The current stand-off in a clash between President Trump and Harvard University is part of a much bigger story than many people realise.  Looking at the dispute in a wider context relates it to the so-called culture wars under way in America. The opposing sides in these wars, representing two ways of understanding the world, can clearly be identified in this Harvard/Trump confrontation.  The defiant stand being taken by Harvard against the Trump administration that seeks to control it, may be seen as a skirmishing before a major, if not historic, battle in that war.

The so-called culture wars which appear in different guises all over the world, refer to the passionate and intense convictions that people have about the way the world is, or should be, changing.  Speaking very generally, one side will look mainly to the past as the key to understanding the present.  Sometimes the past that is evoked is entirely mythical.   American politicians sometimes nostalgically look back to the 50s as time where ‘family values’ were practised.  Much of this nostalgia is romantic and false.  The levels of domestic violence, though hidden, were then tragically high in many countries including the United States.  The Church has its own versions of a gold-tinted past, with memories of packed churches and a place where leaders enjoyed respect and honour from society.  Meanwhile the Church was also presiding over abuse and dark institutions like mother and baby homes, where cruelties were being practised routinely.  Much of the struggle of the culture wars seems to centre around how we deal with the past.  Is it a model for the present or should we always be seeking ways to grow up and beyond our past?  Do we identify, in short, mainly with the forces of conservatism or those of progressivism?  In a political setting we identify this struggle as one between right and left.

The attempt by Donald Trump to undermine all the main institutions of America is a struggle to overwhelm and batter into submission all opposition to his personal vision and his desire to dominate the whole of American society.  I do not want to go down the rabbit hole of discussing motivations for his attempting this massive task, but I observe that this political experiment will take a long time to unravel by a future government.  Trump is, in essence, fighting on behalf of ultra-conservatives to bring back a mythical past when America was great and dominant in the world, both economically and militarily.   It will also enable the massive enrichment of a small band of his cronies, including his family. The fantasy of being omnipotent is also one that many people entertain inside.  It is also the ultimate desire which the narcissist possesses.  To want such control and domination means that one has had to discard all attempts at empathy for others along the way.  Individuals are used and then discarded with no attempt to reward them over a period.  Promises are made and quickly broken when the other individual has served their purpose.   Ultimately Trump is every bit as dangerous as his critics have made out.  He is proving willing to use the entire American nation in his project to fulfil his megalomaniacal aims for complete control.

Where does Harvard come into this?  Harvard University represents a natural ideological centre of opposition to the megalomaniacal ideas of a man like Trump.  It represents an older wiser America, firmly rooted in the real world of history, education, law and science for the past 250 years of its existence.  It was founded in the early 17^th century and was fully exposed to the later Enlightenment tradition that was sweeping over American universities as it was in Europe.  The Enlightenment may not have been the means to discover certainty in every discipline, but it taught the people of Western Europe new intellectual values – the importance of debate and the constant need to challenge presuppositions.  One maxim came to typify this new approach to knowledge and consists of three words.  The saying which sums up so much of this Western intellectual movement of the 18^th century was simply ‘dare to doubt’.   The ability to doubt the received wisdom of the past was for some a deeply unsettling approach to human knowledge.  Most areas of knowledge in the 18^th century were rooted in the tenets handed down from the ancient world.  Even medicine owed as much to reading texts of classical authors and their presuppositions than to current observations of the workings of the human body.  In making these very generalised comments about the Enlightenment, I am aware of straying into areas of study where I have no specialised knowledge.   But one statement which I want to make, which I believe to be broadly true, is that Harvard University can be said to be rooted and nurtured in many of the best principles of Enlightenment thinking.  The same readiness to question and scrutinise ‘authority’ in different forms of knowledge in a critical but open way would be among the values of all universities the world over.  Universities are temples of knowledge but the knowledge they share with their students is one that has been by honed through a constant process of questioning and experiment.  Truth, according to the best minds belonging to our Western universities, among which Harvard has a distinguished place, has truth always to be regarded as a work in progress, not a completed product.

Harvard can act as a shorthand for the methods of seeking truth according to the highest standards of scrutiny that we have in our Western culture.  Within the approaches to truth as practised by the academic word, there will be disagreements and debate, but such disagreement is part of the process.  Gracious disagreement is not to be deplored, but honoured.  There are many who believe that knowledge is to be found using quite different methods of discovery.  Speaking very generally, there are many who will believe that truth is only to be discovered by a fresh scrutiny of the past, as the Renaissance writers and thinkers did.  The achievements of those who rediscovered the classical authors and their views on the world were considerable.  The Renaissance was, however, an incomplete project.  It needed the Enlightenment impulse, with its advances in science, philosophy, law and psychology, to name a few disciplines, to enable our modern Western civilisation to be formed.  This role of universities with their crucial support of Enlightenment values cannot be downplayed.  A challenge to Harvard, and the attempt to destroy the Enlightenment values preserved in its teaching and research right across the board, is an attack on all our values whether or not we have been privileged to have a university education.  I am constantly in awe of the knowledge of people with skills which make modern life possible: engineers, architects and economists.  Any attempt to destroy the credibility of the Enlightenment project threatens and weakens every discipline taught at university level.  Trump’s DOGE project has already halted some vital medical research.   No doubt, the idea of well-educated researchers working in clean laboratories every day offends some who regard education of any kind as elitist.  Book learning does not seem to be widespread among Trump’s followers and enforcers.  Indeed, the demands and attacks on Harvard threaten the entire Enlightenment value system and may remove from America much of what has been achieved in so many areas of life over the past two hundred and fifty years.

Most of the readers of this blog would identify themselves with the Christian label.  Every reader will be aware of ways of identifying with the name Christian which go against any concession to Enlightenment values. For many, the name Christian can only be claimed by those who believe, for example, that the world was created in a week of seven days and that women have no place in ministry. Those who hold to such strict ideas about truth will have little time for the idea that it is possible to change one’s mind about anything in one’s belief system. This position is maintained, even though God himself is recorded several times to have changed his plans, according to the Old Testament.   We call such rigidity of thinking ‘conservative’, especially when there is no room for newness or progression in this way of understanding faith and truth.  It is not difficult to suggest that Trump/Harvard confrontation is rooted in a similar kind tension that we see existing between conservative and progressive Christians.  Speaking for myself, I see a place for conservative views, but I also believe that Scripture and faith allows me to ask questions about the tradition and not be alarmed if some aspects develop and change over time.  The true liberal is anyone who allows this development to take place.  A constant newness is a feature of every culture and set of ideas.  Liberals rejoice in the changing/evolving nature of truth.  It is this liberal value that is embodied by Harvard and the entire Enlightenment project.  The Trump confrontation with Harvard and all the values it represents is an important one.  We follow it with interest and concern.  The clash threatens the whole liberal project of the West and the human values that are contained in the Enlightenment.  The movement may not be perfect from a Christian point of view, as Lesslie Newbigin showed us in the 80s.  But, the complete or partial destruction of Enlightenment values, as Trump is attempting, would be a far greater tragedy.

Most of us have heard of YWAM (Youth with a Mission) and know it to be a large youth centred international organisation devoted to mission and evangelism.  My knowledge of this group did not encourage me to want to look further into its story when I first heard about it a decade ago.  Rumours of mistreatment of volunteer staff members were then circulating.  One particular account did burrow into my memory.  This was the story of a young idealistic volunteer who was working in India, but who became disillusioned with the treatment he was receiving at the hands of YWAM leaders.  The response of the organisation was simply to abandon the volunteer.  He had no money or other means of returning to his home,  which I believe was in Australia.

I would normally hesitate before recounting a story heard a decade ago about an organisation which may be a hostile piece of gossip. I take the risk because although the story I heard may be just that, a rumour, it pales into triviality when set alongside the many other allegations against the group collected by Shanti Das in the Observer last weekend.   The Observer story is in many ways a familiar one, especially for those of us who are familiar with safeguarding stories connected with control in some religious groups.  These seem inevitably to focus on abuse, whether emotional, spiritual or sexual.  The YWAM story appears, from the Observer account, to indicate what we can only describe as cultic exploitation.  The abusers in YWAM, if such they are, seem to be concerned with establishing complete control over their victims.  This enables them to obtain access to a gratification that such control provides.  This pattern is common to the behaviour of cult leaders the world over. 

I retell some of this Observer story of spiritual abuse to show how an ostensibly Christian organisation can put itself in the situation of using cult dynamics, while believing that it is doing God’s work.   There are various danger signs in the Observer description of YWAM that together allow us to refer to it as cultic.  When these danger signs are found in any Christian group, we must be on the alert and aware that we are entering potentially dangerous territory.

The first danger sign is the age issue.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong in recruiting young people from the 18-30 age group to practise Christian evangelism and ministry.   Young people in this age group have not yet settled into family life or careers and so are free to be recruited into a ‘gap-year’ experience as provided by YWAM.   They also possess a great deal of idealism and capacity for self-sacrifice at this stage of their lives.  Youthful health and vitality are also generally more tolerant of the less-than-ideal living conditions that are experienced in poorer parts of the world.   But there is a shadow side to this boundless capacity for self-sacrifice and idealism.  These same qualities, however honourable, make the individual potentially open to abuse and exploitation if there is any rottenness or corruption in the organisation.  In short, where there is human sin there will be a potential for some of those in positions of power to take toxic advantage of those in their charge.  A perennial issue for YWAM, as for any organisation with responsibility for groups of young people being prepared for ministry, is to be alert for this potential for abuse among the trainers.  No amount of high-sounding Christian rhetoric can remove this possible evil, even in organisations dedicated to the highest of values.  Only safeguarding vigilance and a realistic understanding of human nature will make such organisations consistently safe and free from the toxic effects of controlling abuse.

There are two salient factors that have allowed toxic abuse to find a home in YWAM’s method of operation.  One is a practical issue brought about by geography.  If you remove a group of young people to a centre in an alien unfamiliar culture and many miles from home, you inevitably increase a sense of vulnerability and dependency in these individuals.  The greater the vulnerability, the more the dislocated youngster is likely to develop a potentially unhealthy dependence on leaders.  A second method for creating a dependency on an organisation is by insisting on an adherence to an authoritarian understanding of scripture.  In the case of YWAM and numerous similar organisations, the teaching will include a reactionary stance on all things to do with sexuality.  There seems to be an unhealthy focus on compelling YWAM members in group ‘confession’ sessions to open up and admit any deviance from the conservative understanding of sexuality within their personal lives.  It does not take much imagination to see such compulsory ‘confession’ as a weapon of control.  Quite apart from what any of us think about the LGBTQ issue, it cannot be right to use the sexual preferences of an individual as a means of controlling them through the imposition of shame and guilt.  This is what appears to have been a regular pattern in the YWAM group meetings.

The YWAM culture of coercion and control that the Observer article describes is very similar to the dynamics of a cult.  It is one thing to teach and believe a set of attitudes about human sexuality.  It is quite another to impose those beliefs on others using the tools of social shame and the threat of ostracism.  This kind of compulsory groupthink is typical of cults. Whether or not my anecdote about the Australian young man abandoned in India by YWAM is literally true, it represents a sense of dread that a young person might feel when tempted to question those in authority.  To describe YWAM as a cult is simply to indicate that within this group non-conformity is impossible.  Such suppression of identity is, most of us would claim, a denial of an essential human freedom.  The freedom to be a dissident is a fundamental human right.   Maturity is gained through questioning and exploration, not through the surrender of one’s intellect to the dictates of an authoritarian conservative mind-set.

The Observer article is, for a change, not a narrative about sexual abuse and exploitation.  It does, however, lay bare the vulnerability of idealistic young people to harm.  These, in the name of Christian ideals, sacrifice an important stage in their lives to a cultic group.  At best they can extract some positive learning out of their experience, and this may include some insight about the power of groups to take over control of young lives.  At worst, there may be a completely messed up set of values in the head, which puts a permanent block on the ability to understand sexuality and healthy human relationships.  If even half the claims of control in the Observer are true, it represents the imposition of an enormous burden on a substantial cohort of young people at a vulnerable stage in their lives.  If such damage is routinely happening at YWAM, we might ask which other branches of the church are treating young people with the same recklessness and potential damage to their lives.  Abuse is not just about sex and finance.  It is often about damage to trust and the ability to make healthy meaningful relationships with God and with others.  To damage that ability is to create real and lasting harm.

Message for blog post:

Do you have a personal connection to Iwerne camps or have material related to it? I’ve been contacted by someone conducting research in this area and they would be very interested to hear from you. Please get in touch with me directly on parsvic2@gmail.com to learn more.

by Martyn Percy

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/369115/marriages-in-england-and-wales-by-type-of-ceremony/

We, as a nation, have now passed the fifth anniversary of Covid-19. Stay at home. Avoid meeting others. Churches locked. Bishops conducting online services from their kitchens, ritually sanitising their hands (even though nobody was communicated). Dominic Cummings driving to Barnard Castle for some reason or other. Funerals restricted to a handful of mourners. People dying in care homes, with loved ones only able to  press their noses against the window in those final hours. The Prime Minister being admitted to hospital and coming close to death. The daily ritual of banging pots and pans for the NHS, arguably the national secular-sacred faith of the realm.

We all have memories of Covid-19 and the two periods of lockdown, punctuated by “eat out to help out”. But as a recent op-ed in The Economist noted,

“Coronavirus in Britain is a story of individual grief and collective amnesia. The fifth-anniversary commemorations on March 9th, which had been designated a “Day of Reflection” by the government, were dignified but modest. In London relatives of the deceased threw carnations into the Thames, as a piper played a lament. Around them, joggers plodded, tourists gawped and drinkers toasted the first pint of the day in glorious spring sunshine. This is a sentimental country, where Armistice commemorations seem to grow bigger each year and new statues are erected to local heroes. But mention the pandemic, the biggest calamity in living memory, and you will be met by a wince and a change of subject. The memory is less of the neighbourliness and Zoom yoga, more of bitterness and boredom…”

A BBC Survey published on 25 March 2025 estimates that as many as 1:10 may have Long-Covid. That’s around 5.5 million in England alone (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93ker0kevpo). Long-Covid is a new condition which is still being studied. The most common symptoms of Long-Covid include  fatigue, difficulty breathing, problems with concentration and memory, aches and pains.  Other symptoms include disruption to senses (i.e., such as smell, hearing, taste, etc.), chest pains, difficulty sleeping (insomnia), depression and anxiety, feeling sick, loss of appetite and persistent headaches.

Of course, the CofE does not have an illness like this. Not in reality. Here we are speaking only analogically, and in so doing, I draw on David Tracy and his prescient The Analogical Imagination (1981).  Analogically, the CofE is a corporate body with severe malaise, and is experiencing symptoms it cannot make sense of. But what are the underlying causes?

A number of senior clergy have opined that a lot of the struggles the CofE is currently wrestling with have been pinned on to Covid-19. Other senior clergy have expressed scepticism on this, and suspect that Covid-19 has become a distraction for not thinking about the deeper latent problems that were bound to pose issues to the CofE, and eventually become manifest.

I think they are both right. But to understand why the CofE can’t cope with its (corporate, analogical) Long-Covid, one has to look further back.

In their remarkable book Secular Cycles (Princeton UP, 2009) Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov show how societies in Europe evolve and adapt to the bigger underlying cultural, political, demographic templates that shape life, hope, expectations and outcomes. They show, amongst other things, how birth rates, food prices and inflation shape population size. How inflation and stagflation (i.e., the combination of high inflation, stagnant economic growth, and elevated unemployment) impact wages, employment and work. And disease, plague, wars, revolts and natural disasters must also be factored in.

Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change. Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial loss. Turchin and Nefedov explore the dynamics and causal connections between such demographic, economic, and political variables in agrarian societies and offer detailed explanations for these long-term oscillations–what the authors call secular cycles.

Secular Cycles elaborates and expands upon the demographic-structural theory first advanced by Jack Goldstone, which provides an explanation of long-term oscillations. Turchin and Nefedov test that theory’s specific and quantitative predictions by tracing the dynamics of population numbers, prices and real wages, elite numbers and incomes, state finances, and sociopolitical instability. Incorporating theoretical and quantitative history, the book studies societies in Europe during the medieval and early modern periods, and even looks back at the Roman Republic and Empire.

Turchin and Nefedov don’t have much to say about Christianity directly, but it is clear that when one analyses the big social-secular-material cycles, churches are compelled to adapt. As they do so, they incur the consequential symptoms that the larger secular cycles produce. In this regard, Turchin and Nefedov follow earlier work by John R. Moorman, Jack Goldstone and Lawrence Stone

For example, Medieval England had around 10,000 parishes serving three million people. The late medieval parish priest was a semi-literate rural worker. In pre-Tudor England hardly any parish had a resident curate, or even necessarily a parish church. But 1540-1560 saw huge declines in ordinations.

Given the turbulence and violence of the Reformation this is hardly a surprise. In Canterbury diocese in 1560, of 270 livings, 107 had no clergy. In Oxford archdeaconry the numbers of clergy fell – from 371 in 1526 to 270 by 1586.

After 1600 the numbers of clergy in the CofE increased rapidly, and by 1640 there were more clergy than livings (so unemployment). By 1688 there were 10,000 clergy. But the rise and fall in numbers does not tell the whole the story. By the end of the Caroline period, a minister had a university degree, strong religious convictions, a comfortable house, and income on a par with doctors or lawyers, often able to afford domestic help. Ordination was for elites.

This trend continued, albeit in slow decline, during the 19^th century, and to some extent the first half of the 20^th century. But the post-war years have seen a much, much steeper decline in the public status and professional identity of clergy. Teachers and nurses will be better-paid, and enjoy stronger employment rights.

Today there are 12,500 parishes in the CofE serving a population of 57 million. Under 700,000 attend its services, amounting to just over 1% of the population. With 36% of attendees over the age of 70, the cliff edge looks very steep, with 200,000 set to be lost to the CofE in the next 15 years. They will not be replaced.

With around 50% currently aged between 18 and 69, and only 18% being 17 or younger, the CofE has largely lost its transmission rights. When empires or societies collapse, there is loss or disruption in transmission. What was previously assumed is forgotten. What was once known is no longer learned.

Between 2009 and 2019 the average weekly church attendance for the Church of England fell by approximately 218,000. Church attendance figures fell even more during 2020 and 2021, although this was due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Check the collection plate, in the meantime.

In 2022, approximately 207,004 marriages took place via a civil ceremony in England and Wales, compared with 41,915 religious ceremonies. Since 1992, there have been more civil ceremonies in every year than religious ones. Naturally, there were far fewer ceremonies taking place in 2020 due to Covid.  Yet there is no national or diocesan mission strategy, nor even a bishop, getting to grips with any of this. By 2030, the average weekly church attendance for the CofE will have collapsed to around 0.5 million – simply not a sustainable economic position.

That the CofE sits on social and cultural templates it cannot control is hardly news. But there are no national or diocesan mission strategies that show any inklings for engaging with the bigger picture. The CofE thinks it is running out of young people (true). So it pours huge amounts of money, resources and anxiety into reversing this, without ever pausing to consider declining birth rates (there are fewer young people), and that as a population the English are getting older and older, with fewer taxpayers and people at work to pay for the long-term care of the elderly. Young people are extremely anxious about this, and the toll on their mental health and morale is enormous.

The CofE is habitually between 25-50 years behind the times on management, communications, leadership, HR and the like. Initiatives on mission, youth, the elderly, reorganisation, finances, governance, employment and engagement are wincingly out of date, even pre-publication. On safeguarding and sexuality the CofE occupies top spot as a national scandal (and were it not, it would be a national joke). Little of the operational and managerial infrastructure is fit for purpose. The CofE is run by (proverbial) generals fighting the wars and opponents of bygone eras, if not centuries.

On pensions, the recent letter from 700 CofE clergy flagging existential anxiety and poverty has been met with indifference by the hierarchy. As indices of trust are measured across professions, the CofE and its leadership have logged the lowest score on record. People outside the CofE do not believe what bishops say. Inside the CofE, it is hardly any better. Its managers and leaders are out of their depth, yet regard themselves as indispensable, despite being clueless. Locally, for parishes, the annual warmth of seasonal spiritual nostalgia has become a threadbare comfort blanket now so fragile it can barely be touched before being carefully stowed away until the next Christmas or Easter comes.

Meanwhile, theological analysis – which could have been be critical, nourishing and prescient in such a crisis – has been stripped out and marginalised, or ostracised by the CofE’s leadership. Whilst insights from secular social sciences were never really engaged with by the CofE leadership. Corporately, the CofE is like the proverbial frog in boiling water. It has no idea how it got into the kettle, let alone why the water is getting warmer. Alpha Courses, Fresh Expressions, mission statements and another diocesan reorganisation have been, predictably, about as effective as a nosegay in the face of a major plague epidemic.

England was hit hard by Covid as was the CofE. There were 120 days of lockdown in the nation – far more than other countries. Yet our mortality rates were amongst the highest in Europe. It is estimated that the backlog for NHS treatment is still running north of 7 million.

Pupil absence rates in schools remain high, and the bill for the bail-out given to employers and employees (one of the most generous, globally) will sit on the national debt for generations to come. The furlough scheme cost the nation £70bn, which is 2.9% of GDP.

On the ground, locally, rates of stress and anxiety amongst clergy continue to climb, and major issues on morale, mental health, expectations on work, finances (personal and ecclesial), public trust, employment rights and pensions remain unaddressed. Such factors are dogged by other persistent scandals in the church. The nation continues to practice slow-but-ever-increasing social-distancing from the CofE, save for a few festive occasions each year.  Nationally, there is no sign of anyone in the CofE leadership grasping these nettles.

As I have recently argued(The Exiled Church: Reckoning with Secular Culture, Canterbury Press), the huge and calamitous adjustments made by the Church of Scotland to its demographic and financial crises could serve as a warning to other denominations on the perils of not thinking ahead. Five years on, Covid has irreversibly transformed the English nation. Which makes it all the more remarkable is that in the CofE, it seems to barely changed or adjusted at all.

So, what about the CofE suffering from a case of corporate Long-Covid? It seems to fit with our collective sense of symptoms. That said, and as Turchin and Nefedov suggest, issues that the English nation (and thus its national church) are wrestling with lie well beyond its control.  It remains to be seen if the CofE leadership can read the signs of the times and interpret them, let alone think creatively about the survival and shape of the church over the next few decades.

If there is to be any hope, there must first of all be some realism about the present and future. But the leadership cannot talk their way out the collective crises afflicting the CofE. So we need a lot more show and a lot less tell. We need the leadership to show visible, serious signs of real change that are intelligent, wise and considered. On that, we continue to hold our breath. I fear we’ll be waiting for some time. 

by Anthony Bash

Forgiveness

Justin Welby was asked in Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on 30 March 2025, ‘Do you forgive John Smyth?’ Welby answered,

‘Yes. I think if he were alive, and I saw him – but it’s not me he abused. He’s abused the victims and survivors. So, whether I forgive or not is, to a large extent, irrelevant.’

Welby is not a victim of the physical abuse perpetrated by John Smyth. Smyth did not beat him when he was a minor with hundreds of strokes and left him scarred and bleeding. In this regard, Welby has nothing to forgive. He is a third party, an outsider, a critic of what happened, but not the subject of Smyth’s brutality.

A church which perpetrates the view that it is possible for people to forgive those who do not wrong them holds an absurd view of forgiveness. What has forgiveness got to do with anyone except those who have been wronged?

In answering ‘Yes’ and then qualifying what he meant by ‘Yes’ and acknowledging his forgiveness was, to a large extent, ‘irrelevant’, Welby discloses the muddle that lies at the heart of his approach to forgiveness – an approach that mirrors the approach of the Church of England generally.

On the one hand, forgiveness is seen as an overarching good, to be offered at all times, in all circumstances, whether sought or not. People think it promotes reconciliation and wellbeing, and that it avoids conflict and division. Without it, so it is said, there can be no peace.

On the other hand, Welby recognises – despite having said he forgave Smyth – that his is not the place to forgive, as he is not a victim of Smyth’s brutality. We go further: it’s not that Welby’s forgiveness is ‘to a large extent, irrelevant’: it is irrelevant.

Welby’s answer wants things both ways. Welby offers something to everyone and thereby satisfies no one. In fact, his answer could offend everyone – either for forgiving when some say he shouldn’t or for saying forgiving is irrelevant when others say it is not. This approach is an example of the besetting Anglican sin of keeping everyone on board and offending no one. The victims of abuse know this ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it’ approach doesn’t work – as gays and women in the church will also testify.

This is the reply I suggest Welby could have given Laura Kuenssberg in response to her question, ‘Do you forgive John Smyth?’

No, Laura, I do not. Smyth did not abuse me. If Smyth were still alive and I saw him, I would confront him about what he had done, and tell him he needed to surrender to the police to make a full confession. I would also urge him to contact his victims and to put right with them, as best he could, what he had done. He would need to make some sort of reparation in demonstration of a change of heart. Without something like this, he will not have forgiveness from the victims, and there can be no place for him in the life of the church of Christ.

What is lacking in what Welby said is what lies at the heart of forgiveness – remorse, repentance, reparation. Remorse and repentance are the result of a change of moral perspective and precede forgiveness. They demonstrate a commitment both to act differently and to be different in the future. The result is more than words of regret but appropriate reparative action.

The church’s overarching commitment should therefore not be to forgiveness as an end in itself. Rather, it should be to truth, integrity, and honesty. It should be to do right, to call out what is wrong, to seek justice, and to expose lies, deceit, and cover up. Forgiveness may then result, but not necessarily. The church’s focus is mistakenly on the goal, not on the means.

Personal Responsibility

In the interview, Welby spoke of feeling ‘overwhelmed’ by the number of allegations of abuse the church had received in 2013. He is ‘utterly sorry’ and said he felt ‘a deep sense of personal failure’. Though not said, this failure includes not initiating cultural and structural changes to the church between 2013 and 2024: additional safeguarding officers and a welcome change in culture for preventive safeguarding are not the only answer. Welby’s bland ‘corporate-speak’ reason for resigning – ‘personal responsibility for shortcomings’ – obscures the fact that he failed to provide leadership about an issue that has engulfed the church in shame.

Apart from asking for pity because he had felt so overwhelmed, saying (as if an excuse) ‘I had a difficult upbringing’ (it was Eton College, and then Trinity College, Cambridge), and eventually giving up by resigning, what did Welby personally do to put right his errors when he became aware of them? What model of the gospel did Welby demonstrate by his actions?

What has not happened under Welby’s watch is compensation for victims of historic abuse. There have also not been independent investigations of mishandled cases of historic abuse and cover up. Neither have there been independent investigations of cases where safeguarding has been weaponised to cause harm. Rather, the church remains detached from mechanisms of public accountability and independent scrutiny. The church’s perspective has been to look forward, and not to acknowledge and face past mistakes and their consequences. So, the extent of the unaddressed problems has not been acknowledged, and victims of abuse still have no remedy, reparation, justice, or closure. We asked above, ‘What did Welby personally do to put right his errors when he became aware of them?’ The answer is: Not much.

The example of Graham, one of those abused by Smyth, illustrates the church’s failure to properly address the past. In Kuenssberg’s broadcast, Graham said he had had ‘the most extraordinary, traumatic journey trying to get answers, trying to get any kind of support’ from the church and that his experience of historic abuse by Smyth ‘paled into insignificance’ in comparison with what the church had put him through. Even if there is a degree of hyperbole about what Graham says (and I am not suggesting there is), his statement is an extraordinary indictment of what he says is the greater abuse he experienced perpetrated in the name of the church.

When asked whether he accepts that (in Welby’s words) Welby ‘really is sorry’, Graham said that Welby has not contacted him personally or apologised. He regards Welby as having ‘blanked’ him and the other survivors of Smyth’s abuse, and as refusing to tell the truth. Graham concluded, ‘We’re the victims and we deserve to know what happened. We don’t yet.’

Institutional Responsibility

Without going into much detail in the interview, Welby also said that he accepted ‘institutional responsibility for long-term revelations of cover up and failure over a long period.’ The cover up and failure have many causes. A future Archbishop of Canterbury will need to identify the causes and address them. The causes include the following. There is no legal requirement to report allegations of abuse (‘mandatory reporting’). There is lack of resource to deal adequately with reports of abuse. Investigations into alleged abuse are conducted ‘in house’, by people who may wish to avoid public shame and scandal for the church. The church is not subject to the Nolan Principles setting out professional standards of conduct in public life; neither is it subject to the same statutory framework of regulation and accountability as secular institutions. In short, there is lack of statutory regulation, lack of resource – and perhaps even of resolution – as well as a culture of amateurism at the heart of the church and its institutions. The church is not adequately fitted to safely and responsibly carry out its role in public life. Reform therefore needs to be both statutory and in-house – and urgently.

By walking away, ‘overwhelmed’ by the scale of the problem and having done little to address it when in office, Welby has bequeathed to his successors besetting, unaddressed systemic and structural failure in the church. A new Archbishop will need skill and experience to remedy the failure. A new archbishop will also need conviction that the gospel insists on repentance for sin in the context of truth and justice.

Triple Wounds

The culture of forgiveness that pervades the church, the church’s own failure to respond appropriately to safeguarding allegations, and the church’s lack of moral vigour in its approach to forgiveness are triple wounds for the abused. The abused will, first, carry the wounds of their historic abuse. Second, they will carry wounds from a church that has failed to hear them and to act on what the church has heard. Last, there will be wounds from the church – sometimes even from its national leaders – who forgive abusers when they have no business to do so and do not see the absurdity of what they are doing. The result is that the abused will have to learn to survive the historical abuse they have suffered, the neglect of the church, and the wounds of (perhaps well-meaning but) theologically naïve forgivers.

Anthony Bash is author with Martyn Percy of Forgiveness, Remorse, Reparation: Reckoning with Truthful Apology (Ethics Press,2025).