An area of church life that is difficult to discuss without raising passions, is the topic of social class.  For many parish selection committees, there is a real dilemma which the rest of us can only imagine as we are excluded from their deliberations.  To put it at it simplest, what do you do when faced with a candidate that is a social ‘fit’ and another that is more interesting but who would find it harder to resonate with the social and political attitudes of a congregation?  There is no answer to this question, but I raise the dilemma as a background to what else I have to say connected with a safeguarding story in the Church today.

A clergyman unknown to me, had successfully served in an urban parish, having taken his considerable academic and training talents into a post where they were appreciated.  Eventually he was offered a new post.   The new congregation he was to serve were, however, among the social elite of the county.  Their politics were on the far right and considerable but subtle pressure was put on the priest to conform, at least outwardly.  At first he resisted, but gradually he found it easier to conform to the politics and conservative Christian outlook of the congregation’s older more established members.  His original mild leftie political stance softened so that it gradually started to embrace the right-wing attitudes of the congregation.  Changing his philosophical attitudes was one thing but the congregation expected him to support their campaigns for the legality of fox hunting and their resistance to low-cost housing in the area.  This changing of our priest’s political outlook might still not have been too serious, but my friend, watching his career, felt he was seeing something more serious, the corruption of his core personality.

Somewhere, In changing parishes and adopting an overall right-wing approach to life and society, our priest also acquired a new bullying hectoring style of personality.  He had always had the intellectual strength and power to get the better verbally of anyone who opposed him.  The only thing was that, in the urban parish, it had seemed inappropriate and wrong to turn on anyone with both barrels.  In his new wealthy environment, he found himself involved in more and more situations of conflict and these he fought with intellectual and political skill.  At one level my friend was noticing that the priest had become a bully and those who were not among the parish elite, were beginning to be afraid of him.   Some of the causes he fought were to do with the parish.  Others were local causes.   All the battles he was fighting brought him notoriety, press attention and co-enthusiasts, but few friends.   What my friend was noticing was a flexing of intellectual and personal power by the priest, but a decline in the levels of compassion and empathy that had been apparent before.  His intellect and his fierce verbal power were now to be avoided at all costs.  Professional standards were not being broken by his outspokenness in fighting his political and personal battles.  But, overall, he was causing damage to himself and to the reputation of the Church.

Somehow, I found myself indirectly caught up in the drama.  My link was to one of the priest’s victims.  He reached out to me after being in a difficult experience of bullying at the priest’s hands.  For a very brief moment, I considered reaching out to speak to the priest, but I quickly changed my mind.  First, I was not part of the dispute and that any word from me would, in all likelihood, make things worse.  Second, I recognised that the exercise of raw primal power that seemed now to be in evidence, would possibly have a bad unsettling effect on me.  Anger expressed against another individual, even a party not involved in a dispute, is never neutral in tone.  It can feel like a physical assault.  It is one part of the armoury used by the powerful against the weak.  How many abused victims of sexual violence have also suffered in their exposure to the primal verbal power of the bully?  This sort of power exercise is never encountered as dialogue.  It always feels like a frontal assault because the person with the damaging bullying personality appears to have lost the art of soft conciliatory words.

What I was learning from this experience, here heavily anonymised, is that those guilty of one kind of power abuse are likely also skilled at a whole range of other interpersonal power techniques, These, in various ways, in varying degrees, can hold victims in a state of abject fear.  If we take the range of abuse survivors, those whose representatives we meet on this blog, we are talking about tens of thousands of individuals.  Most, however, remain invisible.  They seldom get to see their cause aired by assessors or panels, because they believe their cases will be considered trivial when compared with the serious abuse cases.  These more subtle forms of abuse normally come to light because victims experience them alongside the serious forms of behaviours that require proper scrutiny.  Abuse survivors will also have experienced many other forms of abuse, including anger, shunning and shaming.  Their abuser will likely have honed their power skills in several directions.  Most victims of multiple power assaults, including, I suspect, myself in such a situation, will not hang around to wait for the open resolution of the wrong committed against them.  They will retreat into a safe space to lick their wounds and do everything possible to avoid further pain.  The survivors we know about, among them contributors to this blog, are among the brave souls who refuse to take the ‘easy’ path.  They stand up to be counted and take the cause of justice into the public arena.  This is by no means an easy place to occupy as institutional opponents can still aim a multitude of power weapons against them.  Abuse is, as we are constantly repeating, a multi-dimensional reality.   Those who perpetrate it are proficient at using a variety of weapons against those who challenge their power.

Since starting this blog almost eight years ago, I have probably managed to upset a few individuals along the way.  This upset has only resulted in one actual legal threat of slander.  A slight rewriting resolved the issue.   I have thus not had to suffer the sense of powerlessness or shock that follows the experience of being under a power attack arising out of the anger or aggression of another person.  But I realised, in my recent discussion about the clergyman moving to a new position that I, like most others, have little protection to fend off the consequences of serious verbal abuse.    Being shouted at, trolled or generally verbally abused is a deeply unsettling experience, even if you are innocent and the attacks are entirely misplaced or misdirected.

As a final thought on this subject of bullying or verbal abuse, I also came to one further insight.  Fending off such attacks can be achieved with the help of friends, supporters and maybe, in some cases, a friendly lawyer, but the experience is never pleasant.  When I encounter, even in my imagination, primal anger in another person I am facing up to something deeply disturbing.   Sometimes I even feel it is energised by something evil in a theological sense.  I do not claim to be able to justify such a claim, but I just get the impression that our exercise of power, both good and bad, has always a spiritual agenda or dimension.  People are built up or sometimes harmed spiritually and in other ways by the way we use our verbal power.   To misquote the passage from Exodus when Moses encountered God in the Burning Bush.  ‘When you use words with others, take off your shoes for the place where you are standing is holy ground.’