Surviving Church was honoured to be asked to act as one of the platforms through which the letter to the Charity Commission about Church of England safeguarding could be circulated and made public. The topics that we cover on this blog meant that the sentiments expressed in the letter would be of the kind familiar to regular followers. I was also happy to be one of the signatories of the letter.
The letter to the CC would seem to have made some considerable impact since it appeared on Tuesday last. It seems to be saying two fundamental things. It was, first of all, accusing the Church of England and especially the Archbishop’s Council and the National Safeguarding Team of authorising and using legal processes to cope with safeguarding issues in inconsistent and secretive ways – such that do not further the cause of justice. The letter was also suggesting that in the administration of these in-house forms of justice, fundamental ethical and biblical principles were being ignored. Although not mentioned in the text of the letter, it is apparent that the authors were thinking about the passage in Micah 6 about the importance of justice etc. Gilo makes clear this connection of ideas by calling the appeal for additional signatures, the Micah 6:8 initiative.
In the traditional translations of this well-known passage from the prophets, there is a question and then three answers are given. The question ‘What doth the Lord require’ is answered with essentially three commands. They are ‘do justly, ‘love mercy (or kindness)’ and ‘walk humbly’. One summarised version of the letter would say simply that the safeguarding protocols of the Church of England were at present failing to fulfil any of these three principles set down by the prophet Micah.
The CC letter gives a number of examples of where principles of justice have been ignored by those who oversee the rules governing safeguarding in the Church. Some of these principles had been laid out by Lord Carlile in his 2017 report about the Bishop Bell affair. In the current letter there were some more recent quotes from him inserted into the text. Of these I mention two. He sets out the principle that anyone who is being accused of an offence is allowed to know the evidence that is going to be presented so that preparation for a defence is made possible. The second legal principle is to emphasise the importance of avoiding conflicts of interest. Carlile calls this the ‘law of apparent bias’. It is clear that, in the Martyn Percy case, such conflicts were allowed to enter the process. Those in charge of the Percy Core Group acknowledged this by removing two of their members from the team.
The principle of mercy has also been a casualty of the C/E Safeguarding industry. The English word implies consideration and respect for all parties. There are several examples of the opposite being practised, and these would be described as ruthless behaviour. To remove someone from office, without giving them notice of what they are supposed to have done wrong, offends justice but also consideration and mercy. The thought of Lord Carey being rung up by the press one evening to respond to an accusation of failure over his dealings with John Smyth, seems to indicate a remarkable deficit of respect and sensitivity. He has, apparently, still not been told what he was supposed to have done in this regard. The Core Group that made the decision to suspend him from his limited ministry was using its power in a weaponised fashion. Such behaviour is cruel and unworthy of a body claiming superior moral standards, such as the Church.
To ‘walk humbly with God’ again implies a standard of behaviour which is nowhere in view in what we see in the Church of England Core Groups. Humility is a quality that faces up to the possibility that an accusation may be wrong. Instead what we see all too often is a group of people making up their minds, almost before they start, that a particular individual is guilty. Leaking details to the press about supposed guilt, as we saw with Bishop Bell and Archbishop Carey constitutes an arbitrary use of power. Humility, by contrast, encourages, as part of the process to promote justice, listening to criticisms. These may come from experts in child protection and the Law. Most important of all, humility in the biblical sense requires that Core Groups and those who set them up, listen to the survivors of abuse at the hands of an employee of the Church. Humility in short is a quality that is always prepared to learn and to listen. The NST and the Archbishop’s Council have shown very little inclination to do either of these. By contrast they seem to be digging themselves into a deep hole. To extract themselves from this hole, legal, ethical and practical, they need help, such as the Charity Commission may be able to offer them.
For all these and other reasons, a letter to Baroness Stowell and the Charity Commission was written. We have not all given up on the Church of England. We do however see that there is an urgent need for its leadership to be challenged and held to account. We need to know that those who have the power to make decisions need, not only to follow expert and wise advice, but also to follow the biblical principles of justice, mercy and humility. There are many people who find themselves giving up on the church because they fear that their complaints about episodes of power abuse are not being addressed. Because we have a hierarchical church, we have allowed it to become full of people who ‘love to have places of honour at feasts and chief seats in synagogues….’ In extolling rank, we find that the ones without status, those with no wealth or position feel ignored or excluded and thus unwelcome in the Church of God.
Some of us have a vision for the church. It is a vision of a community that is inspired, not by rank, importance and power, but by a solemn desire to honour those who have the least power. In our Church we have a large phalanx of survivors of abuse. The Church has for decades tried to hide their existence by telling them effectively to go away and stop bothering us. Such survivors need to be heard; they need to be honoured and recognised not only for what they have suffered at the hands of the Church but for what for what they can give to the Church through their experiences. Of all the groups in or on the edge of the Church, survivors are the chief experts on justice, mercy and humility. They know about them because they seek them even though have failed to receive them over long periods of time.
“Because we have a hierarchical church, we have allowed it to become full of people who ‘love to have places of honour at feasts and chief seats in synagogues….’ In extolling rank, we find that the ones without status, those with no wealth or position feel ignored or excluded and thus unwelcome in the Church of God.”
There is an inevitable tension here: even if ἐπίσκοποι as conceived in 1 Timothy had a supervisory function, it is evident that they quickly gained real political power and wealth after 312, giving them a standing which they have seldom forfeited wherever the office has endured. Precedence is the handmaiden of hierarchy, and honour its corollary, so the very idea of rank and status is inherently inimical to those who are ‘ignored or excluded’. No amount of ‘reform’ or pseudo-egalitarian rhetoric will change that essential dynamic.
What is clear is that the interests of hierarchs and victims are so divergent that any attempt by the former to control the latter will compromise the reputation of the former and, invariably, injure the interests of the latter. Hierarchs retain honour by guarding their reputations: ‘face’ is all. This requires compliant subordinates who are incentivised by a mixture of coercion (CDMs, for instance) and reward (DB pensions, relative security of tenure, etc.). Again, the Soviet experience may provide a useful analogy, since many churches have long been spiritual ‘command economies’:
“command economies could secure stable high output…Stability was conditional: the dictator had to be able to offer a reward for effort that conformed to limits imposed by considerations of efficiency and credibility. The stability…rested on the dictator’s credibility and reputation. Under all circumstances high output relied on the credibility of the rewards and punishments promised by the dictator for high and low effort. Under specific circumstances, that is, when the collateral cost to the dictator of implementing punishments became particularly large, high output could also become reliant on the dictator’s reputation as an intransigent and brutal leader…policy errors that undermined that reputation undermined the equilibrium… In 1989, faced with a strike movement and no longer able to afford an efficient penalty, the dictator was compelled to abandon the monitoring regime.” (Mark Harrison ‘Coercion, Compliance and the Collapse of the Soviet Command Economy’ Economic History Review LV 3 (2002) 397-433, at 427-8). And so the regime collapsed.
My argument is that by removing safeguarding (with its inefficient penalties) from the Church, and vesting it in an agency over which it has no control, the tension between hierarch/subordinate and victim within the resolution process is reduced as the risk of conflict is diminished. If the resolution process is outside the hands of hierarchs their reputations are, crucially, less susceptible to damage. This ought to help Church and victims alike.
Just to say a big thank you to those that collated the relevant letters and petition, Martin, David, Gilo and Janet, and anyone else I don’t know about. For me, like others, it will have come at a time in our journey when we are feeling disempowered, anxious and retraumatised by the actions of the church so very many thanks for your courage and hard work.
‘disempowered, anxious and retraumatised’ – yes, the Church of England does that to people. And it really, really shouldn’t. Not if it claims to have anything at all to do with Jesus.
But disempowered? No, not any longer. As individuals we’re each just a single drop of water. We don’t have much effect. But together we’re the tide coming in and changing the landscape.
Say not the struggle nought availeth
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been , they remain….
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)
Many thanks. Whilst I think the use of this poem is apt, it has a possible context…
“Say not the struggle nought availeth” is thought to have been composed on 13 October 1849 (though dates as late as 1852 have been postulated). In other words, it was written well *after* Clough’s emphatic rejection in his highly successful poem “Easter Day”, not only of his Tractarianism, but also of the resurrection of Jesus and the message of hope imparted by Christian doctrine.
It is widely thought that “Say not” was a rejoinder to Matthew Arnold’s equally famous and quotable ‘Dover Beach’. Arnold and Clough were still in very close contact, and Clough, of course, had had Arnold’s father as his headmaster, and Thomas senior had enveloped the boy Clough into the Arnold family circle.
Arnold had, by the end of the 1840s, turned his attentions to eastern religions, and was preoccupied with the Bhagavad Gita (Max Muller having just put the Rig Veda through OUP, the first of his massive series of translations, and which had made a considerable impression on literary Oxford). Hence Clough’s reference to ‘eastern windows’ in the final stanza. Clough thought that the wisdom of the Hindus was as much poppycock as Christianity; by associating the ‘east’ with obscurantism, he was conflating all religion – including Christianity – as ‘eastern’ and damning them all together.
Clough is turning a number of the rhetorical tropes in ‘Dover Beach’ on their heads. Arnold was expressing his regret at the failure of Christianity, and his foreboding at the void it would create. Clough, by contrast, was rejoicing at its failure, and seeing that failure as the harbinger of a bright future for humanity. Arnold was weeping at the graveside; Clough was dancing upon the grave.
That’s fascinating, but the important thing about the poem is its message of hope. Whatever religion we do or don’t follow, hope is important for everyone. And the imagery of the dawn and the tide conveys that very well. I left out the stanza about feeling beaten but finding our fellow warriors had gained the field – we don’t fight alone. We, and truth and justice, will win in the end. All of us fighting for justice and truth in the Church get tired and discouraged, but when any of us needs a break for bit we know others will carry on the battle.
Incidentally, Tennyson’s lengthy poem ‘In Memoriam A.H.H’ gives another account of the struggle many educated Victorian Christians had to reconcile their faith with Darwin’s discoveries and the tragedies of life.
‘He fought his doubts, he gathered strength
He would not make his judgement blind
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them.’
Many thanks. I agree with you completely.
Clough’s apostacy – just over a decade *before* the publication of “The Origin of Species” – was a massive shock to Tractarian Oxford (in which he had been such a luminary), and was one of the first major cracks to the whole matrix of religious belief in mid-nineteenth century Britain.
It was arguably the combination of Darwin and “Essays and Reviews” (1860) and its aftermath which was the death-knell for Oxford as the epicentre of Victorian Church. For example, when Mandell Creighton, then a fellow of Merton, elected to be ordained to the title of his fellowship (1870) almost all of his colleagues, other than those already in orders, assumed him to be either a fool or a knave, so completely had the university turned against the Church and Christianity.
I am glad you mention Tennyson, that poem being roughly contemporaneous with that of Clough (though, again, well before Darwin’s Origin): Arthur Hallam came from a progressive, ‘whig/liberal’ family (son of the great Henry, who was himself the son of a dean of Bristol). Also, it is worth noting that there were a good many thinking people who went through the mill of doubt, and came out the other side – not as sceptics, but as believers: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/crisis-of-doubt-9780199544035?q=honest%20doubt&lang=en&cc=gb
However, as messages of hope, these sentiments are very useful for the struggle that you and others are engaged in, to get the Church to live up to the ideals it purports to profess.
It can be so hard to hold on to hope
Yes, desperately hard. We need each other, and sites like this, to help us when we feel we can’t hang on to hope any more.
I am so glad to see that pressure is being brought to bear on the CoE.