I have been fairly reluctant to get involved in the Brexit debate.   I find that, having put energy and concentration into understanding the Brexit debates yesterday, I am today left with completely obsolete information.  The brain has been urged to attempt to understand complex arguments and perspectives to absolutely no purpose.

One comment that can be made consistently about the present Brexit state of impasse is that, among the political establishment, there appears to be an almost complete lack of leadership.  This is true of both the main parties.  The various factions are so bitterly divided that no one on either side of the political divide seems able to rise above the fray to suggest a realistic way forward.  It is this lack of leadership in the political sphere that is also causing so much damage to the fabric of society as a whole.  One senses that divisions have been created which may take a generation at least to heal.  Among many surprising statistics is the one that says that ordinary church goers are likely to be supporters of Brexit.  This does not follow the lead taken by most bishops and clergy.  Will this solid phalanx of Brexit loving older church people be another reason for today’s europhile youth to refuse to engage with the institution in the future?

There was a time when I tried to tackle some of the massive literature that is available on the topic of leadership.  Now that all my books are temporarily stored in boxes pending a house move, I cannot pull off the shelf one particular work that engaged my attention when I read it some time ago.  The book made the point that every definition of leadership is inadequate in some way. There are simply too many variables in the concept.  However, there is one idea around leadership that comes close to understanding what might be the ideal. 

The successful leader is someone who has risen up the ranks in some way and now embodies and represents a number of people.  The group represented could be as small as a family.  Alternatively, it could be a nation.  The important facet of leadership is to be a person who has listened to and is tuned into the group in such a way that they, as leader, embody the essence of the group.  He or she is then able to act and move the group forward in some way.  In one sense Donald Trump is a successful leader.  He has effectively identified himself with the bigotry, the hatreds and the prejudices of a large segment of the American population.  In his speeches and tweets he well articulates the frustrations of that large group and gives it a voice.  The fact that his leadership is taking his ‘base’ in a malign direction should not hide the fact that it is always important to have individuals who can embody and represent others.  Our nation and our churches desperately need good leaders to represent us and raise our vision to give us positive hope for the future. 

Those with power within our UK political system seem estranged from the aspirations of ordinary people at present.  No one seems to hear what people in general really want in the present muddle and confusion of parliamentary strife.  It is easy to speak about a failure of leadership.  The main reason for this goes back to the time when the Referendum was first called.   Instead of taking on the burden of being a national leader, David Cameron handed over this role to a poorly thought out process of calling a Referendum.  It did not matter that no one really knew what were the issues at stake or whether they had been properly explained.  The confusion of today’s debates goes back to that moment when a British Prime Minister opted out of the task of leadership.

My suggestion that Trump is an embodiment of effective leadership may have seemed a somewhat perverse claim.  Effective leadership does not always have positive outcomes.  When a leader like Churchill was able to inspire among the led qualities of sacrifice, generosity and patience, we speak of a great leader.  In contrast to Trump’s ‘onward and downward’ style of leadership, Churchill during the War drew out of the nation positive qualities.  He identified with the nation and the people largely identified with him.  There was, in the best sense, a narcissistic merger between the charismatic leader and those who trusted him in this role.  This temporary arrangement helped to bring the nation through to victory.  Any collapse in morale could easily have broken what effectively was the necessary psychological spell binding leader and led.  These were needed to obtain final victory.

When we look at the state of the Anglican Church, we see similar crises in leadership to those faced by our political system.  Although Justin Welby and the bishops of the Anglican Communion are not leaders in the party-political sense, the ordinary people in the dioceses want them to be leaders.  They long for someone to represent them, their hopes and their aspirations for the future.   The problem is that the church is bitterly divided on issues that have been inflated by American Right-Wing caucuses.  In some extraordinary way, large swathes of Christians have been persuaded by these malign forces that the defining mark of a Christian is someone who hates the LGBT population.  Because support for this position has been backed up by large sums of institutional money across the world, the leaders of our church have been reluctant to confront this perverse teaching.  Thus, the power of this ‘orthodoxy’ remains unchallenged, or at any rate not properly confronted, because our church leaders are frightened by the power of such ideas.  Anglicanism has traditionally stood for the mutual respect for differing  views in a creative tension.  Evangelical and Anglican Catholic have always been allowed space together in the same overarching tent.  The way our bishops seem to buckle before these intolerant forces from home and overseas can be described as a failure of leadership.  They have not listened to what the vast majority think and feel.  Thus, they cannot help them to move forward with vision and hope.  Leadership has been exchanged for appeasement.  The bishops have become concerned only to preserve the Church as a place of safety and protection. 

The other topical test of leadership in the church is whether church leaders are doing the right thing for survivors and victims of past abuses.  As with the LGBT issue, the primary concern of our leaders is apparently always to take steps to protect the institution and its officers.  Openness and truth as well as doing the absolute best for survivors are never seeming priorities.  Being in touch with a few of these survivors, I hear of the frustrations that are constantly felt every time things happen that indicate avoidance of the problem and those who suffer from their past experiences.  Effective leadership might involve simple gestures like the picking up a telephone or even sending an email to a survivor.  These gestures are largely absent.  When there is a failure by church leaders to offer small gestures towards the abused, the impression is given that they do not care and are only interested in protecting the institution they serve.  In this this way they can be described as mere servants of the Church rather its leaders.

Failures of leadership seem to be all around us in this March 2019.  Are we so wrong to expect to have leaders in Church and State who listen to us and help us to move forward together?  Are we wrong to expect our leaders to be able to articulate what is in the best interest of all and help us with clarity and vision to move forward to embrace it?  

When I began this blog in 2013, it was an attempt to assist people who were grappling with the task of escaping from fundamentalist/extremist groups.  The target audience were people who had bought into authoritarian styles of church governance, at the same time coming to believe an ideology which, from the outside at any rate, made little sense.  Those who have followed this blog for any length of time will know that I have little time for the arguments of Creationism or many of the strange, even weird, propositions that are required of those who believe that the Bible is ‘true’ in every detail.  I have said more than once that the ‘cure’ for fundamentalist belief systems is to read the Bible text in an environment well away from an authoritarian preacher.  Once the Bible is read for what it actually says, rather than what the preacher says it says, then new possibilities emerge.  Unfortunately, the Bible is far from being an easy read.  Many people who attempt to go it alone find themselves quickly returning to the security of having someone in authority doing the reading the text on their behalf.  The comfort blanket of authoritarian teaching and strong directive church leadership is hard for many to escape.   When faced with a choice between uncertainty, ambiguity and even doubt and the reassurances of ‘bible teaching’, many Christians will always opt for the latter.

Today’s blog wants to explore whether the reason for the attraction of bible churches extends beyond simply being a way of resolving the intellectual challenges posed by the uncertainties of life.  Is the offer of answers to life’s deep questions really sufficient to explain why many people are attracted to authoritarian Christian groups?  Intellectual uncertainty and the need to know ‘truth’ do of course inform the decision of many people to join the more authoritarian churches/groups.  This would apply as much to the school-girls from Bethnal Green joining ISIS as it accounts for the young students finding their way into a Christian Union at University.  As my readers know, I approach this question of authoritarian recruitment from the perspective of those who study cults, whether political or religious.  Some in the academic world see joining a cult as a neutral act; others regard the dynamics of cult membership as posing a potential serious threat to psychological health.  This is not the time to enter this particular debate but merely acknowledge that such disagreements exist.  My perspective is that many religious/political groups are sometimes a source of great harm.  The harm is partly intellectual and partly psychological in nature.  The issue that I want to explore today is the way that some religious activity leads to damage in our capacity to form healthy relationships.

Back in the 1950s the American public was intrigued by the issue of ‘brainwashing’.  Soldiers who had been captured by the Chinese Communists in the Korean War appeared to have fallen under the spell of a kind of mind-control.  Another way of explaining this process was to call it thought-reform.  The writer, Robert Jay Lifton, wrote a highly influential book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, to explore this phenomenon.  His work was deemed to offer also a good explanation of what happened to the victims of cults.  The problem for those who use the brain-washing model to explain what happens to cult-members is that it has proved impossible to define exactly what brain-washing is.  Thus, it has never been an acceptable term in a court of law.  In recent years the law has to some extent caught up with a new term, ‘coercion and control’.   Since 2015, men (and some women) in the UK have been prosecuted for holding their partners in a form of psychological bondage which has not involved physical violence.   Coercion and control remain a good description of what goes on in many authoritarian religious groups.  It may only be a matter of time before a case is brought against such a group for harming a member through such methods. 

The old model of ‘brain-washing’ had one further limitation.  It focused on the individual and his/her mental state.  In other words, religious groups were supposedly harming people by manipulating their imembers’ inner mental processes.  Such arguments have their value and no doubt the cult academic world will continue to debate the problem using this model.  But there is another model which is currently on offer, one which I much prefer.  This model takes the individual cult member and examines the relational context in which they find themselves.  In other words, every individual lives in a context which has been formed by their relationships, both past and present.  The author of a book which explores this relational approach, Daniel Shaw, is a New York psychoanalyst.  In his book, Traumatic Narcissism, he explores the dynamics of cults through examining the narcissism that pervades the inner lives of both leaders and led.  From the perspective of his psychoanalyst practice, he was able to see that the leaders of so-called cults were ‘invariably traumatizing narcissists’.  By this he was describing the way that leader and led were caught up in a destructive cycle of harm.  The leader, the traumatising narcissist, was engaged in a process of ‘feeding’ off the followers in a variety of ways.  He/she might be exploiting them sexually, emotionally or financially.  The followers had, by a process of identification, obtained access to a place of self-esteem which was embodied and articulated by the leader.  His narcissistic messianic pretensions, grandiosity and delusions of power were all shared with the followers as long as they stood close to him.  In the original act of surrender to the leader and his claims, the followers had shed themselves of much, if not all, of their self-determination and core-selves.  The narcissistic dynamic had regressed them to the situation of a needy dependent child.  Escaping from such a situation is no easy matter.  The follower has to reclaim back the personality that had been surrendered to the charismatic/narcissistic leader at the helm of the organisation we describe as a a cult. 

What I have written about recent thinking among cult experts comes close to being a critique of some Christian groups.  Do we recognise the pattern of surrender to a powerful charismatic leader who has all the answers to life’s problems?  When individual Christians cease to think for themselves and let a leader do their thinking for them, are they not entering the dangerous dynamic of narcissistic dependency, a dependency that is so hard to escape?  Shaw’s book is full of wisdom and helpful insight about the way that groups and individuals sometimes behave when bound together in a situation of mutual need.  It has encouraged me to believe that a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a key to unlocking some of the appalling problems in our churches as they struggle to uncover unhealthy dynamics which sometimes afflict leaders and congregations.

Martin Sewell writes:

In a week when one might have though the behaviour of MP’s over Brexit had placed the term “honourable member” beyond parody, evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse demonstrated that the low point may not yet have been reached. 

Whilst giving evidence at IICSA last Thursday Lord Steel admitted that he had recommended his party colleague Cyril Smith for a knighthood, having not only heard rumours of his involvement in child abuse, but having received a direct admission of guilt from his criminal colleague. This is outrageous on two levels.

First, through such complicity, Lord Steel placed other young people at continuing risk, facilitating Smith’s narrative to victims that he was too well connected to be held to account for his abusive behaviour. This is a familiar theme to regular readers of this blog who will know that for many, many years Bishops and senior clergy in positions of prominence and influence within both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches knew of credible evidence of abuse by known malefactors, yet permitted them to continue predating the vulnerable for reasons of corporate reputational management.

This resulted in abusers being quietly moved on, sometimes within this country, sometimes abroad yet as in the case of Lord Steel, it denied protection to those who thought they could trust those receiving the imprimatur of trusted Establishment institutions. There were approximately 144 victims, many residents of local authority care homes in Rochdale who were already vulnerable and known to be in need of protection. The sheer weight of numbers is shocking. 

Second, by recommending the honour, Lord Steel misled his Sovereign by representing Smith to be a fit and proper person to receive it when he knew this not to have been the case. He had learnt of the allegations in 1979 but rather chose to see his colleague honoured because it was not a matter for him. That was a severe misjudgement. Can an advisor who has served his monarch so badly really continue to remain a member of the Privy Council? 

The Queen had necessarily relied upon her advisor in such a matter; he was a senior Parliamentarian with a history of principled stands on matters that he considered rightly or wrongly to have important moral dimensions. He later served as Presiding Officer (Speaker) of the Scottish Assembly and was also known to be a significant member of the Church of Scotland which he later served as Lord High Commissioner of the Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Radical thinker he may be, but you do not get much more Establishment than Lord Steel, and his recommending status meant something both at the time and now.

Yet like politicians and indeed Bishops before him, he has demonstrated a dreadful blind spot where the terrible effects of child abuse were concerned. I note it is still being described as sexual and physical abuse whereas, as my previous blog highlighted, it is the institutional Emotional Abuse and re-abuse that is especially wounding. In passing one ought to note that in this, he is far from alone. The crass remarks of Boris Johnson  on the subject demonstrates that the under appreciation of the issue in public life is depressingly widespread. https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-47560192

To their credit, the Scottish Liberal Party have moved swiftly to suspend and investigate Lord Steel’s case. In this they put to shame the Church of England. At virtually the same time problems have again hit the Church of England with reports
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/13/longest-serving-church-england-bishop-faces-calls-resign-court/
from Chester Crown Court that the local Diocesan Bishop had received an admission from a priest abuser but accepted an assurance that he “would not do it again”. This has resulted in campaigning journalist Andrew Graystone writing to directly call for the Bishop’s resignation.  The basis for this call is that whilst a clear admission was made to the preceding Bishop, Victor Whitsey ( himself a recently accused abuser ) the fact of this matter having been discussed, came to the attention of the Diocese in 2009 and yet no proactive steps were taken to protect future potential victims, or to alert the police.

In both cases, plainly those exercising misjudgement are not bad people. I constantly remind readers that the context of the time must be factored in.  However, the time for this to be an excuse allowing us to continue, simply apologising, undertaking a “learned lesson review’ and moving on, has surely passed. That scenario has been played out too many times in too many places. Victims need to see more robust responses either from the individuals concerned or from the relevant institutions. 

Until such public figures pay a price, either through voluntarily resignation, through the withdrawal of honours conferred upon them, or through being shunned by the court of public opinion, we shall continue to have a culture of minimisation and cover-up. Hitherto the only ones who have paid a price for these matters coming into the public domain are the victims who have to revisit their history of pain, humiliation, anger and all the tragedies within their personal lives that go with this. 

If the Establishment, secular or faith, is to retain any credibility, it is time for its members to grasp the personal responsibility that such cases require. Great reputation and personal advantage goes with public status: with great privilege goes great responsibility. Respect for both victims betrayed and the institutions served requires no more feet shuffling but bold moral acceptance of consequence through principled resignation.

Anything less would demonstrate precisely the kind of cynicism which our Archbishop advised us to give up for Lent when he addressed the General Synod last month. It will continue to poison our public discourse unless or until those privileged with public approval voluntarily surrender it when public confidence is no longer merited, 

The theme of betrayal is one known to biblical writers in both Testaments.  The account of Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss is a key moment in the Passion narrative, but we do not often go on to reflect deeper on the meaning of this word.  The book I am currently reading explores the word in a secular context and the way that it finds a prominent place in many abuse scenarios. 

A lot has been written in recent years about trauma and the way it impacts individuals physiologically and psychologically.  Typically, someone faced with assault, abuse or sudden catastrophe will automatically activate primitive levels of the brain in an attempt to deal with the threat.  The response of the body/brain to any dangerous challenge is the fight/flight reaction.  Such a reaction may well assist survival but there are some situations where abuse is faced but neither of these reactions is viable.  One scenario that makes fight/flight impossible is the domestic abuse situation.  A woman or child cannot easily escape an abusing man as the home they live in is the only place on offer for physical survival.  ‘Battered wives’, as they used to be called, often have nowhere to go, so they adopt a third approach to the abuse which is to freeze inwardly and hope that the abuse or violence will stop.  Of these three responses, freezing is probably the least effective in terms of putting an end to violence

The book Blind to Betrayal by Jennifer Freyd and Pamela Birrell sets out the way that domestic violence does far more damage to a victim than an incident of random attack by a stranger.  To be beaten up, psychologically and physically by a lover, sometimes over many years, is far more damaging than physical pain.  It is a betrayal.  It betrays the trust, the loyalty and the love that had originally brought two people together.   It has a devastating effect on the confidence of the abused.  The likelihood of being destroyed psychologically is enormous.  One of the factors in a domestic violence situation is that both parties have in the relationship made themselves vulnerable to the other.  If one party decides to turn on the other violently, he or she will have gathered plenty of ammunition through which to damage and abuse the other partner.  Much of this abusing is done without anyone else knowing, so, in addition to the pain, there is often a dreadful loneliness.

It has become a commonplace of psychological thinking that man and women are born to build relationships and attachments.  From the time of babyhood every child reaches out to those who are responsible for her care because she knows that she needs them for mere survival.  If the carers/parents abuse or neglect the child, there is no alternative on offer.  The child cannot fight or flee but, like the abused partner, she has to cope as best she can with the scraps of attention available.  By not having basic emotional needs attended to, the child has to grow up without a proper sense of self or adequate levels of confidence and self-esteem.  The list of psychological issues that can befall the neglected child when they become adult is extensive.  Having had their self/subjectivity neglected, the damaged child often grows up depressed, disassociated and unable to cope with forming lasting relationships for herself.  The child from the earliest days had reached out to the parents/carers, seeking affirmation and protection as well as the chance to become a person.  The nurturing relationship between parent and child was tragically not present.

A further casualty of the legacy of neglectful/selfish parenting is the inability to trust.  We can speak of the right of every child born into the world to be able to trust their parents.  If the ability to trust the nurturing parent is responded to by abuse or other failure, the legacy for the child is massive.  How will the child ever learn to trust anyone outside herself if the parents have failed in this area?  Every act of abuse represents a catastrophic episode in the child’s life, and if the abuser is in a position of trust, the damage is especially costly.   People in positions of power in the family/church/school are all representing places that should always be safe.  When those places cease to be safe in the child’s eyes, the world becomes a far more dangerous place.  The act of betrayal by the adult has changed the child.  Instead of an attitude of openess and trust towards the world, there is one of suspicion and fear.  Growing up to learn about life in and through the experience of others becomes impossible.    The abused are often left to fight all their battles totally alone unless they can receive expert help.  The abuser has taken away ready access to the support of others through the ability to trust.

Enough has been said to indicate the point that the experience of betrayal on the part of someone who should be able to be trusted will always make abuse a far more serious event than the original act.  When an act of betrayal is perpetrated by a man of God, then the situation becomes still more complicated at a variety of levels.  The survivor is unlikely to look to the church as a source of help since the institution and the offender may be one and the same in their minds.  Can we really blame any survivor from mistrusting officials and representatives of the church which was the source of the original hurt? The sense of betrayal by what was once a place of safety may also have alienated them from their sense of trust in God.  The abuse, in short, has robbed them of their sense of self, their faith and their ability to trust what had been once a place of security and love.  It is hard to know how these important markers of identity and potential happiness can ever be returned.  How do we give back the possibility of faith and inner security to someone who has had it brutally and suddenly snatched away from them?  Can the church not have far more compassion towards those who show inevitable bitterness and loss in the face of so much betrayal and pain? 

Those who are responsible for the good name of a church denomination often fail to recognise how much is lost when individual members are betrayed by the failure of leaders in an act of abuse.  The loss to self-esteem and identity that is experienced by an individual is inevitably going to be shared as others come to hear of the abuse and the institutional failure that surrounds the event.  In Australia the sentencing of Cardinal Pell is not only about one act of sexual abuse committed decades ago.  It is about a potential collapse of trust by many people in an institution that has failed at so many levels.   People quickly realise that for every perpetrator of horrendous acts against children, there are always bystanders and colluders who have made the action and a cover-up possible.  Destroying trust through acts of betrayal is a serious matter.  It takes humility and contrition on the part of an institution or an individual to put right the broken trust.  If things are ever going to be right in our broken churches, we need to see much more evidence of this contrition on the part of leaders.  It needs to be freely extended both towards those who have been wronged and those who look on with dismay and sorrow.

Two events have interrupted the normal flow of articles from the editor. One is a major crash on my computer with Windows 10 disappearing along with a recent post. The second thing is a house move. I have taken the liberty of lifting a piece which I wrote three years ago which most of my readers will not have seen. I hope to be back to normal shortly, but I believe that this piece has stood the test of time.

Freedom is one of those words that everyone believes they understand. It also assumed that everyone is searching for freedom, particularly if they do not already possess it. Children, and particularly teenagers, are longing, we suppose, for the freedom of adulthood. People in a situation of slavery are also assumed to be striving for freedom above all else. The truth of the matter is in fact far more complicated. Many young adults far prefer to remain at home being fed and housed and generally looked after. Those released from slavery often find that the world of freedom is far more complex and anxiety-inducing than anything they knew before. Freedom brings about many choices and, if truth were told, people fear these choices. Some people will always prefer that life and all its complications be reduced to simply doing what other people tell them to do. The picture we have of every 18-year-old, desperately waiting to break free from family constraints, is only perhaps an idea of what we think should happen rather than the actual reality. Also the belief that every person in any kind of bondage wants to be released from their chains is also something which fits into the way that we would like them to be, rather than the way they in fact are.

From time to time I have reflected on the nature of addiction in our society. It takes many forms from cigarettes to alcohol, sex and drugs. Food is also a well-known comforter to help people cope with the choices and stresses of life. When one indulges in an addiction of choice, the addictive substance makes life seem far more under control. The highly stressed executive returning home from work may relax with alcohol. What he or she is doing is to escape from a world where they feel only partially in control. Alcohol gives them a predictable sense of well-being which helps them temporarily to blot out the choices, uncertainties and ambiguities of the working world. Most forms of addiction can also be understood to be a regression into the comfort and fantasy of being looked after and cared for by someone else. The addictive substance acts as a psychological crutch so that one can retreat from the unpredictable parts of life to something that is reliable and comforting – the child returning to the safety of a mother’s embrace.

One of the things that can be observed about the mass political movements of the 20th century is that, whether Communist or Fascist, they provided a way to relieve the stress of being a free individual, one with choices and decisions to make. The political movements, particularly as experienced in continental Europe between the wars, gave many people the experience of being in a large crowd. These crowds were all focused on a person or idea. While in the crowd the individual was relieved of having to think or feel for himself. It is no coincidence that Nazi Germany and Communist Russia appealed most especially to the young, young men in particular. This is the age group which goes through a period of anxiety as they move from the security of childhood to the time of decisions that being an adult normally involves. If there is someone or something to believe in which will resolve that anxiety, then it will be extremely popular. In short the mass ideologies of Germany and Russia in the 20 and 30s provided shortcuts to maturity for the mass of the population, albeit an utterly dysfunctional maturity. To be given a uniform by the Soviet or fascist state allowed the young man to feel adult without ever having to face up to the ambiguous and challenging freedom that such a stage would normally involve.

My reader may be wondering when I am going to reflect on the way that a fear of freedom is expressed in some aspects of Christianity. What I have to say here will not be popular with some, but I firmly believe that some presentations of Christianity have similarities to both the mass political movements of the 20th century and the current availability of many forms of addictive substance, legal or illegal. There is in fact a great deal in the New Testament about truth and freedom and the importance for the individual to take responsibility for his or her morality and choice of life. But the way the church presents itself sometimes leads us to conclude that the institution is colluding with people’s fear of freedom in the way that it peddles certainties and fixed answers that cannot be challenged. Many people see the church, not as providing a springboard for independent thinking and living, but as a place where people go to be submerged in a large group experience, not totally different from the mass political rallies of the 1930s. The music of these gatherings also helps to ‘soften’ people up to be part of a mass mind. Thinking and believing are here not the actions of individuals but this work is done on behalf of the whole by a small band of leaders. When people claim that they believe everything taught by a particular church or Christian leader, I see something profoundly regressive taking place. How is it ever possible in normal life to agree 100% with another person? And yet that is what is both claimed and believed to be possible in the context of a church. In a normal family one would expect that the 10-year-old child would begin to find areas of disagreement with his or her parents on various issues. By the age of 15 one would expect these divergences to be quite marked. Why is it that we expect everyone to agree with each other in the so-called church family? There is something quite unhealthy going on when this dynamic is at work.

Returning to our theme about the meaning of freedom, I am suggesting that this idea is far more difficult to live out and put into practice than would appear at first sight. Many people, including Christians, want to escape the demands of freedom and find a place and an ideology which makes them feel safe and included. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to belong, such ‘cosiness’ does need to be challenged from time to time. Any parent would want to tell their25-year-old offspring to find their own place rather than staying at home for ever. In the same way a church leader should want to encourage every member of his congregation to explore freedom rather than feel gratified that everyone wants to stay sitting at the foot of the pulpit in a dependent relationship. And yet the dynamic of many churches is one of creating and encouraging dependency, at the same time depriving people of the experience and challenge of finding a new freedom.

I cannot in this short piece explore fully what Christian freedom might actually look like. But I hope I have said enough to imply what the absence of this freedom appears to be. An absence of freedom in the Church can be seen in an over- dependency on particular experiences, words and individuals, This will be combined with a refusal to explore newness, paradox or the unexpected. To demand a freedom from freedom, as many Christians appear to do, is itself a kind of addiction. Somehow Christians have to own up how both in the past and in the present the church has colluded in this addiction. Living out a life of truth and freedom is hard work but this is the life in all its fullness to which Christ calls us.

Every so often, thanks to the Internet, I come across a discipline or subset of a discipline which is entirely new.  This was certainly true when I first encountered the DARVO phenomenon.  Today I want to introduce my readers to another new area of discourse, one which has a slightly longer history.  It is called Impression Management (IM).  This is a study of the way that individuals and organisations project themselves, particularly when confronted with a crisis or threat.  How should they respond, especially when the crisis challenges their very existence?  In exploring this issue, we have especially in mind the way that revelations of past wrong-doing are handled by church organisations.  Every organisation that is answerable to the general public may need to face these kinds of challenge from time to time.  Public image and reputation will always be a precious commodity for any firm, commercial organisation or religious body.  The tainting of OXFAM and other aid organisations with abuse scandals in recent years, has seen their public image and reputation damaged.  Such attacks on the integrity of these organisations will have a negative effect in terms of the donations and contributions they receive, and which form a large part of their income. 

This discussion on impression management owes much to the doctoral studies of an American Christian scholar, Wade Mullen.  He has sought to apply the principles of this sub-discipline to evangelical church bodies in the States.  He has allowed his total thesis to be published on the net.  I am not proposing to summarise all his findings.  Rather I wish to utilise this central tool of his analysis, IM, to question, as he does, on how a church should react when faced by abuse scandals.  These severely call into question a church’s integrity and are a stumbling block for the faith of many of its members.  Whether in the Catholic church or in the Southern Baptist network in the States, the way scandals are handled will determine whether churches can successfully pick themselves up after a crisis of this kind.  The damage that such scandals cause to church bodies is a very serious matter.  We still do not know what will be the results of the many evils committed within churches over recent decades.

The origins of the theory of impression management go back to a book published in 1959 by Erving Goffman entitled The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  In this book Goffman used the metaphor of an actor on the stage.  He/she influences the audience by using a variety of communication techniques to win them over.  What an actor does on stage is not a clear-cut lie, but neither is it the truth about his real off-stage character.  The audience is persuaded (manipulated) to see reality as the actor defines it.  Words are used, emotions are displayed to draw the audience into the actor’s world.  The methods of Organisational Impression Management (OIM) all link back to the basic notion that members of an audience can be persuaded by techniques and words such as those deployed by an actor on the stage.  Those involved in public relations for a company are a bit like teams of actors who work to sustain the corporate image desired by those in charge, even when a crisis is breaking.

Companies and organisations are often forced to negotiate crises and threats to their reputation because of mistakes, incompetence or sheer malevolence.  Amid the huge literature on the way organisations cope with crises, there is one article from 1999, quoted by Mullen, that I found particularly helpful.  With the off-putting title of ‘A Taxonomy of Organizational Impression Management Tactics’, Mohamed and others, the authors, describe the tactics that organisations use to defend their interests.  The article authors employ a series of eight words, memorably all beginning with the letter B to describe the process.  Four of these B words describe methods which relate to ‘assertive tactics’ while the remaining four relate to methods of defence. 

The assertive tactics used by an organisation to defend its reputation, are, as one might imagine, not necessarily very pleasant or even always completely honest.    The ‘B’ words that appear in this category are respectively boasting, blaring, burnishing and blasting.   Behind these words we catch a glimpse of the techniques of intimidation, bribery, false claims and a general flirtation with the edges of truth on behalf of the organisation.  The claims of success which may be made relate probably more to propagandist-type thinking than to reality.  Assertion through sheer bluster (a 5th B word!) is combined with the claim that the organisation is always successful, effective and competent.

The defensive tactics of Organisation Impression Management are summed up in four additional words: burying, blurring, boosting and belittling.  The two words which sum up all these ideas are justification and excuse.    Justification is a word that implies that full responsibility for the threat can be, in some way, partly or completely avoided.  Even when an organisation is forced to admit that their procedures have failed and that fault is admitted, the apology offered often comes with an expectation that all will be quickly forgotten and that the good name of the institution will be quickly restored.

The IM/OIM literature is extensive and even Wade Mullen’s summaries are beyond what we can share in this short post.  Enough space remains for us to consider the outlines of what might be a Christian approach to impression management.  Mullen’s thesis contains a consideration of several biblical episodes.  The characters recorded in them are seen to use typical IM techniques, such as avoidance, excuse or ingratiation as ways putting things right with others.  One example of extensive IM by an individual is in the story of Saul and his interaction with Samuel (1 Samuel 15).  Whatever we think of the command of God to kill the Amalekites in this chapter, Saul was full of excuses in explaining his failure to obey God’s direct command.  Mullen notes six IM strategies being employed by Saul to avoid admitting that he had disobeyed.  In contrast we have the surprising and instant confession of sin by David when confronted by Nathan over David’s adultery and murder of Uriah.  It is interesting to note that David’s passion to punish the man in Nathan’s story who had eaten the poor man’s lamb had been stirred. 

Prevarication, truth avoidance and excuses seem to mark the way many individuals in the Bible used impression management as they do today.  While it is natural to wish to present an organisation or an individual in the best possible light after a mishap or failure, there is always the temptation to retreat into fantasy or even dishonesty as a way of making a problem somehow go away.  Impression management is a good description of what is going on in the Church today as it seeks to do two things in English society.  It wants to convince others that it has Good News while at the same time it wants to be seen as an organisation that supremely values truth, transparency and love.   Somehow the dishonesty that currently afflicts the Church of England at the highest level, in its failures to be open about its past (Smyth, Whitsey and the revelations of IICSA), is a stumbling block.  It is hard for these Christian values to shine clearly.  IM with its undertones of propaganda afflicts the Church at present.  We all want to be part of a Church where we encounter not impression management but reality and honesty.  We serve a God who demands from us openness as we pray that in him ‘all hearts are open …. and from whom no secrets are hid’.    The truths of impression management don’t quite measure up to this standard.

I have recently been introduced to some helpful ideas which set out a pattern of behaviour which often describes the relationship between an abuser and the victim.  In September 2018 many of us watched the confrontation between the nominee for the Supreme Court in America, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and his accuser Christine Ford.  The confrontation was remarkable because, against all the odds, a woman was prepared to stand up to enormous power of a judge in front of a huge audience and tell a wholly credible story of sexual abuse.  Although the American Senate believed the judge and confirmed his onward path to the Supreme Court, I and countless others felt that Kavanaugh was lying.  His performance was poor, and the bluster and contrived anger demonstrated at the hearing bore all the hallmarks of male entitlement and dominance.  Whatever the final truth in this story (my reading of this story may yet be shown to be wrong), it was still a clear illustration of why so many women are afraid of coming forward to tell their stories of abuse.   Christine Ford deserved to be believed but, on this occasion, bravery and apparent integrity failed to win through.

The Christine Ford story is one that is found all over the world in countless settings and contexts, including the Church.  An abused individual finds the courage to stand up for themselves but then the abuser is able to deflect the accusation and effectively turn the tables around.  The victim is then portrayed as an offender for daring to suggest that the abuser has done anything wrong.  This scenario of turning the tables by a perpetrator against their accuser has acquired a name, or at any rate an acronym.  It is called DARVO.  This stands for Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim and Offender.  Those who study this phenomenon have claimed that this is not just a common reaction, but it is almost the inevitable reaction adopted by many who find themselves in a situation of being accused of sexual or other violence.

A recent article by Jennifer Freyd and others explores DARVO in more detail. https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/defineDARVO.html   It has a lot to say about the psychology of this response and it also explores the experience of victims.  The details of much of this analysis do not really concern us here.  But we do note the salient fact that DARVO will be encountered in many, if not most, cases of accusation against an abuse perpetrator.  Such a response will make the job of investigators much more complicated.  They are faced with the testimony of an abused individual alongside the self-justificatory rhetoric of the accused.

What might be going here?  As I reflected about DARVO in its relation to the present issues in the Church of England with abusers and victims/survivors, I found myself noticing a possible theological dimension.  The sexual abuse of the young or vulnerable is a terrible crime.  The victim has been treated as a thing, suitable only as a means for gratification by a dominant abuser.  The awfulness of the crime is such that one can imagine that any perpetrator, brought up in a Christian environment, would have to wall off reflecting on the abuse so that it was separated from the areas of the mind that process conscience and Christian morality.  In short, the perpetrator will perform almost every kind of intellectual gymnastics to avoid admitting the evil of the act.  DARVO is thus one part of the ways we might expect a person of conscience to deal with his/her crime.  The abuser is probably unlikely ever to say simply ‘I did wrong, please forgive me’.  The DARVO mechanism would cause the abuser to claim, for example that, among other things, the young person cooperated in the abuse.  They should also be in some way be grateful to the perpetrator for helping them in the task of learning about their sexual identity.  In the case of adult adulterous relationships, a variety of innocent-sounding excuses may be found to justify and avoid the evil of the action.  Everything will be admitted but not the fact that the Christian leader/youth worker was abusing power and using another person for the purposes of sexual gratification.  Understanding this DARVO mechanism is then a valuable tool in the analysis of the complicated dynamics between victim and abuser.

The dynamics of DARVO which effectively silence and blame millions of victims of abuse across the world do not just apply to individuals.  Readers of this blog will be quick to notice that DARVO is a mechanism applied by institutions.  Several of the experiences recorded in Andrew Graystone’s booklets relate to this process.  All too frequently the abused person is made to feel that they are the enemy in bringing forward accusations against church leaders.  Because they ask for justice from the wider institution and a proper hearing of their case, the church is sometimes felt to swing into action against them.  The use of lawyers and NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) is a perfect example of the Attack part of the acronym.  It certainly makes the survivor feel more like a victim than before.  Whenever the church behaves in a way that is putting the reputation of the institution first, this certainly can be said to fulfil the Deny part.  The victim, as the result of the abuse, ends up feeling on the far side of a wall of partition with the church on the other side.  When this happens, something has clearly gone wrong in what might have been a process of healing.  Once the victim feels that he/she is the ‘problem’, then there is certainly a case for saying that the Reverse Victim and Offender aspect has taken place.

DARVO is thus a useful concept for helping us to think about the dynamics of power in both an individual as well as an institutional setting.  I hope that my attempts, as here, to survey ideas that appear all the time in psychology and the other social sciences are found helpful.  They are offered in the hope that the various disciplines can in different ways be applied to the puzzling and damaging incidence of power abuse in our churches.  For too long even the thought that power is sometimes used by church leaders to harm individuals was not admitted.  Perhaps DARVO is one way of understanding how and why this happens so that we can talk about it with greater clarity in the future.

Ten years ago, I used to belong to an organisation called Bridge Builders.  This group, with links to the Mennonite Church, specialises in training church people to take part in mediation and sorting out the conflicts that inevitably affect churches from time to time.  Although I was on a list of possible mediators for a time, the few requests that came in were impracticable for reasons of geography or timing.  So, my potential skills as a mediator were never properly tested.  The training was not however a waste of time.  What I learned about mediation has proved useful in other contexts, not least in trying to understand the extraordinary problems that seem to bedevil the relationships between abuse survivors and the authorities of the church. 

I should start by saying that mediation skills are designed to help two groups/individuals or more who are in conflict or strong disagreement with one another.  The assumption is that each side diverges in the matter of a strongly held principle.  It may be a local matter or a theological principle like the ordination of women or the gay issue. There also may be a conflict of leadership styles between a minister and his assistant.  Mediation as a process is not appropriate as a way of bridging a chasm between an abuse perpetrator and their victim.  The break that will have occurred in the course of an abuse episode between a victim/survivor and the offending institution/perpetrator cannot be repaired through the skills of a mediator.  Mediation skills are about getting two more or less equal sides to listen to one another and to work out a way forward.  The attempt to make a victim listen to the self-justifying rhetoric of a perpetrator will probably be counter-productive and potentially the cause of further harm to the victim.   Victims need protection from having to deal with the delusional and narcissistic attitudes of their abusers.

As I thought about the way that mediation has little to offer in abuse situations, I began to think of conflict situations where such a process might be useful in congregations.  The analogy that I began to explore in my mind was one of a boys’ school.  Based on my memories of what used to take place in such institutions some 55 years ago, I began to see how words like mediation, reconciliation and forgiveness might work in this context.  The first scenario would be two school boys in a situation of conflict as the result of a long-standing rivalry.  They could be in competition over a girl friend or who should be the captain of a sport’s team.  For various reasons the rivalry might reach such a pitch that someone could suggest mediation.  Mediation could work if both sides accepted the process.  The causes of rivalry would be heard out in a calm environment and hopefully a new understanding of the issues would be reached by both sides. 

In contrast to a rivalry potentially resolved by mediation, we encounter in our imaginary boys’ school a situation of bullying, physical or mental.  Such situations are hard to resolve and certainly the methods used would not be those of mediation.  When one person has been bullied or damaged by another, the process of making things right will be costly and for that reason seldom attempted.  Issues like justice and compensation will all have to be worked out if there is to be a path towards full resolution and reconciliation.  A third party who wanted to help achieve this healing would have to be wise in all these areas of human interaction.  There is nothing easy or automatic about bringing people together who have been divided by an act of cruelty or gratuitous misuse of power.

A further level of complexity is reached when, at our school, a boy with prefect’s responsibility misuses his power.   For someone to bring full reconciliation into the situation, the school leaders would have to be involved as it was the power afforded to him by the school authorities that has been misused.  In practice the issue would probably not be properly faced but, if it were, one possible outcome would be that the prefect would be disciplined or demoted. Clearly power, when given to an individual, needs to be seen to be used consistently and fairly.   It is only in a corrupt institution that a misuse of institutional power is routinely covered up as a way of protecting the reputation of the whole school.  When this reputation becomes more important than the attempt to promote good relationships at every level, then something has been compromised and even destroyed.

It will be clear that, in describing a hypothetical school that is trying to do the correct thing in repairing relationships and making them as right as possible, I could be describing the Church.  Mediation for one kind of dispute is possible while the gifts of forgiveness and reconciliation can be deployed for others.  Being at peace with others is an aim to work for in every congregation and perhaps, under the leadership of exceptional clergy, something near it can be achieved.  But the disease of misusing institutional power is so common that it is sometimes very hard to find the place of safety and shalom for which all long.   Sometimes we even forget to expect it because a culture of bullying and power games has become endemic in many of our congregations.  Everyone learns to avoid closeness or trust, even while paying lip service to notions of love and mutual acceptance. 

To return to an earlier blog on institutional narcissism, the Church all too easily becomes mired in institutional dysfunction without really realising that there is anything wrong.  It is the casual mistreatment of the weak and abused to protect the interests of the strong that is the serious accusation of many survivors at present.  If they are wrong is making the claim that survivors are routinely neglected and ignored, then we need to see the evidence to refute it.  I have not seen it.

Today (Tuesday) Andrew Graystone has sent a short pamphlet to every member of the Church of England General Synod which is meeting this week in London.  https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Stones-not-Bread-Revisited.pdf  The booklet is entitled We asked for Bread but you gave us Stones. One year on.  It is a follow-up to the one produced a year ago at the London General Synod which I attended as a visitor.  This was my way of showing solidarity with a small group of survivors who were gathering to make a protest.  This protest was to coincide with the debate that was to take place on safeguarding in the context of the then upcoming hearings by IICSA on the Church of England. 

The situation at this February’s Synod is that there is no scheduled debate on the topic of safeguarding.  It may be that the word safeguarding is not even mentioned.  Several questions on the topic have been put, but given the fact that they appear as questions 95 and 96 on the Q & A document, it is probable that any supplementary follow-up points will be crowded out by other topics.   The Church of England is giving a great (disproportionate?) deal of energy to transgender issues at present

To return to Andrew’s booklet.  The second page is an introduction to survivors’ testimonies, and he makes a telling comment about the elephant in the chamber.  This Synod is due to debate evangelism, a term that implies that there is an audience out there waiting to hear what the Church has to say.  This potential audience, unlike the Church itself, sees only a rather large elephant when looking at the evangelising community.  This all too visible elephant is the fact that the church continues ‘to re-abuse and neglect its own victims’.  Andrew goes on ‘You cannot preach repentance until you have repented.  You cannot speak about the love of God whilst you treat survivors with cruelty.’

This second edition of Bread and Stones then educates the reader through a series of vivid testimonies in case the evil of what is going on some parts of the church has been forgotten.  The elephant, so visible to the general public, is carefully described.  No reader of the booklet can make the excuse that, somehow, they were unaware of the problem.   Last July Jo Kind, a survivor, spoke to full Synod at its meeting in York.  She received a welcoming response by members.  It seemed that Synod might finally be ‘getting it’ over the issue of the importance of dealing properly with survivors.  Sadly, Jo reports in the booklet that ‘the treatment meted out by the diocese since then has been terrible.  Just when there seemed hope of openness and reconciliation, I felt mistrusted and controlled.’ 

The insight that Good News will never be heard by our nation until the Church gets things right over abuse is an important one.  The failures that are recorded which lead to ‘re-abuse’ are not inadequate compensation payments, but mostly simple failures of compassion and human contact.  The defensiveness towards victims by members of the hierarchy is particularly striking.  Broken promises, delay and secrecy litter the accounts made by the ten survivors who have contributed to Andrew’s booklet.  Last month the Archbishop of Canterbury made a telling statement in an interview in the Spectator which seemed to show a real understanding of the issue.  He said ‘we have not found the proper way of dealing with complainants …. not telling them to shut up and go away, which is what we did for decades.  Which was evil.  It’s more than just a wrong thing: it’s a deeply evil act.’

This statement by the Archbishop sadly still reflects the present reality as far as the ten survivors represented in the booklet are concerned.  One male survivor asks the question.  ‘Has anyone seen a positive testimony of a survivor engaging with the Church of England?’  The question is unanswered but clearly, if any such positive testimony were to be had from among this cohort of survivors, it would have been recorded. 

What do the survivors look for? Speaking from the evidence of the two booklets, as well as my own engagement with survivors, there seem to be certain simple things that are demanded.  The first is transparency.   Too many letters and communications seem to disappear into filing cabinets, or possibly shredders, where they can be forgotten or ignored.  Making a serious complaint against a church leader should engage the minds of those who manage the church with a compelling urgency.  While some aspects of the process may have to be kept confidential, the main thrust of the enquiry and process should be shared as far as possible with the victim.  The police treatment of victims seems to be able to combine the pursuit of justice with an openness of information for the victims.  Certainly, openness and good communication are aspects of caring that should be able to exist in a church that speaks about love.

The second part of the treatment that survivors need is even simpler.  It is human care and concern.  The first thing that any human being has to offer to another who is going through a crisis is the hug or embrace.  Why is it so difficult for leaders to show ordinary human compassion when a story of abuse emerges?  Even when these stories are decades old, the survivor needs to feel that he/she will encounter human sympathy.  The old excuse that such human compassion might compromise legal processes has been shown to be an urban myth.   If it is not dead, the latest published advice from the Ecclesiastical Insurance company should have finally killed it off.  Love shown to a victim does not make a church liable for an increased pay-out.  It is striking that of the ten victims recorded in Andrew’s booklet, not one in fact mentioned compensation.  Even if financial need is there among their requirements, it is not by any means at the top of the list.

I hope that all members of General Synod this week will read Andrew’s booklet.  I hope also that the hierarchy of the church will listen better to these survivors.  Andrew reminds us that ignoring the elephant in the chamber could prove very costly indeed for the church and its long-term survival.  Recognising this evil, the abuse and re-abuse of victims, is an important first step.  In many ways it is, arguably,  the most urgent task for the church today.

Looking back over the decades of working as a parish priest, I remember with gratitude the enormous and necessary help given by lay volunteers. When the church has a group of dedicated people who are prepared to give time and expertise to the work of the church, the morale of the whole church (especially the clergy) is boosted considerably. Without these lay volunteers, things can become extremely difficult. I once heard of a clergyman who had to act as a churchwarden and treasurer in his parish because no one was prepared to fill these posts.

There are two aspects of lay volunteers working in churches that I want to explore. The first issue is a practical one. In the church of my childhood, there was always a group of church women who had never worked outside the home.  These were prepared to run the Sunday school and the various organisations that each church would sponsor. More recently the women of the parish would go out to work.  But working life for both sexes was often still the prelude to a long retirement, starting at the age of 60/65.  Retired people often had skills and energy and could potentially offer up to 15/20 years of active service to their local parish churches. In 2005, in my final parish, I was able to recruit as churchwarden a retired senior teacher who had run a department of 14 other teachers. She was just 60 and had plenty of energy for the post. These golden years for the recruitment of energetic and active volunteers for church work are arguably now over.  Professional women no longer retire at 60 and the value of pensions has begun to shrink. I wonder how long it will be before the church begins to feel the real cost of these social changes which reduce the availability of volunteers.

The lay volunteers on which the churches rely will always have more to give if they have age and energy on their side. If one waits until the age of 67 is reached, one cannot expect the same amount of energy and service to be on offer to a local parish church. So far, the generation that retired at the beginning of their 60s are still reasonably active. Thinking of my own church, from which I retired in 2010, I can see that there is a generation of church volunteers who will not be easily replaced. Up and down the country the now 70-75-year-olds who have carried the work of the church for up to 15 years will simply not have the stamina to continue in a few years time. Is anyone facing up to this potential volunteer crisis in the churches of all kinds in Britain?

The second issue about volunteer labour in our churches is the need to take stock over the way they are treated by the full-time clergy. Many older clergy have become so used to recruiting volunteers without difficulty over the years, that they are not prepared for the future volunteer crisis that may be looming. In a previous blog we suggest that there may also be a potential crisis of morale among the clergy themselves when they find that they cannot fulfil all the expectations laid on them.  A similar crunch point may hit their lay volunteers.  If a layperson agrees to become churchwarden but then finds that he/she is required to be acting treasurer as well, there is going to be unhappiness.  I am not aware that anyone has given attention to this potential crisis.  For the reasons I have outlined we have to imagine that there is going to be a tipping point in the future. In short, recruiting volunteers to support the practical work of the church may become the most difficult part of the work of a church leader.

The word volunteer speaks of the fact that an individual is never compelled to do the job that is asked of them. It is offered as an act of goodwill and without any sense of compulsion. The full-time person in the parish cannot easily walk away when things get tough, but the volunteer can.  This future scarcity should change the dynamic of the way that leaders relate to these volunteers.  Although this blog is about power abuse in churches, a shortage of volunteers is one thing that could in fact make things better in this area.  Saying thank you to the volunteers, listening to their issues and generally treating them well is something that could be forced on all clergy by necessity.  The alternative of employing professionals to do many of the administrative tasks may be an option for better-off churches but not the majority.

The church has not quite reached the crisis point over its volunteer work-force but that moment may not be far off.  The time may arrive when volunteers are so scarce that the practical and administrative tasks are simply not being done in many smaller churches.  One way of delaying that moment will be for church leaders to learn how to treat their volunteers with profound respect, honour and dignity.  For some clergy this will be a revolution in attitude.  They will also need good teaching about the dynamics of power in institutions and real understanding of enabling and working with teams.  The traditional patriarchal patterns of working, where a male priest gave the orders and everyone rushed to obey, will no longer suffice.  This reflection on the role of volunteers will, I hope, require my readers to think about their own local situation.  Are your church leaders aware of a future crisis?  If they are, are they helping the situation by an effort to overcome their narcissism and grandiosity and treating their volunteers with greater honour and respect?  If that is happening, then perhaps something good is emerging alongside a potential crisis and break-down within many church structures in our country.