This morning, on the last full day of witness hearings at IICSA, I was with a group of other permission to officiate clergy doing my compulsory safeguarding training. I thus did not hear the morning questioning by the lawyers of Archbishop Welby. I did however, catch his closing reflections after lunch. He was asked to reflect on the impact that encountering victims of church sexual abuse had made on him. His answer came only after a long pause. The words that he used were striking. First, he spoke of a deep sense of shame. He was ashamed of his church. His posture and body language suggested that he was articulating a deeply held feeling. I have no reason to think that this was anything other than a genuine expression of emotion. Even though we are critical of the leadership of the church in this area of caring for the vulnerable, it seems that we need to accept that some of our church leaders have been deeply affected by what they have heard at the hearings.

A second word came out of Welby’s reflections at the end of the questions by Fiona Scolding. This was the word ‘tribalism’. The Archbishop wanted to make the point that when groups or factions within the church band together to protect themselves and their privileges, that creates an atmosphere highly hostile to good and transparent safeguarding. Although he used the word tribalism in the context of protecting vulnerable people in the church, it was clear that this word also sums up many of the problems being faced by the Church of England in other areas. Tribalism seems to be rife in the whole Anglican Communion and is the cause of many of its intractable divisions.

Those of us listening to his words realise that, for the Archbishop, church tribalism is a source of deep frustration. The problem is that everyone feels stronger when they band together with others to accomplish a particular task. Some tribalism is of course healthy. The church rightly encourages people to gather together the purposes of study, prayer and worship. Feeling support from others as we grow together in community is something that enriches our lives. But community or communion can become something dark when it descends into tribalism. This negative side of community is manifested when the individual surrenders their thinking and feeling to a group mind. In political terms this is seen in mass movements whether on the Right or on the Left. Anyone who attends a fascist rally does not have to think for themselves. He or she is part of something great and of enormous power. The Movement, the Cause has replaced the individual isolated functioning which belongs to a single person. Within the mass gathering there is power; outside the rally there is only insignificance and a sense of personal weakness.

A readiness to surrender our individual weakness in exchange for tribal power is perhaps not as far away from each of us as we would like to think. Membership of a tribe promises us many things; we are freed from the struggle to understand and make sense of the world. We have instant purpose, direction and significance once we have surrendered to the large group. In church political terms there are many people who have opted to belong to a group which does all necessary thinking on their behalf. This is particularly true of those who occupy a position at one of the extremes of churchmanship. At the charismatic end of things, we can see how the large group fills the individual with sound and music so that thinking is no longer required. The fact that lots of other people are there with us helps to dampen any rational questioning that might try to erupt. I vividly remember the single occasion when I attended a professional football match. The wall of sound that filled the stadium removed any individual sense of identity. I did not want to repeat the experience. The thinking, reasoning and feeling parts of me were too important to be destroyed in this kind of event.

When Archbishop Welby spoke about tribalism he was talking, I believe, about this tendency for people to want to be swept up into a large group who does their thinking and decision making for them. People who think as part of a large group and find their identities there, are not the kind of people who would be sensitive and alert to the needs of abused individuals. The individual is never important in tribes or mass movements. We only support others when they belong to our tribe. If they do not they are to be scorned and pushed to one side. That is not a good atmosphere for safeguarding the weak and the vulnerable. Effective safeguarding can only be done by people who are prepared to stand outside this tribal mindset. We need to be above a crude morality that places all the good in our tribe and sees everything else as distorted or evil. We need to have an independence of thought and behaviour which will be able to do the loving and intelligent caring that is required of true safeguarding work.

My comments which support Archbishop Welby in his horror of tribal thinking have to end on a slightly critical note. The tribalisms of churchmanship that we see in the Church of England are paralleled by other inbred groups that we find within professional bodies. Tribalism is such a universal phenomenon that we find it in safeguarding networks, social work groups and even in the House of Bishops. In all of these, the same dynamics of letting the group to do some of your thinking for you is evident. A lot of the unanimity of thinking that we observe among bishops may itself be an example of the very tribalism that the Archbishop wants to banish. We need to spend a great of time in finding out what ‘disagreeing well’ really means. This is not just about encouraging conservatives to speak to liberals in the Church. It also means allowing the flourishing and fostering the independent exploration of morality and faith within the church. The opposite of tribalism is something very untidy. Perhaps it is precisely that fierce independence of thought, faith and morality that is what we should be seeking in the church and thus furthering the cause of good care and safeguarding..