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
Thanks Charles! Brilliantly written!
I am trying to work out if any of the ‘High Priests’ is conscious of what they are doing, and by extension, is there anything we can do to help them? Is it a lost cause?
The destructive psychology described will resonate with many readers and contributors here.
If Iwerne boys were the elite, many others followed the same doctrine/algorithms/compartmentalisation. The inner circle so frequently referenced in this blog, is exactly described above. Many others deferred to this circle.
The repudiation of reflection is particularly dangerous mentally. At bottom, this method of being doesn’t work.
I believe I have escaped it too, again not without scars. Recovery has been long and arduous.
Any system of abuse preys on vulnerability. This one is particularly pernicious because it fosters the vulnerability it then utilities.
Other church streams have their own variations of psychological manipulation. Con evo is not the only bad tree.
The algorithm is faulty of course. JF getting to ‘high priest’ and then getting expelled, illustrates this. I would argue too, that the system is self limiting. With the transparency we now have, aided and abetted by The Daily Telegraph, and many others, the illusion of the elite is rapidly dwindling.
Still there will be a few, even on this blog, who will try to defend the jolly good chaps.
For me, aside from trying to recover, I’m trying to figure out how to help others who have suffered.
Great article, sheds light on a lot for me being comprehensive educated but having known many of the ‘chaps’ at university and beyond. I just hope this review takes place, no real sign of it yet. Feels like Vaughan et al are hoping it will go away.
Charles, thank you so much for being so honest. You do encounter this kind of limiting behaviour in closed orders, too, in my experience. And of course the Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t allow reading, listening or discussing either. All so sad.
Charles
Thank you for your honest and thoughtful article
I would graciously like to suggest a fourth group of alumni for those like me who whilst recognising the pain caused by a few leaders and would not be actively involved with camps any more nevertheless have a huge amount to be thankful for. Iwerne instilled in me a love for the bible, it helped me to hone and develop my gifts of teaching, and it showed me the importance of investing time in individuals to help them grow as Christians. I recall my first visit to be a senior camper in 1990. I will be eternally grateful for the love and kindness shown to me and the investment made in helping me to grow as a disciple. Here I am 29 years later still in ministry!
You can make the point that not everybody was cruel and manipulative, or a pervert! That’s fair. But you can’t “offset” it. How many success stories like yours “cancel out” one abuse case? Is it one to one? Two to one? Ten, perhaps? If the system had abuse cases, it was wrong. If it wasn’t dealt with then, it needs dealt with now. Being well treated should have been the minimum they could expect. Everyone should have been treated as you were. How do you select those who will be abused?
That is a bit like saying that the education system (which, as I ascertained and published in What Are They Teaching the Children? , has higher rates of abuse than the Church) is all tarnished because of the bad apples in it. Is it all sanctified because of the good apples?
The other point would be that ‘not everybody’ suggests something like 70% or (your 3 examples) 50%, 33%, 10%.
Iwerne was a massive organisation. The percentages were far lower than 10%, similar to what they are in most organisations. Not that vague and manipulable terms like ‘abuse’ are always readily measurable anyway.
This is the huge part of the picture that so many seem to want dishonestly to screen off and never learn anything about. Thereby producing a skewed, stereotyped and second-hand (hearsay) picture rather than a more comprehensive one.
Good article. There is a fourth type of alumni (to which I mercifully belong). I enjoyed Iwerne while at school, but the niggles grew into impossibilities once I became a senior camper – so left, learnt better theology and forgot about it. Lucky me.
Charles, thank you for you courage and your honesty.
My father grew up in the London slums, left school at 16, and spent much of his professional life in the USA, but his theology and personality displayed many of the features you have described. I have been mulling that over and wondering where these tendencies, which afflict so many conservative evangelicals, came from. It seems to me that it reaches right back to the Reformation, especially to Calvin and Zwingli and their followers, Cromwell et al.
I was brought up to revere the Reformers, and it was not until I studied English Lit at university that I began to see the functions and value of symbols. My novel tutor was big on F.R. Leavis and ‘7 shades of ambiguity’, and that too was a revelation. I don’t think it had previously occurred to me that sign things as clear-cut was not a virtue. It took some years to work these insights out in my spiritual and emotional life, but that’s when the process began.
My father always said he was an evangelical because it was the ‘most intellectually consistent’ form of Christianity. Unfortunately that consistency comes at the cost of ignoring many of the complexities of life and human nature, and the mystery of God.
I’ve never met anyone who thought being clear cut per se (let alone simplistic) was a virtue – the more thought and analysis, the more virtue, generally. Yet it can be a virtue – e.g. if someone hits on a correct theory that explains things, the ease with which that theory explains things (by comparison with other theories that had been tried and failed) is a virtue. Ambiguity would be a failure (an explanatory failure, a failure to understand how things are and hang together) in physics just as it can be a virtue in English lit because of the subtleties of life and of personalities. It would be totalitarian and over-generalising to see ambiguity as a good thing across the board – one can easily cite occasions when it is good and occasions where it is negative.
Also seeing God as mystery can be (a) a cop-out discouraging further actual thought on the matter; (b) a very ill defined theory, which one cannot therefore recommend as true without further clarification; (c) a failure to garner or capitalise on anything that *might* be known, which is how the pursuit of knowledge would normally proceed; (d) self-refuting, since if you ask the theory’s proponent whether they are sure God is a mystery, they suddenly become uncharacteristically dogmatic and *are* sure.
The phrase ‘the mystery of God’ is not a theory, but an acknowledgement that God is beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand or grasp. As I stated above, I reached that realisation only after many years of Bible study and learning Christian doctrine. I would have acknowledged it in theory, but still had an instinct to define and analyse. If, after many years of striving to know and understand God, you arrive at the conclusion that God cannot be fully understood, that is hardly a cop-out.
There is much in my evangelical background that I’m grateful for, but I have come to find it rather limiting. Not everyone will find it so, of course, but that is my experience.
Mine too! Nicely put, thank you!
Was this a cult? It’s ironic because I’ve heard many preachers in this circle warn about cults while their own practices show all of the hallmarks – an exclusive set showing extreme loyalty to an authoritarian and emotionally manipulative leadership
Denouncing cults while behaving like a cult being another example of compartmentalisation, I think
David. You will realise that the word cult has to be used with care. But the answer to your question, if you are prepared to use the word, is that the Iwerne Camps as described by Foster were certainly a cult. Among the commonly accepted definitions of cult are groups which practised mind control, thought stopping and encouraged intense loyalty to a charismatic leader(s). The significance of Iwerne is that there are among senior Christians in Britain considerable numbers of emotionally damaged individuals who do not have full insight as to what really happened to them at an impressionable age. If the Church of England is to recover from that legacy it will have to come clean about these camps. There are damaged people but also many who were not damaged but who are in denial about what went on for those who were. Keep following this blog as the issues will come up again and again. My main message here is be careful how you use the ‘c’ word and to whom you share it. There are many way of talking about spiritual harm and the abuse of spiritual power without having to use the controversial word.
We can check it against the marks of a cult. First we should distinguish cult from sect. A sect is snobbishly regarded by the more culturally mainstream body as ‘out’ in the Mitford sense. But being smaller and less culturally mainstream has no bearing on truth at all. The views of the greatest scholars and professors are not culturally mainstream, because they think thoughts no-one else thinks. To follow the crowd takes zero brainpower, and shows no ability for independent thought. The tendency to follow trends in popular opinion for fear of being in a minority is widespread. If you want to know the difference between a church and a sect (as the man said) it is which one has the larger army.
A cult is not the same as a sect though there are overlaps and (partly for the snobbish / subjective reason above) top scholars like Eileen Barker have set the present trend for not simply taking the unscholarly approach church=good, cult=bad, but being a bit more neutral and scholarly, objective and observant about the whole thing.
Marks of a cult:
(1) uses extrabiblical ideas and puts them quite central – Iwerne was studiedly biblical, so no.
(2) unquestioning devotion or obedience to what comes from the top – tick. Much like in the army or public school. Or in a school or music lesson – it takes quite a while, realistically, before it is a good idea to challenge the teacher or before one is liable to be in a position to correct them.
(3) stress – we have heard evidence of that in some quarters. Discipline is hard work and the idea of not having discipline at all is not much of an option. What is suggested instead?
(4) not mixing with churches – no. Iwerne members were very much part of their normal C of E churches and leaders in them, and also of their mainstream CUs which are pretty much the largest (most mainstream) university societies.
(5) claims to exclusive knowledge – no.
(6) Charismatic leader – Bash was very uncharismatic but had a great hold on people because of their respect for him, and he was also rigid, as well as earning all the great respect he got. The substitution theory was not Iwerne but Isa 53 which is agreed to be the main background NT cross passage.
After Bash Iwerne was more collegial, the very reverse of having a charismatic leader. However, the spectre of Bash could (even in his final yrs1978-82) have been seen to be the highly influential leader. Given that he was now finally less present, it may have been more (for JS): when the cat’s away – a different scenario altogether.
(7) Culture of reporting and checking up on others. Yes – I would say that people’s spiritual development was kept under close watch, as one closely watches one’s child and as neglect is the worst thing for them. This is proportional to how important spiritual formation was seen to be, i.e. very important. Cf. need for regular prayer meetings, because the work itself was regarded as important and whatever one does one…
ought to do to the best of one’s ability. Particularly the thing that is closest to one’s raison d’etre or worldview. Yes, a lot of thought about whether people were sound (just as any organisation checks who is promising and a future leader, according to the lights and precepts which honestly seem to them to be correct) and even more about whether they were BIble men and people with a regular quiet time which is the one feature I have above all found to be pure gold.
We should also consider the impact this particular group had on the wider Christian community. I lived in Cambridge between 1975 and 1982 and taught at a theological college there in the 1990’s. Iwerne ‘boys’ were well known for espousing a theology of election and punishment that excluded, judged and, for some, created anxiety and despair. Their witness put many off Christianity all together. The fact Christian leaders appeared to respect and make space for them bolstered up their ability to have impact. They were not always up front about their intentions and there was a sense that you were not ever quite able to to ‘meet the real person’ unless you were one of the group – the same element of hiddenness I associate with cults. They were one of the groups that raised, for me, a question about how far loyalty goes within a tradition. I think a few of us tried to say ‘this is not healthy’ we had insufficient direct evidence. It disturbs me a great deal to think that clergy such as Mark Ruston did have the evidence.
I don’t think it was (in fact I am sure it was not) specifically Iwerne that espoused a theology of election and punishment (and countless other things too) but the Christian Bible that did and does so. Both of these are, of course, biblical themes and teachings. However, if they thought that was accurate, then what is the alternative?
(a) Censorship – stopping people from saying what they think. Or…
(b) Thought crimes. Or…
(c) Saying that theories are true to reality when they are psychologically healthy and untrue to reality when they are psychologically healthy. Psychological health is not what determines the accuracy of any theory – the 2 issues are unrelated.
Re: my point (9) quashing individualism, there was very much such an entity as the ‘Iwerne man’ – a sort of Platonic ideal which different people realised to different degrees. I can think of a couple of individuals who realised it to a particularly high degree and they would get mercilessly ribbed by Christian comrades, all in fun: ‘[Name!] Iwerne man! Right!’.
The ‘right’ needs explaining. The caricature, and caricature it was although not without a little basis in fact, was that Iwerne men spent their whole time saying nothing but ‘Right’ or ‘Oh right’. However, this was OK because there were endless different contexts and inflections for saying ‘RIght’. This meant that ;potentially quite a varied conversation could be conducted without one’s ever saying anything other than ‘right’ (or that was the game I played with my sister – see how long and interesting the conversation can be without one participant venturing beyond ‘right’). This in turn was based on an amusing incident when we arrived half way through the night at a camp and witnessed one of the ubiquitous pranks which we thought wrongly had been a car theft. When we explained all this in the morning to one of the most quintessential and loveliest Iwerne men, he was utterly unruffled and sympathetic, while varying his different types of ‘right’ a treat. The other part of the game we naughtily developed was the idiom ‘wrong’. For example: ‘I go to Millwall Comprehensive.’ ‘[PAUSE] Oh, wrong.’
My most recent Iwerne communication from a master I/c CU was almost apologetic (10 years ago) in how it was couched: ‘You may have had some association with our group, whether or not you now wish to admit it’ etc etc. Very English and gentlemanly. That gentlemanliness and civilisedness is a key element of much of Iwerne. How sorely it is lacked in so many circles today.
read ‘untrue to reality when they are psychologically unhealthy’
Am I being too extreme? Last week in the midst of the antisemitism ho-ha in the Labour Party I wondered if there was not a passing similarity to the decidedly anti-evangelical tone of a lot of what goes on here. The statements often appear to be saying that those individuals are either emotionally harmed or worse even evil. We want to “out” them preferably “out” from our Church.
I’m glad that Charles mentions Vaughan Roberts as “an abiding friend for whom he has great respect”, I wish we could hear a little more of that instead of the cartoon I saw recently of a lifeboat packed with Evangelicals decanting a ship and the byline “….AT LAST!”.
Shell. You illustrate the problem of using a word like cult. My definitions come from the US experts where it is studied and discussed to a high level. Your definitions come from somewhere quite different and they don’t appear in any of the books that I read. I suggest that we close this part of the discussion down. I am usually careful never to use the word precisely for this reason that we all start from such different places. It would take me 5000 words to explain what I mean and that would be a futile effort for this blog’s purpose. Let us stick to the idea of harmful and abusive religion which is what Foster is describing and what is the point at issue.
Yes – I think that (as mentioned) the vagueness of the term cult is very much an issue. When people want to prove some point that may be difficult to prove, it helps them to use vague words.
Do mention the names of the US experts in question as I would like to read up further.
I was not giving definitions but features. I would be surprised if the features I mentioned were totally different to those found in other lists (surely the other lists do include charismatic leaders and separation etc) – there would be likely to be some overlap. One I had intended to include but forgot was:
(8) Quashing of dissent. Iwerne, I agree, did not much like dissent. Perhaps because they thought they had discovered a treasure, and what was essentially needed was more pursuit of Christ rather than (what they perceived as) time-wasting debate on non-essentials. Today’s internet echo chambers like it as little, or even less. Even today or yesterday a judge (re Anderton Park, Birmingham) was only stopped at the 11th hour from quashing debate even on the internet about some very contentious issues which badly need better debate. When people quash debate, they score an own goal, since what is it that they are trying to hide? Sometimes the motivation for quashing debate may be fear of losing it.
(9) Quashing of individuality. This is also interesting. Bash was told he always produced a certain type. ‘But it’s a good type’ he protested – as indeed it was. Individuality can be fetishized of course – we need to strike a balance. Too much individuality can mean too little fellow feeling, empathy, community spirit, public spiritedness, even comradeship and true friendship.
It is very good that a thinker of Charles Foster’s calibre is now able to take the debate to a new level. I do strongly recommend his thinking & have sold some of his books like Jesus Inquest, Wired for God? But in particular remember his excellent performance in a debate in Temple inns of court on abortion which was won by over 100 votes with not much more than 100 present.
As for the Inner Ring I have always utterly despised it together with all freemasonries, and just gone after the truth which I suppose has been largely viewed as a nonconformist attitude. It is not nonconformist, since if I think the truth is on the side of conformity, as I think it often is, I will go with it. That is not nonconformity but truth seeking. I was so far gone along this road that I would have been utterly immune to (and would have scarcely noticed) anything at Iwerne that might be working in any different direction. But I have been repeatedly surprised in life – absolutely staggered – at the lengths to which people will go in order to conform, and their fear of anything that might put them in a minority.
The fact that Charles stayed 2 years with Mark Ruston and yet heard not a whiff of the JS business just confirms what I have said all along. Those who took the Bible seriously often took seriously its injunctions against gossip. Plenty in gossip saturated cultures simply cannot believe that. But it is the case. As for the man who would not talk about Jonathan Fletcher, this only illustrates the same point. That man wanted to be doing something positive and practical, and knew (as surely most of us know if we would only admit it) that delicious speculation on these topics (which CF admits avidly he cannot get enough of) is never-ending and degenerative and eats into the time we ought to be spending doing more worthwhile things. So of course he had the self control to desist.
Well done Charles.
Janet Henderson’s point about how this is part of a wider problem of ‘hiddenness’ is really important. Here’s an example: this hiddenness has affected the CoE’s women for the whole of the last 25+ years, damaging their trust and respect for clergy and their commitment to the Church of England. It has also deterred or limited women’s vocations.
This is because the conservative evangelical group of clergy who subscribe to the theology of male headship (which they like to call ‘complementariansim’), have given themselves permission to lead ‘quietly’ on this. Just think about that: ‘quietly’.
Women church members are often kept in the dark for years before they learn that their clergy believe that men’s theological opinions are ontologically superior to those of women, and that women are therefore to be excluded from the real decision-making, leading and teaching, and from discernment of vocations to priesthood. This group of clergy is very rarely upfront and open about what they are thinking and doing: just look at the websites of the big con evo churches – do you see much mention of how they view women and how they limit the opportunities they provide for them? This is affecting the Church of England’s mission and the flow of young women’s vocations to priesthood (see the stats). So it’s a serious issue that we need to resolve over the coming year.
Male headship cannot equal complementarianism but can be an aspect of it. Complementarianism is an odd word, since it describes those who are of the ‘opinion’ that men and women complement one another rather than being indistinguishable – but that is not an opinion but a fact and a precious very central aspect both of biology and of romance.
People will want to work through the implications of this complementarity for other areas of life. Most revisionists seem to have no vision at all, let alone a positive one, of what men are actually for (they are certainly not to be defined in terms of females or of female needs) making their position a non-starter. A good position is one that will have a very positive view of both females and femininity, males and masculinity. Leadership is not a particularly biblical concept; headship is, but where this has implications for gender this is within a family context more than within a church context.
If people conclude that there is something about maleness that goes with leadership, there are these possibilities:
(a) we censor them (not very equal or very liberal – the reverse) – and on what authority?
(b) we thought-police them. DItto.
(c) we bully them, as is often the way with minorities. 1 is not a large number of Conservative Evangelicals to be a (rather minor ranking) bishop compared to over 100 non Conservative Evangelicals. But rather than address the imbalance, the idea is that the scandal is that the 1 is not 0. Should be hounded or stamped out of existence (never mind that this is the majority historic position by far, and that the other position seems culture-led, whether correct or incorrect intrinsically). It is a bit like 3-4 RSE protest-leaders or 3-4 active abortion-visuals-educators can be seen as a national scandal, tiny minority though they are. Probably because (in these latter 2 cases) they make points that others cannot answer and that expose the weakness of their position. People seem not content until there be a full extermination or extirpation to zero – as though the threes or fours really loomed so large among millions.
A number of conservative evangelicals have said, when discussing women’s ministry in a male headship context, that flourishing in ministry does not mean seeking leadership roles, and that ministry is about service not ambition.
Individuals can flourish In their ministry without then also seeking leadership roles over those whose ministry that – in all honesty – they don’t endorse. Truth matters.
But the point about service is a correct point from a Christian point of view.
This means that individuals who are happy to lead local churches, grow them, and not be promoted further, are more commendable than those who think it’s all about climbing the pole.
I say ‘lead’ local churches because the leader and their vision is a very key factor in church growth.
Leaders of large churches are generally male. Generally the people you are saying ought not to be seeking leadership would have to be replaced by others – someone would have to lead these churches. Why not those with the requisite training? There is also a category of women who appreciate strength and vision in a man – a large category. I would think it is larger than the category of those who spend a long time in Evangelical churches before they twig that the thinking is that there is some association between fulfilled/flowering masculinity and leadership.
What is for sure is that men don’t like passivity in church but do like challenge and adventure. So much hand wringing and ink spilling results from irrationally rejecting the obvious basic premise that men and women are different biologically and (partly as a result of that) averagely different in legion other ways. Paul’s ‘body’ blueprint of complementary ministries already covered that perfectly.
There are plenty of female clergy with both the training and the gifts to lead large churches, but it’s noticeable that these positions usually go to men. I have noticed from the websites of large conservative evangelical churches in particular, that if women are given any leadership role at all it’s usually in the sphere of pastoral work with children and other women. Women’s gifts are being overlooked, and the church is poorer for it.
In my experience, men who have strength and vision are not threatened by the gifts of other people, whether male or female. St. Paul showed this when he ranked Priscilla ahead of her husband Aquila in teaching Apollos (an adult male); and in his commendation of a mumble roflcopters other women in leadership and teaching roles. Men are not diminished by working alongside women.
Most likely the number of men who are not working alongside women is vanishingly few. Secondly, most likely the number of those women who have not been put in position with a view to using their talents is vanishingly few. It is sad that all these things seem to be framed as males = the problem and females = the victims. That is precisely equally bad to assuming that females = the problem and males = the victims – i.e. really bad, a harmful stereotype that harms those who get the rough end of it.
The Church has been very slow to use the talents of women, and still is not doing so. The Church of England has a poor record in this regard, though things are improving. The fact that almost all the big churches and the majority of dioceses are led by men shows that we are not fully using the gifts of women who have offered themselves for God’s service.
But I am far from assuming that men are the problem. I have met discrimination from women as well as men – and support form men as well as women. Many men have been proponents of women’s ordination. George Carey was an early and influential example; I read his booklet on women and headship when I was praying about a call to ordination back in 1983.
Christopher Shell, I find your thinking exceedingly tortuous and difficult to follow, so I may be misunderstanding you, but this paragraph in particular I find very troubling.
“What is for sure is that men don’t like passivity in church but do like challenge and adventure. So much hand wringing and ink spilling results from irrationally rejecting the obvious basic premise that men and women are different biologically and (partly as a result of that) averagely different in legion other ways. Paul’s ‘body’ blueprint of complementary ministries already covered that perfectly.”
This seems to me to pigeonhole both men and women in disturbing ways. For example, the setting in opposition of ‘challenge and adventure’ and ‘passivity’. Do you think, as you seem to imply, that women like passivity, and dislike challenge and adventure, while men do vice-versa? Really? And are you seriously implying (as would seem to follow from your phrasing) that Paul’s gifts and ministries, within his body metaphor, are divided along gender lines? This kind of thinking is at best simplistic, and at worst perpetuates the kind of potentially abusive power dynamics that places like Iwerne exemplify.
No on both fronts.
Read what I said.
I said that men do not like passivity – this is, I gather, a big reason they do not attend in big numbers – though the Pentecostals buck this trend.
The topic of women and passivity I did not even begin to broach.
My premiss was that men and women are averagely different to one another as sexes – not that they are opposite or the reverse of one another.
On the other point, complementarity is of the essence of Paul’s body metaphor. Complementarity is also found between males and females, of course. From this we gather that complementarity is key. Do we also somehow gather that Paul’s body metaphor is divided along gender lines? That would be a non sequitur. And if we read Paul, it is clearly not divided that way.
‘Troubling’, ‘simplistic’: not my (mostly commonsense) thinking but your misunderstanding of it.
Not mine alone, I suspect.
‘… men and women are averagely different to one another as sexes.’
What does this even begin to mean?
It means that if you measure men vs women according to various measures they will very regularly fail to score approx. the same average score.
Thank you all so much. I learned a lot from the article and the discussion. Personally, I had nothing but benefit from my Iwerne time, and especially helping at the junior Swanage camps in the early seventies. When I discovered the gifts of the holy spirit in the late eighties, I was indignant with what I had been taught earlier, leading to my prejudices in this field, but I managed to get over this in time.
I like the idea that we are all on a journey, a pilgrim’s progress. The thing for me to do is to remember the words “there but for the grace of God go I” and keep a close eye on my behaviour. If you think you’re standing firm be thankful you don’t fall, as Paul put it, and Ishmael memorably sang it.
In my opinion, every officer and leader that I met through Iwerne wanted to honour the Lord. Pleasing!
Amen to all of that.
Another thought. The Iwerne people were keen on the writings of R. A. Torrey, the nineteenth century successor to D. L. Moody the evangelist. I absorbed this enthusiasm, and I still own a number of Torrey books (which are looking for a good home. Please Google me and send me a postal address if you would like them.)
Particularly influential in my case was “Proofs of the Divine Origin of the Bible”. which I read in about 1968. (Sadly it was a library copy and I have not found one to buy since). It took me three years to decide, but by 1971, I made up my mind that the Bible was the word of God, and I have lived my whole life in the light of that view. I learned NT Greek, and did a PhD in OT Hebrew which is still quoted today, and read up on paleontology in an attempt to master the material. I also memorised several hundred verses and their references, working with small cards, from 0600 – 0630 every morning for some years. To this day I regularly read great chunks of the Bible.
I say this not to boast but rather to show the influence that can be had from a Christian group with clear beliefs. Personally, I value what I received. You may think I was led down an unhelpful path – fair enough.
One of the great things about our gospel, it seems to me, is how God can bring good out of evil. See Romans, and above all, the Crucifixion. There may be bad things happening in a group or movement, and good things at the same time, to my mind. We should be slow to write people and movements off.
This was a value of the American pastor John Wimber. It took him ages to finally state that he could no longer back one particular group, long after most others had rejected them. I personally found that approach of giving people plenty of room to make mistakes helpful.
I had the misfortune to come across Iwerne and its religious ideology while I was at Oxford University (having been at a comprehensive school in Wales). Thank you for this description of its algorithmic thinking, which rings very true. I always thought of it as a simplistic algebra which imprisons minds and selves.
I have since worked extensively on atrocities associated with religious extremism in many parts of the world. If Iwerne were a phenomenon of another religion, I suspect we would speak much less politely, and most likely classify it as extremism or radicalisation: a system to inculcate an ossified, misogynistic and supremacist worldview of us/them through rigid teaching in cells and training camps, all underpinned by threats of social ostracism and even violence. The outcomes may not be the same, but it’s not so terribly far from a jihadi or hindutva methodology.
Some of the generalisations are far too sweeping and omit any positive data. But the sort of people who screen out anything but the negative are, are they not, either Eeyores or gossips.
To be in the company of Iwerne people is/was generally to be in the company of the civilised, gentlemanly, well turned out (which is itself a sign of altruism and maturity), and polite, who exhibited and generally also expected character and standards. All within a thoroughly relaxed, hilarious (full of pranksters), but also hard-working environment. One is tempted to say: No wonder today’s culture is so averse to them.
Christopher, perhaps you could say more about ‘civilised, gentlemanly, and well turned out’? I’m intrigued in particular by what constitutes being well turned out, and how that’s a sign of altruism and maturity.
Would anyone agree that these words and phrases are not in common parlance?
I turned up at Iwerne with very long hair looking dishevelled after a 10 days’ camping holiday in France. Everyone else was nice and neat, into which end-result (and this is the point) they must have put some effort. I know and knew that my lack of attention to appearance was a manifestation of a rather selfish and uncaring attitude. Anyway I received a jolly good haircut. No condemnation anywhere. That is the way the world ought to be and in many places is.
‘Well turned out’, if it is used at all nowadays, often means in quality or expensive accoutrements. These are not available to everyone, for reasons beyond their control. A ‘jolly good haircut’, for women at least, is often expensive too.
Poverty (all too common now), illness, depression or other mental health problems – all militate against being ‘civilised and well turned out’, and being ‘gentlemanly’ is out of reach of more than half the population. That doesn’t mean they’re lacking in altruism and maturity.
“To be in the company of Iwerne people is/was generally to be in the company of the civilised, gentlemanly, well turned out (which is itself a sign of altruism and maturity), and polite, who exhibited and generally also expected character and standards. ”
Talk about a generalisation that is completely meaningless and even troubling. What on earth do you mean by character and standards? And who is the judge of those vague ideas?
It’s true that this is a rather accurate description of the products of elite male British boarding schools. These people are quite likely to be civilised, gentlemanly, well turned out, and polite. They are also likely to be severely emotionally damaged, due to having been most likely dispatched to their boarding schools at a tender age. There is now a psychological category known as ‘Boarding School Syndrome’ which is rapidly gaining recognition in the therapeutic world. The most usually presented symptom is the inability to form and sustain intimate relationships. This is often combined with an assured exterior, and exactly the kind of outer qualities described above. The work of people like Nick Duffell (The Making of Them) and Joy Schaverien (Boarding School Syndrome) may well be able to shed a good deal of light on the goings-on at Iwerne.
Damaged people are not gentlemanly. polite etc.. Or should I say – these are by definition positive symptoms so can, of course, scarcely be associated with ‘damage’.
By contrast, laziness, scruffiness and dressing in shapeless clothes are symptoms more likely to be found among those who do not care for the feelings of others nor for themselves. The very reverse symptoms, in other words.
Really? In all the pictures I have seen of Smyth, he seems immaculately turned out. I expect he was also polite & gentlemanly. Matt. 7:15 should help us to understand that interior & exterior do not always match.
That’s exactly correct, they don’t always match. John Smyth was immaculately turned out, and as a moralist upheld and inhabited a stable family life. As for his dark side, it was probably furthered by his being erroneously judged by the company he kept.
Re: the cult consideration – that JS could be seen as a leader of a cult – at least in retrospect – has mileage. That David Fletcher could be seen as such only fills one with mirth at the unlikelihood of it all.
I think we are getting off topic again. The sartorial appearance of Iwerne leaders does seem to add anything to the discussion. The article is about serious issues of theology, harm and serious defects of leadership. When superficial issues get aired it discourages individuals from making more serious points and reflections. I shall use my editorial right to remove further trivial points.
Yes, discussion of the physical appearance presented by Iwerne men is in a sense trivial. However, it has indicated a pressure to conform in details of dress and hairstyle which is in itself troubling. If a short haircut for men is an indication of altruism and maturity, that would come as a surprise to John the Baptist – and, I suspect, Jesus himself.
I hope the idea is not to maximise the felonies of Iwerne men in all ways, and in order to do that, some very dubious and also trivial boxes are ticked so as to maximise the list. Be neat – how could they? Dress like others in their peer group (as both Jesus and John the Baptist also did, albeit the latter’s peer group was small: Elijah and Bannus spring to mind) – for shame! Let’s distance ourselves from such troubled ways. When I spoke of a ‘jolly good haircut’ this was in the sense that someone can be taught or learn a ‘jolly good lesson’ or indulge in a ‘jolly good canoodle’, but even that was mined for the idea (not in the text) that this (free) haircut was a high quality upper class piece of hairdressing, and therefore symptomatic of the atrociously monied ways of Iwerne.
Stephen is right that appearance is not by any means directly on topic. I hope that the discussion as a whole has not indicated that anyone who can see one thing wrong with Iwerne men finds everything wrong and nothing right. Most likely truth will be found among those clear sighted people not biased in any direction who are speaking from a position of knowledge and can see the good, the not so good, and everything in between. I have never received the impression at Iwerne Bible studies that Iwerne Christians were any different from other Christians at accepting the existence of, and pledging to attend to, their shortcomings.
That’s what I think, anyway.