
One of the interesting features of a recently published Lessons Learned Review about events at the parish of Tylers Green, in the Diocese of Oxford, is the frequent use of the expression ‘spiritual abuse’. The authors of this review, Elaine and Patrick Hopkinson, use this term often in describing the malfeasance of the Reverend Michael Hall at St Margaret’s Church between 1981 and 2000. During that period this expression was not in common use as a shorthand for a range of harmful behaviours. perpetrated by some church leaders against members of their congregations. We could speculate as to why this term spiritual abuse has taken such a long time to emerge as a way of describing poor behaviour by the clergy. One reason is that no one then wanted to admit that a man of the cloth (women were not incumbents until the last years of the century) would ever act malevolently. It was also not an expression available to clerical victims to help them describe their pain. Those in oversight roles in the Oxford diocese seemed, for a variety of reasons, to be unable to check the tragic twenty-year period of harsh and harmful behaviour on the part of Mr Hall. Another new concept used by the Review authors, one that finds its origin in domestic dysfunction, is the term coercion and control. These words have gained a currency only at the beginning of the present century to describe non—violent controlling behaviour used against another. The law of the land now recognises such behaviour as potentially criminal, especially in the context of abusive domestic relationships where the victim is typically female. The language of coercive control allows the law to identify a situation where men (typically) may control and humiliate others without the use of physical force. It has taken society a long time to understand fully the nature of such things as threatening and coercive behaviour against a weaker party in a relationship.
Mr Hall’s offences and the descriptions of them that are made in this Review, attracted my attention for two key reasons. First, the twenty-year period of Mr Hall’s time as an incumbent of the Church of England dovetail very closely to my own time as a Vicar in in two English dioceses. In short, the parochial environment, especially the account of the interactions with figures in authority in the Church, are similar to what I knew at that time in other dioceses. Bishops and Archdeacons in those days were fairly remote figures and the freehold system could effectively screen the hierarchy from involvement in ordinary parishes. A short summary of the pattern of the bonding between the parishes and the centre would be to say that it was, at best, weak. It would also have been possible for a Vicar to remain at arm’s length for long periods of time from any contact with fellow clergy, if he chose it that way. I have thus some feel for the situation described in the Review about the way that bishops, archdeacons and other church overseeing authorities could be, during the twenty years of Hall’s incumbency, kept firmly out of the way. The ill-tempered and forceful actions of a determined freehold incumbent, bent on exploiting his legal status, would be enough to terrify any bishop. While the system of freehold worked fairly well for incumbents, it never worked well for bishops when faced with a Vicar known to be harming members of his flock. Whatever we may think now of the operation of CDMs or its current proposed replacement, the situation in the 80s and 90s gave far too little power to the those in episcopal authority to check clerical malfeasance.
The second reason that the Tylers Green Review has attracted my attention picks up my interests on a more personal level. Having written a book on Christian healing in the 80s, I was, in the 90s, invited to join a committee in London which had some supervisory powers for accrediting healing organisations. To obtain this accreditation, these organisations had to be open to being visited and to be free from scandal and ethical lapses. I was present when some truly dreadful abuses by individual healing organisations were discussed. The saga of the Nine O’Clock Service in Sheffield was not in fact within our organisational remit, but I found that the committee work had sensitised me to have some insight as to what was going on at the church at Sheffield. The link between sexual misbehaviour and religious leadership was at that time something quite hard for many to admit or understand. From 1995 onwards I was beginning to explore why and how certain forms of spiritual practice could be a prelude to truly dreadful and harmful behaviour on the part of Christian leaders.
I think it was in 1997 that my reading on abusive power and forms of exploitation within the Church was consolidated into a book proposal for Lion Publishers. The commissioning editor did not find it easy to sell my text to his superiors when I eventually presented the manuscript at the end of 1999. Nevertheless, the work, Ungodly Fear, was well received as an attempt to explore the way that power, spiritual and authoritarian, could be abused in church settings. People knew that church abuse was taking place but there was then little help in understanding the psychological and theological context of what was going on. In much of my book I was writing about spiritual abuse, but this expression had not then been formulated so it was not available to me to use.
After the book appeared in 2000, I began to read more widely to see in the psychological literature whether there were writings about power abuse, personal and institutional, that could be applied to the Church. To summarise, in my reading on the topic over several years, I stumbled on the notion of narcissism. There I saw clearly that the so-called narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) was something that well described the self-inflation evident in many Christian and cultic leaders involved in abuse. I pursued this idea at my first presentation to the International Cultic Studies Association at their conference at Trieste in 2011. Being then a new boy in this organisation, I was surprised to discover that it was considered a novel idea. Since then, the notion has become commonplace and reading the Tylers Green Review, it can be offered as revealing a further interpretation of the dysfunction apparent in the extraordinarily harmful behaviour of Michael Hall.
I am well aware of the warnings in the psychoanalytic literature against applying the diagnosis of NPD to someone who is not accessible to detailed examination. My use of the narcissism label is not in any way offered as a professional diagnosis for Michael Hall. Nevertheless, using the idea of narcissism we are helped to have a coherent pattern of understanding allowing us to see many of the salient aspects of Hall’s personality described in the Review as a coherent whole. The phenomena of extreme anger, litigious and threatening behaviour and apparent indifference to the pain and suffering of others, are all part of the typical NPD profile. The word narcissism is also now frequently used to describe an insatiable appetite for power and importance. I would maintain that whether or not we claim the diagnosis of a full personality disorder for Hall, the categories attached to the ideas of narcissism are appropriately applied as a description of his behaviour.
So far, we have seen how the reviewers of 2023 have had the categories of coercive control and spiritual abuse at their disposal and have made good use of them. Thankfully the use of term spiritual abuse has passed into general use in spite of the defensive paper put out by the Evangelical Alliance in 2018, saying that it was an unnecessary expression. No doubt they may have felt that ‘conversion-therapy’ and hellfire preaching from some of their members could be regarded as spiritually abusive. Some of us do indeed believe that certain strands of preaching are designed to foment terror in their hearers. When fear, reinforced by aggressive preaching dominates an institution for twenty years, as at Tylers Green, is it any wonder that the observer might describe this as spiritual abuse?
The reviewers of 2023 have been allowed to think in the categories of the current age when looking at the past behaviour of Michael Hall in the events that took place 20 to 40 years ago. The expression, spiritual abuse and the ideas around coercion and control, have greatly assisted their task. To these two expressions, I have added a third, narcissism and the various ideas that are associated with the word. The cultic world has already widely adopted into its discourse concepts like ‘toxic narcissism’ to describe the damaging behaviour of individuals like Donald Trump and Michael Hall who seem incapable of acting in a truly altruistic way. Perhaps we should face up to the terrifying thought that there are, among our existing leaders, a number who are afflicted in this way. For reasons deep in their psychological make-up, some Christian leaders are incapable of acting in a way that builds up another. Unless such leaders are named and inhibited, they will have the power to create the same appalling damage as was created in a parish in the Oxford diocese 20 -40 years ago. One thing has changed in the intervening time, and we should use it to good effect. This is our ability to articulate and describe better what may be going on inside the minds of individuals who lead us. The battle to prevent another Michael Hall appearing is a serious struggle and will require enormous resources of psychological insight as well as wisdom of leadership and management. Even a small number of destructive leaders can wreak terrifying damage on an institution like the Church. The task of neutralising the impact of toxic leaders as well as the individuals who use their power to abuse in other ways is urgent and should demand much of our energy and resources.