By Fiona Gardner
There is a new and fascinating biography out about Bishop Stephen Neill (1900-1984). ‘A Worldly Christian’ is a meticulously researched and referenced book by Dyron B. Daughrity, Professor of Religion at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, published this year by Lutterworth Press.
Daughrity describes Neill’s life as ‘a tumultuous one’; both his parents were missionaries and following his father’s ordination the large family moved frequently. Despite an unstable and nomadic childhood – the children were looked after ‘by a series of nannies and governesses’– Neill’s upbringing was ‘thoroughly evangelical: family prayers, Bible memorisation and recitation, unwavering faithfulness in attending church services.’ Eventually settled in Dean Close, an evangelical boarding school in Cheltenham, Neill found this ‘a consistent place to call home’ noting in his own autobiography his approval of the use of the cane which ‘certainly did me no harm’, a practice that Neill later adopted in his adult ministry. Clearly academically brilliant both at boarding school and then at Cambridge where he won numerous academic awards, Neill studied and ‘may have taken early refuge in a kind of lonely stoicism. Religion, as well as nature and circumstance, may have conspired to mold him this way … Perhaps a less austere religion would have given the church a servant less deeply damaged.’
For despite all the academic success Neill was troubled by long periods of mental and physical ill health – with insomnia, depression and temper outbursts plus exhaustion – he himself acknowledged: ‘My fierce temper, the outward expression of so many inward frustrations’. The issue of his repressed sexuality is discussed in the autobiography. Neill had a negative attitude towards women involved professionally in Christian work, and was fond of being with young men, but wrote that both homosexuality and masturbation ‘falls below the level of genuinely human activity’. His biographer comments, ‘the possibility that he was a closeted gay man should not be ruled out.’
Leaving an academic career Neill became a missionary in South India and spent over twenty years there eventually becoming Bishop of the Tinnevelly diocese in 1939. He moved into ecumenism in Geneva working for the World Council of Churches, later taking on a professorship in Hamburg, and then working in Nairobi. His last years were spent in Oxford. He wrote 65 books and numerous articles many of which are still enthusiastically read and cited, and he achieved international fame and esteem lecturing and evangelising around the world; and the book details all these successes.
Previous biographies have either chosen to not know about, ignored, or glossed over Neill’s destructive side, and it is to Daughrity’s credit that this is openly acknowledged and discussed. Neill was unable to be candid about certain chapters in his life; even when confronted with his abusive behaviour he interpreted the situation differently –placing the blame on events and refusing to accept any wrongdoing.
From his earliest years in India, Neill used the cane and later a knotted rope as a form of discipline: ‘he utilised it throughout his life when he thought someone needed to be corrected.’ He was seen as both devoted to ‘the betterment of the diocese’ and as ‘overly autocratic’. One priest ordained by Neill showed deep ambivalence, commenting on Neill’s generosity and concern with the poor, yet, ‘He was very strict in many ways. He was a disciplinarian, an autocrat, imperialistic. Highly intelligent, he used to think very little of other people’. At a time of the movement for Indian Nationalism, and the struggle for independence the known incidents that led to Neill’s resignation carry the added horror of the weight of colonial rule. Neill was later described as ‘a famous colonial missionary’, but in Africa in the early 1970s was judged as displaying ‘racism and arrogance’, with ‘a bullyish etiquette’ insensitive to the African way of doing things and ‘exploitative to the people around him.’
His modus operandi remained the same in all the documented and known incidents of abuse included in the biography, where young men would be asked to report their good and bad actions. Neill would ask if they were prepared for punishment, and once they agreed would take them into a room and beat them on their bare buttocks.
‘When they cried, Neill stopped. Neill did this all throughout his ministry, even as Bishop. Advice was given to him by his supervisors and friends, but he continued to do it. Neill would often beat young people, mainly teenagers. Normally he would beat people aged 10-25 years. Older ones who were close to him were also beaten… Many advised him to stop, but he could just not stop’.
The situation that forced Neill to resign the bishopric involved a local school teacher whose village then complained to the diocese with a number of influential figures supporting the movement to get rid of Neill. Charges of violent assault would have been brought against Neill in the Episcopal Court ‘citing a number of instances of violent assault of clergy, laymen and teachers’, so he was forced to resign despite a powerful campaign to keep him as Bishop.
Neill returned to England and in his own autobiography did not give the real reason for leaving India. He worked for a short time in the faculty of divinity in Cambridge. While researching the biography, Daughrity was contacted by the painter Patrick Hamilton who recounted Neill’s punishment for his personal failings. Hamilton wrote, ‘Certain things [Neill] did have affected my whole life and now, at the age of 83, I still find him lurking in the dark places of my mind. I believe I am the one who reported what was happening and was probably responsible for his immediate removal from Trinity in about 1947.’ A further incident was fully documented dating from Neill’s time in Nairobi in the early 1970s and finally reported to Anglican Church authorities in July 2020. The account includes the victim’s suspicion that although remaining fully clothed, Neill found the experience arousing. Importantly this victim was able to confront Neill some years later when he threatened to repeat the beating, and able to tell Neill, ‘how inappropriate it was to spank a grown man. Neill was flummoxed.’ Neill regularly visited and stayed at Yale University in the US. In 1979 an eyewitness account reported the spanking of two or three young men following a small group discussion of the Christian tradition of ‘beating the body’ as a spiritual discipline. The witness to the scene reported: ‘he combined a biblical teaching with a practice that gave him pleasure.’ One of the men reported the incident, and Neill was told not to have private meetings with students. Another documented abusive incident took place shortly before Neill died whilst a senior scholar at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. The victim was helping Neill preparing a book for publication when Neill asked the person to sit on his lap, and then discussed the need for punishment and began slapping them on the buttocks. Needless to say, this person avoided Neill as much as possible after the incident.
Whilst Neill did consult a psychiatrist about depression, he was unable to seek treatment for his beating fetish or what his niece referred to as his ‘sado-masochism’; nor were these incidents seen as criminal – so he was never prosecuted. His status and reputation were such that whilst many senior church authorities knew about his actions including Archbishop Donald Coggan, Neill was never held to account. Indeed, when Richard Holloway disclosed the abuse in a book review of an earlier biography in 1991, Holloway was castigated by many for not focusing on Neill’s ‘fruitful life and ministry’ and ‘the brilliance of the man’. Inevitably though more victims of his perverse behaviour came forward in the 1990s as a result of the publicity. The account from the victim who disclosed in 2020 suggests that currently there is ‘a growing file on Stephen Neill’.
So, what to make of yet another sad account of abusive practices in high places? Canon Eric James who in his role as Chaplain of Trinity College, Cambridge, ‘came to know the tragic truth’ of Neill’s compulsive abusive behaviour called in 1991 for ‘psychosexual understanding’ and for members of the Church to ‘examine the psychosexual basis of much that passes for theological conviction.’ Thirty years later as the abusive so-called ‘spiritual practices’ of Peter Ball, John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher are reluctantly dragged into the light we might wish for the same thing. It’s not just about understanding though, it is also about confronting and properly bringing to account all abuse, and offering realistic support and help to victims. There is a need for understanding how emotional deprivation and illiteracy may re-emerge in abusive behaviour and linked to these, why senior clerics find it hard to face up to the need for professional psychiatric or psychotherapeutic help. Why is mental health and sexual well-being never taken as seriously as reputation and status?
By the same token, people discount bullying. Probably because it’s so common, “it’s part of life”. Obviously, someone who can’t understand you don’t spank adults is weird. But probably his admirers won’t have realised that he thought that way. One hopes the beating thing is so much less acceptable nowadays, that it wouldn’t be ignored. But also, many people think you can offset bad behaviour with good. And you can’t.
‘Never did me any harm’ – that sentiment about corporal punishment is usually expressed by men of a certain age and background. I disagree about the harm. I attended a primary school in the 1970s where teachers routinely slapped children for minor misdemeanours. My first slap was with a ruler behind the left knee for dropping a stitch in knitting! Every teacher in that school – all female – was (in my adult opinion) sadistic.
2021 – many unresolved cases of abuse remain, particularly in the context of the Anglican Church.
It was worse in the 1940s and 50s, my time in a Church of England primary school ruled by a Victorian (literally) headmaster with exactly this same philosophy as Neill, but flogging younger boys from the ages of six to ten or eleven, it seemed at random for trifling offences or none at all. To varying degrees this ethos rubbed off on other members of staff and, sad to say, I can only remember one who was really kind to the children in her charge and never hit anyone. I now realise that one male teacher clearly was perverted, but in those far off days young children innocently weren’t aware of such things. And, to my knowledge, similar things happened elsewhere. That this was a Church school is my main justification for mentioning it here.
Fortunately the local education authority prohibited corporal punishment of girls by male teachers. If it happened, it would not have been more than a slap on the hand with a ruler, and in all honesty I cannot remember this ever happening. However, our headmaster used to regale us with stories of corporal punishment for misdemeanours at home, and once boasted from his own schooldays that he had seen a cane broken across a girl’s back.
I suppose the similarity of what Neill did, including the abuse overseas, is a close parallel to John Smyth.
Thank God for the work of Baroness Warnock, and others, who put a stop to all this cruelty in primary schools. She had no illusions about its ‘doing no harm’. What a travesty to ever suggest that.
The ‘it didn’t do me any harm’ or destructive entitlement means that at some level you feel entitled to take revenge for what was done to you especially on an innocent person and experience no remorse either … in fact you don’t always see the people you enact the destruction on as fully human.
The religious ‘justification’ bit is in Proverbs 13: 24 – ‘Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them.’ Much damage has been done from this text – let’s hope that’s really changing.
Hebrews 12:6, ‘because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son’, is also much quoted by disciplinarians in many contexts. I really hate that verse.
Whatever one thinks of this verse or any other, the trials faced by Christians in this life are a fact on the ground that calls for an explanation in terms of God’s special love and providence for them. For the purposes of this post/thread and many related, the key point is that the verse in its preceding context (vv. 4-5) refers to God’s procedure and his alone, with no necessary implications re. corporal punishment in schools etc. So don’t hate the verse, hate misapplications of it.
I’m aware what the interpretation is. But when you’ve been abused in a church context it doesn’t help to think that your suffering is part of God’s special love and providence for you. That’s too much like what abusers say, and it makes God as cruel as they are.
What I do believe, and have experienced, is that God is able to bring some good out of even the worst things that happen to us – at least, as long as we are willing to use them for the good of other people.
Janet, sad to hate a verse because some people abuse it. I can relate to Psalm 118:18 – the pain and trouble I have been through because of my my folly and disobedience of God years ago were entirely right and proper, and hopefully have made me a better person.
The Hebrew of Proverbs 13:24 is clear – “(the one who) withholds his rod hates his child”. It is a father’s job to train and discipline his own son – nobody else’s.
Whilst this pattern of unforgiveable behaviour was not known to me, Neill is well-known for having suffered serious mental health issues. The first involved his forced resignation as bishop of Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, and then in the Madras presidency) in 1944, and the second his forced resignation as assistant bishop to the archbishop of Canterbury (i.e., bishop for ecumenical affairs) in 1950. These very severe breakdowns, which resulted in protracted periods of treatment, were attributed in part to excessive over-work. Compulsive industry was a recurrent theme of Neill’s life.
I am not certain that he is still as well-known as he deserves to be (though now he will be better known for the wrong reasons). As Kenneth Cragg and Owen Chadwick – both formidable scholars themselves – noted, Neill was the most prodigiously erudite parson to minister in India since William Hodge Mill (of Fort William College, and later regius professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, canon of Ely and rector of Brasted), and as a linguist arguably had no peer but Henry Martyn. His facility for languages make him something of an Anglican Mezzofanti, and probably only Edward Hawtrey approached him within his own Church. Even if his books on the history of ecumenicism are now largely forgotten, the two volumes of his projected triple decker on the history of Christianity in India (1984-85), the second of which was posthumous, remain an abiding memorial, and have only latterly been superseded by the works of Robert Frykenberg.
Was Neill a colonialist and imperialist? He was nurtured in the Church in India, where his parents were missionaries. That Church was, effectively, a branch of the colonial government (as the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment); it was integrated into the extremely rigid hierarchies of the Raj. The Government of India had long disparaged missionary work, and the IEE was effectively an introverted clerical caste, ministering chiefly to members of the Indian civil and military services, and to the Eurasian community. It would have been a miracle had Neill not imbibed many of the problematic attitudes associated with that, and yet few IEE chaplains or bishops did so much to diffuse Christianity to the masses in Madras, or to help in the formation of the ecumenical Church of South India, with its soi-disant relationship to the Anglican Communion. If he was a racist and imperialist, he was also not a racist and imperialist. Many interesting people are bundles of contradictions.
Neill was the sort of person whose remarkable gifts could not be ignored, but whose weaknesses (chiefly his mental health) were such that he would be a high risk. The question is whether the risk was worth it.
His ashes lie just outside the east end of St Giles, Oxford, on the Banbury Road.
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/1247/71p603.pdf
https://www.cccw.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Daughrity-Dyron-6-Mar-2003.pdf
‘His biographer comments, “the possibility that he was a closeted gay man should not be ruled out.”‘
I began my training at Wycliffe Hall soon after Neill had died. There was not much doubt then about Neill’s sexuality; young male ordinands were still talking about how Neill would casually slap them on the bottom as he passed. They were known as his ‘pastoral pats.’ I remember one young man talking of how much it had upset him.
I wonder now how much the principal and staff knew about this.
Is there anything to say about the difference between Scottish and English corporal punishment? Corporal punishment in the Scottish school was administered by the “strap” or the “belt” upon the hand in front of the class. The cane upon the bottom was the English way. Is there something different going on here? I don’t know, I just refer to it as strangelly different from the Scottish perspective.
The two differing ‘methods’ were traditional, but both overlapped to some extent. The strap or tawse was also used in some English schools, but was very much rarer.
I think people are tending to overlook that it is strictly illegal both sides of the border to inflict any corporal punishment on a child in a school or other institutional situation, and parents now have very limited rights, I think limited to no more than a slap which must not result in visible bruising. In fact I believe Scotland pioneered the latter move. I haven’t checked the legislation for chapter and verse, but all corporal punishment in schools was banned in the last century!
In Scotland parental smacking of children is banned though not (so far) in England.
It seems to me that all these abuse issues (the physical ones) have a connection with the bottom (Neil, Smyth, Fletcher) which seems to me to hint at psychosexual associations. I haven’t heard of any involving straps on the hand.
This seems particularly true of abuse on men and boys. I haven’t yet heard of church abuse where girls or women have been beaten on their bare bottoms. Which tends to confirm the psychosexual element of Smyth, Fletcher, and Neill’s beatings, as you say – particularly since Neill also used to ‘pat’ the bottoms of young men he passed in the corridors of Wycliffe Hall.
Boys schools and homosexuality have a history which is understandable when you fling a lot of young boys with burgeoning sexual feelings and no one to ‘practice’ on but their fellows. Whatever happens in later life the effects remain.
I was once slapped on the leg for being late at nine or ten. The official punishment was cane on the hand. Or ruler. But I never saw it or experienced it. The teacher who slapped me was unpleasant and disliked.