For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

As I reflected on the events that are unfolding at the University of Kent this past week, I was reminded of the proverb quoted above.  This reminds us how small things can have far-reaching consequences.  The organisers of Lambeth 2020 wanted to smooth over what they may have thought was a relatively minor problem — one which could cause potential offence to some of the bishops due to attend the Lambeth Conference.  A decision was made not to invite a small number of episcopal partners who are in same sex relationships.  This fateful decision has now blown up to become a major crisis.  The Council of the University of Kent, whose buildings are being used for the Lambeth gathering of bishops from all over the world, have been alerted to the decision that such partners are not being included in the official invitations. As the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion announced publicly on February 15^{th, ‘}it would be inappropriate for same sex spouses to be invited to the conference.’ Wives have always been included in the Lambeth invitations.  Clearly there is a blatant discrimination at work in this statement.

None of us know exactly how this decision was arrived at.  In all probability it was a pragmatic decision which avoided, seemingly, giving offence to those who maintain ‘biblical’ objections to such relationships.  If these same-sex partners are left at home, this thinking might have reasoned, the Conference can pretend that same-sex partners do not exist. Anglicans are quite good at this kind of thinking.   If a problem, such as the continuing needs of the sexually abused, is buried, then everyone can pretend that it does not exist.  Making sure that only heterosexual relationships are visible at Lambeth preserves the myth that only orthodox and ‘biblical’ marriage is to be found within the Communion and its bishops.

Excluding a small number of same sex spouses might have been, from a pragmatic point of view, a price worth paying to preserve harmony and unity at the 2020 Lambeth gathering in Canterbury.  Surely everyone recognises that although a few people might protest, this action is not illegal.  The Equality Act of 2010 certainly allows for the Church to make such distinctions between hetero and homosexual partners.  This calculation seems to have been a miscalculation and protests began almost immediately it became known.   What began as a small nail being lost, started to become a massive headache for the conference organisers.  Although it is not uncommon for people to expect a degree of discrimination against gay partnerships in the churches, this attitude is far from universal.  One particular factor in the protests and debates that have followed this Anglican decision is the siting of the Lambeth Conference gathering in a university campus. The one segment of the population that will never easily acquiesce in the conservative rhetoric about gay relationships are students.  Enormous amounts of money are spent across the world promoting the anti-gay message of the religious Right in the States and countries like Uganda.  Very few however among the under-30 generation are impressed by this message and they normally will not tolerate what they see simply as homophobia.   Even if church authorities argue their right to discriminate according to the religious exemptions of the Equality Act, students will not stop making their opinions known.  These protests have now come to the attention of the most senior members of the University of Kent and they have issued an official statement.

The letter sent by the Chair of Council and the Vice Chancellor of the University of Kent is a piece of powerful prose.  They make it clear that they are not withdrawing their invitation to the Lambeth Conference to their campus but they wish ‘to bring the Council’s concerns to their (the organisers’) attention and discuss the issues’.  They also pointedly extend an invitation to the excluded same-sex spouses to come to the campus. This is a ingenious way of allowing honour to be preserved on both sides.  The Conference is to go ahead but the uninvited will be welcomed and they will be honoured according to the values of the University. To quote the letter, this welcome places ‘great value on diversity of opinion, open, respectful debate, recognition of difference, and the central role of constructive engagement and dialogue…’  There are many in the Anglican fold who could say Amen to such sentiments, while recognising that there are those who want to turn their backs on such values.

A compromise seems to have been reached which will no doubt protect the Conference for 2020.  Conservatives in the Communion can pretend that they have preserved ‘gospel’ boundaries against gay partnerships among the clergy by making these partners invisible.   The University by welcoming the ‘invisible’ ones have stood up for humane and liberal values that they feel are central to academic life.  The balance of honour may be claimed on both sides.  But can it?  Can we really say that the organisers of a future conference will be allowed to plan for 2030 without a thorough vetting by the University in advance?  The patch up that seems to have been worked out for next year is only that – a patch up.  No vice-Chancellor or anyone else involved with the University is going to allow such a situation to occur again.  I for one cannot see that the University of Kent will ever allow a future Lambeth Conference to take place unless there is a radical shift towards the liberal values that the University itself embodies.  If the Anglican Church is able to move in this direction, then there is a chance that it can meet again on the campus above Canterbury city.  If the Church does not move but remains infected by the reactionary values of GAFCON etc, so amply funded by the wealthy foundations of the American Right, the University will simply tell the Conference to look elsewhere for its 2030 gathering.

On practical level the campus at the University of Kent is perhaps the only site possible for a large conference the size of Lambeth.   Its relative proximity to the mother cathedral of the Anglican Communion makes it particularly suitable to be a meeting place for 700 bishops and their partners.  Also being close to the ancient church of St Martin where St Augustine began his mission in 597 AD gives a further powerful symbolism to this unique expression of Anglicanism.  The organisers of Lambeth 2030 will have a choice.  Will they insist on doctrinal purity by excluding same sex partners of bishops, or will they accept that all spouses and committed companions of bishops are here to stay?  Will they by then understand that faithfulness and commitment is more important in the eyes of God than biological sex?  The nail that was lost when a decision was made to limit who comes to Lambeth in 2020 could mark the end of the Lambeth enterprise altogether.  The kingdom was lost … all for the want of the horseshoe nail.

I have been fairly reluctant to get involved in the Brexit debate.   I find that, having put energy and concentration into understanding the Brexit debates yesterday, I am today left with completely obsolete information.  The brain has been urged to attempt to understand complex arguments and perspectives to absolutely no purpose.

One comment that can be made consistently about the present Brexit state of impasse is that, among the political establishment, there appears to be an almost complete lack of leadership.  This is true of both the main parties.  The various factions are so bitterly divided that no one on either side of the political divide seems able to rise above the fray to suggest a realistic way forward.  It is this lack of leadership in the political sphere that is also causing so much damage to the fabric of society as a whole.  One senses that divisions have been created which may take a generation at least to heal.  Among many surprising statistics is the one that says that ordinary church goers are likely to be supporters of Brexit.  This does not follow the lead taken by most bishops and clergy.  Will this solid phalanx of Brexit loving older church people be another reason for today’s europhile youth to refuse to engage with the institution in the future?

There was a time when I tried to tackle some of the massive literature that is available on the topic of leadership.  Now that all my books are temporarily stored in boxes pending a house move, I cannot pull off the shelf one particular work that engaged my attention when I read it some time ago.  The book made the point that every definition of leadership is inadequate in some way. There are simply too many variables in the concept.  However, there is one idea around leadership that comes close to understanding what might be the ideal. 

The successful leader is someone who has risen up the ranks in some way and now embodies and represents a number of people.  The group represented could be as small as a family.  Alternatively, it could be a nation.  The important facet of leadership is to be a person who has listened to and is tuned into the group in such a way that they, as leader, embody the essence of the group.  He or she is then able to act and move the group forward in some way.  In one sense Donald Trump is a successful leader.  He has effectively identified himself with the bigotry, the hatreds and the prejudices of a large segment of the American population.  In his speeches and tweets he well articulates the frustrations of that large group and gives it a voice.  The fact that his leadership is taking his ‘base’ in a malign direction should not hide the fact that it is always important to have individuals who can embody and represent others.  Our nation and our churches desperately need good leaders to represent us and raise our vision to give us positive hope for the future. 

Those with power within our UK political system seem estranged from the aspirations of ordinary people at present.  No one seems to hear what people in general really want in the present muddle and confusion of parliamentary strife.  It is easy to speak about a failure of leadership.  The main reason for this goes back to the time when the Referendum was first called.   Instead of taking on the burden of being a national leader, David Cameron handed over this role to a poorly thought out process of calling a Referendum.  It did not matter that no one really knew what were the issues at stake or whether they had been properly explained.  The confusion of today’s debates goes back to that moment when a British Prime Minister opted out of the task of leadership.

My suggestion that Trump is an embodiment of effective leadership may have seemed a somewhat perverse claim.  Effective leadership does not always have positive outcomes.  When a leader like Churchill was able to inspire among the led qualities of sacrifice, generosity and patience, we speak of a great leader.  In contrast to Trump’s ‘onward and downward’ style of leadership, Churchill during the War drew out of the nation positive qualities.  He identified with the nation and the people largely identified with him.  There was, in the best sense, a narcissistic merger between the charismatic leader and those who trusted him in this role.  This temporary arrangement helped to bring the nation through to victory.  Any collapse in morale could easily have broken what effectively was the necessary psychological spell binding leader and led.  These were needed to obtain final victory.

When we look at the state of the Anglican Church, we see similar crises in leadership to those faced by our political system.  Although Justin Welby and the bishops of the Anglican Communion are not leaders in the party-political sense, the ordinary people in the dioceses want them to be leaders.  They long for someone to represent them, their hopes and their aspirations for the future.   The problem is that the church is bitterly divided on issues that have been inflated by American Right-Wing caucuses.  In some extraordinary way, large swathes of Christians have been persuaded by these malign forces that the defining mark of a Christian is someone who hates the LGBT population.  Because support for this position has been backed up by large sums of institutional money across the world, the leaders of our church have been reluctant to confront this perverse teaching.  Thus, the power of this ‘orthodoxy’ remains unchallenged, or at any rate not properly confronted, because our church leaders are frightened by the power of such ideas.  Anglicanism has traditionally stood for the mutual respect for differing  views in a creative tension.  Evangelical and Anglican Catholic have always been allowed space together in the same overarching tent.  The way our bishops seem to buckle before these intolerant forces from home and overseas can be described as a failure of leadership.  They have not listened to what the vast majority think and feel.  Thus, they cannot help them to move forward with vision and hope.  Leadership has been exchanged for appeasement.  The bishops have become concerned only to preserve the Church as a place of safety and protection. 

The other topical test of leadership in the church is whether church leaders are doing the right thing for survivors and victims of past abuses.  As with the LGBT issue, the primary concern of our leaders is apparently always to take steps to protect the institution and its officers.  Openness and truth as well as doing the absolute best for survivors are never seeming priorities.  Being in touch with a few of these survivors, I hear of the frustrations that are constantly felt every time things happen that indicate avoidance of the problem and those who suffer from their past experiences.  Effective leadership might involve simple gestures like the picking up a telephone or even sending an email to a survivor.  These gestures are largely absent.  When there is a failure by church leaders to offer small gestures towards the abused, the impression is given that they do not care and are only interested in protecting the institution they serve.  In this this way they can be described as mere servants of the Church rather its leaders.

Failures of leadership seem to be all around us in this March 2019.  Are we so wrong to expect to have leaders in Church and State who listen to us and help us to move forward together?  Are we wrong to expect our leaders to be able to articulate what is in the best interest of all and help us with clarity and vision to move forward to embrace it?  

When I began this blog in 2013, it was an attempt to assist people who were grappling with the task of escaping from fundamentalist/extremist groups.  The target audience were people who had bought into authoritarian styles of church governance, at the same time coming to believe an ideology which, from the outside at any rate, made little sense.  Those who have followed this blog for any length of time will know that I have little time for the arguments of Creationism or many of the strange, even weird, propositions that are required of those who believe that the Bible is ‘true’ in every detail.  I have said more than once that the ‘cure’ for fundamentalist belief systems is to read the Bible text in an environment well away from an authoritarian preacher.  Once the Bible is read for what it actually says, rather than what the preacher says it says, then new possibilities emerge.  Unfortunately, the Bible is far from being an easy read.  Many people who attempt to go it alone find themselves quickly returning to the security of having someone in authority doing the reading the text on their behalf.  The comfort blanket of authoritarian teaching and strong directive church leadership is hard for many to escape.   When faced with a choice between uncertainty, ambiguity and even doubt and the reassurances of ‘bible teaching’, many Christians will always opt for the latter.

Today’s blog wants to explore whether the reason for the attraction of bible churches extends beyond simply being a way of resolving the intellectual challenges posed by the uncertainties of life.  Is the offer of answers to life’s deep questions really sufficient to explain why many people are attracted to authoritarian Christian groups?  Intellectual uncertainty and the need to know ‘truth’ do of course inform the decision of many people to join the more authoritarian churches/groups.  This would apply as much to the school-girls from Bethnal Green joining ISIS as it accounts for the young students finding their way into a Christian Union at University.  As my readers know, I approach this question of authoritarian recruitment from the perspective of those who study cults, whether political or religious.  Some in the academic world see joining a cult as a neutral act; others regard the dynamics of cult membership as posing a potential serious threat to psychological health.  This is not the time to enter this particular debate but merely acknowledge that such disagreements exist.  My perspective is that many religious/political groups are sometimes a source of great harm.  The harm is partly intellectual and partly psychological in nature.  The issue that I want to explore today is the way that some religious activity leads to damage in our capacity to form healthy relationships.

Back in the 1950s the American public was intrigued by the issue of ‘brainwashing’.  Soldiers who had been captured by the Chinese Communists in the Korean War appeared to have fallen under the spell of a kind of mind-control.  Another way of explaining this process was to call it thought-reform.  The writer, Robert Jay Lifton, wrote a highly influential book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, to explore this phenomenon.  His work was deemed to offer also a good explanation of what happened to the victims of cults.  The problem for those who use the brain-washing model to explain what happens to cult-members is that it has proved impossible to define exactly what brain-washing is.  Thus, it has never been an acceptable term in a court of law.  In recent years the law has to some extent caught up with a new term, ‘coercion and control’.   Since 2015, men (and some women) in the UK have been prosecuted for holding their partners in a form of psychological bondage which has not involved physical violence.   Coercion and control remain a good description of what goes on in many authoritarian religious groups.  It may only be a matter of time before a case is brought against such a group for harming a member through such methods. 

The old model of ‘brain-washing’ had one further limitation.  It focused on the individual and his/her mental state.  In other words, religious groups were supposedly harming people by manipulating their imembers’ inner mental processes.  Such arguments have their value and no doubt the cult academic world will continue to debate the problem using this model.  But there is another model which is currently on offer, one which I much prefer.  This model takes the individual cult member and examines the relational context in which they find themselves.  In other words, every individual lives in a context which has been formed by their relationships, both past and present.  The author of a book which explores this relational approach, Daniel Shaw, is a New York psychoanalyst.  In his book, Traumatic Narcissism, he explores the dynamics of cults through examining the narcissism that pervades the inner lives of both leaders and led.  From the perspective of his psychoanalyst practice, he was able to see that the leaders of so-called cults were ‘invariably traumatizing narcissists’.  By this he was describing the way that leader and led were caught up in a destructive cycle of harm.  The leader, the traumatising narcissist, was engaged in a process of ‘feeding’ off the followers in a variety of ways.  He/she might be exploiting them sexually, emotionally or financially.  The followers had, by a process of identification, obtained access to a place of self-esteem which was embodied and articulated by the leader.  His narcissistic messianic pretensions, grandiosity and delusions of power were all shared with the followers as long as they stood close to him.  In the original act of surrender to the leader and his claims, the followers had shed themselves of much, if not all, of their self-determination and core-selves.  The narcissistic dynamic had regressed them to the situation of a needy dependent child.  Escaping from such a situation is no easy matter.  The follower has to reclaim back the personality that had been surrendered to the charismatic/narcissistic leader at the helm of the organisation we describe as a a cult. 

What I have written about recent thinking among cult experts comes close to being a critique of some Christian groups.  Do we recognise the pattern of surrender to a powerful charismatic leader who has all the answers to life’s problems?  When individual Christians cease to think for themselves and let a leader do their thinking for them, are they not entering the dangerous dynamic of narcissistic dependency, a dependency that is so hard to escape?  Shaw’s book is full of wisdom and helpful insight about the way that groups and individuals sometimes behave when bound together in a situation of mutual need.  It has encouraged me to believe that a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a key to unlocking some of the appalling problems in our churches as they struggle to uncover unhealthy dynamics which sometimes afflict leaders and congregations.

Martin Sewell writes:

In a week when one might have though the behaviour of MP’s over Brexit had placed the term “honourable member” beyond parody, evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse demonstrated that the low point may not yet have been reached. 

Whilst giving evidence at IICSA last Thursday Lord Steel admitted that he had recommended his party colleague Cyril Smith for a knighthood, having not only heard rumours of his involvement in child abuse, but having received a direct admission of guilt from his criminal colleague. This is outrageous on two levels.

First, through such complicity, Lord Steel placed other young people at continuing risk, facilitating Smith’s narrative to victims that he was too well connected to be held to account for his abusive behaviour. This is a familiar theme to regular readers of this blog who will know that for many, many years Bishops and senior clergy in positions of prominence and influence within both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches knew of credible evidence of abuse by known malefactors, yet permitted them to continue predating the vulnerable for reasons of corporate reputational management.

This resulted in abusers being quietly moved on, sometimes within this country, sometimes abroad yet as in the case of Lord Steel, it denied protection to those who thought they could trust those receiving the imprimatur of trusted Establishment institutions. There were approximately 144 victims, many residents of local authority care homes in Rochdale who were already vulnerable and known to be in need of protection. The sheer weight of numbers is shocking. 

Second, by recommending the honour, Lord Steel misled his Sovereign by representing Smith to be a fit and proper person to receive it when he knew this not to have been the case. He had learnt of the allegations in 1979 but rather chose to see his colleague honoured because it was not a matter for him. That was a severe misjudgement. Can an advisor who has served his monarch so badly really continue to remain a member of the Privy Council? 

The Queen had necessarily relied upon her advisor in such a matter; he was a senior Parliamentarian with a history of principled stands on matters that he considered rightly or wrongly to have important moral dimensions. He later served as Presiding Officer (Speaker) of the Scottish Assembly and was also known to be a significant member of the Church of Scotland which he later served as Lord High Commissioner of the Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Radical thinker he may be, but you do not get much more Establishment than Lord Steel, and his recommending status meant something both at the time and now.

Yet like politicians and indeed Bishops before him, he has demonstrated a dreadful blind spot where the terrible effects of child abuse were concerned. I note it is still being described as sexual and physical abuse whereas, as my previous blog highlighted, it is the institutional Emotional Abuse and re-abuse that is especially wounding. In passing one ought to note that in this, he is far from alone. The crass remarks of Boris Johnson  on the subject demonstrates that the under appreciation of the issue in public life is depressingly widespread. https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-47560192

To their credit, the Scottish Liberal Party have moved swiftly to suspend and investigate Lord Steel’s case. In this they put to shame the Church of England. At virtually the same time problems have again hit the Church of England with reports
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/13/longest-serving-church-england-bishop-faces-calls-resign-court/
from Chester Crown Court that the local Diocesan Bishop had received an admission from a priest abuser but accepted an assurance that he “would not do it again”. This has resulted in campaigning journalist Andrew Graystone writing to directly call for the Bishop’s resignation.  The basis for this call is that whilst a clear admission was made to the preceding Bishop, Victor Whitsey ( himself a recently accused abuser ) the fact of this matter having been discussed, came to the attention of the Diocese in 2009 and yet no proactive steps were taken to protect future potential victims, or to alert the police.

In both cases, plainly those exercising misjudgement are not bad people. I constantly remind readers that the context of the time must be factored in.  However, the time for this to be an excuse allowing us to continue, simply apologising, undertaking a “learned lesson review’ and moving on, has surely passed. That scenario has been played out too many times in too many places. Victims need to see more robust responses either from the individuals concerned or from the relevant institutions. 

Until such public figures pay a price, either through voluntarily resignation, through the withdrawal of honours conferred upon them, or through being shunned by the court of public opinion, we shall continue to have a culture of minimisation and cover-up. Hitherto the only ones who have paid a price for these matters coming into the public domain are the victims who have to revisit their history of pain, humiliation, anger and all the tragedies within their personal lives that go with this. 

If the Establishment, secular or faith, is to retain any credibility, it is time for its members to grasp the personal responsibility that such cases require. Great reputation and personal advantage goes with public status: with great privilege goes great responsibility. Respect for both victims betrayed and the institutions served requires no more feet shuffling but bold moral acceptance of consequence through principled resignation.

Anything less would demonstrate precisely the kind of cynicism which our Archbishop advised us to give up for Lent when he addressed the General Synod last month. It will continue to poison our public discourse unless or until those privileged with public approval voluntarily surrender it when public confidence is no longer merited, 

The theme of betrayal is one known to biblical writers in both Testaments.  The account of Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss is a key moment in the Passion narrative, but we do not often go on to reflect deeper on the meaning of this word.  The book I am currently reading explores the word in a secular context and the way that it finds a prominent place in many abuse scenarios. 

A lot has been written in recent years about trauma and the way it impacts individuals physiologically and psychologically.  Typically, someone faced with assault, abuse or sudden catastrophe will automatically activate primitive levels of the brain in an attempt to deal with the threat.  The response of the body/brain to any dangerous challenge is the fight/flight reaction.  Such a reaction may well assist survival but there are some situations where abuse is faced but neither of these reactions is viable.  One scenario that makes fight/flight impossible is the domestic abuse situation.  A woman or child cannot easily escape an abusing man as the home they live in is the only place on offer for physical survival.  ‘Battered wives’, as they used to be called, often have nowhere to go, so they adopt a third approach to the abuse which is to freeze inwardly and hope that the abuse or violence will stop.  Of these three responses, freezing is probably the least effective in terms of putting an end to violence

The book Blind to Betrayal by Jennifer Freyd and Pamela Birrell sets out the way that domestic violence does far more damage to a victim than an incident of random attack by a stranger.  To be beaten up, psychologically and physically by a lover, sometimes over many years, is far more damaging than physical pain.  It is a betrayal.  It betrays the trust, the loyalty and the love that had originally brought two people together.   It has a devastating effect on the confidence of the abused.  The likelihood of being destroyed psychologically is enormous.  One of the factors in a domestic violence situation is that both parties have in the relationship made themselves vulnerable to the other.  If one party decides to turn on the other violently, he or she will have gathered plenty of ammunition through which to damage and abuse the other partner.  Much of this abusing is done without anyone else knowing, so, in addition to the pain, there is often a dreadful loneliness.

It has become a commonplace of psychological thinking that man and women are born to build relationships and attachments.  From the time of babyhood every child reaches out to those who are responsible for her care because she knows that she needs them for mere survival.  If the carers/parents abuse or neglect the child, there is no alternative on offer.  The child cannot fight or flee but, like the abused partner, she has to cope as best she can with the scraps of attention available.  By not having basic emotional needs attended to, the child has to grow up without a proper sense of self or adequate levels of confidence and self-esteem.  The list of psychological issues that can befall the neglected child when they become adult is extensive.  Having had their self/subjectivity neglected, the damaged child often grows up depressed, disassociated and unable to cope with forming lasting relationships for herself.  The child from the earliest days had reached out to the parents/carers, seeking affirmation and protection as well as the chance to become a person.  The nurturing relationship between parent and child was tragically not present.

A further casualty of the legacy of neglectful/selfish parenting is the inability to trust.  We can speak of the right of every child born into the world to be able to trust their parents.  If the ability to trust the nurturing parent is responded to by abuse or other failure, the legacy for the child is massive.  How will the child ever learn to trust anyone outside herself if the parents have failed in this area?  Every act of abuse represents a catastrophic episode in the child’s life, and if the abuser is in a position of trust, the damage is especially costly.   People in positions of power in the family/church/school are all representing places that should always be safe.  When those places cease to be safe in the child’s eyes, the world becomes a far more dangerous place.  The act of betrayal by the adult has changed the child.  Instead of an attitude of openess and trust towards the world, there is one of suspicion and fear.  Growing up to learn about life in and through the experience of others becomes impossible.    The abused are often left to fight all their battles totally alone unless they can receive expert help.  The abuser has taken away ready access to the support of others through the ability to trust.

Enough has been said to indicate the point that the experience of betrayal on the part of someone who should be able to be trusted will always make abuse a far more serious event than the original act.  When an act of betrayal is perpetrated by a man of God, then the situation becomes still more complicated at a variety of levels.  The survivor is unlikely to look to the church as a source of help since the institution and the offender may be one and the same in their minds.  Can we really blame any survivor from mistrusting officials and representatives of the church which was the source of the original hurt? The sense of betrayal by what was once a place of safety may also have alienated them from their sense of trust in God.  The abuse, in short, has robbed them of their sense of self, their faith and their ability to trust what had been once a place of security and love.  It is hard to know how these important markers of identity and potential happiness can ever be returned.  How do we give back the possibility of faith and inner security to someone who has had it brutally and suddenly snatched away from them?  Can the church not have far more compassion towards those who show inevitable bitterness and loss in the face of so much betrayal and pain? 

Those who are responsible for the good name of a church denomination often fail to recognise how much is lost when individual members are betrayed by the failure of leaders in an act of abuse.  The loss to self-esteem and identity that is experienced by an individual is inevitably going to be shared as others come to hear of the abuse and the institutional failure that surrounds the event.  In Australia the sentencing of Cardinal Pell is not only about one act of sexual abuse committed decades ago.  It is about a potential collapse of trust by many people in an institution that has failed at so many levels.   People quickly realise that for every perpetrator of horrendous acts against children, there are always bystanders and colluders who have made the action and a cover-up possible.  Destroying trust through acts of betrayal is a serious matter.  It takes humility and contrition on the part of an institution or an individual to put right the broken trust.  If things are ever going to be right in our broken churches, we need to see much more evidence of this contrition on the part of leaders.  It needs to be freely extended both towards those who have been wronged and those who look on with dismay and sorrow.

Two events have interrupted the normal flow of articles from the editor. One is a major crash on my computer with Windows 10 disappearing along with a recent post. The second thing is a house move. I have taken the liberty of lifting a piece which I wrote three years ago which most of my readers will not have seen. I hope to be back to normal shortly, but I believe that this piece has stood the test of time.

Freedom is one of those words that everyone believes they understand. It also assumed that everyone is searching for freedom, particularly if they do not already possess it. Children, and particularly teenagers, are longing, we suppose, for the freedom of adulthood. People in a situation of slavery are also assumed to be striving for freedom above all else. The truth of the matter is in fact far more complicated. Many young adults far prefer to remain at home being fed and housed and generally looked after. Those released from slavery often find that the world of freedom is far more complex and anxiety-inducing than anything they knew before. Freedom brings about many choices and, if truth were told, people fear these choices. Some people will always prefer that life and all its complications be reduced to simply doing what other people tell them to do. The picture we have of every 18-year-old, desperately waiting to break free from family constraints, is only perhaps an idea of what we think should happen rather than the actual reality. Also the belief that every person in any kind of bondage wants to be released from their chains is also something which fits into the way that we would like them to be, rather than the way they in fact are.

From time to time I have reflected on the nature of addiction in our society. It takes many forms from cigarettes to alcohol, sex and drugs. Food is also a well-known comforter to help people cope with the choices and stresses of life. When one indulges in an addiction of choice, the addictive substance makes life seem far more under control. The highly stressed executive returning home from work may relax with alcohol. What he or she is doing is to escape from a world where they feel only partially in control. Alcohol gives them a predictable sense of well-being which helps them temporarily to blot out the choices, uncertainties and ambiguities of the working world. Most forms of addiction can also be understood to be a regression into the comfort and fantasy of being looked after and cared for by someone else. The addictive substance acts as a psychological crutch so that one can retreat from the unpredictable parts of life to something that is reliable and comforting – the child returning to the safety of a mother’s embrace.

One of the things that can be observed about the mass political movements of the 20th century is that, whether Communist or Fascist, they provided a way to relieve the stress of being a free individual, one with choices and decisions to make. The political movements, particularly as experienced in continental Europe between the wars, gave many people the experience of being in a large crowd. These crowds were all focused on a person or idea. While in the crowd the individual was relieved of having to think or feel for himself. It is no coincidence that Nazi Germany and Communist Russia appealed most especially to the young, young men in particular. This is the age group which goes through a period of anxiety as they move from the security of childhood to the time of decisions that being an adult normally involves. If there is someone or something to believe in which will resolve that anxiety, then it will be extremely popular. In short the mass ideologies of Germany and Russia in the 20 and 30s provided shortcuts to maturity for the mass of the population, albeit an utterly dysfunctional maturity. To be given a uniform by the Soviet or fascist state allowed the young man to feel adult without ever having to face up to the ambiguous and challenging freedom that such a stage would normally involve.

My reader may be wondering when I am going to reflect on the way that a fear of freedom is expressed in some aspects of Christianity. What I have to say here will not be popular with some, but I firmly believe that some presentations of Christianity have similarities to both the mass political movements of the 20th century and the current availability of many forms of addictive substance, legal or illegal. There is in fact a great deal in the New Testament about truth and freedom and the importance for the individual to take responsibility for his or her morality and choice of life. But the way the church presents itself sometimes leads us to conclude that the institution is colluding with people’s fear of freedom in the way that it peddles certainties and fixed answers that cannot be challenged. Many people see the church, not as providing a springboard for independent thinking and living, but as a place where people go to be submerged in a large group experience, not totally different from the mass political rallies of the 1930s. The music of these gatherings also helps to ‘soften’ people up to be part of a mass mind. Thinking and believing are here not the actions of individuals but this work is done on behalf of the whole by a small band of leaders. When people claim that they believe everything taught by a particular church or Christian leader, I see something profoundly regressive taking place. How is it ever possible in normal life to agree 100% with another person? And yet that is what is both claimed and believed to be possible in the context of a church. In a normal family one would expect that the 10-year-old child would begin to find areas of disagreement with his or her parents on various issues. By the age of 15 one would expect these divergences to be quite marked. Why is it that we expect everyone to agree with each other in the so-called church family? There is something quite unhealthy going on when this dynamic is at work.

Returning to our theme about the meaning of freedom, I am suggesting that this idea is far more difficult to live out and put into practice than would appear at first sight. Many people, including Christians, want to escape the demands of freedom and find a place and an ideology which makes them feel safe and included. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to belong, such ‘cosiness’ does need to be challenged from time to time. Any parent would want to tell their25-year-old offspring to find their own place rather than staying at home for ever. In the same way a church leader should want to encourage every member of his congregation to explore freedom rather than feel gratified that everyone wants to stay sitting at the foot of the pulpit in a dependent relationship. And yet the dynamic of many churches is one of creating and encouraging dependency, at the same time depriving people of the experience and challenge of finding a new freedom.

I cannot in this short piece explore fully what Christian freedom might actually look like. But I hope I have said enough to imply what the absence of this freedom appears to be. An absence of freedom in the Church can be seen in an over- dependency on particular experiences, words and individuals, This will be combined with a refusal to explore newness, paradox or the unexpected. To demand a freedom from freedom, as many Christians appear to do, is itself a kind of addiction. Somehow Christians have to own up how both in the past and in the present the church has colluded in this addiction. Living out a life of truth and freedom is hard work but this is the life in all its fullness to which Christ calls us.

Every so often, thanks to the Internet, I come across a discipline or subset of a discipline which is entirely new.  This was certainly true when I first encountered the DARVO phenomenon.  Today I want to introduce my readers to another new area of discourse, one which has a slightly longer history.  It is called Impression Management (IM).  This is a study of the way that individuals and organisations project themselves, particularly when confronted with a crisis or threat.  How should they respond, especially when the crisis challenges their very existence?  In exploring this issue, we have especially in mind the way that revelations of past wrong-doing are handled by church organisations.  Every organisation that is answerable to the general public may need to face these kinds of challenge from time to time.  Public image and reputation will always be a precious commodity for any firm, commercial organisation or religious body.  The tainting of OXFAM and other aid organisations with abuse scandals in recent years, has seen their public image and reputation damaged.  Such attacks on the integrity of these organisations will have a negative effect in terms of the donations and contributions they receive, and which form a large part of their income. 

This discussion on impression management owes much to the doctoral studies of an American Christian scholar, Wade Mullen.  He has sought to apply the principles of this sub-discipline to evangelical church bodies in the States.  He has allowed his total thesis to be published on the net.  I am not proposing to summarise all his findings.  Rather I wish to utilise this central tool of his analysis, IM, to question, as he does, on how a church should react when faced by abuse scandals.  These severely call into question a church’s integrity and are a stumbling block for the faith of many of its members.  Whether in the Catholic church or in the Southern Baptist network in the States, the way scandals are handled will determine whether churches can successfully pick themselves up after a crisis of this kind.  The damage that such scandals cause to church bodies is a very serious matter.  We still do not know what will be the results of the many evils committed within churches over recent decades.

The origins of the theory of impression management go back to a book published in 1959 by Erving Goffman entitled The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  In this book Goffman used the metaphor of an actor on the stage.  He/she influences the audience by using a variety of communication techniques to win them over.  What an actor does on stage is not a clear-cut lie, but neither is it the truth about his real off-stage character.  The audience is persuaded (manipulated) to see reality as the actor defines it.  Words are used, emotions are displayed to draw the audience into the actor’s world.  The methods of Organisational Impression Management (OIM) all link back to the basic notion that members of an audience can be persuaded by techniques and words such as those deployed by an actor on the stage.  Those involved in public relations for a company are a bit like teams of actors who work to sustain the corporate image desired by those in charge, even when a crisis is breaking.

Companies and organisations are often forced to negotiate crises and threats to their reputation because of mistakes, incompetence or sheer malevolence.  Amid the huge literature on the way organisations cope with crises, there is one article from 1999, quoted by Mullen, that I found particularly helpful.  With the off-putting title of ‘A Taxonomy of Organizational Impression Management Tactics’, Mohamed and others, the authors, describe the tactics that organisations use to defend their interests.  The article authors employ a series of eight words, memorably all beginning with the letter B to describe the process.  Four of these B words describe methods which relate to ‘assertive tactics’ while the remaining four relate to methods of defence. 

The assertive tactics used by an organisation to defend its reputation, are, as one might imagine, not necessarily very pleasant or even always completely honest.    The ‘B’ words that appear in this category are respectively boasting, blaring, burnishing and blasting.   Behind these words we catch a glimpse of the techniques of intimidation, bribery, false claims and a general flirtation with the edges of truth on behalf of the organisation.  The claims of success which may be made relate probably more to propagandist-type thinking than to reality.  Assertion through sheer bluster (a 5th B word!) is combined with the claim that the organisation is always successful, effective and competent.

The defensive tactics of Organisation Impression Management are summed up in four additional words: burying, blurring, boosting and belittling.  The two words which sum up all these ideas are justification and excuse.    Justification is a word that implies that full responsibility for the threat can be, in some way, partly or completely avoided.  Even when an organisation is forced to admit that their procedures have failed and that fault is admitted, the apology offered often comes with an expectation that all will be quickly forgotten and that the good name of the institution will be quickly restored.

The IM/OIM literature is extensive and even Wade Mullen’s summaries are beyond what we can share in this short post.  Enough space remains for us to consider the outlines of what might be a Christian approach to impression management.  Mullen’s thesis contains a consideration of several biblical episodes.  The characters recorded in them are seen to use typical IM techniques, such as avoidance, excuse or ingratiation as ways putting things right with others.  One example of extensive IM by an individual is in the story of Saul and his interaction with Samuel (1 Samuel 15).  Whatever we think of the command of God to kill the Amalekites in this chapter, Saul was full of excuses in explaining his failure to obey God’s direct command.  Mullen notes six IM strategies being employed by Saul to avoid admitting that he had disobeyed.  In contrast we have the surprising and instant confession of sin by David when confronted by Nathan over David’s adultery and murder of Uriah.  It is interesting to note that David’s passion to punish the man in Nathan’s story who had eaten the poor man’s lamb had been stirred. 

Prevarication, truth avoidance and excuses seem to mark the way many individuals in the Bible used impression management as they do today.  While it is natural to wish to present an organisation or an individual in the best possible light after a mishap or failure, there is always the temptation to retreat into fantasy or even dishonesty as a way of making a problem somehow go away.  Impression management is a good description of what is going on in the Church today as it seeks to do two things in English society.  It wants to convince others that it has Good News while at the same time it wants to be seen as an organisation that supremely values truth, transparency and love.   Somehow the dishonesty that currently afflicts the Church of England at the highest level, in its failures to be open about its past (Smyth, Whitsey and the revelations of IICSA), is a stumbling block.  It is hard for these Christian values to shine clearly.  IM with its undertones of propaganda afflicts the Church at present.  We all want to be part of a Church where we encounter not impression management but reality and honesty.  We serve a God who demands from us openness as we pray that in him ‘all hearts are open …. and from whom no secrets are hid’.    The truths of impression management don’t quite measure up to this standard.