blog, when I began writing in 2013, was to stand up for individuals who were at the wrong end of power games played by the church, particularly cult-like charismatic groups.  I was combining a long-held interest in charismatic Christianity with observing how their behaviour could sometimes harm people. In 2010 I joined the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA ) and am a member to this day.  There are a huge variety of cults in our modern societies, not all of them obviously religious.  Perhaps the majority operate with some kind of spiritual agenda, whether New Age, Buddhist or Christian in origin.  Most of those who study them are ex-members themselves.  They know all the tricks that had been played on them to bring them, at one point in their lives, into a state of mental and emotional submission to a leader.  At the ICSA (cult studies) conferences I am meeting a variety of people who are in the process of escaping one or other of these groups.  While they were now no longer inside the culture that had caused them so much harm, there was still a continuing process to be gone through of escaping the mental tramlines that the cults had placed inside their heads.  Serious damage had been done and even when they were working, possibly as full-time psychotherapists, to help other cult survivors, they were still fighting their own internal battles.  The wrong kind of religion can, we can summarise, be bad for your happiness, your finances as well as your health.

My time in ICSA (cult studies), mainly by attending their conferences and preparing beforehand to give a paper, has helped me to become more and more sensitised to the possibility of the real damage that can be caused by religion.  I have to emphasise that it is seldom the doctrines or belief systems that cause the damage.  It is the use made of those beliefs by a controlling leader.  The long process of recovery from cultic bondage is one of relearning how to feel, how to think independently and generally escape all the destructive patterns of dependence that have been inculcated by a leader.  Most survivors of the cults preserve mental fragility years after their exit from a high-control group.  The tentacles that controlled them for so long were far more than deviant doctrines.  They were a whole nexus of social, psychological and theological strands woven together.  Those who have successfully helped individuals ‘escape’ from cultic bondage do not start with the theological/religious belief systems.   It is probably as futile to discuss such systems of belief with a exiting member, as having a conversation with someone whose only language is Finnish.  Mutual understanding is impossible.

Having said that beliefs on their own do not cause actual harm, I have to admit that this statement needs qualification.  When I wrote my piece for the volume of essays edited by Janet Fife and Gilo, Letters to a Broken Church, I looked at some biblical passages that bolstered clerical/leadership authority in potentially harmful ways.  People are harmed when Christian communities turn against them for no other ‘wrong’ than disagreeing with a pastor’s desire to use power inappropriately.  In administering such ostracism, a leader may be quoting scripture to back up his harmful consolidation of power.  His power is enhanced by his weaponization of the scriptural text.  Other examples are the use of scripture to foster fear of demons or hell and that will cause damage.  A theology or style of reading scripture that causes obvious harm to people, physically, emotionally or spiritually will always need to be challenged.  To repeat, it is not the actual texts that are being questioned, it is the way that they are being used to do damage to others that is under scrutiny. 

One of the extraordinary developments in the long unhappy saga of the institutional church and its neglect of survivors is in the way that simple morality and conscience has often seemed to be absent.  When bishops and church officials are found to be colluding with others to supress truth and transparency, that is of serious concern for the whole church.  The fact that institutions will have a natural tendency to protect themselves is a neutral observation.  It becomes a problem when the leaders of that organisation resort to underhand methods to promote that defensiveness.  It would seem that, in Gilo’s recent revelations, lawyers, medical experts and insurance personnel have conspired together to deploy highly questionable strategies in abuse cases – on the edge of what most people would consider ethical. This has been to the severe detriment of survivors’ well-being.  The effects have had serious and lasting consequences.  Julie Macfarlane’s book is soon to appear telling the story of tussle with the legal/insurance cabal employed by the Church which did so much in its attempt to destroy her and her case.  Fortunately for the abused, some survivors, Macfarlane, Gilo, Tony and Julian among them, have, at great cost to themselves, stood up to the bullying juggernaut represented by the insurance faction/legal teams/reputation managers arrayed against them.  There are signs at last that somewhere in the system individuals are beginning to show signs of shame that may lead, we hope, to real changes in the end.  Then we have the IICSA (sexual abuse inquiry) report, due at the beginning of October.  This may help to reinforce the message of needed new beginnings that is so sorely needed.

I began this reflection with the word anger.  I was talking about the anger I feel for the appalling things I have reported on in this blog.  A few are to do with individuals seeking gratification for sexual urges.  More shocking are parts of entire constituencies doing underhand things, whether they are called the Church of England, Lambeth Palace or the ReNew/Titus network.  Each, in different ways, is involved in ducking and diving to avoid owning up to massive failures of care, love and common decency in regard to abuse survivors.  Many of these have written to me to confirm that the institutional failures towards them are far more hurtful and harmful.  Their stories have made me angry and I hope that my reader can share some of that with me.