From time to time, I feel myself drawn back to books which have, in different ways, been crucial in changing the way I think about religious themes.  After spending a couple of years thinking and writing about fundamentalism and charismatic phenomena in the 90s, I was still unable to come up with a psychological theory which offered some insight to explain the dynamics of what I was seeing.  Around 2005 I came across the work of Len Oakes.  He is an Australian scholar who wrote an important book in 1997, Prophetic Charisma:  The Psychology of Revolutionary Personalities.  Almost immediately I became captivated by his key thesis. The central idea of the book is that there are sometimes connections to be noted between the mysterious power and skills of certain leaders in the religious charismatic world and the profile of an individual who suffers from a clinically defined narcissistic personality.  When I am speaking about such a personality, I need to emphasise that most of what I am describing here is something at one end of a wide spectrum of behaviours.  Many of these are not problematic. The word narcissism on its own is not a diagnosis of any kind and It is quite often a part of simply being human.  It only becomes a problem when we see it in its pathological manifestations. Oakes’ own interest in the topic came about through his own need to understand a charismatic group in the 1970s of which he had been a member. At some point he changed his role within that community from being a member to becoming a student and chronicler of the dynamics of his group.  His book eventually became a study of charismatic religious leaders from a variety of traditions, including his own, over a period of some 20 years.

When I was writing my own study of Christian fundamentalism and charismatic groups in the 1990s, this word narcissism appeared nowhere in my vocabulary or understanding.  I knew the word but at that time the pioneering work of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg in the 1970s was unknown to me or anyone else I knew. These two scholars were, between them, laying the foundations for the then new category of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  This reached the wider public as a category of mental disorder in the 3^rd Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual published in 1980.  Since that time, the concept of narcissism has grown from a fairly narrowly defined clinical term within the psychoanalytic literature to become a common word used to describe behaviours which are in many cases harmless.  Our own use in this blog piece will follow that of Oakes.  His observations tend to be concerned with the pathological toxic examples of narcissism, thus following closely Kohut’s case studies. This categorising was embedded in some quite dense and complex psychoanalytic ideas.  These conceptualisations have, so far, stood the test of time and even those who disagree with him still use Kohut’s insights as a starting point. 

 When we talk about religious charisma, we are confronting the mysterious phenomena by which some Christian leaders have an almost magical power over their followers.  We find it difficult to understand what is going on in a Toronto Blessing type of event.   The happenings are simultaneously fascinating and, at the same time, a little frightening. It is not just, of course, in religious settings that we observe such charisma.  It can appear in political or indeed in any institutional setting.  Oakes takes the word and begins to demystify much of it as he links it, with the help of Kohut’s theories, with the grandiosity, the messianism and the enormous self-confidence that are key manifestations of classic narcissistic behaviour.  

Kohut originally saw a link between charisma and chronic narcissism, when he noticed how charismatic leaders were similar to a group of his patients who possessed severe narcissistic symptoms. His patients were not, of course, capable of any leadership role, but they possessed, like charismatic leaders, an enormous self-confidence together with an extraordinary lack of self-doubt. They also felt themselves to be invincible, possessing totally unrealistic and grandiose fantasies about themselves and their powers. These typical symptoms of the narcissistic personality in its clinical manifestation also acted like a shell, covering over an extremely fragile core.  The psychoanalytic treatment for this disorder had as its aim the restructuring and rebuilding of this core personality, one which had been hollowed out by adverse childhood experiences.  But, even as he was treating these patients, Kohut could not help but notice the way that, in many cases, they possessed acute almost psychic sensitivity to others.  This was however a negative sensitivity.  It worked in such a way to enable the narcissistic patient to manipulate other people to serve his (normally his) needs or purposes.  The other person was, in the process, becoming simply a source of potential psychological gratification for the patient. Thus, other people had one purpose, to be a kind of extension of the narcissist’s own ego.  It was only in and through exploiting and dominating others in this way that the narcissist felt himself alive.  In this way all his relationships were parasitic.  Dominance and control of others were a key part of the narcissistic personality.

Oakes uses these observations of Kohut about the narcissistic personality and its closeness to the characteristics of some possessors of charismatic gifts to form the heart of his study. His own experience of being a member of a cult had allowed him to see at close hand the typical external facets of narcissism, grandiosity and over-confidence.  These were combined with an inner emptiness and dependence on other people to feed and allow the narcissist to flourish. Oakes helps us a great deal by penetrating and rearticulating the dense prose of Kohut himself. Although Kohut was writing in English, his background and training was as a Freudian psychoanalyst in Austria. His English style is convoluted and quite hard to unravel. In a few pages of the book Prophetic Charisma, Oakes explains in fairly straightforward language the key ideas of narcissism and its origins. He tells us how a child, according to Kohut’s theory, with the wrong kind of parenting can develop the distortions of the severe narcissistic personality. Narcissism, in its clinical version, emerges as the result of the child receiving either too little or too much parental attention. At the risk of over-simplification, we have explained to us by Kohut and Oakes, how there is an optimum way for a child to build, with the help of parents, a secure sense of self. When there is inadequate attention, the child has a desperate sense of loss.  At the other extreme there may be too much attention, depriving a child ever of experiencing frustration and learning to deal with it.  This can lead to the child being unable to handle the inevitable setbacks of real life where things do not go his way as an adult.  Both these distortions of parenting can lead to the kind of clinically disordered behaviour we associate with narcissistic illness.  Needless to say, the word has greatly expanded out of its original clinical setting to signify almost any kind of self-centred behaviour.  This fact that the word can simultaneously refer to a clinical condition as well as ordinary human self-absorption means that we have to use the word with great care.  But, however we use the word, every use of it owes something to the clinical examples of it set out by Heinz Kohut before his death in 1981.

Why do I find this book by Oakes so compelling? It is because it enabled me, at a time when I was puzzling over the dynamics of charismatic churches, to see how a therapeutically trained writer could account for some of the strange goings-on in that world.  It is not all bad. Some people might actually benefit from being with a charismatic leader for a limited time.  There are good things to be learned from the vision, the energy and even the giftedness that comes out as insight and gifts of healing. Problems arise when such relationships are allowed to go on for too long.  Charisma has a life-cycle of its own and eventually all parties become disillusioned and damaged so that we can talk about a kind of narcissistic collapse.

One of the things that I find fascinating is that, although there has been this breakthrough in the understanding of the dynamics of charisma, little seems to have penetrated into church circles to encourage critical reflection on the powerful institutions in the Church which practise this style of church life.  The work of Len Oakes should be taught compulsorily in places like theological colleges and in in-service training for senior clergy leaders.  The language of narcissism also has something to say to other safeguarding disasters we have seen over the past fifteen years.  Although Oakes has focussed on the charismatic styles of church life, pathological narcissism is clearly found in the dynamics of other parts of the Church.  Oakes’ study could be used to unlock and interpret many of the disasters and dysfunctions of leadership that we see in our churches.  In some of the major parishes of the Church of England narcissistic processes are obvious, if one has the eyes and insight to see them. The phenomenon of self-satisfied influential leaders standing in pulpits receiving the acclaim of dutiful acolytes is all too common.  Whenever a clergy leader feels himself to be the target of idealising dynamics, that is a time for self-examination and reflection.  A great deal of the observable power operating in the church is sustained by what we can describe as pure narcissism.  There is much more to be said on this theme, but space prevents further discussion here.  It is sufficient to conclude by suggesting that much of what we see as power in the church is less than healthy for those involved.  It will always be unhealthy to be caught up in narcissistic cycles of self-importance and grandiosity.   The stories of Jonathan Fletcher and Peter Ball can both be re-told with an emphasis in each case of strong narcissistic dynamics at work.   That fact alone should alert us to the need to understand the crucial importance of Len Oakes’ work. 

by Charles Foster

At the revue at the end of the Iwerne camps we sang a sentimental song:

‘Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, at Iwerne Minister with [David] Fletcher & Co….It won’t be long before we all pack up and go.’

Our wistfulness was misconceived. We never did pack up and go. Or, rather, the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer went with us wherever we went, as the Ark went with the Israelites.

That’s how we liked it. Iwerne was great. We were fed lasagne by willowy lady helpers, from whose ranks we were expected to select our brides – the dams of the next generation of the Elect. And the senior officers fed us with a few theological formulae – mostly from 19th century America rather than 1st century Palestine.

For budding boys wrestling with the complexities of evolving personality and sexuality, and fearfully though dimly aware of a seething jungle of nuance outside the camp gates, the simplicity was intoxicating. Assent to A, B, and C, stay out of your girlfriend’s knickers, never, ever stray beyond the camp gates, and all would be well in this world and the next. Iwerne would look after you. It held the keys of death, hell, and the merchant bank of your choice.

No wonder we stayed. It looked like a fantastic deal. We treasured our badges of membership: the inflections of the voice, the uniform, the allusions, the delicious acronyms which confounded the state-schooled heathen. We listened to camp talks every Sunday in the Iwerne churches. Whatever the season, and whether the church was in London, Oxford, Cambridge, or beyond the edge of the mapped world in somewhere like Durham, the sermon was always really in summery rural Dorset, because our God could do what He liked with time and space, and His throne was near Blandford Forum and his season was the summer. Every week, happily and wonderfully, we heard the same talks, by the same people, using the same illustrations and the same jokes, all delivered by voices just like ours. We no more expected the content of a talk to be altered than we expected the text of Mark’s gospel to be updated. We believed in the infallibility of the talks as originally given. We’d have been outraged by any change.

What was being preached, of course, was The Gospel.  We knew this because we’d been told it, with unimpeachable authority, in Dorset. We knew too that whatever was not preached by one of us was not the Gospel, and therefore suspect. We alone, having received the Gospel at the Dorset well-spring, were its true custodians. We alone knew how to enunciate it.

How did one get to see God? By listening to the pastiche of the Bible encoded in the formulae, which in turn were encoded in us and in our culture.And here the real danger began, for, we came to believe, one could not distinguish between message and messenger. As individuals we fell short. But the culture of which we were part did not. How could it? It was part of the Gospel itself. So if and insofar as we were good, enculturated Iwerne chaps, to see God we had only to look in the shaving mirror.

‘Iwerne is my church’, Jonathan Fletcher is said to have said. Everything about Iwerne’s self-containedness and suspicion of non-Iwernism suggests that by this he really meant ‘Iwerne is the church.’ Think about that. The church isn’t the eternal community of the redeemed, serenaded and guarded by hosts of angels and archangels, the bride of Christ, boasting of its extravagant poverty, its hospitals, and its martyrs. It’s a set of boys’ camps and the middle class cabal to which campership gives life membership. If you’re a leading light in that church – as Jonathan Fletcher certainly was – what are you saying about yourself by saying that Iwerne is the church?  

Twitter now knows the culture as #Fletcherculture, and uses the word ‘narcissism’ to denote one of its most toxic components. That usage is accurate, but it should be understood that at the root of the narcissism is a conflation of Gospel and Self which occurs because of a conflation of Self and culture. The victim-blaming we’ve seen in the aftermath of the Fletcher scandal occurs at least partly because to criticise the person is to criticise the Gospel/Culture embodied in that person. Mock the plummy inflections, and you’re mocking the voice of God. Criticise his anointed, and you’re denouncing Him.

Yet more fundamental than our tribal and theological loyalties was our loyalty to the innocence of the Dorset summer, in all its suffocating, liberating simplicity. To betray the culture was to betray the Gospel, and so to be damned. It was also to betray our own childhood. To live in the Iwerne culture was consciously to hang onto childhood; to make a daily decision to arrest our theological, spiritual and intellectual development. And to do so in the name of God, because God met with us in Dorset in an unmistakable, unmediated way, handing each of us our life-plan. We followed St Paul, choosing to remain in the state we were in when we were called. Paul was talking about matrimonial status: we took him to refer to childhood. We were theologically infantile because we were actually infantile, and remained actually infantile because we were theologically infantile.

All this came naturally to us, for the catastrophe of boarding school had left us all emotionally stunted (see Mark Stibbe’s brilliant and heartbreaking Home at Last on this, and Joy Schaverien’s more academic Boarding School Syndrome: The psychological trauma of the ‘privileged’ child). We were only too glad to hear not only that our stuntedness was not pathological, but that it was what God decreed.

I feel sorry for the Iwerne-ites, and for myself as one of them. But I feel even more sorry for the non-Iwerne-ites who go to their churches. It’s one thing to be fossilized in one’s own past; it’s quite another to be fossilized in someone else’s – to live, vicariously and unconsciously, the perpetual childhood of your vicar, without even having the genuine comfort, enjoyed by him, of remembered cream teas. If you’re in an English Anglican Conservative Evangelical church there’s a sporting chance that, whatever your age, gender or background, you’re really a rather lost, constipated public schoolboy, but without the perks.

The senior officers were fond of quoting Luther’s alleged words at us: ‘Here I stand….’ But where were they urging us to stand? In our own childhood, of course. In Dorset. Inside the camp. To this day our cosmic dramas are played out against a mental backdrop of leafy lanes, windsurfing in Poole harbour, tennis with the eternally bronzed Jonathan Fletcher, earnest walks round the playing field with the dormitory officer, games of ‘ragger’ (a game unique to Iwerne, for the unique Iwerne people we are), and the tuck shop (known, masonically, as the ‘Old Firm’). All our prayers are tightly focused, barked out in a martial voice, and kept short because David Fletcher hated long prayers.

The injunction ‘Stand!’, I now see, is, like so much Iwerne-speak, theological window-dressing for a defence of the culture: for a defence of ourselves, just the way we are. It’s engendered by fear. The status quo is fragile. Dissenters need to be vigorously suppressed. Iwerne Christianity is at its most muscular when it wields its cold shoulders. The culture and theology, being inseparable, are sacred. The childhood Gospel – the childish Gospel – must not be challenged. If it is, we know at some deep, unexamined level, it will fail. The Gospel is not a lion that needs to be unleashed, but a sickly pussy-cat that needs to be nursed.

Stand! You don’t go through the door of a Iwerne church wondering nervously where the tsunami of the Holy Spirit is going to leave you at the end of the service. If you’re doing the right thing you’ll be standing in exactly the same place at the end. Stand! You don’t expect a mystical, transformative encounter: you had that encounter once and for all, in person or by proxy, years ago in Dorset.

Stand! Stand in the camp, because if you don’t you’ll be like one of the ones outside; the outside where time flows, minds change, people grow up, and where there is real love, grief, mess, contingency and joy; where nothing worth having fits into a formula.

‘All reality is iconoclastic’, wrote C. S. Lewis. ‘The earthly beloved, even in this life, continually triumphs over your mere idea of her.’ Reality, that is, is process. It is an unfolding, as our lives, if they’re real, are meant to be an unfolding.God, as the ground of all being, smashes up the laughably inadequate ways in which we frame him or her (including the pronouns we use). This is wholly uncontroversial in all the historic Christian traditions – and (it sadly needs to be said) doesn’t begin to mean that one has to deny (for instance) the historicity of the resurrection, the literal, biological understanding of the virgin birth, or the possibility of immutable ontological facts or moral truths. But it is the antithesis of much conservative evangelical theology, whose connection with historic Christianity is often slender. It is particularly the antithesis of that iteration which whispers that God, like the dinosaurs in the cliffs of the Jurassic coast very near Iwerne, is petrified in our childhood, and that we therefore have to live in our childhood or our vicar’s in order to live a godly life.

Fletcherculture is a disease of both theology and psyche. But it doesn’t have to be terminal. Get the theology right, and the peculiar, peculiarly dangerous, and downright sacrilegious narcissism of Fletcherculture is much less likely.

[this should be read in conjunction with earlier article by Charles http://survivingchurch.org/2019/11/26/smyth-fletcher-iwerne-and-the-theology-of-the-divided-self-charles-foster/ ]

We have recently been watching one of the films on Netflix which takes as its background the political life of Korea.  In this Korean film, the main character is a scientist who, after a terrorist attack, finds himself president of the whole country.  Innocent of political life and devoid of ambition in this arena, he has to negotiate his way through the strong political forces in the country.  He also needs to make the decisions which he believes to be for the good of all, rather than for his personal benefit or that of a particular political faction. 

The confrontation between the rationality and objectivity of an independent technocrat and the experience of seasoned politicians, is the basic theme of the film.  All the experienced politicians know that holding on to their own and their party’s power is a major part of what they do.   The idea that there could be an honest broker in their midst, completely uninterested in personal power is a major challenge to the assumptions of the whole system.   Serving a country in a way that meets the democratic hopes of the people is, of course, held up as the ultimate end of government, but the reward for the successful politicians is also personal and institutional power.   Along the way there may have been ethical shortcuts, betrayals, dishonesty and even lying.  The unspoken question of the film is whether there can ever be technologies of government, uncorrupted by political power-games.  Do we always have to submit ourselves to be ruled by people who are motivated by a desire for influence and power?  Can there ever be such a thing as a ‘science’ of government?

When we talk about politics, whether it be in government, the Church or in any other organisation, we are referring to that messy overlap between the hoped-for flourishing of an institution and the personal ambitions of those who pull the levers within.  Politics will always be in some way linked to the process of gaining (or losing) power in an institution.  Many people can be motivated by the offer of power.  Many also firmly believe that they can hold it without succumbing to any of its dangerous seductions.  For others, power represents the opportunity of acquiring wealth.  At the national level currently in the UK, we are told that politics makes some individuals, such as Boris Johnson, poorer in the medium term.  Johnson was able to make far more money writing newspaper columns than the £150K he receives as head of the country.  In the longer term there are huge rewards to be obtained from book deals and speech fees, but these are not available in the here and now.  The rewards of high office do not include, in most Western democracies at any rate, instant wealth.  The evident corruption of former President Trump and his cronies is, hopefully, to be regarded as a rare exception to what we would like to think are the norms of political life among democracies in the West.

If instant wealth is not afforded to our rulers, we can allow that there are, in the short term, perks to be had which make up somewhat for the stresses of political responsibility.   We have already alighted on the single word, power.  Even without the promise of instant wealth, there are various ways of enjoying its possession.  There is the simple gratification of having people around you open doors, chauffeur your car, and generally pay attention to all your domestic needs.  Wherever you go, you become the centre of attention.  Such attention may be enjoyable; equally it may be a burden.  One thing is clear is that the experience of having this kind of power and being the centre of attention may change and corrupt the individual.  The personality becomes so used to being thought of as superior or special that when this flattery is no longer available there are withdrawal symptoms, similar to the withdrawal from an addictive drug.  This expectation of a constant supply of ‘feeding’ and adulation is an early indication of a narcissistic disorder. 

We need to go back one stage to this phenomenon of power and think about the way that it is enjoyed by those who possess it.  I find it helpful to think about power and its enjoyment along a continuum.  At one end there is the completely altruistic person whose only use of power is to achieve change and subsequent flourishing for a group of people. S/He enjoys the satisfaction and pleasure of a job well-done. To serve or love so that another may flourish is close to a definition of Christian love. This was the only reward sought by the non-political leader in the Korean film.  A leader who tirelessly works to take a country out of a crisis caused by war or economic collapse deserves the applause of those who benefit and the positive verdict of history.  This is precisely what we would like to see in all our politicians in Church and State or wherever they hold sway.  If only this were the norm.

Along the continuum are found those whose motives and actions are a mixture of altruism and selfishness.  Seldom are motives ever completely pure.   At the far end of the continuum of power, we see the malignant narcissist.  This is the individual who seems to be ‘milking’ every occasion as an opportunity for self-aggrandisement and the humiliation and exploitation of others.  In some cases, there seems to be a total absence of any concern for other people in the exercise of this power.   All we see is endless self-gratification and self-inflation.  To call those who operate at the exploitative end of the scale of narcissistic behaviour is to raise further issues.  Are they behaving this way because they ‘need’ the gratification that power provides to protect a fragile ego?  Alternatively, and more commonly, are they just enjoying the exercise of power because it is there.  Are they, in other words, what I call ‘situational narcissists?’ 

The spectrum/continuum we have described in the way power is used/misused, is observable right across the board.  We can observe both extremes in operation in places as diverse as schools, vicarages, company offices and bishops’ palaces.  Individuals may sometimes be observed moving down the spectrum. From originally using power only to serve others, they may find themselves over the year approaching the other end of the spectrum.  Here power is used typically to gratify the self at the expense of others.  When I mentioned my sketch idea in the last blog, I should also have suggested that theological students learn to recognise the narcissistic contaminants that creep into the use of power.  The question might be asked.  To what extent is power operating here in a way that serves the one who has it?  How should this use of power be described on a narcissistic spectrum?  Obviously there will be times when motivations are not obvious.  A desire to serve can be mixed up with an urge to satisfy self-needs.  But it is the wrestling with these questions that is important.  We repeat one issue that was mentioned last time.  It will normally be almost impossible to challenge the individual in a place of narcissistic power.  Alongside the power that is possessed to control an institution will be found the skilled use of tools to defend and deflect all challenges.  In short, the narcissist can make life very unpleasant for those who try to stand up to him/her.

The recent book that very powerfully describes the extreme abuses of power through narcissistic processes is one by Daniel Shaw, Traumatic Narcissism.  I mention this book especially to draw attention to the title.  It is a work that explores how the extremes of narcissistic behaviour can do immense harm.  Harm is caused by any abuser but also the hurt is enhanced by the bystander/leader with no insight into the processes at work in the abuse.  The abuse we meet sometimes in church settings is traumatic, even catastrophic.   There is plenty more to be explored in this area.  I am setting down a few pointers here for developing a set of categories that can be used when we see dysfunctional and exploitative leadership in a church setting. 

We began this blog by suggesting that politics is best thought of as the way leaders choose to deploy institutional and personal power.  With this understanding we can see that politics can be a much larger concept than just that found in the seat of government.  While politics and power in themselves are both neutral concepts, politicians in every setting will use power in any number of ways, depending on such things as psychological need or personal morality.  Politics needs the injection of other disciplines, like philosophy, ethics and economics to evaluate its workings and interpret what is going on.   These amateur attempts at analysis and commentary in this blog may help some of my readers to penetrate a little better in understanding the functioning and culture of church power.  I sometimes feel we are travelling down a dark tunnel with few lights to guide our understanding of the way power is deployed and experienced.   We all the time need better signposts to help us avoid completely floundering in incomprehension and confusion.  That is a dangerous place to be, not only for the individual but for the whole Church.

There have been two occasions when I might have been on the staff at a theological college.  On the first occasion I was asked to apply for a post, while, on the second occasion, I was on a short-list of four candidates after making an application for the job.  Neither episode came to anything and so no ordinands ever had the dubious benefit of learning from my parish experience or my theological insights. 

These two possible encounters with the world of teaching ordinands have led me to ponder the question: what do I want future clergy to learn from their training?  This is partly a question to myself about what I regret never having been taught.  In my day, the late sixties, there was an attempt to make us aware of our own inner processes by exposing us to the then fashionable teachings of group dynamics.  One thing that was not taught then was the dynamics of institutions and the way that roles are exercised within them.  To put it another way, we never learned to see how people and institutions interact.  People – clergy and laity – might have psychological issues to sort out.  The Church itself, as an entity of power, was not considered as a problem within the total picture.  Topics like the psychoanalysis of institutions did not exist and we certainly had few insights into the nature of power and the way it exercises an important role in the life of the Church and within the personalities of those who lead it.

From the perspective of retirement, I can now look back and recall how some of the clergy I used to know, played ‘power-games’.  Nothing in their training had taught them to question how they used the power that they possessed as parish priests.  It is obvious now, from the perspective of thirty or forty years after the event, that perhaps only a minority of clergy knew the meaning of humility.  Many used their status as Vicar, Rector or Canon as a way of boosting their self-esteem.  The Church institution was being used like a giant esteem filling station.  Whenever a sense of social fragility was felt inside them, they went off to refill, so that they regained once more some of the prestige that their Church role was giving them.  They might act out this power in a variety of ways – raising their voice unnecessarily, showing impatience or in some way belittling another person without a word being said.  This way of using the institution to define their value and meet their self-esteem needs is what I call institutional narcissism.  It is not just in the Church you find it; it is equally evident elsewhere, especially in political life.  It is also visible at every level in the church, from bishops downwards.  It is certainly visible among celebrity preachers and leaders in the con-evo constituency.  Failures here have been explored recently in the aftermath of the Jonathan Fletcher Review. Anyone using the Church in some way to promote their self-importance has made power into a problem.  Such people are often not aware of any misuse of power, but this institutional narcissism has begun to corrupt all their relationships and their effectiveness as pastors is seriously compromised.

In my musings about how to reduce ‘power-games’ in the Church, I have invented for myself a fantasy role as a teacher in a theological college. I have decided in that role that there should be for every student a series of classes using role play as a way for participants to learn about power.  I would write a series of sketches which show typical scenarios in a parish.  Some might involve day to day encounters with parishioners going about their voluntary tasks.  Other sketches might portray staff meetings or chapter meetings.  There would certainly be at least one to illustrate a difficult meeting with a bishop, with a curate telling him that his Vicar was guilty of sexual offences. The one thing that all these sketches would have in common is that an issue of power is implicit in each one of them.  The question for the watching group is to identify who in the scene has power and how is that power acquired?  How is the power being deployed?  What are the feelings of the various characters in the sketch?  Is the first person aware of the feelings of the other?  What is the best outcome for all concerned?  I would expect that the teacher would frequently have to remind the students that there is much more going on that is evident on first watching.  Certainly, after doing this exercise a few times, the student might become more aware of hidden, even subconscious, power issues.  I would also want to share the insight that the place of meeting can affect the power dynamics in an encounter.  If a bishop expects a young curate to share deeply personal stuff in the setting of his palace, then he will probably be disappointed.  What was missing in the story of A and the Bishop of Durham in the last post, was the failure of imagination and empathy.  No group of students would be allowed to watch a sketch of such a meeting without being made fully aware of all the many possible nuances contained in that encounter.  To most of us they may seem obvious, but to clergy from an older generation, empathy, imagination and an awareness of power dynamics seem to have been in short supply.

One of the dramatic changes to parish life that has begun some years ago, but has now, maybe, become encoded by covid, is the end of clergy visiting parishioners in their own homes.  Issues of safeguarding no doubt come into the reasoning, but I have also heard the excuse given that there is no time available for such an activity.  Clergy of my generation clearly regret the loss of this parish activity but I want to raise an important factor which is nothing to do our feelings of sadness. It would seem clear that the absence of home visiting may affect the issue of power dynamics and the relationship between church leaders and the congregation.  When I used to enter the home of one of my parishioners, I was always there as guest.  That is, when we think about it, a power relationship, putting parishioner above priest.  The host is the one in charge.  If the Vicar only ever sees his/her flock in the study or having coffee after church, the priest-people power differential is fixed in one direction.  Even if there is no desire for the clergyman ever to misuse his/her power, the encounter on the ‘home-turf’ of the priest will inevitably determine the dynamic of the relationship.  To restore the balance, as it were, in the power dynamic between priest and parishioner, home visits perform a vital role.  Home visits, in my estimation, help to put the power dynamics of the parish into a far healthier frame.

Understanding power dynamics in the Church, whether at the parish level or within the hierarchy, will always be an important task.  The problem is that that powerful people do not enjoy being challenged for the way that they use that power.  Sometimes one would love to challenge a pompous senior church functionary, but such behaviour might be a career wrecking move.   Politeness and expedience will mean that much power abuse and narcissistic behaviour remains unchallenged.  It will continue to damage the institution and the individuals within it.  Perhaps my idea of role play exercises is a safe way of helping would be clergy to become aware of how the unconscious exercise of their power can harm both themselves and others for whom they have pastoral responsibility.

‘Heads I win, tails you lose’.  This is a trick children’s game that may or may not still be played today. It certainly is a description of situations that adults find themselves in from time to time.  We are faced with a scenario where every single reaction or response has drawbacks. We know we will be in a losing situation whichever avenue we follow.  Whatever we decide to do, in whatever way we react, the result will be damaging to us in some way. 

At this point I should be able to provide the perfect anecdote to illustrate what we can call the ‘lose lose’ situation.  Issues that centre round the care of the elderly or children’s education come to mind.  Should the gifted child pursue a talent for music or academic ability?  Should the elderly relative go into a home where they are physically safe, or should they remain at risk living on their own but with their own things around them?  These sorts of dilemma face us constantly.  Every decision we make may involve some form of loss or a less than perfect outcome. 

In the safeguarding context there is one classic ‘lose-lose’ situation that has been faced by many survivors over the decades.   An individual is abused by a member of the church, their vicar or some other person in authority.  If they are a child, they might possibly tell a parent, though it seems that the majority of such cases go unreported for years, even decades.  Eventually the abused victim, by now a young adult, becomes aware that the situation was deeply harmful to them and they now need help.  A further consideration may be that the perpetrator needs to be stopped from harming others.  What should the survivor do?  From an adult perspective, this is clearly a lose-lose situation.  To tell others will likely involve activating legal processes, insurance assessors and, worst of all, challenging a Church that seems primarily interested in promoting itself as a place of honesty, love and safely.  The story that the abused individual is now revealing is bound to disturb that carefully constructed narrative.  It will be resisted by the idealising dynamics of the institution and its legal and episcopal guardians.  Is the survivor able to stand up to this kind of resistance?

The alternative to reporting or disclosing abuse is, of course, not to say a thing.  Because of all the difficulties of disclosing, many, if not most, victims/survivors of abuse do not reveal any of what they had to suffer.  Some may disclose privately to a spouse or a therapist, but many more are reluctant to admit to what happened to them as a child or young person.  There is not the space here to do more than hint at the damage caused by undisclosed abuse.  It may wreak damage both to mental well-being as well as physical.  It may damage future relationships.  We have explored a little in the past about such issues as dissociative identity disorder.  Here past trauma is lodged outside active consciousness.  In this cut-off part of the mind, it can adversely affect the general capacity of the mind to know contentment and generally flourish.  Therapies of various kinds can alleviate the effects of abuse, but if it is not faced or owned up to at all, the likely legacy is almost certainly serious and life-long.

What this post is attempting to communicate is that the abuse survivor in the Church often faces a bleak outcome.  The options or choice to disclose or not to disclose both have ‘lose’ outcomes.  In short, the survivor is like a child who listens to those words, ‘heads I win, tails you lose’.  In this post I want to tell the story of ‘Survivor 3’, a victim of Granville Gibson, the convicted offender who served in and later became an Archdeacon in the Diocese of Durham.  The events surrounding Survivor 3’s abuse took place in the 1980s but the story that is told illustrates attitudes and assumptions that are unlikely to have disappeared completely from sight even today. 

Survivor 3 (I shall refer to him as A) was not in the category of a child or a vulnerable adult when the offences against him took place as a curate under the charge of Gibson.  His story is recorded both in the Review written by Dr Stephanie Hill of the case and in a privately printed memoir written by A himself.  As a curate in his twenties, A first became aware of problems when a parishioner reported seeing Gibson kissing a young male refugee who was seeking support.  A spoke to another priest who told him that if he reported the incident, he would be ‘hung out to dry’.  A then himself experienced a sexual assault by Gibson which left A confused and uncertain what to do.  In a twist to the narrative Gibson then confided in A, confessing that he had a ’homosexual spirit’ which caused him to have numerous affairs across the parish.  While not telling A any details, Gibson forced him into the role of an adviser, asking him what he should do.  A decided (fatefully as it turned out) to go to the Bishop of the Diocese, John Habgood.  It is obviously difficult to tease out all the details of the interview, but clearly it was a difficult situation for A.  A major factor was the power issue, first between curate and vicar and also between curate and diocesan bishop.  No records of this meeting exist.  They were either never taken or subsequently destroyed.  Habgood later told A that Gibson had denied the allegations.  He, for his part, should stop listening to ‘vexatious gossip and causing problems’.  The parishioner who had witnessed the assault on the young refugee was never spoken to.

The story goes from bad to worse.  The relationship between vicar and curate deteriorated as Gibson used his power to belittle A’s personal character and professional reputation.  In short, A experienced vividly the Church in full self-preservation mode.  As the result of Gibson’s hostility, A soon found himself forced to resign his curacy as well as his home.  It was only thanks to family and friends that he was able gradually to put his life back together.   In later years A has had a highly creative ministry exploring the relevance of Celtic spirituality to the Church and new explorations of community life.

The fateful decision of A to go and see Bishop Habgood to share his problems about Gibson was a point of no return.  He had suffered sexual abuse himself at the hands of Gibson and he knew that his vicar was a danger to others. What realistically did the Church expect A to do?  The question has to be asked again and again as this story is shared by new generations of safeguarding professionals.   It is sad that this story has publicly, through the Hill Review, placed questions over the posthumous reputation of one who latterly was a greatly admired Archbishop of York.  It is clear from A’s testimony that Habgood had little insight into power dynamics in the Church.  He also showed no apparent understanding of the vicar-curate relationship, let alone the dynamics involved when a young curate entered into the presence of his bishop, to whom he had sworn canonical obedience.  There appears to have been no insight on the part of Habgood over the conflict of emotions for a curate to tell such a dreadful narrative.  I do hope that such poor pastoral interaction with very junior clergy is no longer found among the bishops.  Speaking from my own memory of that stage in my ministry, I can imagine how much courage it took for A to approach Habgood in the first place.  There was nothing vexatious or gossipy about this act.      

To return to the impossible dilemma of the abuse survivor.  It is a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  The very least that the current crop of safeguarding professionals can take from the story, is a readiness to learn from it.  To say that we do not do things like this any more is not enough.  We have to be able to say:  Yes, we have systems in place that allow a survivor to come forward and tell his/her story without ever being accused of gossip or being shamed.  They should also not have to risk being re-abused in any way.  Where was the pastoral support?  Where was the simple pastoral imagination that could make sense of the disclosure?  It was not on display then and are we sure that we have yet got things right for the future?  Stories like A’s experience must be used in the teaching of safeguarding.  The Church must be ready to hang its head in shame and say ‘No, this can never happen again’.                                                                                                                 

Dear Bishop Emma,

I am writing to you as one of many who want to congratulate you on your new appointment to the post at Lambeth, helping both our Archbishops.  No doubt you will be receiving plenty of advice from those who know you and from others who have expectations of what you might be able to contribute through this position to help the Church move into the future.  I write as one of the numerous retired clergy in your current diocese, but we have never met.  My interest now is to offer thoughts on one important part of your job.  This is the aspect of your role which is to advise the Archbishops on how to respond effectively to the avalanche of safeguarding and abuse issues that swamp the inboxes of those in authority in the Church.

I note that Gilo has already written to you recommending reading matter.  As you have responded to him, saying that you visit my blog, Surviving Church from time to time, I am going to assume that you will see this open letter at some point.  It comes with some thoughts of mine on what you might seek to achieve in this very complex, even messy, world of safeguarding.  First of all a word about my own ‘qualifications’ in this area.  Simply stated I have none, not even that being a survivor.  I also have no training in any of the relevant skills around safeguarding, like social work, law or psychology.  But I can claim to have taken an informed interest in the issue of power abuse in the Church over twenty-five years, having written a published book on the topic in 2000.  I also have had the experience of an ordinary parish priest.  My blog has posted well over 600 articles, the majority written by me.  This writing has, over time, resulted in an extensive correspondence with a variety of survivors of church abuse.  I remain in touch with many people who, I believe, have a great deal to offer the Church in terms of making things better in the future.

This issue of what the cohort of survivors have to offer to the whole Church is the first thing I want to raise with you.  Obviously, the oversight of safeguarding is only one element in your future job specification at Lambeth, but I hope you will regard it as an important one.  I want to state my firm conviction that the witness of abuse survivors is one the most valuable untapped resources the Church possesses in terms of successfully sorting out safeguarding for the future.  Financial compensation for survivors may be a part of it of what is needed.  Equally as important, I believe, is the creation of a new culture where survivors are properly listened to.  Their suffering and lasting pain must never be treated as merely something to be managed, before being lost in a large filing cabinet somewhere.  

One of the problems you will find very quickly is that the current crop of survivors’ testimonies is bringing much damage to the Church’s reputation and credibility in society.   Stories of predatory clergymen and organists abusing children of course sells newspapers.  The temptation is for the Church to attempt to respond to such stories by reassuring the public that vetting is better, training is better and that the future promises a safer Church for all.  These attempts to create the conditions for the Church to be a safe space are commendable.  But they lack one important ingredient.  This ingredient is one that I have already mentioned, the task of effective listening.  Some dioceses have made strides in this area … whilst others hardly at all.

There are two important ways that listening to survivors is a vital ingredient of the Church’s future response to the Safeguarding crisis.  The first thing is that it is only by listening to their stories that the solid foundations of future reform can be built.   Survivors need to know that the team of highly trained specialists are starting from a place of real understanding and insight before they start to plan and build for a better future.  The key to understanding is, above all, empathetic listening to existing survivors’ stories.  I believe that these stories are vitally important for you and others to hear in at least two ways.

Listening intently to what survivors have to say is crucial, as we have already indicated, because new policies can only work when they are rooted in what has already happened.  Sticking plasters cannot work unless there is a surface for them to be attached to.  So often the cry from survivors is that the authorities are trying to find solutions for the future when the Church stills seems determined to ignore or bury so much of what has already happened.  The first thing that survivors need to know is that the raw pain of abuse and re-abuse has been acknowledged.  This might lead to any one of number of potential responses.  One idea could be be a survivors’ day in the Church calendar, with special liturgical resources provided to be used by all.  A Day of Reconciliation between survivors and leading bishops might be organised at a major cathedral.   Above all, the torrid story of what sufferers have been through has somehow to enter the consciences and awareness of everyone, especially those who are making policy and taking decisions in this area. 

Survivors have another gift for the Church which has not been used.  They have memory which is not only of their personal stories.  One of the problems that has accompanied the never-ending renewal of the safeguarding structures at the centre of the Church, is the loss of corporate memory.  However skilled or highly qualified a new appointee may be, they cannot do the job properly if they do not know the stories of abuse that are scattered around in the Church’s memory.   Many survivors are walking encyclopaedias of the reports, the notorious individuals and parishes where abuses took place. They will have a finely nuanced understanding of the wider narrative that lies behind the IICSA reports.  They know the bits of the jigsaw, including many missing pieces.  One hour with a survivor will teach you far more than five hours of reading reports.  For one thing, a report cannot evaluate the impact of an abusing individual.  It cannot fill in the real emotions of fear, disorientation and deep loss that were experienced in the abusive event, nor the frustration of dealing with decades long of disclosures that were walked away from, or the corruption and cover-ups that survivors have had to fight a way through.  Written reports may record facts, but they can never reveal the raw emotion of past shameful events in the Church.  If you watched the recent Panorama programme on racism, you will remember the dramatic moment when Clive Myrie slapped down the  great pile of reports connected with the Church and racism in front of the Archbishop of York.  A similar quantity of reports and reviews have been made in the Church’s response to safeguarding – and their recommendations frequently ignored or ‘retranslated’ to suit the spin of lawyers and communications people and the PR management of Archbishops Council. Gilo has recommended books, most of which you appear to have read.  I am going to recommend that you meet survivors as a matter of urgency.  They will probably have a quite different perspective to the professionals and the experts on safeguarding, but you will get closer to the raw truth of what needs to be done in the next few years.  It is so important that you meet these people who carry all this knowledge in their heads and have strong well-informed ideas about how the Church might get things right in the future. 

Bishop Emma, there is an enormous urgency for you to help to put things right in the area of safeguarding.  The greatest contribution you can make on day one is a determination to listen carefully to all the voices clamouring for your attention in this area.  There will be professional input as well as the voice of survivors.   But as you hear each voice speaking, I would like you to think and ask yourself what each one represents.  The question that might be going through your head is this.  What perspective does this person represent?  Do they speak on behalf of smooth management and control, are they on the side of legal correctness, or are they promoting gospel imperatives of reconciliation, truth and goodness?  Gilo has a powerful image that he often returns to, the idea of bureaucratic institutions ‘hoovering up’ those who come into their orbit.  What he is saying and perhaps I am also saying is that the survivor community are urging you to retain your independence, your gospel convictions and your personal integrity as you enter what has become the political minefield of safeguarding in the Church of England.  Independence in this area will be hard to maintain, but if you succeed you will be doing something historically important for the Church. This may help to redeem the culture of a church leadership which has seemed very broken, but will also bring some healing to survivors.

Stephen Parsons Retired Priest living in Greystoke Cumbria.

The revelations about David Cameron working for a private finance company, where standards of ethics were not of the highest, have reminded us of the Nolan Principles.  These were formulated in 1995 by Lord Nolan and were offered as a statement of what was expected on those who accepted posts in government and public life.  The press and opposition politicians have been revisiting these seven principals.  They want to remind their audiences of the way that those in government, from the Prime Minister downwards, sometimes appear to be guilty of serious ethical lapses while carrying out their public duties.  While it is not my intention here to get involved in making judgments about the behaviour of politicians and senior civil servants, I can, for the purposes of this article, remind my readers of the seven words that sum up the Nolan Principles.  They are respectively Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty and Leadership.

These seven principles of conduct in public life could, of course, merit a separate blog for each of them.  My purpose in listing them is to remind the reader that values and principles within institutions matter.   We have the right to expect that the people who represent us in public life and manage the country on our behalf follow ethical guidelines.  In listing these seven principles of public life, I am aware that there is no equivalent list in church life.  We do not have a statement that sets out the ethical basis for the way that, for example, church legal protocols are managed.  Is the principle of openness ever compatible with Non-Disclosure Agreements that are sometimes part of legal cases connected with abuse awards?  Is not the obsessive secrecy that has existed in the parts of the Church which knew about Smyth, but refused to say anything, another example of non-compliance to Nolan principles?   In short, the Church needs a set of its own principles – Church Nolan Principles.  These could then be appealed to whenever ethical standards are under attack or possibly being betrayed.

In thinking about the possibility of a set of principles that might help to guide the Church in the future, I realised very quickly that the Church in some areas of its life, can operate in ways that are a complete antithesis to ordinary standards of behaviour.  Taking this thought further, I have come up with a set of seven negative principles that churches sometimes follow.  Most of these impact on the ethical behaviour of the Church.  The examples that I give of these failures of standards, could be illustrated from various areas of church life.  For the purpose of this post I have chosen to make my points by looking at the recent thirtyone:eight Review on Jonathan Fletcher.  It is there we can see clearly what I choose to call seven anti-principles of church life.  These examples of poor behaviour each constitute a kind of shadow to the ideals that Nolan wanted to be enshrined in public life.  Some of these church anti-principles were found in JF himself and many still pervade the culture that nurtured him and over which he presided to the harm of many.   Let us look at each one of these, and see how they are illustrated by incidents or situations in the thirtyone:eight Review.

The first anti-principle that was revealed in the Review is the one that always gives priority to the interests of the institution over the needs of the individual.  The survival and the preservation of the institution’s power, in this case the con-evo constituency, will always take precedence over everything else.  We can call this anti-principle, the priority of institutional power.  This first anti-principle has two aspects or sub anti-principles.  The first of these is defensive in tone.   It will seek to push back any challenges to the whole by a whistle-blower or any other kind of challenger.  To make this defence, there are a number of powerful weapons at hand.  First there is shunning and shaming, followed by threats of various kinds.  The ultimate weapon is expulsion.    In the case of a religious group, like the ReNew constituency, expulsion is much more threatening than just being required to leave the organisation.  It has the implied threat of eternal punishment because you no longer belong to the ‘saved’ group.  These various weapons of control over difficult or dissident members, have had the result that, up till now, few individual voices have been heard in this group beyond the circle of its leaders.  The group entity has always prevailed in its determination to preserve the interests of the whole against those who question or challenge.

The second part of this anti-principle of group protection is the active encouragement of actions or inactions that preserve the group.  This anti-principle is about doing things or not doing them so that the interests of the institution may prevail.   The fulfilment of this second anti-principle is especially illustrated by the extraordinary inaction and failure of anyone in the ReNew circles to say anything about Smyth or JF.  This studied passivity of an entire cohort of Christian believers went on for over forty years.  It also accounts for what I referred to in a blog post as the ‘Great Silence’ that descended over the con-evo world after the offences of JF were first revealed in 2019.  The Review has used one word to account for this silence, the word ‘fear’.   It is this fear cultivated among insiders combined with an obsessive loyalty to the system that has helped to protect the organisation for so long.  Loyalty, fear and desperate protectionism towards the system/group have pervaded the con-evo world.  The institution prevailed by excluding the dissidents and whistle-blowers and by forcing loyal members to remain in passive faithful dependence.

The third anti-principle which is to be found more among the leaders of the con-evo constituency and tacitly tolerated among the followers can be summarised in this way.   It is the ‘born to rule’ anti-principle.  Someone has to be in charge, the reasoning goes, so those who went to the right schools/camps and knew the right people have an inbuilt and unchallengeable right to be leaders.  Leaders like the current crop of ReNew leaders who have assumed power in this way, want everyone to believe that their motives for taking charge are entirely altruistic.  However, there is no discernible democratic or accountable process through which to raise questions about suitability when they get things wrong.  Leaders who are appointed according to the rules of nepotism and the school tie may or may not be good and altruistic.  But whatever their qualities, they certainly need to be clearly accountable.  The fact that JF presided over the same congregation for thirty years was likely to be extremely unhealthy for all concerned.  But, being answerable to no one but himself, he could indulge his power and narcissistic needs free from any challenge.

Secrecy is another anti-principle to be discerned in the thirtyone:report.  We find secrecy in mysterious meetings among ReNew leaders where no minutes were produced or any record of who was present.  We can also refer to the way that the value of secrecy was sustained by the miasma of fear.  It was this anti-principle of secrecy that, protected known miscreants over long periods of time.  Secrecy was and is a necessary principle of the ‘school tie’ type of governance we have touched on above.

Secrecy is closely linked to another anti-principle, that of manipulation of the truth.  Some of the ReNew leaders spoke of not knowing anything of the JF allegations until the early part of 2019.  (+Rod Thomas has now made it clear that he knew in the autumn of 2018.) These are claims that are, frankly, difficult to believe.  The Diocese of Southwark was making detailed investigations into JFs behaviour in 2016 before the PTO was withdrawn (or surrendered) at the beginning of 2017.  This part of the story is important, and it is a pity that the Southwark authorities contributed, apparently, nothing to the Review. But even without the testimony of the Southwark team, it is hard for us to believe that none of the detailed enquiries into JF’s behaviour got back to the ReNew leaders.  It is also difficult to imagine that a thorough investigation took place which did not involve in any way the bishop in charge of the constituency of which JF was a key leading member.  We are also not helped to understand how a PTO suspension was to be enforced without anyone, not even the overseeing bishop, being told.  How is anyone reading the Review to make sense of these lacunae of information?  One additional fact that I have gleaned from a completely different source is that JF was ‘marched off’ one of the Iwerne camps in the summer of 2017.  Even if it might possibly have been the summer of 2018, that is still something that could not have taken place except at the instruction of someone in authority.  From what we know of the hierarchical system in operation in ReNew, somebody very senior was taking sanctions against JF in the summer of 2017 (or 2018).  That does not fit in with the protestations of William Taylor or +Rod Thomas and the others that they only discovered in late 2018/early 2019..

 The ‘orthodoxy’ of the ReNew group is seen to be an all-pervading system which does not tolerate discussion or disagreement.  JF, in his own writings, showed himself keen on the notion that truth never changes.  This could be seen as a pervading theological principle that is continued to this day.  I want to call this an anti-principle, but I have to acknowledge that this anti-principle is not one that involves ethics or morality.  Thus it is quite different from the others I have mentioned so far.

Nolan mentions, in his final point, the word leadership.  By this he is drawing attention to the fact that it is important for anybody in an organisation to be able to take a lead, when necessary, to challenge bad or dishonest practice.  There is little evidence of this kind of leadership in the rank and file of the con-evo world.   Rather the power of intimidation, the fear of being labelled ‘unsound’ and thus to be shunned, effectively sustains the status-quo even now in the world over which JF used to preside.

I wish that that the whole Church and its constituent parts, including those under the ReNew umbrella, could aspire to something similar to the seven ethical principles of Lord Nolan.  The civil service and the government of this country try to follow them, at least in theory.  Even when they fail, these institutions do one better than the Church.  Not only does the Church not even have an equivalent list of principles, but it often seems to operate from the negative list that I have set out.  The anti-principles that I have named here, are doing and will continue to do enormous damage to our national Church.

Responding to Abuse in the Institutional Church
by Fiona Gardner

by Cliff James

A profoundly intelligent, insightful and inspiring book, ‘Sex, Power, Control’ is essential reading for anyone who cares for social justice. 

Much of the public discourse around clergy abuse has focused on the acts that were committed, the institutional cover-ups, performative apologies and promises that “things have changed”. This traditional response oversimplifies the issue by re-imagining the abuser as a singular problem, a one-off “rotten apple”, who is mythologised as essentially “evil” and whose casting out – or incarceration – is supposed to provide reassurance that the system has been purified, the danger safely exorcised. 

In contrast to these traditional, oversimplified discourses, Fiona Gardner casts a powerful and intellectually forensic spotlight onto clerical abuse. She delves deeply into the psychologies of individual abusers, and into the “groupthink” of institutional hierarchies that have protected the abuser and vilified the victims. Arguably more importantly, she scrutinises the structural systems of power in patriarchal society that continue to engender abusive personalities and abusive behavioural patterns. We are left in no doubt that, until these systems of power and privilege are changed, our flawed society will continue to produce abusive personality types, particularly among those who are fast-tracked into positions of authority. 

In fundamental ways, the analytical reach of ‘Sex, Power, Control’ extends far beyond the Church of England; it provides critical insights into how our hierarchical, class-based society reproduces narcissistic, emotionally damaged and damaging personality types within the higher echelons of the Establishment. Gardner highlights the fact that a significant percentage of clergy were privately educated, as were most of the senior leadership of the Church. One brilliantly perceptive excerpt from the chapter on British public schools illustrates the damaging effect of this elitist education far more clearly than I could hope to summarise:

“The training of boys on the playing fields of public schools was supposed to produce ‘manly’ men … at the forefront of empire… This outdated ethos lingers on, partly because men who went to public schools (as did their fathers and grandfathers before them) are still dominant in positions of power in the core of the establishment… This means that there is a difficulty in changing the structure of the institutional church because the commitment of a powerful group to the institution derives not only from the institution itself, but also from their earlier experience of having been formed, apart from parents and family, to be part of the elite.”

In a later passage, she elaborates on the links between such an elitist education and patterns of abusive behaviour: “It is feeling entitled to be present, entitled to be there, entitled to be heard, entitled to be recognised, entitled to be promoted and …. entitled to have sexual conquests where and when you want and to beat others the way you were beaten. This is also entitlement but destructive entitlement – the ‘it didn’t do me any harm’ kind.”

These passages take on a greater relevance when one considers that 64% of the current Conservative Cabinet went to such fee-paying schools (compared to 7% of the general public)1. It may also cast some light on why the current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson – himself an Old Etonian – infamously and flippantly dismissed the IICSA inquiry (into historic cases of sex abuse in the Establishment) as “malarkey” and said money “was being spaffed up a wall, you know, on some investigation into historic child abuse.”

Johnson’s comments perfectly encapsulate Gardner’s point, that the British private education system fosters a patriarchal obsession with rules and authoritarianism; with devotion to the team and a dislike of “snitching” and “tale-telling”; with the veneration of a “manly” toughness of character, an acceptance of (even an admiration for) the bully, and the suppression of emotions; with a distrust of women, the mocking of any feminine traits in men, and minimal empathy for those who are perceived as weak or vulnerable.

In stark contrast to the emotional illiteracy fostered by the British Establishment and its private education apparatuses, Garner’s tone throughout the book remains emotionally intelligent, humane and empathetic while firmly analytical. Her approach is informed by her extensive experience as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, as a social worker, and as a safeguarding adviser to the Church of England. It is doubtful that anyone without this range of expertise could have produced a work so rich in psychological and sociological insights, while simultaneously and adeptly navigating the Byzantine labyrinths of the institutional Church.

In particular, her personal experience of working within the Church environment gives a greater depth and resonance to her analysis. In one stand-out incident, Gardner describes how – while providing safeguarding training to a group of bishops and other high-ranking clergy – she was surprised to see that several clergymen were laughing during a survivor’s account of being sexually abused as a child. “[I] can’t understand why she doesn’t pull herself together,” one of the clergy commented of the survivor, while another said, “she [the victim] had such a boring voice and went on and on”.

It would be satisfyingly easy to simply condemn the inhumanity of these clergymen, to regard them as “rotten apples”, and to go no further than outrage. However, Gardner does dare to go further: she interrogates the elitist system that produces such patriarchal ideology and normalises such abnormal behaviour. It is the system, she reminds us, that is the problem. Unless and until the existing systems of power in our society are changed, the abuse and the defence of abuse will continue unabated.

Notwithstanding the accounts of abuse and the equally reprehensible collusion by those in the church hierarchy, ‘Sex, Power, Control’ remains an inspiring and hopeful book. Gardner reminds us that change is possible, perhaps even inevitable, and that – more often than not – it is actuated by those on the margins. In this respect, the book celebrates the determination and courage of numerous survivors – such as Gilo, Janet Lord, Matthew Ineson and Phil Johnson – who continue to fight for the transformations that the institution, if left unchallenged, would never dream of making for itself.

It would be impossible to overstate the importance and relevance of ‘Sex, Power, Control’. It is not merely an analysis of abuse within the Church of England, but an exploration of those harmful patriarchal assumptions and structures that fracture the whole of society. The essence of this argument is, I think, best captured by Gardner’s use of a Carl Jung quote in the final chapter: “Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking”.

1 – ‘Two-Thirds of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet Went To Private Schools’, The Guardian, Amy Walker, 25/7/2019

Cliff James is a novelist and the author of a philosophical travelogue, Life As A Kite. As a survivor, his work appears in Letters To A Broken Church and he features in the BBC’s documentary The Church’s Darkest Secret.

The recent debates and discussions that have come out of the Jonathan Fletcher/Emmanuel Church Review have had a considerable impact both on individuals and the wider Church.  All of us have now passed beyond the point of being shocked by the revelations.  Those who were in any way associated with JF, will by now have arrived at a new stage.  This is to take stock and consider afresh how the revelations have affected their personal faith.  There is also the need to look at the Christian networks they belong to and ask themselves whether their loyalties have changed in any way.  For some, this taking stock may have been extremely painful.  Some have looked up to JF for decades so that their Christian identity is bound up with having had him as a mentor or guru.  They will be asking themselves, ‘how much of my Christian conviction has been created by my dependence on JF’s personality and in the way that he exercised a strong influence over me?  What is left now after he has been shown to be to be a false prophet concerned with the preservation of his power and image?’  Others will be asking themselves other questions, those which were put out by the Review itself.  ‘Is my current post or position within the Church tenable when I owe it to the patronage of JF and his circle? Am I now caught up in an institutional structure which was created by a dishonest and unedifying scramble for power?  Can I continue when so much rottenness at its base has been revealed?’

Speaking for myself, I have not had to go through these painful stages of realisation.  Jonathan Fletcher had been completely unknown to me until fairly recently.  Stories about him were circulating at the start of 2019, and the first Daily Telegraph exposure in June of that year did not surprise me in any way.    I reveal this detachment from the world of JF, not with any sense of smugness, but with a real feeling of sadness for all those who were (and are) living in thrall to his influence.  Over the years when I have been trying to study closed Christian groups and cults, I have noted this phenomenon of surrendering responsibility to a religious leader.  Once this fateful decision has been made to become the disciple or follower of a particular leader or guru, certain things happen.  Few of them are helpful to the long-term well-being of the disciple or the guru.  Nevertheless, each seems to gain in the short term.  From the perspective of the follower, the main gain is the sharing of and access to the leader’s version of truth.  Suddenly, issues about morality, the meaning and purpose of life are made clear.  Instead of doubt there is certainty.  The leader, the supremely wise individual, has, it is believed, access to levels of insight and wisdom which are given him by his special spiritual status.  All cults and closed Christian groups seem to practise a version of this surrender to a ‘realised’ leader.

 One of the weaknesses of conservative Christianity is the claim that there is only a single version of truth and teaching.  There is a single way of reading the Bible and the leaders and their group possess it and proclaim it.  This ‘truth’ is completely above any need to debate or even discuss.  Such a claim is extraordinary when we think about it.  It totally ignores the wide variety of cultural and historical manifestations of Christianity that exist. The expression the Bible ‘clearly teaches’ is also palpable nonsense for those who actually take the trouble to read the text for themselves.  Consistency and clarity are not there to be found in the Bible, but only in the imagination of one who keeps the book firmly closed.  Only in the context of a carefully supervised reading of selected passages during a sermon on Sunday mornings, can this illusion of coherence and consistency be maintained.  For the rest of us who study it for ourselves with the help of commentaries, the Bible turns out to be a highly complex work, full of insight, nuance, paradox and mystery but not clarity.  It does not suddenly become easy to understand, just because a preacher declares it to be the infallible word of God and makes numerous selected quotes to back up a line of teaching.

The world of conservative evangelical Christianity is an extraordinary one for those of us who are not part of it.   We ask many questions of this group, but we often fail to receive answers.  How does conservative Christianity place such enormous weight on some ambiguous verses in Leviticus on the gay issue, while virtually ignoring some straightforward prohibitions on divorce given by Jesus?    Does Christianity ever have the right to operate as a privileged but closed system of knowledge, unwilling to engage properly with the disciplines of learning which have developed over the past 500 years?  Christianity is not at its most attractive when it claims to have the ultimate truths connected with human life, while shutting out debate with others who see things differently.  If debating is ever closed down on the grounds that ‘authority’ has decided that there are settled opinions which must be followed, some of us rebel. 

Within the world of the conservative Anglicanism, as exemplified by JF, St Helen’s Bishopsgate and All Souls, the inerrant authority of Scripture, interpreted by the godly ‘sound’ preachers gives a semblance of unity to the whole institution.  If the appointed leader has the divine authority to preach the word of God, this logically allows him to exercise control in other areas of church governance.  If any part of this authority is shown to be shaky, then the rest of the authority structure is under threat.  The democratic impulse is not one well cultivated in these circles. If the hard line preaching on moral issues is ever contested, the institution must push back strongly.  Any concession to another version of truth puts a possible doubt over the legitimacy of the leaders.  JF skilfully used the structures of conservative Anglicanism to maintain an enormous amount of power for himself.  He used the power of the institution to resist challengers within.  More importantly, he had power as the preacher of the infallible word of God.  To oppose such a leader, is to oppose God himself.  Who wants to be on the wrong side of God? 

The unseemly initial response by William Taylor to the Fletcher Review on Palm Sunday from the pulpit at St Helen’s, was revealing.  https://anglican.ink/2021/04/05/william-taylors-palm-sunday-criticisms-of-the-fletcher-report-from-the-pulpit-of-st-helens-bishopsgate/   It seemed like the reaction of a man who felt that his personal power was under attack. Although Taylor apologised for his remarks a week later, this first reaction was an understandable outburst in at least two ways.  First of all, Taylor probably owes an enormous amount to JF.  Taylor’s spiritual formation, as well as his place as leader of St Helen’s and current head of the ReNew constituency, all seem to be linked to his personal and professional ties to JF.  The way that patronage has operated during JF’s period of influence suggests that no appointments were ever made to a post as central as St Helen’s without the blessing of JF.  In the second place the structures of the con-evo section of the Anglican church are indebted to JF’s work in the past.  The Review went as far as suggesting that this whole edifice of the con-evo institution needed dismantling and rebuilding to cope with the aftermath of JF’s disgrace.  Such a process would of course directly impact Taylor himself and his position as overall leader.  He was, clearly, rattled by this suggestion, and his first instinct was to lash out against it and also declare the advisors’ other supplementary comments ‘political’.  The main Review had avoided naming individuals, but the extra comments from the advisors had no such inhibition. 

The power to control an institution without challenge has always been the goal of cult leaders and other authoritarian leaders of religious groups.  From my perspective, the ReNew constituency is such an authoritarian network.  As such it cannot tolerate questioning or dissent.  If any part of the structure, the leadership or doctrine, is challenged, the whole system goes into panic defensive mode.  All the complaints about bullying and other forms of power abuse that we hear from these networks (there are several ongoing at present) have a high degree of credibility.  They are credible because an organisation that needs to be without error is also likely also to be disproportionately aggressive in the way it defends itself.  The Bible, the institution, the doctrine and the leaders – all have to be part of seamless whole that knows no doubt or error.  The logic of infallibility as a doctrine of the Bible is extended to the whole structure, including leadership decisions.  No questioning of leaders, decisions or structures can be tolerated.  That would undermine the fantasy of perfection and certainty which holds the whole structure together.  It is this promise of certainty available to the followers that gives the leaders much of their enormous power.

Commentators on the Church in 2021 have been speaking of the enormous changes that are predicted as the result of the pandemic.  The thirtyone:eight report on Emmanuel Wimbledon may be seen by historians as of equal importance.  The Review will perhaps mark the moment when the complacent secretive structures of conservative Anglicanism were prized open for the first time.  The flaws and corruption seen within helped to dispel the myth of infallibility and certainty for these leaders.  This expression of Anglicanism may be allowed to flourish in a quite different way in the future.  Without the arrogance of certainty with claims to divine truth, the ReNew network may come to serve the wider church in a better way.  With a new attitude of humility, chastened by its clear past failures, especially in its failure to respond to abuse, it might eventually come to serve the wider church in a form that enriches other Christians groups, rather than trying to dominate them.  

A review by Linda Woodhead, Distinguished Professor of Religion and Society, Lancaster University

When she was the Director of Safeguarding for Bath and Wells, Fiona Gardner was puzzled why so many of the diocesan hierarchy asked her, ‘How can you stand it?’. At the time, she thought that ‘it’ must be sexual abuse and predation. Only later did it occur on her that ‘it’ was something different: the shadow church, as difficult to face up to as the shadow side of one’s own psyche.

The anecdote gives a flavour of this important book. Gardner draws on many years of experience as a psychotherapist, a safeguarding officer, a spiritual writer and counsellor. She was one of the people who eventually helped bring Peter Ball to justice. She knows the Church of England from inside out, and the human psyche too. She writes with clarity and understanding about the mind of the abuser and the trauma of the abused, always grounding her thoughts in actual examples.

It is Gardner’s multifaceted experience that enables her to do something fresh and useful: to psychoanalyse the Church in order to explain its abusive tendencies. While sociologists like me are wary of attempts to psychologise social phenomena, Gardner gets past my defences because she understands institutions and social relations so well. She knows that they always involve power, and that an institution is in essence a structured set of power relations. The book’s title ‘Sex, Power, Control’is well chosen.*

Back to ‘it’, the grubby side of the Church of England that those in power want to bury. Gardner’s achievement is to drag it into the light. By listening carefully to the insights of survivors and analysing ‘the mind of the abuser’, she finds a key to unlock the Church of England’s bloody chamber.

Narcissism features prominently in the analysis, narcissism being understood in clinical terms rather than simply as vanity. The narcissist buries shameful things that he or she cannot bear to face. Some of these may derive from childhood, some from later episodes and actions. In order to defend against horrible feelings, a false self is constructed. The more grandiose the self, the more it needs to be continually re-inflated. One way of doing so is by joining an institution that confers dignity. Dressing up, being given a title, and being treated as more ‘reverend’ than others does the job very well. So – to take a further step – does controlling, demeaning and even abusing other people. The smaller you make them, the bigger you feel. The abusers that Gardner encountered were all men, and were all predatory narcissists.

In sociological terms, abuse both exploits existing social inequalities and reinforces them. Victims of clerical abusers are selected because of they are lay, young, lower-class, female, or have other vulnerabilities. The abuse reflects and reinforces their relative powerlessness, meaning that abuse serves a social as well as a personal purpose: it is not peripheral to hierarchical structures, it is integral to them.

Gardner tells us about the warning signs of narcissism. She sees in men like Ball a ‘completely self-absorbed sense of reality’. Everything is all-about-them. They work tirelessly to salvage their reputations and inflate their egos, and draw on all the connections and tools available to them to do so. They are deeply manipulative. Those who cross them are likely to be treated with rage, contempt and various forms of intimidation. As well as a campaign of letters from Ball himself, Gardner was advised by three senior church officials to back off, in one case being walked round the bishop’s palace grounds for a ‘chat’, and on another being rung by Lambeth Palace.

As well as the solipsism, the narcissist gives himself away by a lack of boundaries. There is no thee and me, just me. You are of interest only insofar as you serve the narcissist’s needs, and you have no separate subjectivity or independent existence for him. This blurring of boundaries extends to the body. The abuser does not just groom victims emotionally, he invades their personal space uninvited with touches and gropes, hugs and strokes; he may sit people on his knee, or suggest sharing a bed.

Understanding the mind of the perpetrator helps Gardner to understand why the Church has been so hospitable.  It is a rigidly and steeply hierarchical institution. The clergy, she says in one chilling passage, are the subjects, the laity are objects, and victims of abuse are not even objects – they are marginals, untouchables, a kind of ‘matter out of place’, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas put it in her discussion of dirt and impurity. To allow the victim to speak and have agency is to upset the whole order, thereby putting at risk not just the institution but the very identity of those whose sense of selfhood is bound up with it. No wonder that when Ball’s abuse was reported to no less than nineteen bishops and an archbishop by increasingly desperate victims and concerned supporters, not one of them intervened.

Gardner uses the idea of ‘institutional narcissism’ (which I think comes from Stephen Parsons and his blog) to take the analysis further. It helps to explain why senior leaders crave success stories even when they involve things as dodgy as the Balls’ monastic order or Chris Brain’s ‘Nine O’Clock Service’. It explains why those who try to blow the whistle are ignored or traduced, and why bad news has to be hushed up. It explains why so many large and costly ‘comms’ teams are employed by dioceses, Church House and Lambeth to pump out good news and bury bad. It explains why truthfulness is not a value you ever hear preached. This all makes sense because there is institutional grandiosity to defend, and an ‘it’ to be denied.

Gardner includes a helpful chapter on the public schools from which over half of the bishops are drawn. The repression of emotion and vulnerability in order to appear strong and manly, and ambivalence about homosexuality and women, are discussed. This helps to situate the current problems in a wider framework of English class, privilege, and establishment.

If that all sounds a bit grim, it is. The obvious conclusion is that the only way to rid the Church of England of abuse is to dismantle its hierarchical structure completely. Safeguarding is a hopeless sticking plaster.

Yet I found at least one hopeful thing in Gardner’s analysis, for she reminds us that abusers are made, not born. And if the making of an abuser is a process, that process can be halted. Gardner gives the example of a young man abused by his mother as a child who is aware of his own attraction to children, and terrified by it. Instead of surrendering to this part of himself by, for example, downloading images of children, masturbating, becoming addicted, and perhaps going on to offend, he seeks medical help. This allows him to manage his desires by understanding, externalising and controlling them. There can be ‘interventions’ just as with any other kind of addiction, and the earlier the better.  Books like this help by making people more alert and understanding.

But can the institution change its spots?  Gardner is too nice to say ‘no’, but she probably thinks it. She may be right, but I wonder if a more historical view of the Church of England would have let in a bit more light and possibility. It is easy to think that the way things are now is the way things have always been and always must be, but the diocesan structures that weighed down on Gardner in Bath and Wells are actually rather recent. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that diocesan bishops became powerful bureaucrats, as the Church was remodelled along the lines of the state with its own kind of regional devolution and expanding civil service. Parliamentary control and lay patronage were whittled away, and the disastrous simulacrum of democracy, the General Synod, was born.

For all the episcopal bluff, the Church of England is not really one thing, and never has been. ‘Unity’ is a narcissistic fiction. The Church of England is one big unhappy family whose several parties divorced one another some time ago. And although some parts and parties of the Church really may be abusive at the core (where abuse means abuse of power, which opens the door to sexual abuse), other parts can more easily be cleaned up.

Gardner is right that the problem of abuse is tied up with theology and governance structures, which means that any real solution must be, too. I have long thought that the constituent parts of the CofE should be allowed to separate from one another, develop on their own terms, and become parts of a federal structure. If the Church wants to be taken seriously by civil society, let alone enjoy the privileges of establishment, then the criterion for remaining part of this loose affiliation must be to respect the basic norms of equality, non-discrimination, transparency and independent oversight that govern other public bodies. That, combined with proper safeguarding and an open learning environment, might just save what is worth saving.

*Full disclosure: I have not met or corresponded with the author, but she cites my book with Andrew Brown That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England lost the English people and its definition of the institutional Church.