There are many discussions between people that are rendered difficult or even impossible because each side understands particular words differently. When words which have contentious backgrounds come into a conversation, there is massive scope for non-communication. Recently someone used the word ‘cult’ in an online comment on this blog. The one thing wrong with using a word like this is that its use tends to foster misunderstandings. For this reason, I am reluctant to use it except when I go the annual conference of cultic specialists, the organisation known as the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA). There are of course numerous other words in the area of theology and religious thinking that have the same capacity for meaning different things to different people. A recent topical example is the word ‘review’ when used by an institutional body, like the Church, to describe an attempt to hold an examination of past (mis)conduct with the express aim of learning from what went wrong.
In the Church Times today (Friday) there is a story about the review of the case of Matt Ineson and his abuser, the late Trevor Devamanikkam. The National Safeguarding Team (NST) has commissioned Jane Humphries to carry out a ‘lessons-learnt’ review of the case. The basic facts of the original case are not disputed but what will be under examination are the responses of senior church people to Matt’s attempts to disclose to them what had happened to him. These disclosures were made over a period of several years. Matt has named four bishops, including the current Archbishop of York, as having been informed of the case by him personally. The review is thus being asked to consider some information which could potentially prove embarrassing to the bishops concerned. Up till now, despite attempts by Matt to establish accountability over the way his case was handled, there have been no apologies from the Church. In an excruciating encounter at the IICSA hearings, Justin Welby failed to offer any kind of apology to Matt even though he was sitting only a few feet away. No doubt, issues of legal liability were uppermost in the mind of the lawyers advising the Archbishop. It was, nevertheless, a shameful incident in the history of church safeguarding and its failures.
Matt is, according to the Church Times story, refusing to
cooperate with this current review. He
asks the valid and so-far unanswered question.
How can you trust a review which is set up by the organisation that is
being accused of bad behaviour? To quote
his words: ‘The Church is steamrolling ahead, trying to control an
investigation into themselves. This is open to corruption. I would work 100 per cent with a genuinely
independent review. This is not it. …. We have repeatedly asked the Church to
have a totally independent review, which they have refused’.
Matt’s concerns about the independence of the Church review process are not unfounded. One independent review did get conducted into an abuse case, the Elliot Review, but this was subsequently ignored and undermined. The IICSA process uncovered some of the falsehoods used to question the Elliot Review but the damage had been done. Although the review initially received the attention of Archbishop Welby himself, and a bishop was commissioned to implement the recommendations, there was a complete failure to do this and Elliot has been quietly dropped and ignored. It is not surprising that the word ‘review’ when used by senior church people means something different from the meaning it has for the rest of us.
The BBC Sunday programme in August broadcast an interview with Kate Blackwell QC about what a properly conducted review should look like. I took the trouble to have that interview transcribed and placed on this blog. http://survivingchurch.org/2019/08/05/bbc-radio-4-sunday-programme/ . It seemed to set out so clearly the common-sense approach to what a review of a past abuse case might involve. Her clarity seemed to show up how extraordinarily amateur the Church’s approach to this issue appears to be. Kate emphasised that the focus of any review must be the victim/survivor. There can no question of institutions using such reviews to protect themselves.
Interestingly, across the world in Florida, an example of good practice has appeared this week. http://anglican.ink/2019/11/27/independent-investigation-into-st-peters-anglican-cathedral/ An organisation called Godly Response to Abuse in a Christian Environment (GRACE) has been asked to investigate a Cathedral in Tallahassee within the fold of ACNA, the independent part of Anglican Church in North America. The case concerned one Father Eric Dudley, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral. He was accused of grooming and molesting young men over a period of years. The report has now been published and it seems a thorough piece of professional work. A crucial detail of the investigation was that at the beginning, the ACNA bishop wanted to hold an internal inquiry. Senior clergy in the diocese prevailed upon him to engage GRACE as they realised (like Matt) that organisations which investigate themselves are in danger of doing a less than fully competent job. However good the reviewer is, the fact that they are employed by the organisation means that their true independence may be questioned.
GRACE interviewed fifty-one witnesses and reviewed countless documents and telephone records. The story that emerged about Dudley’s behaviour was deeply disturbing to his flock, especially since a major part of the rationale of their breakaway status was the firm resistance to the LGTB cause. Dudley chose lonely young men to abuse. These could be manipulated and sucked into a relationship over a period. The victims all expressed their gratitude for the professionalism of GRACE. One of the painful experiences for victims within the whole process was the way that some, early on in the process, had received ‘godly admonitions’ for coming forward to report their abuse. In other words, the Church left to itself had tried to shut the victims up for trying to speak out. The charismatic hold, as we would describe it, had meant that, at the beginning, people in the congregation had not wanted to hear any accusations against their Dean.
There is a great deal that cannot be mentioned in my perusing of this American document. The fact of its existence and the way that it provides detailed examples of good practice means that it should be part of the tool-chest of every safeguarding professional in this country. We need increased professionalism in this area. There is too much at present that seems like individuals making up good practice as they go along. Matt’s concern that the investigation in his case will not be adequate is a reasonable concern.
I have been
following the John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher sagas obsessively. I would like
to be able to say that this is out of concern for the victims. But although I
do feel deeply for them, my main interest, I must admit, is in the light that
the sagas shed on my own past – and particularly the time I spent at the Iwerne
camps.
Iwerne, for
anyone who doesn’t know, runs Conservative Evangelical holidays for pupils
(boys only in my day) from the top few public (i.e. independent) schools. They
were established by E.J.H. Nash (‘Bash’). ‘Lord’, he prayed, ‘we claim the
leading public schools for your kingdom’. The assumption was that if you
convert the ‘elite’, the rest of the world will follow, since that’s how
society works.
I was involved in the Iwerne camps for several years from
Summer 1982, as a ‘Senior Camper’
(general dogsbody) for a year, and then as an ‘Officer’. I gave talks at Iwerne
camps and at Iwerne schools. For two years I lodged in Cambridge with Mark
Ruston, Vicar of the Round Church (the Iwerne church in Cambridge where Jonathan
Fletcher had been a curate), and author of the 1982 report on John Smyth. Justin
Welby had lived there a few years earlier. After Cambridge I attended St.
Helen’s Bishopsgate for a while.
I escaped from Iwerne’s orbit thanks to a lot of travelling,
a lot of forbidden books, and a dark, painful epiphany in a Middle Eastern desert.
I repudiated first Iwerne’s insupportable politics and corrosive misogyny. The allure
of its algorithmic theology – a tweedy, brisk, Colonial spin on a 16th
century Swiss reaction to some mediaeval Roman Catholic abuses – took longer to
fade. Though I’m free, the scars remain.
Iwerne was profoundly authoritarian – as the use of the title
‘Officer’ indicates. Unquestioning obedience to the upper echelons was
expected. The ultimate
accolade was ‘He’s sound’ – by which we meant that all his thoughts were
diligently shaded from the light of reflection, scholarship, and experience. Camp
talks were
vetted privately for orthodoxy beforehand, and subject to detailed public
criticism afterwards.
The theology was banal, stern, and cruel – a set of
suffocatingly simple propositions held with steely eyed zeal. Its insistence on
penal substitution and nothing but penal substitution embodied and tacitly
encouraged the notion that ultimate good depended on violence. Without penal
substitution, John Smyth would have had no thrashing shed in his back garden.
We loved hell, and needed it. We were glad that it was well
populated – particularly by people who hadn’t been to major public schools –
because that emphasised our status as members of an exclusive club of the
redeemed. If hell hadn’t existed, or had been empty, we wouldn’t have felt
special. We were elected – socially and theologically – and proud of it: if
everyone were elected, it would make a nonsense of election.
The theology chimed perfectly with our politics, our
sociology, and the grounds of our self-esteem. We were sheep, and delighted
that there were goats. And we never, ever, read the rest of that parable. If
someone was hungry, we had better, more urgent, and more eternally significant
things to do than feed him. If someone was a stranger, we wouldn’t dream of
taking him in: he might not have gone to a strategically significant school. If
someone was in prison – well, that was the sort of thing you expected from the
lower orders, not from us, and our time would be better spent evangelising
stockbrokers at the Varsity Match than visiting him. And as for the Sermon on
the Mount? An embarrassment, to be spiritualized into impotence. Blessed are
the sleek. Blessed are those who earn. When I should have been handing out soup
and blankets at a homeless shelter I was listening to fulminations about the Social
Gospel (always capitalized, and apparently more deadly than rabies). Not only
can one serve God and Mammon, one should:
just ask the banker-prophets filling the pews at St. Helen’s Bishopsgate.
Humans were denigrated: they were wholly fallen. They were
therefore wholly straightforward – and their needs could thus be met by
childishly simple theological formulae. Any books that pretended that there was
much in humans to explore or describe were suspect. Shakespeare should have put
down his pen and picked up his Scripture Union notes. Humans were made in God’s
image, and since God was easy to summarise and explain, so were humans. God wasn’t the ground of being. He was
a headmaster, and we liked it that way, since headmasters were one of the only
things we really understood. Mystery and nuance were
diabolical. To be moved by anything beautiful was unsound and effeminate.
Beauty itself was a snare.
Emotion was taboo – whether religious emotion, in the form of
charismatic experience or otherwise, or more general human emotion. For most of
us it was a relief to hear this: our schooling and conditioning had left us
emotionally stunted, and it was good to know that this stuntedness was what God
wanted. Romantic relationships were belittled. A speaker assured us that it was
better to be out telling public schoolboys about Isaiah 53 than to be
‘whispering sweet nothings in our girlfriend’s ear as we chewed it off’. We all
sniggered nervously and obediently, longing for an ear we could chew without
emotional engagement. If we could not be as the single, celibate speaker was
(and it was grudgingly recognised that not all could aspire to that high
calling), we should marry one of the Laura Ashley-clad lady helpers from Iwerne,
and mitigate our guilt by producing new public schoolboys to become Iwerne
officers.
We
instrumentalized people. The lady helpers cooked at the camps, and were potential
incubators of the next generation, and so were tolerable. If someone could be
used for ‘the Work’, he was flattered, favoured, and promoted. But at the first
sign of ‘unsoundness’ (perhaps a rumour that he’d been a bit too cosy with a
non-Christian girl, or had been seen on the London train with a Buddhist book, or
if he’d asked in exactly what sense the Iwerne gospel was Good News for
homosexuals), out he’d go into the outer darkness, where there was weeping and
gnashing of Comprehensive school teeth. The speed with which we dropped them,
and the rigour of the quarantine, suggests that our main worry was infection.
The high command was shrewd, in its way. It knew that it
would take little for the fallacies of its position to be exposed, and it took
steps to avoid exposure. It built high-walled ghettos, from which the cultists
would emerge solely for the purposes of evangelism, lectures, and rugby, and to
which they would retreat at nightfall. Officers, at least in Cambridge, were
expected to attend a weekly prayer meeting during term time, at which
intelligence from the various ‘camp’ schools was exchanged. This helped the top
brass to keep an eye on its officers, and ensured that the officers were kept
emotionally tethered to the schools from which they had come themselves – which
fostered a sort of nostalgic infantilism, and helped to shroud the intellectual
and moral insupportability of Iwerne’s theology.
Why did I put up with it for so long? I have asked the
question repeatedly over the years. Part of it was the lure of the Inner Ring:
the Masonic secrecy; the flattering insistence that we were the elite; the spiritual
stormtroopers of the nation. Part of it no doubt stemmed from our insecurity.
We were all from the public schools that were Iwerne’s constituency, and hence
emotionally immature and damaged. We needed personal and theological assurance
more than most – perhaps particularly because we had to keep up the pretence of
poise and infallibility. And, like most people, we loved easy answers.
Broadly there are, I think, three groups of Iwerne alumni.
First, there are those who remained inside their ghetto. They have lived
timorous (though often stridently dogmatic and chauvinistic) lives – constantly
fearful of invasion. They don’t marry, or they marry within the clan, and tend
to have jobs that make few demands on the imagination – for you never know
where the imagination might lead. Second, there are those who left the ghetto,
found that they couldn’t cope without its synthetic certainties, and had some
sort of collapse. And third, there are those who left the ghetto, looked back
at it in disgust, with regret at the wasted years, with bemusement and remorse
because they were taken in, and with a huge sense of relief that they escaped. For
them, every free post-Iwerne act is all the more piquant because it is an act
of defiance. Mercifully I am in this third class, but I hate the disgust and
bitterness that comes with membership, and I’m worried that this blog puts them
shamefully on display.
So Iwerne, and the Conservative Evangelical world that Iwerne
still dominates, were my worlds for a while. They are Jonathan Fletcher’s worlds,
and were John Smyth’s. Jonathan Fletcher’s brother, David, ran the Iwerne camps
while I was there. Jonathan is one of the High Priests of Conservative
Evangelicalism: Iwerne is his power base. John Smyth was the Chairman of the
Iwerne Trust.
I met John Smyth myself only once – probably in 1982. I went
to his house to ask his advice about going to the Bar. Nothing untoward
happened.
I never heard of the Smyth allegations until the Channel 4
story broke, but when I did hear them I wasn’t surprised. I knew why Smyth had
told those boys to go into the shed, and why they had gone.
My wife asked me the other day whether I thought that Smyth
was a simple sadist, or whether he actually believed the theological
justifications that he mouthed. I am sure that both were true. He had been trained to be incapable of the
(elementary) reflection necessary to realise the dissonance between sadism and
Christianity. In our culture, reflection was actively discouraged.
Introspection was regarded as egotistical, and a highroad to heresy. Real men
got on with manly sports (to burn off their libido and to make them too tired
for dodgy philosophising) and with the promulgation of the algorithms.
I recently watched
one of the few videos of a Jonathan Fletcher sermon that remains live on the
internet. Despite everything that has emerged about him, and despite my own repudiation
of his creed and his circle, I was moved. I didn’t and don’t doubt his
sincerity for a moment.
That he could
believe wholeheartedly what he said, while still behaving in the way that it
appears he did is, as in Smyth’s case, a sign of compartmentalization – a
compartmentalization that can only be sustained by systematic insistence that
self-examination is effeminate and dangerous. There are strange, complex,
seething things in the human psyche, we were told. Keep them out of the living
areas! They’ll make a mess. Wholeness entails the breaking down of the barriers
between the compartments of oneself. A whole person would know that the
evangelical algorithms were literally unbelievable, and so we were taught that
we should not be whole people.
Walled up
behind my own Iwerne reception room were, amongst other things (some tawdry,
some glorious), The Tibetan Book of the
Dead, some proscribed girlfriends, a taste for animism, and the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. I hope that
some of my own walls are coming down. It is slow work, but it helps not to have
a philosophy and a hierarchy that insists that God built them.
I sometimes bump into some of the ghettoized people. They have an easy air when they’re on their own territory, with their own people. But get them slightly wrong-footed – lurching against one of those scrupulously erected internal walls – and the panic rises.
I had lunch
with one of them last week. ‘What do you make of the Jonathan Fletcher
business?’ I asked. ‘Very sad’, he barked, ‘Now about those building plans….’
There was no getting him back to it. There was too much at stake. It would have
demanded a re-evaluation of the algorithms, and the algorithms mattered more
than the truth about Christianity, or the truth about himself, or the truth
about the kind of creatures humans are.
Some of the
best people I have ever known were fed into the Iwerne machine. Such talent,
energy, discipline, and goodwill. I mourn for what they might have been – as I
mourn, with less reason, for what I might have been had I not been drawn into
Iwerne. Some of them are amazing still: the compartments to which they admit me
are tastefully furnished and cosy. But if they had been whole!
What I want
to know of Smyth, Fletcher, my former and current Iwerne friends, and myself,
is this: when you use personal pronouns, what do you mean? When you say ‘I
believe’, ‘I love’, or ‘I am saved’, which compartment is speaking?
Vaughan Roberts (himself a Iwerne man – one of the best; an abiding friend for whom I have great respect) made a statement at the Evangelical Ministry Assembly about the Jonathan Fletcher allegations. He said that a ‘lessons learned review’ would be necessary. That review will no doubt deal with questions such as why Fletcher was allowed to minister so widely after his licence to do so had been revoked, and more generally about the Church of England’s safeguarding policies. All very important, of course, but not as urgent and repercussive as many others. What is this theology of Jekyll and Hyde: of the Royal Courts of Justice and bloodstained canes in a Hampshire garden: of buttoned-up exegesis and naked massage? What are we? And how did ‘life in all its fullness’ come to mean a shrivelled, cramped life, characterised by fear of the Other, and maintained only by walling off all the parts of the self that might criticise the tyranny of the algorithms and wish for something better?
Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, a practising barrister, and a writer. He read veterinary medicine and law at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and holds a PhD in medical ethics and law from Cambridge. His research is mainly concerned with questions of identity and personhood in law and ethics, and his latest non-academic book is Being a Beast – an attempt to enter the sensory worlds of non-human animals. He has six children, lives in Oxford, and spends a lot of time in the sea, up mountains, playing folk music in pubs, and in Greece. His website is at www.charlesfoster.co.uk
Everyone has their fifteen minutes of fame said Woody
Allen. My fifteen minutes beckoned some
eighteen years ago and then vanished as quickly as they had appeared. My brief flirtation with fame was when I was
asked to take part in an independent television programme about Rasputin. At one point there was even a suggestion that
I might go to Russia and do some commentary from there about Rasputin’s
life. This was then downgraded to being a
‘talking head’ role in a UK studio, but the footage which was shot with my
commentary was eventually completely edited out in favour of other
material.
The only thing left behind from this brief flurry of excitement was the reading I did, to prepare for the programme. I wanted to sound reasonably informed on Rasputin’s notorious but very significant part in Russian history. I had just seen my book of religion and power, Ungodly Fear, published and so I was then well sensitised to the way that Rasputin could and did use the image of holiness to seduce the entire Russian royal family in his bid for power. There are in few people in history who succeeded in exercising so much power, personal and political, all at the same time. His voracious appetite for sex, partying and political power seem to have had no limits. No one seemed prepared or able to stand up to him until he was murdered in 1916 by political rivals.
The part of the story that I found most intriguing was Rasputin’s relationship with the Czarina Alexandra. She was instrumental in keeping Rasputin right at the heart of the royal family during those dying days of the Romanoff dynasty. It was not only because Rasputin seemed to be able to help her haemophiliac son that the relationship was strong. There seemed to be something far more than that which kept this destructive relationship alive for so long. As I read around the life of the Czarina it was evident that she came to Russia in 1894 to marry Nicholas as, what we would call nowadays, a ‘vulnerable adult’. Her mother, Princess Alice, one of Queen Victoria’s children, had died when Alexandra was only six. Life in a German castle as the motherless daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse cannot have been easy. Her mother seems to have taught her to speak English and presumably she would have learnt fluent German. Arriving in Russia she would have had few opportunities to speak German. Czar Nicholas was, however, fluent in English and this remained the language they used to communicate with each other for the whole of their married life. The nobility and the Russian court had, I believe, a preference for French. Russian was the language spoken by the common people.
Rasputin served to meet several of Alexandra’s needs. First, he was a gateway for helping her feel
that she was making contact with the unknown people outside the court,
especially the country people, the peasant class. Further, although Rasputin was not a monk, he
represented for the Czarina the mysterious aspects of the Russian religious soul. Associating with him enabled her to feel better
connected to her adoptive country, the real Russia beyond the palace
walls. A further reason to feel deeply linked
to Rasputin was in the way that he tapped into her extreme vulnerability. Her father had died two years before her
marriage in 1892. We can speculate that
she still needed parental support which her emotionally stunted husband was not
apparently able to provide. Psychologically
she came to be more and more dependent on Rasputin. She had been swept up into a relationship of
deep intensity, drawing on the sexual energy of both parties, though apparently
without physical consummation.
The power of Rasputin over the Czarina was thus an all-embracing one. It tapped into Alexandra’s need for parental and human affection as well as guidance in a strange alien world. The nature of Rasputin’s personality and his enormous charismatic and sexual energy fed and alleviated areas of Alexandra’s neediness at a profound level. To describe this relationship using words like seduction or charm is inadequate but such words hint at the way the relationship with Rasputin seems to have combined charisma, sexual energy and religious fervour together.
Since preparing to take part in that programme, my understanding and study of ‘charisma’ has moved on a great deal. In particular I have come to see that it is normally linked with narcissistic traits. No doubt if I were asked to comment on Rasputin again, I would draw attention to the way that he fulfilled most of the criteria for that disorder. The one area that I have not made any further progress in understanding is the way sexual energy and charisma seem often to be linked. When we describe the power of charisma in an individual whether in a religious or non-religious setting, we often want to describe it in quasi-sexual terms. People who exercise this kind of power have a kind of magical charm which seduces people into their orbit. We talk about people being in some way being bewitched into a relationship. Even though I cannot make a completely coherent pattern out of these observations, there are connections between these ideas that I feel are worthy of further exploration.
Two other recent stories cry out to be compared with the Czarina’s tale in recent history. They both involve royals and they both involve relationships involving charisma and the use of sexually-charged power. Two people, Peter Ball and Geoffrey Epstein, successfully used their charisma and charm to manipulate members of another Royal Family in pursuit of the perpetrators’ own selfish ends. Ball needed the friendship with Charles to protect his establishment credentials after his police caution. Epstein, according to some interpretations, was exploiting a faux friendship with Andrew to provide cover for his nefarious activities. In neither case, of course, was sex used directly, but there seems to have been in each ‘friendship’ a magnetic irresistible power drawing in the royal victims. I have personally witnessed the charm/charisma of Peter Ball when he was my diocesan bishop. It is in retrospect that I can identify a powerful attraction which was not unlike a form of seduction. A child might use the word ‘creepy’ to describe this uncomfortable combination of repulsion and attraction at the same time. I know nothing about the way Epstein came over to the people he manipulated (I am not here talking of his female slaves). It is not unreasonable to suggest that he was gifted in this area of charming powerful people and making them do his bidding with the use of the tools of a sexually charged charisma.
My reader will see that I am not in a position to offer a
coherent pattern about the way the dynamics of charm, charisma and seduction
can be described. I am describing
something based on hunch and instinct rather than scientific analysis. And yet I am sufficiently confident that I am
describing something worthy of our attention that I want to write about it in
this post. The sooner we can unravel
these strands of human behaviour, the better we will be to make sense of many
scenarios that take place within some dark areas of church life. To understand is to be able to prevent something
bad in the future. That is surely a
worthy aim even if our tools of analysis are not yet complete.
I made a decision that I would not allow my equilibrium to be disturbed by watching what many have now called the ‘car-crash’ interview of Prince Andrew last Saturday. And yet even without watching the Newsnight programme, I have drawn out, from the extensive commentary, some telling parallels with the safeguarding scandals of the Church and elsewhere. The question of whether Andrew ever met the woman he is accused of having sex with is not the central issue at one level. As with the many cases of sexual abuse in the Church of England, it is just one event in the miasma of numerous half-truths, denials and examples of cruel behaviour. How many times have we heard in various contexts the denial which comes in the form of ‘I have no recollection’ when abusers or colluders are faced with claims of abuse? Such forgetfulness does not impress an observer or here, a television viewer. It does have the advantage of being an answer that allows no follow-up question. A protestation of ‘I don’t remember’ will always close down that part of the interview. Perhaps that is why such a response was fed into the interview by Andrew’s publicity machine.
The most important part of the interview seems to have been what was not discussed. Andrew mentioned sleepless nights of self-recrimination for not being more careful in his friendship with Epstein. Having had nine years to think about this friendship after the full horror of Epstein’s behaviour had come out into the open, you might wonder why Andrew has never given any thought to the victims. The focus in his mind was on the damage to himself, his family and the institution that he represented. In other words, the victims/survivors of Epstein’s behaviour never entered into the royal awareness. He certainly had nothing in the way of regret or sympathy for their situation.
There are a number of words that seem to be appropriate in describing Andrew’s attitude. The words might include elitism, arrogance, failure of empathy and a deficit of imagination. If we are really to believe that Andrew saw nothing odd about the clusters of very young girls in the various mansions where Epstein entertained his guests, this suggests a chronic naivety and blindness. In short, Andrew felt himself to be too important to notice such details. Other people were apparently there to amuse him, buy him drinks and generally provide for his needs. From a psychological point of view, we are observing chronic narcissistic behaviour. The individual sees himself at the centre; other people are there to be used and tolerated while they can provide gratification. Being royal allowed Andrew to offer one thing in return, his momentary royal attention. For some people, mesmerised by the institution of royalty, two or three words from such an Important Person can boost a flagging ego for a long time.
Why do I link the Church’s safeguarding crisis with Andrew’s
poor interview performance? It is
because I see many sad parallels. In
Andrew’s interview there was the effective air-brushing away of the suffering
of many hundreds of innocent victims. His
claim was that he was not a perpetrator at any point could possibly be true,
but, by failing ever to speak up for the girls, we saw how to him such individuals
had no value and were beneath his princely attention. No
doubt he wished, as Epstein would have done, the complaints of the victims to
be shut down and silenced. The way the
Church has often failed to acknowledge victims and allow them an honourable
place in its corporate consciousness seems to be a similar phenomenon. Every time a Bishop ‘forgets’ a disclosure of
abuse or a church leader helps to cover up decades of abuse, it is eerily close
to Andrew omitting to mention anything about the victims of his friend Epstein.
One issue that my blog has given a possibly disproportionate amount of time to is the Smyth/Fletcher affair. Events from so long ago might in other settings lose some of their potency after 30 plus years. But to repeat, the safeguarding crises in the Churches have never been only or even mainly about the abusive events of the past. It is about the cover-ups that have followed. People who watched the Andrew interview on Saturday are rightly alarmed at the accusations levelled against the prince. But they are probably just as alarmed by the twists and turns of his publicity machine as it has tried to help extricate him from his appalling choices. What is especially damaging about the Andrew affair is his persistent refusal to own up properly to what happened in the past. However ghastly and unroyal, a clean breast of the behaviour of a younger man might just have earned public forgiveness. The denials and unconvincing story lines invented by public relations experts have done the opposite. It is hard to see how Andrew will ever live down what passed in the interview on Saturday night.
The effective demise of Prince Andrew as a public figure may
have begun last Saturday. A similar
process may be in operation in the Church of England as well. Here the ‘car-crash’ has not yet happened but
there are many signs that people in and outside the Church are becoming weary
of the spin and cover-up that seems endemic in parts of the Church. The church body as a whole may seem healthy
with the founding of new congregations and signs of growth in various parts of
the institution. But readers of this
blog will know what I am talking about when I say that there are areas of
serious disease within the body. Since
the safeguarding crisis has become public knowledge, it has become more and
more apparent that many, if not the majority, of our church leaders have been
complicit in suppressing information about the past. What
information is publicly available has in every case come from survivors and the
work of investigative journalism. Channel 4 broke the Smyth episode and the Daily
Telegraph came up with the outlines of a story about the activities of
Jonathan Fletcher. That process will not
stop.
The hierarchy of the Church of England are clearly aware of the full dimensions of all the hidden scandals and many of them are fearful of more press disclosures. One particular group that has more to fear than most are the network of conservative leaders that form part of the Renew Constituency. Numerically this group is not large, but over the years they have presided over many of the institutions with the darkest secrets. It is possible to speak of Iwerne/Renew/Church Society/AMiE together with a cluster of massively wealthy parishes, such as St Helen’s Bishopsgate, as a single entity. Following the closure of REFORM and the re-organisation of the other groups into the Renew network, the Vicar of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, William Taylor, has become the most powerful figure in this group. He and Hugh Palmer, the Rector of All Souls Langham Place have together been working within the conservative networks for many decades. It is not unreasonable to conclude that their current silence and irregular approach to safeguarding (the curious messages sent out to churches after the Fletcher scandal broke) are consonant with an extensive knowledge of the shameful things that have gone on in the past. If these leaders were truly innocent of any information about the Smyth/Fletcher outrages, you would expect their churches to be at the forefront in offering massive help to those in their constituency who have been affected. Instead appeals for pastoral support there seem to meet with a patrician silence. As with Prince Andrew, survivors are apparently too unimportant to care about.
Prince Andrew has shown to the world that his first concern, in his blinkered view of the world, is to himself and the institution of the Royal Family that he so poorly represents. The Church in its lamentable history of care for its own victims has also shown a blindness to anything but its own reputation and the survival of the institution. The failure to come clean about the past is enormously damaging. The eventual realisation by ordinary people of what has been hidden from them by people they had always looked up to in respect will cause a shocking sense of betrayal and disillusionment which will reverberate for decades to come.
A few blog posts back I discussed the idea of ‘imagination
deficit’. In putting forward this
thought, I was thinking especially of the way many people, even church people,
seem unable to enter into the subjective experience of others. There is here a failure of empathy. But the imagination is also to be used in a
quite different way, to imagine the world being better than it is. The Beatles song, Imagine, reminds us about
the way that the imagination can evoke in us a sense of hope that the ‘world
will be as one’.
Using our imaginations, Beatles style, is a good exercise for all of us. Instead of the cynicism that so often infects us and our institutions, our imagining can help us draw on and take seriously some of the biblical imagining with its constant striving for harmony, reconciliation and peace. We may also try to imagine at the same time what we would like the Church to be. We spend a great deal of time hearing sermons about love and reconciliation but quite often these qualities in people are hard to find. About a year ago I wrote about the breakthrough that came to a church near Manchester after the suicide of a teenage member, Lizzie Lowe, who believed she was gay. The Vicar, Nicholas Bundock, led his Church on a difficult journey of self-examination so that they ended up in a place of acceptance of the LGBT community. Lizzie’s death had forced them to imagine and think about the isolation and sense of rejection which many gay people experience at the hands of society and much of the Church. The old policy of ‘we don’t discuss this issue here’ had been a cause of real danger and tragedy. Having sat with Lizzie’s family in the place of grief and reflected on what the Bible was teaching about the needs of all ostracised outsiders, the congregation, or at least the majority of it, knew that it had to change. The congregation has now adopted a positive welcome to the LGBT community as well as to other minorities in society. By using their imaginations, they had come to see that God’s welcome and acceptance was not just for ‘people like us’. It has been a difficult journey, especially hard for those Christians who believe the Bible has a fixed unaltered teaching about the gay question and other issues. The Vicar still attracts attention from online trolls and attacks for this brave act of compassion towards the minorities represented by Lizzie. I would like to regard this Church’s movement as being like a divinely inspired action based on the exercise of their imagination. Imagining allowed that congregation to sit in a new place and understand the central aspects of the Good News in a fresh way.
Acts of imagination take us to new places that in the real world are normally hard to achieve. Too often the effort is inhibited and controlled by fear. The kind of fear we are talking about may well be expressed in theological language but it normally has precious little to do with theology or belief. It is far more likely to be a sign of personal insecurity. The Church is, sadly, very prone to colluding in a fearful retreat into immobility and rigidity when it is asked to exercise its corporate imagination. Let us, nevertheless, think what kind of world, what kind of Church, we can imagine which would resolve our present crisis of unacknowledged abuse and the existence of many unhealed survivors of those terrible actions.
In our new Church, the one created by an act of our
imaginations, there is no space for individuals and institutions to cling on to
self-referential status or power. The
work of the Church, the task of promoting God’s forgiveness and welcome to
humanity can happen without there ever being a hierarchy of manipulation or
control in the background. We can imagine
how preaching and the other tasks of ministry would cease ever to be a way of enhancing
individual self-esteem. There are at
present too many individuals in the pulpit who use it as a way of overcoming
their personal fragility to receive some kind of psychological boost. Our imagined Church will be one like the one dreamed
of by Mary in the Magnificat. The proud
are scattered, the mighty cast down and the humble and meek are exalted. Translating these words for today’s survivors
might mean the following. In our new
Church the survivors will always be honoured and listened to. No longer would they be despised and treated
with contempt. The proud and the
powerful would come to see that they can longer use underhand methods of demeaning
these weakened abuse victims and making their situations worse. The Church, the body of Jesus’ followers, will
no longer ever tolerate this kind of behaviour from some of its powerful
members. Our imagined Church will thus be
at last a true place of refuge, a place of healing for all, because God’s
healing will truly flow through it.
The Church of our imagination would also be a place where
mutuality would mark all relationships between Christians. While some kind of authority structure will
continue to exist, among the relationships in the church there would never be space
for crude status seeking among those in authority. Our
Church would be a place where legitimate authority would be the norm while at
the same time cabals, secret groups and controlling networks would
disappear. Every single member of the
church would somehow acquire an instinctive understanding of the words of Paul
when he told the Philippians to treat others as better than themselves. If ever old crimes are revealed, the first
instinct of the person who receives this information will always be to seek the
welfare and make a compassionate response to the complainant. This would always involve the pursuit of
justice, so that, in a biblical sense, God’s righteousness may prevail. The old
‘forgetting’, ignoring or belittling of survivors to protect that church will
be no more. The Church in our
imaginations would be a place where power posturing has become extinct.
The Church that comes alive within our imaginations when we
allow this imaginative process to begin is a wonderful place. Obviously, the gap between what is and what
could be is wide. Chief among the
difficulties that Nicholas Bundock found when he led his church in a new
direction were his encounters with trenchant opposition. Just as the Church is sometimes manipulated
by fear-based methods of control, so fear is a factor in stopping people in
pursuing a Magnificat vision of the Church in the first place. It will be also an issue for anyone standing
up to powerful vested interests. Institutions
like the Church will always, as we have seen, have ways of pushing back
strongly against those who question the status quo, even if it means ignoring
the individuals who have been damaged by its own misuse of its power. Once
again, we need the Church to rediscover the way of power that was taught by Jesus. That would bring us closer to the Church of
our imaginations, the Church of true healing and safety.
This blog post has been updated with a message from the conference organiser Jaqui Wright.
53 years ago, at an important meeting of the National Assembly of Evangelicals in London, John Stott, the unofficial leader of all evangelical Anglicans in Britain, resisted strong pressures encouraging him and his fellow evangelicals to leave the national Church. Many conservative Anglicans, both inside and outside the Church of England, wanted to be part of a new trans-denominational evangelical body. Stott successfully persuaded Anglican evangelicals to stay and remain part of the Church of England. Although he was successful in resisting this pressure, there is still a tendency among many conservative Christians to sit lightly on their Anglican membership and seek links with other groupings. Some, such as GAFCON or the Anglican Mission in England (AMiE), have the Anglican name in the titles, while possessing a somewhat loose connection to the official structures of the Church of England or the Anglican Communion. Keeping many such disparate groups together within the broad tent of Anglicanism has, over the years, been a challenging task for Church leaders. Next year we will see once again the gathering of the world-wide Anglican Communion bishops at Lambeth 2020. The many divisions that currently exist will once again be exposed to full view. One wonders if a Conference of this kind will ever be able to be held again.
What I have been describing is a Church where centrifugal
forces and pressures towards schism are constantly in evidence. There is, however, one particular facet of
the Church’s life which holds things together in spite of a constant tendency
to fragment. I am not referring to the
Church’s position within English law or the resources of the Church
Commissioners to provide pensions for those who serve in salaried posts. No, the unity of the Church is made possible
because of the work of bishops. Bishops do
not normally allow themselves to get involved when congregations hive off into
semi-autonomous units, but they do take an interest when cases of immoral
conduct emerge. The power they have in
this situation is important. They can and
do withdraw licences and permissions to officiate. Those with PTOs are particularly vulnerable
to having their ability to take services withdrawn. There is no appeal against this action as far
as I know and it is an instrument of real and effective power granted to bishops. In effect it gives every diocesan bishop the
right to decide who and who is not able to act as his/her representative in the
parishes of the diocese.
In January 2017 the Bishop of Southwark, no doubt after months (years?) of enquiry, withdrew the PTO from Jonathan Fletcher, a retired priest living in London. This event attracted absolutely no attention outside the circles occupied by Fletcher. However, within the circles of his influence, it was a seismic event. Jonathan Fletcher is a major player in the group called Renew. Renew is the brainchild of William Taylor, Rector of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate. It currently comprises churches affiliated to it, and what was formerly Reform (co-founded by Jonathan Fletcher), AMiE (plants churches outside C of E), and Church Society (education and patronage society). Renew has an annual conference and regular regional groups led by ministers Taylor selects. The most recent conference included an international GAFCON speaker – signalling Taylor’s desire to extend his Renew control to that movement in its English expression. All Souls is a crown appointment, so not a CS church. But it is a Renew church by affiliation. Robin Weekes, the current Vicar of Emmanuel Wimbledon, Fletcher’s old church, chairs the Southwark Renew group of ministers. All these networks are inextricably connected, apparently under the control of William Taylor.
The action of the Bishop of Southwark against Fletcher had an instant effect within this constituency of Renew where it could be seen as threat to the considerable power exercised by its leaders. The wealthy parishes within it and the patronage and influence they exert through the institutions under their control means that Renew and it leaders have substantial power in the Church of England as a whole. The Renew group could be said to have a control almost equivalent to the House of Bishops. The scandal of Fletcher’s suspension could be seen to be a major threat to this continuing influence.
In June this year, the Daily Telegraph published an
account of the background to the story of Fletcher’s suspension. This spoke of sexual misconduct and spiritual
abuse. I do not propose to go over that
material again. The reaction after the
breaking of the Telegraph story had two parts. First of all, apart from very brief press
statements from the Renew leaders, there was a rather unconvincing ‘apology’
from Fletcher himself. He apologised for
harm done but claimed not to know who were his victims. His former parish in Wimbledon also offered a
help-line for his victims. The second
reaction we noted on this blog was the way that the Internet suddenly seemed to
eliminate all mentions of Fletcher, including his sermons and other references
to his existence. It was as though
someone (with power) had made a decision to make him disappear. Somebody somewhere was alarmed by the
exposure of this story and was hoping very much that it would go away. Thus, the story remains left hanging in the
air and little new information has been allowed to leak out over the past
months. But when an individual of influence appears to
have been misbehaving over thirty plus years, it is hard to see that new material
will not eventually come trickling out.
A new twist in the story has arisen this past week. It relates not to Fletcher himself but rather to an apparent state of disarray among the current leading members of the Renew network. The current point of interest concerns a day conference for May 2020 entitled ‘Church as a Refuge’ to be held at All Souls Langham Place but promoted by the Church Society, the education arm of Renew. It is featuring as a main speaker Dr Diane Langberg from the States. She is a top-notch speaker and an expert on Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the way that it is often found in cases of child sexual abuse.
An organisation which sponsors a conference on this theme is
to be commended. It extends the Church’s
knowledge and understanding of how to deal with past abuses. To quote the publicity sent out by Ros Clark,
the conference is designed ‘to enable better understanding of power, control
and abuse within the Church’. When the
conference was first announced it contained an endorsement from Vaughan
Roberts, the Vicar of St Ebbes Oxford and a key Renew player. He is an important figure in the Fletcher
saga since all the official, somewhat terse, press statements from Renew about
Fletcher carried his name. But that
endorsement for the conference has now disappeared. Can we
possibly read from this that some among the Renew leadership are embarrassed by
the fact that All Souls/Church Society is sponsoring such a conference so soon
after the revelation of the Smyth/Fletcher scandals?
The most notable feature around these scandals has been the
complete failure of the current leadership, including Roberts, to come forward
to say what they know about the Fletcher/Smyth abuses. A conference of this kind endorsed by the
entire Renew leadership might represent a positive step forward by the network
to look at abuse and its aftermath. But,
by the simple act of withdrawing endorsement on the part of Roberts, we are
left to draw quite different conclusions.
Behind the scenes of a very well defended and secretive leadership
clique, we detect strong disagreements.
These will be not only about the desirability of the conference itself,
but also the ongoing issue of how to navigate the continuing fall-out of the
Smyth/Fletcher scandals. We do not know
the details, of course. The dynamics of
such a disagreement are likely to centre, not on the welfare of the numerous
survivors of both men’s abuse, but how best to preserve the reputation and
power of the Renew coalition and the various organisations allied to it.
The conference of May 2020 is, in itself, a thoroughly positive initiative. I may apply to go to it myself. But the power and effectiveness of the conference will be damaged unless it is accompanied by a commitment to sort out the abusive past practised and concealed by members of the Renew network and its leaders. Meanwhile we surmise that any open discussion of abuse is perhaps rattling cages and consciences in places where there is something to hide. Everything about the Fletcher/Smyth affair and the way that it seems to centre around a cluster of conservative Anglican organisations sends out a smell of long-term conspiracy and secrecy. Can such a conference do anything to wash away the guilt of thirty years of secrecy and cover-up within the Renew network? It may do something to help but we suspect that any improvement will be weakened by apparent strong disagreements within the leadership of these powerful networks. This makes the conference appear to be more like a fig leaf, attempting to cover up something shameful rather than the beginning of a new chapter. Our welcome of this positive initiative thus has to be tempered with some strong reservations.
Since writing this piece and having drawn information from the Church Society website, it has been drawn to my attention that the conference is an independent initiative. This new information would have changed some of the emphases of my piece, including my intended unreserved endorsement of it taking place. However, the Renew network and the churches attached to it remain a controversial setting at the very least. The organiser Jaqui Wright has asked me to include the following
The Church as a Refuge conference is the idea of Jacqui Wright, a survivor. If she can spare one person or family the heartache and grief that she and her family have experienced, then it will all be worth it.
The overarching aim is to prevent further instances of abuse occurring in churches and Christian organisations. Within this aim, the first objective is to raise awareness about the abuse of power in Christian contexts among the leaders of churches and Christian organisations – and those whose task it is to hold those leaders to account. A second objective is to begin developing a clearer pathway to help victims. Skilled support for traumatised survivors is difficult to find in the UK. We therefore need to hear the voices of survivors.
There appears to be much speculation on social media about the arrangements for the conference. For clarification:
This is not a conference about conservative evangelical Anglicans. The problem of abuse in Christian contexts is not confined to one denomination. People from all denominations or none are welcome to attend;
Jacqui Wright asked Rev Hugh Palmer if All Souls Langham Place would host the one day event and we are grateful that he has agreed to hire the venue to us;
Jacqui has invited Dr Diane Langberg to be the main speaker and to pay her costs;
Jacqui and her family have created the website which is still a work in progress (subject to change) and made arrangements for delegates to buy tickets online;
Revenue from the tickets will be used to offset expenses in relation to the conference and will be held in a separate charity account (not for profit) with an independent signatory;
The financial risks involved in holding the conference are born only by Jacqui and Cliff Turner (her husband), not by anyone else;
Cliff will chair the conference. (He has significant experience of chairing conferences as he has previously been the independent chair of three local safeguarding boards);
We have been asking organisations and churches across denominations to publicise the conference. Various people offered their endorsement of the conference when they heard about it, including Vaughan Roberts. We decided to change the Home page of the website for a supporters’ page instead. However, this is on hold as we have been dealing with incorrect information spreading around especially online;
Rumours on social media suggest we are being manipulated by others who allegedly are seeking to do ‘window dressing’ or put a ‘fig leaf’ over past organisational sins. We find these untrue comments upsetting. Like everyone, we don’t know what we don’t know, but neither are we entirely naïve. We respectfully ask that people would refrain from speculation. Please contact us directly with your concerns and seek the facts before sharing judgements. Email info@churchasarefuge.com
We are seeking to do this conference for the glory of God and his church. Everyone is welcome! We appreciate your support. Cliff and Jacqui 10.11.19
There are some words in the English language where a precise
meaning is always going to be approximate.
One such word is Establishment when used in a British context. The word speaks of such things as the
protection of traditional and conservative values by a powerful elite who have
a strong preference for the status quo.
There is also an assumption that those who belong to such a group are among
the very wealthy in society. When
challenged to define exactly who in fact belongs to the British Establishment,
the answers are going to vary according to whom you speak. This ambiguity about who belongs to our UK Establishment
points to another feature of the word.
Those in this group normally exercise their power and influence over
society in secret, or at least in ways that do not draw too much attention to
them.
The word ‘Establishment’ is also a helpful one to use in
trying to understand what is going in our Church affairs. The safeguarding crises over the past twenty
years have brought out into the open a much clearer picture of the way establishment
dynamics and values can work. These
values, normally completely hidden from view, are strongly articulated in the
2000 letters sent to Lambeth Palace to support Bishop Peter Ball after his
Caution in 1992. The great and the good, members of one or
other of the particular establishment networks occupied by Bishop Peter Ball, entered
into a letter writing frenzy to try and persuade Archbishop George Carey to
rehabilitate the disgraced bishop. Among
the letters were some from royalty, the top echelons of the social and
political elite and other groups such as top lawyers and public-school
headmasters. The very existence of this
stash of letters is an important witness to the fact that we can still
meaningfully speak of a powerful establishment dynamic in England. Here it is a sub-set of the main one, but one
energetically operating inside the Church of England. They are doing what such groups do best,
protesting vigorously when one of their number is attacked, trying hard to
restore the status quo by seeking the rehabilitation of the accused. In this episode the establishment methods
were temporarily victorious. Although
Peter Ball eventually, in 2015, went to prison for his crimes, he had enjoyed
twenty years of partial rehabilitation.
For all that time he had continued to enjoy dinner invitations, week-end
house parties and a warm welcome at many English public-schools.
A second clear example of establishment dynamics at work is
in the present situation with John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher and the activities
of the Iwerne/Titus Trustees. As I have
claimed several times on this blog, there is clear evidence of powerful wealthy
people linked to the Church hiding the truth about damaging abuse to some
individuals attending the Iwerne camps, as well as protecting Smyth from
prosecution. The Ball group and the
Smyth group seem to have operated in similar ways and may even have had some
individuals in common. Ball’s supporters
were socially drawn from some socially extremely well-connected people,
including members of the Royal Family.
One cannot provide higher social credentials than letters from the
Prince of Wales. The Smyth backers and
supporters did not have the Royal Family to advance their cause, but they could
call on numbers of extremely wealthy evangelical backers to rally together to
keep a lid on the scandal. As I have
pointed out before it takes enormous energy to manage a scandal as far-reaching
as the one around Smyth and Fletcher. It
is unfortunate that this story will not probably ever receive the same scrutiny
as that given to the Peter Ball affair through the IICSA process.
The Smyth supporters and the Ball supporters seem to have sufficient
things in common to allow us to describe them both as ‘establishment groups’
operating within the Church of England.
Both these networks operate like ‘establishments’, socially powerful
groups who wish to defend and support one of their own as well as defend
privilege and power that they believe to be rightfully theirs. One intriguing connection which links them is
that both groups have connections a number of major public schools in
England. In particular the headmasters
of some of these establishments seem to play a prominent part in both the Ball
and Smyth supporters’ groups. This
raises many intriguing questions which, unfortunately, I can take no further.
Before we leave this theme of establishment values and groups operating within the Church of England, I need to mention one further group that seems to use similar methods to promote its cause. I am thinking of Freemasons. When I was a child, I knew two things about the Masons. The first thing was that the Archbishop of Canterbury who confirmed me, Geoffrey Fisher, was an enthusiastic Mason. The other fact was that local papers then (the 50s) published regular stories about Masons. As part of the story a local Vicar would be quoted, opposing them on scriptural grounds. Since those far off days, my meetings with them have been on some awkward but rare occasions, when trying to organise funerals of individuals who combined church membership with attendance at the local Masonic lodge. Although my current exposure to the world of Masons is non-existent, I am still left with uncomfortable questions. Any group that possesses secrecy, privilege and power will potentially be working in a similar way to the two other establishment networks we have mentioned. The Ball and Smyth supporters have done the Church considerable harm and that damage is a continuing wound to the Church right up to today. I have no current conspiracy theories about the Masons to air here, but there will always be an air of discomfort about any group that operates outside the norms of open communication and accountability. The late Frank Fisher, one of Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher’s sons, managed to combine membership of a masonic lodge, the Church of England, the board of the Ecclesiastical Insurance Company and Nobody’s Friends, the elite dining club. His day job was as a headmaster of consecutively, I think, two public schools. Without having further details, there is a curious coinciding of several establishment traits in a single individual. The rest of us, living outside such charmed circles, are given further reason to wonder whether, when such networks exist in the Church, ecclesiastical power is always being exercised healthily. The establishment groups we have identified operate with a large degree of secrecy. This fact alone will always generate suspicion and lack of trust. How can we know that the power possessed by these elite secret groups is always or, indeed ever, used for the benefit of all? As the IICSA process has made clear, much power and privilege in the Church have been dispensed in ways that are hidden from sight. We are constantly being reminded how sexual and spiritual abuse thrives in such places of secrecy. Every area of the Church, to be healthy, must become properly and routinely transparent. The Church otherwise will remain a sick and unhealthy institution. Self-serving groups have no real place in an institution which follows a master who came to be the servant of all.
