My recent blog post on the topic of disaffected Anglicans in Oxford writing to their bishops seems to have struck a chord.  I queried whether the 100+ clergy and laity who signed the letter on behalf of ‘Concerned Anglicans’ spoke for anyone beyond themselves.  This letter could be understood to be the work of a small group which was then circulated to others known to them through social media.  Numerous virtual communities like this exist on the internet.  Many people are happy to add their names to a protest, particularly if it does not involve them in any work themselves.  In short, I believe that this was a small group of politically minded church leaders who then appealed to other members of their internet tribes.  Certainly, there seems little evidence of the protest reaching the lay people in the parishes.  One anonymous lay person wrote to this blog, claiming that no attempt was made by the clergy of his church to consult or even inform the wider congregations of an intention to sign.

My curiosity about the conservative forces at work in the Diocese of Oxford has led me to look more deeply at the signatories to have a better understanding, how these networks work, particularly if they are bypassing, for the most part, parish congregations.  This examination has proved fascinating and as far as I am concerned, it severely weakens any claim that the Diocese of Oxford is facing a grass-root challenge to its leadership or authority.  I have tried to examine the evidence of the signatures, being as objective as I can.

The first concern I have is that there are a cluster of organisations in the Oxford area which are, arguably, not Anglican.  It is unclear to me whether an organisation which is founded, financed and presumably directed sometimes from abroad by a non-Anglican can ever be said to be working in the interests of the Church of England.  Such an organisation may have Anglican staff working for it, but an Anglican director does not, to my mind, necessarily create an Anglican institution.  I noted among the signatures of retired clergy the name of Chris Sugden, who used to head up the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies.  As an Anglican with a general License from the Bishop, he obtained a place on General Synod where he forcefully represented the concerns of REFORM and the interests of conservative evangelicals for many years.  I wonder how many of those who voted for him understood the source of finance which has kept his Centre going for over twenty to thirty years.  It was not money raised in this country.  According to Stephen Bates, the Centre depended largely on American money.  One of the funders is the well-known Howard Ahmanson who has placed millions into trusts to promote ultra-conservative causes, religious and political.  Money from the same source has been linked to the setting up of a subversive group which did much to undermine the Lambeth Conference of 1998. Ahmanson’s concerns are about as far away as one can imagine from main-stream Anglican ones.  He is committed to the ideas of ‘Reconstructionism’.  This, following the ideas of Rushdoony, seeks to rebuild society after the models of Old Testament law.  Reconstructionism would involve the death sentence for gays and adulterers. Ahmanson has always maintained direct contact with the Centre by placing one of his employees to sit on the management team of the Centre.     Meanwhile his foundation will be ensuring that its money furthers any and every group that supports similar rightist conservative Christian causes.

A second organisation appears on the list with considerable financial resources, represented by the signature of its director, Paul Bolton, of the Titus Trust.  This signature is in addition to the five or six other names identified as former campers at Iwerne Minster.  The Titus Trust is a group that currently organizes these camps for public school boys.  The Trust is anxious to locate itself outside the Church of England and preserve a separate legal identity.  Since the emergence of the Smyth scandal, many journalists and others have started to take an interest in this organisation and its history.  All the Trustees officers and campers, past and present are members of the Church of England, so it is hard to think of the organisation as anything other than Anglican.  The published accounts for the charity suggest that it is extremely wealthy, but it is not clear why such large sums are needed or where they come from.  Any organisation which handles large sums of money is naturally going to be regarded with a certain degree of concern.  The legacy of the Smyth scandal and the way that criminal behaviour was buried within the organisation for thirty years is still a continuing unhealed wound for the organisation.  Money, social influence and secrecy are a toxic mix.  Until the organisation comes clean over its past, it will continue to attract conspiracy theories as to whether any of this wealth is being used for ‘political’ purposes within the Church of England. 

The final group on the edge of the Church of England is the so-called Latimer Minster network.  From a reading of its web-site, this seems to be a cluster of church plants, based on one in Beaconsfield.  These operate under a Bishop’s Mission Order (BMO) but their structure is unusual by Anglican standards, if not unique. What makes the Minster different from other such plants is that it was founded by the initiative and enterprise of a single family rather than an existing congregation.  Initially, at any rate, the Orr-Ewing family seem to have drawn on considerable funds from somewhere to get the church under way.  Frog Orr-Ewing and his wife are also networked with various other conservative organisations in and around Oxford such as the Ravi Zacharias Trust and the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.  Money never seems to be a problem for any organisation where the preservation and propagation of strict conservative theology is practised.   As with the Titus Trust and the Oxford Centre for Mission studies, money (from foundations?) seems to flow into such groups without any obvious fund-raising efforts.  The Latimer church plants do not have permanent buildings but the headquarters at Beaconsfield conducts worship, ministry and instruction in a large tent.  The numbers of staff serving the various centres is impressive.  The potential problem of a single family having done so much to bring a new church into being is that they will likely insist in managing every part of its life and stamp not only their personality but also their theology.  One has to wonder how the oversight of bishops will continue to function well in what feels like an independent church set-up.   Even if it retains its recognition from the Oxford diocese as a BMO, it will have to conform to at least some of the disciplines and boundaries that already exist for serving clergy.  Latimer Minister does not seem like a place where, on the face of it, such limits would be easily managed.

I have mentioned three organisations represented on the list of signatures that are around the margins of Anglicanism.  One is a part of the formal Anglican structure while the other two are independent. As conservative groups with strong ties to conservative theology they all share the ability to attract wealth to themselves with apparent ease.  This combination of fundamentalist beliefs, wealth and power is the challenge that the more moderate parts of the Church of England have to face.  As long as conservatives seem able to attract wealth they will always, at one level, appear strong.  But, I would maintain, the moment groups or individuals buy into this fundamentalist gospel, they betray the Anglican genius for tolerance, inclusion and love.  I query whether we should allow Anglicans who serve an organisation outside the oversight of bishops the privilege of sharing the Anglican name.  But it is not up to me to express an opinion as to who is and who is not Anglican.  I merely observe that the church men and women who rage against the eirenic letter of October 2018 from the four Anglican bishops in Oxford seem to have somewhere lost that moderation and equanimity in favour of an intolerance and passion against what they do not like.  Rage, passion and scapegoating are not Anglican qualities. I have said many times that Anglicanism works best when it is able to be inclusive, tolerate difference and promote generosity towards those it disagrees with.  These are not the values of these groups or the signatories of the letter. Oxford bishops are being challenged by groups of Christians who would like to be identified as Anglican.  Just because rage and intolerance somehow attract wealth, that does not make them right.

The recent response to the Ad Clerum of the four bishops in Oxford by 110+ clergy and laity deserves our attention.  The text of the letter, rehearsing now stale points about the bible in conflict with LGTB lifestyles, is of less interest to me than the signatories.  Here we have a list of clergy, mostly male self-identified evangelicals, and laity who want us to believe that they somehow speak for a large number of church people in rejecting the bishops’ mild, even eirenic letter from last October.  This called for listening and respect for the views of others in this difficult area of moral discussion.  Others have picked up the challenge of looking at these arguments.  Here I am concerned to think about what might be going on when 110+ individuals sign such a document.

In the Diocese of Oxford, there are apparently 2.5 million in the population and 55,000 who count themselves as members of the national church.  The 110+ signatories thus represent 0.02 % of the church-goers in the area.  Someone might immediately object that vicars and other Christian leaders represent their members.  As most of those who signed are such leaders, do they not speak for many others?

Before I pick up this reasonable claim and respond to it, I want to think for a moment about how the process works in getting lots of people to sign such a letter.  Today, thanks to the internet, the task is not difficult.  An email is sent round an existing network of contacts to gather signatures.  Such a network can be thought of as a kind of power circuit.  It allows an individual to tap into and connect with friends or allies instantly and put into effect the joint act of signing a letter.  Each individual within the circuit has helped to make something powerful happen. One of the main networks in operation in this case is clearly stated.  Many, if not most, of the signatories are members of the Oxford Diocesan Evangelical Fellowship.  As a group they would have a common view on the Ad Clerum letter and no doubt it was discussed at a meeting.  But there are also in evidence other circuits of power or networks that the list reveals when examined closely.  A check through Crockfords Directory shows us how many signatories knew each other at theological college, particularly Wycliffe Hall and Ridley Hall.  Then there is a further circuit which networks at least five, possibly more, of the names -the Iwerne Minster connection.  To belong to this network, one is a former attender of the prestigious conservative Christian camps in Dorset.  Here boys from the best public schools were nurtured in a strongly conservative version of the Christian faith.  The vision of the Iwerne founder (popularly known as Bash) was for his ex-campers to take power and influence in society as Christian leaders.  The signing of this letter by at least five of these Iwerne graduates can be seen to be one small contribution to further this vision.  For Bash followers, the Calvinist version of conservative Christianity needs to be promoted within the church at every opportunity.  That expression of Christianity is, for many of us, unattractive and even repugnant.

My examination of the names that appear on the list of signatures tells me that we are mainly dealing with a power that comes from horizontal networking rather than power rooted in the ground.  To continue the metaphor, it is not a ground up form of energy. We do not see, for example, any attempt by PCCs to have ‘no-confidence’ votes in the bishops. The signatures are thus to be regarded the view of single individuals and not expressing the thinking of corporate entities.   It is true that some churches, such as St Aldate’s and St Ebbe’s in Oxford, seem to have persuaded the vast majority of their full-time staff to sign.  But it is still hard to know how such highly eclectic churches could ever produce a statement which was a genuine reflection of the congregation’s mind on the topic.  Students are in such a state of constant flux, that a poll of this kind would be meaningless.  When we look at a normal parish like the Chesham Team where three members of staff signed, there were two who did not.  What does that suggest to us about the ‘mind’ of the congregation?  Other signatories, a significant number, give their local parish next to their name, when their attachment is fairly tenuous.  We may note also that one bastion of conservative orthodoxy like Wycliffe Hall is divided.  The Principal himself did not sign while three members of staff did.  It is also striking to see that two student members of the college were attached to the lay signatories.   What did the other students think about the letter?  Were they consulted?

My degree of cynicism over the question as to whether a Vicar ever represents his congregation in an exercise of this kind also comes from slight personal knowledge of two parishes in the Oxford diocese, the leaders of which both appear among the signatures.  Each has now, during the past twenty years, come to be overseen by conservative clergy.  I knew the parish of Burford and the nuns who lived there before it became a bastion of conservative Anglicanism at the end of the 90s.  A Vicar was appointed in 1998 who had served as a curate at St Helen’s Bishopsgate.  The middle of the road traditions at Burford were fairly quickly turned upside down.   I was also at one time familiar with the church at Wargrave.  I know nothing of the present Vicar, but this parish used to be a centre of traditional Anglicanism under its former Vicar, John Ratings.  The current Vicar has been identified to me as a former Iwerne camper and I imagine things are now radically different in that parish.

My final observation about the Oxford scene is to note that there are a number of highly attractive parishes now occupied by conservative clergy who have signed this letter.  Places like Henley on Thames, Burford, Purley, Eynsham and Wargrave all seem to have Vicars or clergy who come from extremely conservative but also, in some cases, privileged backgrounds.  Were any of these parishes formerly in the gift of conservative patrons or are there other forces at work here?  Among the signatories there is more than a hint of upper-middle class entitlement.  There are mysterious references, unknown to Crockford, to an institution called Latimer Minster located in Beaconsfield.  In the absence of further information, one is forced to suggest that this is one more independent institution designed to subtly undermine the national church, using privilege and wealth to do so.

My scrutiny of the list of those who signed this letter suggests that it is far from being clergy exercising protest on behalf of the lay people they serve.  Rather it is clergy, using their existing networks of discontent, in an effort to unsettle the bishops and force them to bend to their will.  To the four bishops, I say, hang in there.  There is no evidence of lay unrest in the diocese.  What you have is a group of clergy, many of them of them products of public schools, who have bought into the ideas of REFORM and its Calvinist right wing ideas.   These need to be resisted to allow the inclusive and generous spirit of the Church of England to thrive for the future.

Most of us have had to experience occasions when another person has, in the course of an argument, manipulated our words through some verbal trickery.  Here I want to mention just two of these techniques.  The first is the false dichotomy.  This is a way of arguing that that says because statement A is provably wrong, it follows that statement B must be correct.  The person who argues in this way has probably been coached along certain tramlines of thinking.  It is an argument used by proponents of creationism against Darwinism.  Because there are apparent gaps in the fossil record, it follows, according to these apologists, that the Genesis account of creation needs to be considered seriously as a scientific account of the origins of the Universe.  Ideas of paradox or lateral thinking are probably not part of the mental processing of those who argue in this way.  The alternative to statement A might be statement C or perhaps there needs to be a complete reworking of the argument.

Another form of verbal trickery is a failure to see that many words or ideas exist along a continuum of meaning.  A single word or idea can mean a variety of things.  It will depend on where along a continuum of meaning the person using the word wishes to place it.  To take one word as an example, one that comes up from time to time on these posts, let us consider the term evangelical. I hesitate, usually, to use this word because it is one of these continuum words. The meanings at each end of the continuum will probably have very little in common with one another.  The word could be used to describe the beliefs of a group of racist survivalists in the States who believe that God’s law supports the supremacy of the white race and that we have no obligation to care about anyone except our ‘tribe’.  Those who are poor are believed to be under some kind of curse from God.   At the other end of the continuum of meaning we may find evangelical individuals who owe their distinct spirituality and outlook to a biblically informed upbringing.  That earlier nurture now may co-exist with other traditions of Christian prayer and theology which have been encountered along the path of their Christian journey.  It is said of the bishops of the Church of England that the majority today are evangelical. If we think of our continuum to be a line going from left to right, these bishops belong in a very different place from the racist survivalists.  They would be found well to the left of centre. They have virtually nothing in common with the extremities of the racially intolerant and those who wish to introduce the death sentence for homosexuals and adulterers.  The only thing they share is this word evangelical.

In emphasising my contention that we need to be careful how we use words, I would like to draw attention to a recent interview with Jerry Falwell Jr. which appeared in the Washington Post. In many ways Falwell can be said to represent the political/religious Right in America.  This group has decided, for good and ill, to throw their lot in with President Trump. The interview is interesting because it helps us to see what many self-identified American evangelicals are thinking. As a noted Christian leader and the president of a Christian university, Falwell is able to use words effectively.   Many of us are curious, to put it mildly, to see how Christian evangelical arguments are marshalled to support such an outrageous president.

I am not expecting anyone reading this post to agree with anything that Falwell says.  Although he claims to be an evangelical and a Christian, it does not follow that others cannot use these words of self-description while utterly rejecting Falwell’s sentiments.   Both words need to be reclaimed by others who occupy a markedly different place on the continuum.   Few evangelical Christians would want to join Falwell in the place he has marked out for himself and many others who think like him.

The first, extraordinary some would say, claim made by Falwell is that the commands of Jesus to love and respect others has nothing to do with political life. Jesus, according to Falwell, was only interested in a heavenly kingdom. The earthly kingdom is given over to Caesar. It is not clear what Falwell is actually referring to when he talks about the heavenly kingdom. Is it a private inner world where Christians live beyond any political or social responsibility? But whatever it does means it allows Falwell and other Christian Right leaders to exonerate Trump from his indifference to the suffering of the needy and the poor.

 Falwell then declares himself to be proud of the values of the American people as he sees them. He speaks about ‘free enterprise, freedom, ingenuity, entrepreneurialism and wealth’. While one can see that a political case can be made for such values, they become decidedly less wholesome when combined with an indifference towards the poor.  According to Falwell, ‘a poor person never gave anyone a job; a poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume’. Such words about the poor are at best patronising; at worst they demonstrate an utter contempt for fellow human beings.

It is hard to imagine anyone calling themselves a Christian evangelical in the UK wanting to be identified with the political and religious attitudes of Jerry Falwell Jr.  It will be interesting to see whether the students at his Liberty University will eventually see through this extraordinary uncompassionate attitude towards a huge swathe of the American population and demand a change. The approach that also says, ‘I support Trump, right or wrong’, is hopefully an attitude that will not remain unchallenged over the next few months. Although Trump claims that the Christian faith is an inspiration for his presidency, his despising attitude towards many of his fellow citizens is a reality and something that must be fraying the nerves of many of his current supporters.

Jerry Falwell is proud to call himself an evangelical. But, so that the word does not become debased by this association, we must assert that Falwell’s self-description belongs at one end of the continuum of meaning for the word. We must not allow him or anyone else to thoroughly degrade and debase a perfectly respectable concept.  With Falwell and other members of the Trumpian Right, the word evangelical is clearly being dishonoured.   Even though I do not in any sense regard myself as an evangelical, I still want to respect those who also claim this label as part of their self-identification. They possess, in using this word, an honourable spirituality as well as being followers of a distinguished form of Christian theology.  Nothing that can be said by the far Right in the States can take away their right to be honoured by other Christians.

In a piece that I recently wrote about denominations, I suggested that there were powerful forces, especially in the States, that are seeking to destroy all large church groupings in favour of small independent ‘bible’ churches.  The Episcopal (Anglican) Church in America has suffered its own confrontations with factions and small groups seeking to persuade congregations that its central body has strayed from the Bible in favour of heretical beliefs.  Over a period of years, such a church congregation may be totally undermined so that eventually it declares itself to be independent of the denominational structure provided by a national body or a local diocese.  Such an independent Episcopal congregation, if it wishes to retain its Anglican identity, will often seek the oversight of a foreign province such as Nigeria or Rwanda.  In practice it has become an independent congregation.  Nevertheless, it wants to pay lip-service to the idea of being under the discipline of African bishops and some of the historic traditions of Anglicanism.

Recently I have acquired a book with the title Steeplejacking.  The word is one used in the States to describe the process by which small groups of conservative Christians engineer the take-over of local congregations.  Having succeeded in gaining power, they then force the congregation to cut ties with the sponsoring denomination.  It would appear from the book that this process is not uncommon.  The book, by Sheldon Calver and John Dorhauer, presents the issue from the perspective of one denomination, the United Churches of Christ (UCC).  Both the authors have watched various congregations within this denomination being ‘steeplejacked’.  Each was then persuaded to become independent under the control of a group of powerful lay people or a minister with a strongly conservative agenda. 

The book describes in some detail the processes which allow two or three motivated newcomers with an agenda to take over the reins of an unprepared congregation.  Sometimes the minister at such a church is weak or ineffective.  Alternatively, he lacks the theological understanding to see what is going on.  Sometimes it is the minster himself actively managing the break-away process.  In most denominations on both sides of the Atlantic there are legal and financial ties which bind the local body with the national one. Break-away churches may have to factor in the loss of pension rights for a departing minister and expensive court cases to determine ownership of property.  The potential reward in gaining possession of valuable church plant through independence evidently makes these battles worth fighting.

What is the motivation for seeking to destroy denominational structures of the churches of America?   The simple and probably wildly over-simplified answer is that independent congregations are more easily integrated into the values of the political/religious Right.  The right wing political/religious juggernaut that is in the ascendant today in America is first of all deeply immersed in the idea of spiritual warfare against ‘secularism’.  This is another word to describe the dominant liberal culture of America, which is politically represented by the Democrats.  At the same time, it is appealing to a fantasy golden age of male white dominance.  This is alluded to in Trump’s slogan, ‘Make America great again’.  The use of the word ‘again’ indicates that those who identify with this slogan are active believers in the idea that there was once a golden age of secure Christian morality and stability in America.  Golden age beliefs are generally products of nostalgia rather than accurate historical memory.  Many people do, in fact, buy into the idea of rebuilding a 1950s Christian society.  The reality of living in that period actually favoured only one group – white men.  Women and people of colour were treated poorly, if not abusively.  Women were kept in their place in the home, subservient to the wishes and dominance of men.  Many of the old-fashioned moral values being promoted today by the religious Right are those that in fact victimise women.  The right of women to have an opinion about such things as birth control or abortion barely existed.  Gay relationships were then hidden.  Even now they are considered abhorrent because they subvert the nostalgic picture of a Christian home with its clearly defined hierarchy.  One person, the man, was in charge of all that happens in the family.  Much of the energy which drives churches out of denominational structures is the energy that simply hates the new realities of modern democratic liberal ideals.  These promote inclusiveness, justice and tolerance.  How much easier to promote a fantasy return to the past?  Such a regression fantasy lies behind most fundamentalist movements all over the world.

The book Steeplejacking lists the techniques used to gain dominance in congregations so that under the guidance of the conservative cabal, the congregation can vote themselves into independence and thus ownership of the church, theologically and legally.  Typically, the overseeing denomination is caricatured as taking a position contrary to biblical ‘values’.  In the case of the UCC, a favourable vote on ‘gay marriage’ in 2006 was a signal to conservatives that the denominational leadership was taking a position where the bible was being betrayed.  This was represented as being on a slippery slope to heresy and abandonment of the faith itself.  Such distortions were fairly easy to sell when adherence to such ‘facts’ is presented as a salvation issue.  Lay people often find it difficult to see through the distortions and propaganda of the steeplejackers.   Also, a minister who is unsure of his theology, or is too demoralised to face up to the virulence of his attackers, sometimes simply abandons the field to the plotters.  They are then able to get themselves voted on to committees and generally subvert the congregation on its way to independence.

The parallels between the situation in the American UCC and the Church of England are not particularly close.  Few clergy in the Church of England are interested in leaving their denomination, not least because they would stand to lose pension rights.  It also is impossible to move a parish outside the legally binding structures of the Church of England.  But even if most Anglican clergy stay loyal to their bishops and church in a formal way, some of them oversee disloyal activity and promote a variety of intolerant stances within their congregations.  As a parish priest I have often had to stand up to small ‘factions’ when it was suggested that some activity or teaching was not ‘biblical.  I have had to point out that the Church of England takes more than one view on a variety of topics.  This is not a teaching that is found in conservative congregations.  Far too many Christians are being taught that truth is a single entity.  You either have it or you don’t.  It is thus hard for these Christians who are taught in this way to feel comfortable in a place where difference of opinion is not only tolerated but even encouraged.  Many of them want to hear only from a minister who preaches a single perspective, based on this ‘biblical’ perspective.  Preaching from the bible should of course produce a single consistent message.  But we know that it does not in fact happen.  There are as many bible ‘truths’ as there are preachers to disagree about what they are. The reason for the current popularity of the independent congregation is that there only one voice is heard, that of the minster.   Hearing a single opinion creates a kind of semblance of unity.  But this can only exist when all other opinions and perspectives have been removed from the arena.  In a political context we call this a one-party state or fascism.

Steeplejacking may not exist in a formal sense in Britain but the dynamics that enable it are alive and well.  Telling a congregation that another congregation or even an entire denomination has been taken over by Satan, because it does not agree with your current moral stance, is a form of steeplejacking.  Allowing any church to become a cocoon of like-minded believers who are actively discouraged from asking questions or being allowed to disagree with ministers, is an expression of the Christian culture that steeplejackers want to promote.  Perhaps those of us who find the concept of an inerrant bible problematic should be more vocal in our challenge to this kind of thinking.  The impulse to take over churches in the name of ‘truth’ will never be a recipe for unity and harmony.  What it does create is division in an unseemly and fractious struggle for power.  That does not look or seem to be very Christian or able to promote the teaching and spirit of Jesus.

At the beginning of 2018 I could not have anticipated how much new interest there was going to be in issues around church power/sexual abuse.  Also, I did not see all the many events that would need to be covered by this blog.  The General Synod of the Church of England has visited the topic of safeguarding at both of its 2018 gatherings.  I personally attended a session of the February Synod and watched the proceedings from the gallery.  Gilo was invited to give a presentation to a fringe meeting at this February meeting.  In the July session the topic was raised again, and Jo Kind gave her much appreciated speech to full Synod on her experiences of abuse.

There was of course a reason for Synod to spend so much time on the safeguarding issue at its gatherings.  The Church of England was aware that its record of failures in this area was about to come under intense scrutiny through the IICSA process.  Three weeks of IICSA hearings in London took place in March with a further week on the Peter Ball case in July.  These hearings were all devastating for the church.  It showed that until very recently the Church at every level was unprepared to respond effectively to criminal abusive activities by certain clergy in Chichester and elsewhere. These had taken place over decades.  The question that was on everyone’s mind after hearing all this evidence was whether the Church could ever be relied upon to deal properly with these matters without help from outside.  Many of the witnesses, including the solicitors acting for survivors, asked for a system of mandatory reporting to be brought in.

The details revealed about Church safeguarding procedures and the reports of conversations and meetings that took place in the past were fascinating.  To hear that a former Bishop of Chichester actively sought to subvert a police investigation into the activities of Bishop Peter Ball bordered on the surreal.  The detective in charge of the case was thankfully able to gather all the information he needed, in spite of the church’s officers working against him.  Revelations from Lambeth Palace and the part it played in the Ball saga showed us something of the mindset of the 90s.  There was, apparently, an extraordinary reluctance to consult experts in this area of abuse.  George Carey himself was outwitted by pressure coming from the Ball brothers and persuaded to make light of the 1992 Police Caution.  Prince Charles and other members of the Establishment were also drawn into the deceits spun by Ball.  One lesson I took from the Ball saga was to observe the extraordinary charisma he possessed.  This he exercised both against his young victims and, in a different way, with the powerful individuals in society who pleaded with the Church on his behalf.  One day the 2000 letters written to support Ball will be studied.  They will reveal the power of this charisma and the charm which fooled so many and allowed them to see innocence instead of rampant guilt.

Before the IICSA hearings, there was, in January, another event that took place in the church, this time involving spiritual abuse.  A Vicar in Abingdon, Timothy Davis, was found guilty by a Tribunal of spiritual abuse and inhibited from ministry for, I believe, ten years.  This case from my perspective was extremely important.  It marks the beginning of a recognition by the Church that power abuse is not always just about sex or money.   The case against Mr Davis provides an important precedent for similar cases that may arise in the future.  Spiritual abuse is a reality.  Clergy can and do sometimes use their spiritual power in a way that damages and harms individuals.    Where power exists, there is always the possibility of it being used wrongly in some situations.

This blog has sought to provide a commentary on all these events. My posts reached a crescendo in July when I was posting a daily commentary on the Ball hearings. Over the year the blog has acquired new readers.  Most of these are anonymous but a few have taken the trouble to comment on the posts or write to me privately.  This has helped me to feel that my writing is not being launched into a great emptiness.  It may in fact be helping some people to make sense of the whole scene of safeguarding and power issues within the Church.

What about 2019?  Several things are due to happen while other things are hoped for events on my wish list.  The first event of the year is the publication of the delayed book of essays on Church abuse.  It has been written by a collection of people who have found each other on the Internet.  I am not clear on what line these contributors have individually taken, but the title, Letters to a Broken Church, is, to say the least, provocative.  My own piece considers the way that some ministers exploit the Bible as a way of promoting their power.  I will leave the other topics to be discovered when the book finally appears.

The second episode is the final hearing by IICSA on the Church of England in July.  Intriguingly the dates for the hearing coincide exactly with those of General Synod.  It will be hard for Synod to ignore the Inquiry which will be critiquing the National Church while Synod is gathered.  The Church will also need to move into high gear to respond to the IICSA written findings that arise out of 2018 sessions along with the Press interest that is likely to accompany them.  We don’t know exactly when these are due to appear.   As I have said, these IICSA findings are likely to be highly critical of our national church. 

2019 looks to be an embarrassing and uncomfortable one for the Church in this area of safeguarding and past abuses.  It is no longer possible for a bishop or archbishop to control the narrative of what is said or shared.  Too much is known and being shared through the new means of instant communication, the Internet.  Church leaders have to work on the assumption that detailed information about past events will all eventually enter the public domain. So much has already been revealed through the public hearings of IICSA.  The media and the general public will continue to take an interest in any story where issues of power, accountability and hypocrisy are involved. 

Speaking personally as a former employee and now pensioner of the Church of England, I see this body as coming perilously close to a threat to its entire existence.  To use a medical analogy, the Church has been inflicted with serious wound.  This metaphor includes all the hypocrisy, cover-up and secrecy which has surrounded abuse scandals over recent decades.  Up till now the only treatment that has been offered is a sticking plaster when what is needed is major surgery.  The medical intervention now needed would involve a serious outlay of money and resources as well as a commitment to end all the secrecy of the past.  Openness is required, not just for the sake of church members but for the entire general public of this country.  The Catholic Church in the States has been grievously damaged both financially and in respect of its reputation.  Some dioceses there may never recover from the scandals in that church and the same thing could happen to parts of our national church.  The Church of England faces many other challenges to its survival over the coming decades.  Some are not easy to resolve – declining congregations and buildings that absorb a huge amount of energy to maintain. The issue of a Church making peace with an abusive past is something we actually can do something about.  Our church leaders need to put the right amount of energy into resolving this crisis before it is too late.   

My last but one blog post on safeguarding was critiqued on the Thinking Anglicans web-site.  This was on the grounds that my idea of a survivor in a safeguarding context did not include those falsely accused of sexual crimes.  I have no doubt that to be falsely accused of a crime of this kind, that of betraying trust, would be a terrible thing.  There is, however, one main reason why those falsely accused do not get discussed or supported in these blog discussions on safeguarding.  These individuals are, for the most part, completely invisible.  Whereas there are some among the survivor population who are ready to ‘come out’ and face scrutiny by the media, it is hard to imagine that anyone accused of a crime, even unjustly, would want to be questioned about the circumstances.  Whatever else may have happened to allow a false accusation take place, something unwise in a person’s actions may have occurred.  Youth leaders and clergy will now routinely behave in a manner that includes common-sense measures for self-protection.  These might involve leaving doors ajar when speaking alone with a vulnerable person.  The risks of a false accusation against a Christian leader in ministry are always a potential hazard to be faced.

I can think of only two individuals that I know, at a distance, who have been through the Clergy Disciplinary Process (CDM) for sexual abuse against a young person.  In each case they were eventually vindicated.   That should have been the end of the matter, but the toll exacted on them and their families was in each case dire.   Serious life-changing illnesses befell the families concerned.  In the first case it was the accused person who suffered an illness and in the second case it was the wife who fell ill.   No one is ever able to say that there is a definite link between overwhelming stress and illness, but the anecdotal evidence often seems to point this way.  The toll of months being suspended while waiting for a judgement must be appalling.  Yes, I agree with the comment on Thinking Anglicans.  The falsely accused are victims in the safeguarding and CDM processes but it is hard to show sympathy to them if we seldom know who they are.

The fate of those who are sexually abused and those falsely accused of such a crime can be compared.   I would however maintain that those in the second group do normally have a good chance of a full recovery.   The life-long damage borne by the sexually abused is, on the other hand, usually grievous.  I am not going to list the possible symptoms of one who has been through such an experience, as my knowledge of this specialised area of psychology is, to say the least of it, incomplete. I have a little experience of engaging with those on the way out of cults or harmful religious groups who are afflicted with serious Post Traumatic Stress.  To say that sexual abuse will often ruin a life is probably an understatement.  It will often seriously damage both education and emotional development.  Every child that is born has its own potential as they seek to discover their unique capacity for creativity and skills in some area.  An emotional stability born out of early healthy relationships will allow the young adult to become eventually attached to a partner.  The social/religious contract we call marriage spells out the expectation that a couple will remain together for their entire span of their lives. 

Sexual abuse or the distortions of cult experiences will frequently play havoc with a child and young person’s educational and emotional potential.  Normal concentration may be affected especially if, as a result of abuse, addictive patterns of behaviour sometimes emerge.  Alcoholism or drug abuse does not fit well when studying for exams.  Neither are good lasting relationships easily built up in such a setting.  And yet self-medication with drugs, sex or alcohol is all too easy to understand when these substances are being used as a way of trying to escape the trauma of sexual abuse.  The remembered pain must be blotted out in some way.

The survivor of a false accusation may have many issues to overcome but, if they are adult, there will normally be family and friends to help them endure the ordeal.  The passage from adolescence to adulthood will have been crossed and that will have brought with it a certainly emotional stability with which to face the challenge of the false accusation.  The suffering will still, nevertheless, be terrible as the accused risks losing something that is precious to all of us – reputation.  Here the dead are threatened equally with the living unless, as in the case of George Bell, there are individuals concerned to protect a reputation even beyond the grave.  A person’s reputation is not only of concern to them; the shame of a false accusation is something that potentially infects everyone around them as well as their descendants.

The issue of financial compensation for those who have been abused by servants of the church is an uncomfortable topic to raise.  The sums that have been mentioned in the public domain as being paid to survivors are not so large that they would naturally tempt false claims.  The process that has to be gone through before such claims are settled seems fairly intimidating.  In the face of such barriers, can we really see many false claims getting past the process?  Standing up for yourself against an institution as powerful as the church, when making a false claim is, on the face of it, an unlikely scenario.  Many of those who have genuine claims are said to drop out of the process.  Those falsely accused do not seem to have recourse of any kind.  They suffer in silence, facing their pain alone.    Do they not deserve some of the help and support that we seek to be provided for survivors in the past and present?

I would like to see the Church of England eventually come out from the protection of its lawyers and insurers and begin to set aside serious sums of money for both victims as well as the falsely accused.  Money can help to repair damaged lives.  From the IICSA hearings we learned that even small sums of money were simply not available for the purpose of providing basic counselling, let alone compensation for abuses suffered.  A few hundred from a Bishop’s discretionary fund is hardly an adequate response to what was revealed of wicked activities by individual perpetrators. 

2018 has been an eventful year in the area of church safeguarding.  If the same momentum is maintained in 2019, who knows what this will bring?  We can hope for certain outcomes.  One is that the flow of transparency and openness will continue but at the same time the Church’s response be a healthy one.  The technique of hiding from public scrutiny uncomfortable realities about abuse will no longer work.  The only realistic path for the Church is to work with the truth rather than trying to pretend it does not exist.  Out of such openness we may hope to provide better healing both for the victims and those falsely accused of such crimes.  A Church which promotes justice of this kind will also be a far healthier place.

This reflection was written five years ago when the blog was being followed by fewer than ten people.  I revisited it and felt it deserved another airing for those who will not have read it before.

At this time of year, we all receive many Christmas cards. The one thing that all Christmas cards have in common is a picture on the front. It may be a nativity scene or some representation of people having a good time. In the past we used to receive many Christmas cards harking back to a lost time in the early 19^th century which the card designer seemed to think represented quintessential Christmas cheer.  For some reason Christmas was thought to involve stage coaches, street scenes and snow. But whatever the picture, the important thing is that each card gives us something to look at, something that in different ways evokes the Christmas event.

I have mentioned in previous blogs my concern and interest for the church in Eastern Europe – the Orthodox Church.  In my early twenties I spent some 10 months in various Orthodox countries, mainly Greece, being exposed to a completely different way of being a Christian.  One important thing that I learnt in those months all those years ago was the language of pictures. By this I do not mean that the Orthodox are only concerned with icons to the exclusion of everything else, but that the whole atmosphere of worship and theology seems to be highly visual.  Seeing a picture or a ritual act rather than listening to words as we do in the West, is a vital component of their religious life. Attendance at worship for a typical member of an Orthodox church will involve the use of the eyes as much as, if not more than, the facility of hearing.  In many Orthodox countries the actual words of the liturgy are largely incomprehensible to the ordinary worshipper. The Russians use a version of old church Slavonic which is quite different from modern Russian. The Greeks also use for worship an archaic form of their language which was understood better in the days of the Byzantine Empire which came to an end in 1453. Obviously, some parts are understood but also much of what is heard remains obscure to the congregation. In the Greek service books, the priest is instructed to say the words of the prayer of consecration in such a way that no one can hear it. 

These comments about Orthodox worship lead me to my main point that Christians in the East do far more in the way of seeing that they do through listening to words and ideas.  We could say in summary that they live in a visual culture rather than one which attempts to put everything into words. These comments about Orthodoxy provide me with an introduction to the thought that Christmas is for most of us a visual event. Its appeal and popularity are in part because the pictures that represent it are attractive to our imaginations.   A preacher at Christmas might possibly talk about the meaning of the Incarnation, but he will also realise that Christmas exists far more as a visual event in people’s minds.   There are many varieties of traditional scene that we can conjure up in our minds to remind us of the events of the birth of Jesus. The traditional Christmas cards reinforce these images.  Some focus on the star shining in the East and showing the way to the stable for the wise men. Another picture which is frequently represented is the singing of the angels to the shepherds on the hills around Bethlehem. Yet another will dwell on the simplicity of the stable with the animals standing around. Some of us will have questions about whether these events actually happened in the way they are depicted on the cards, but equally something powerful is being communicated to us through them.

By emphasising what happens when we look at pictures of Christmas, we have moved away from thinking of Christmas as a doctrine or as a literal historical event, to seeing it as an evocative statement of how we understand God to participate in the world.  In this we are beginning to think and visually evoke the Christian message like Orthodox believers.  What I am indicating here is that a strong emphasis on ‘seeing’ at Christmas is similar to the Orthodox preference for meditation and contemplation of images.   To look at a picture of a star in the sky being followed by three men on camels, will not illuminate us in any finer point of theology. What it might do is to help us to see that following an inner light may help us to discover new meaning and new understanding of what God wants us to be and to do. To pick up a point from my last post, the pictures and images of Christmas, whichever ones we choose, may well touch our hearts and help to create in us once more a new longing for the infinite, the ultimate and the true. We sing carols, we listen to readings and pray, not because we can learn some new information or obtain some new knowledge, but so that something inside us can once again be touched and drawn out of us.  It may be that, in spite of the over-familiarity of the story, our hearts can be renewed to contemplate the reality of God afresh, one who identifies himself with our world.

Christmas is then, I would claim, a festival of pictures and inward seeing. This is a different kind of understanding and apprehension of reality from what we are used to.  Perhaps in our world so obsessed with words and rational concepts, it is a way of understanding that most of us need to engage with far better. So this Christmas maybe we can learn, not only to listen to the stories, but to see deeper into the pictures and images of the season.  By using our imaginations and our hearts, we may glimpse better the encounter of God with humanity that is at the heart of this festival. We will never fully understand the theology of the Incarnation, but perhaps we may be able to see something more of its meaning through the pictures that are given us this time. The light shines in the darkness. May we be able to come into this light and know something more of God’s radiance.   It is that radiance that we encounter in Jesus as he guides us through our lives.   As his light shines in the darkness, may we learn better to walk in that light.

Dear Meg Munn

I was very grateful to read your ‘first reflections’  https://chairnsp.org/ in your role as Chair of the National Safeguarding Panel.   Like you, I approach this whole area of safeguarding as an outsider, though my status as a retired Anglican clergyman means that my relationship with the Church of England is different from yours.  Outsiders are sometimes in a privileged position to see things that others miss. My only formal contact with the world of organised safeguarding is to have obtained an attendance certificate from attending a morning session for retired clergy like myself here in the Newcastle diocese.  But I have also had my perspective formed by reading some of the massive amounts of material available online, particularly over the past twelve months.  This access to this detailed information has allowed me to function as a commentator.  I fulfil this self-appointed role through the medium of my blog, survivingchurch.org. There has been no shortage of material on which to comment recently.

Allow me to say a little more by way of personal introduction.  I have had an interest in power/abuse topics for some twenty years since researching for a book during the late 90s on the topic.  My perspective on the current sexual abuse issue is to see it primarily as the extreme expression of dysfunctional church dynamics.   To put it another way, I believe that we should see sexual abuse of children and vulnerable people as being at one end of a continuum of power abuse in the Church.  My blog has had as its aim helping people to think about the variety of ways that power can be mishandled and abused in church settings.  Sexual abuse of children is criminal, but there are other ways in which the Church can become a place of harm and danger for its members.

In your reflections, you referred to the various safeguarding organisations and structures you have had dealings with recently.   Some have been created by the Church, such as the National Safeguarding Team in London,and others are on the outside, as with the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).  At a point later in your piece you refer to ‘survivor groups’.   I ask myself the question whether you have internalised a picture that there exist two entities in the safeguarding universe,the Church, struggling to make good the mistakes of the past, and its victims.  These two realities need to be reconciled through the safeguarding industry. I wonder whether in our thinking we are creating in our minds a classic ‘us-them’ scenario.

I would like to share with you a different perspective on this issue.  Space does not permit me to give a full account of all the things I have learned in my studies on abuse issues.  Neither can I share here all that I have learnt from church and cult survivors especially over the past five years of my blog.  In summary I would like to suggest that we are dealing with three realities which are present when we think about the overall practice of safeguarding.  The first entity is the organised church body which is active in creating structures to prevent the incidence of sexual abuse. It does this mainly by sensitising everyone in the Church to the dynamics of abuse and the importance of making the church a safe space. The second reality is the existence of survivors/victims. The Church’s record of care and support has been, in many cases, poor but the Church must not be allowed to forget them.   Further to these two, I want to point to a third reality which needs to be named and discussed.  The overall descriptive word for this entity is ‘culture’, a word which sums up the environmental factors which can give birth to the possibility and reality of spiritual abuse as well as the sexual abuse which is sometimes found within it.  I do not believe that sexual abuse or exploitation ever takes place in a vacuum.  There are, in the Church’s life, certain assumptions about theology, power and custom that may help to make possible this spiritual/sexual abuse.  If we want to successfully eliminate the sexual abuse of children and others, we must, when necessary, identify and face down those aspects of church culture that help,even indirectly, to incubate it in different ways.  To give just one example, the Church seems tacitly to encourage a culture of competition among its clergy.  Often clergy seem to care more for their status and power within the organisation than the people in their charge.  The Church also does little to discourage a manipulation of texts from the Bible which puts a minister in a place of real power over a congregation.  In such settings, real spiritual harm can take place.  When undue power and control in a congregation are not just tolerated but normalised, we are on the path to a place of danger.  That danger may include sexual abuse.

I would suggest that considerable resources need to be placed in making sure that the Church begins to understand far better the dynamics of dysfunctional power that commonly exist within it.  I have written a lot on this blog about the Church and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).  I would suggest that many of the power issues that ultimately result in sexual abuse can be linked to narcissistic disorders of various kinds.  But that is a huge subject which cannot be opened up here.

Meg, you mention in your piece that a number of your assumptions have been challenged.  Can I challenge at least one of those revealed in what you have written?  You speak about survivor groups.  This understanding of the way survivors normally operate is open to question.  There are of course some survivors who ‘go public’ but it is at great cost. Due to the trauma they have suffered, most survivors I know (not all Anglican) are not linked to any others.  I am in the privileged position of hearing from survivors who contact me privately with an account of their experiences.  They are mostly isolated in their pain.  There must be hundreds of others out there who have been loaded down with the shame of their experiences and who do not reach out to anyone.  Even though these individuals are invisible, they are there waiting for the Church to reach out to them.  They will never respond to the cruelty of being subjected to legal or psychiatric examination as part of some compensation deal.  The issue of survivors reporting that the treatment by the Church post-abuse is worse than the original episode, is something that urgently needs addressing.

If Meg, you find this Open Letter, I hope you find something in it helpful for your work.  My main advice to you is to allow all your assumptions to be challenged not once or twice, but many times.  Safeguarding and doing the right thing for survivors and the Church is a massive project.  You need help in this and that help is to be found in many places.

Stephen Parsons

 In the past week my attention has been drawn to a useful essay https://www.academia.edu/37932680/The_Lawful_Argument_for_the_Disestablishment_of_the_Church_of_England on the topic of disestablishment of the Church of England. The author, Richard Conway, a lawyer, is suggesting that the current safeguarding crisis in the Church of England is so serious that it brings into question the arrangements by which the Church is established and allowed to enjoy much legal independence.  In short, the Church needs to lose some of these legal privileges to allow outside bodies to oversee its safeguarding.  For me, the interest of the paper is not this issue of disestablishment.  It is the way that Conway sets out clearly the overall state of play over safeguarding in the Church, including a brief summary of Gilo’s story and the Elliot report that followed it.  A second point, of even greater value for me, is the fascinating section on the culture of the Church.  Although Conway is addressing problems in the Church of England, his comments could equally be said to apply to the Catholic Church, particularly after the IICSA hearing on Thursday 13 December.  The culture of protecting the institution,doubting and challenging the evidence of survivors and generally impeding the pursuit of justice, is an issue for both the major churches in this country.  But, returning to the Church of England and Conway’s paper, the claim is made strongly that the Church of England, based on its past record, is incapable of managing safeguarding on its own without outside help.

 I want to look at some of the observations that Conway makes with regard to the Church of England culture.  These overlap with themes that this blog has tried to explore in the past.  We have frequently mentioned the instinctive desire to protect the institution against perceived attacks from the outside. This may take the form of covering up incidences of abuse, not recognising them for what they are and failing to report them to the secular authorities.   Some church members will typically question the credibility of survivors and victims as well ‘degradate these individuals in favour of the alleged abusers’.

What Conway adds to the discussion beyond these observations,is an attempt to explain this defensive stance in psychological/sociological terms. The paper refers to an article published in 2017 in ‘Child Abuse Review’.  This supports the hypothesis that church people have typically a tendency to be sceptical in the face of the claims of survivors.  The paper then intriguingly goes on to speak of a ‘narcissistic identification’ with the church and speaks about‘selves, merged to the religious institution’. 

Speaking of ‘narcissistic identification’ may make the paper a little technical for the general reader. Here, however, what is being explained is of great importance on the theme of abuse in churches, so I thought it would be worth trying to unpack this language to see what is being said about why church people are not good at treating survivors well.  From bishops downwards, many church people still find it hard to welcome survivors and listen to them with the dignity and respect they deserve.   

The expression ‘narcissistic identification’ takes us back to a branch of psychoanalytical theory which came into being through the writings of one Heinz Kohut in the 70s in the States.  I have tried to wade through his dense prose,but the outlines of his theory are reasonably clear.   Every human being has to construct a sense of self in childhood.   This is accomplished through a gradual process of separation from parents.  The close psychological merger with the protecting figures of infancy gives way to independence and autonomy.  This is the process of establishing a secure self which has the ability to cope with the normal stresses of life and relationships.  Unfortunately, the path towards securing a solid sense of self is sometimes met with set-backs, maybe caused by parental neglect or trauma.  In the place of a secure self, the child and later adult has a weakened identity.   They are, according to the classic Kohutian model, ‘narcissistically wounded’,though the levels of its severity will vary enormously.  Their recourse is to seek ‘self-objects’, entities(people or things) with which they can merge to relieve the emptiness that exists inside them.  The need to ‘feed’ their emptiness by a variety of strategies, will sometimes involve controlling groups of other people. Narcissistic behaviour will normally be a trait of cult leaders who are manipulating their followers in ways that that meet their emotional neediness of the leader.  Narcissistic neediness may also be found among the followers of a religious/political leader.  He/she provides a powerful but flawed role model with which to identify, again fulfilling the role of a ‘self-object’.  The dynamics of many churches, particularly those of a charismatic style, can be interpreted by recourse to this narcissistic model. 

When Conway speaks about a ‘narcissistic identification’ on the part of church members, he appears to be saying that the church institution has become a ‘self-object’, a part of the ‘self ’of its members so that one can speak of a narcissistic merger with it.  To put it another way, the sense of self/identity has become bound up seamlessly with their membership of the church. There is probably nothing surprising or unusual in this, except when it becomes an impediment to clear vision and the just treatment of abuse survivors.

Richard Conway is familiar with Gilo’s story and he knows the extraordinary way that several bishops completely failed to ‘recollect’ the moment they were told about Gilo’s encounters with his abuser.  The same institutional narcissism seems to beat work as when people within congregations cannot bear to hear any ill of people who have become part of their identity in a narcissistic way.  To attack my hero, the one on whom I have identified some key parts of my identity, is to attack me.

The explanation of the way that narcissistic processes are at work in the failure of some congregations and church leaders to support victims and believe their stories is an important insight in our attempt to understand the Church’s failures in this area.  It will always be dangerous to internalise the idea that the individual is below the organisation.   Not only does the notion fail justice, as we have seen happen in both Catholic and Anglican churches, but it also destroys and undermines integrity and honesty, both corporate and individual.

Since I was a theological student I have never been attracted to the theology of John Calvin, the 16^th century Swiss Reformer.  What little I knew about him and the Puritanism that he inspired, seemed always to put a damper on Christian  joy and freedom.  In recent weeks, in my attempts to understand the American Right and the onward march of conservative Christian ideas under Trump, I have been forced to consider the man and his doctrines as a way of getting a handle on an approach to the Christian faith for which I have had little appetite. The book that I have recently read, Blueprint for Theocracy by James C Sanford, makes it clear that ignoring Calvin is no longer an option if anyone wants to comprehend the mind-set of conservative Christians and the so-called Christian Right.

The first foundational idea of Calvin and his followers is the idea that God is all-powerful and has control over every part of his creation including humankind.  Out of this grasp of the sovereignty of God comes a strong sense that he is all-knowing.  In particular, he knows the future of every individual.  Predestination, the doctrine that gives all, Calvinists and non-Calvinists alike, cause to shudder, is a logical working out of this idea of God’s supreme sovereignty.  This states that God has already decided on those that he has determined to save and those he will condemn.

Calvinism as a system was not adopted without resistance in Protestant Europe.   Among the conflicts that raged in the 16^th-17^th centuries was the debate with Arminius over the problem of what we call free-will.  This debate was well aired at the Synod of Dort in 1618-1619.  Calvinism was also later refined in the so-called Westminster Confession in 1646.  Both these councils, written at times of civil conflict, were to stress the harsher and more rigorous aspects of Calvin’s thought. 

The doctrine of the all-seeing sovereignty of God, as set out by Calvin, is one that is, arguably, deeply claustrophobic for those who try to live by it.  The notion that a judgmental God governs every event of our life and is in control of every detail, is likely to place a Christian in a permanent state of anxiety and tension.  Predestination is also a harsh doctrine and even Calvin admitted this.  His response was to quote the passage in Romans 9 where the clay is denied any right to interrogate the potter. 

Calvinism is, to summarise, a system which emphasises the will of God above the exercise of human reason.  Questioning God is not permitted because mere creatures cannot expect explanations from their creator.  Unaided human reason can never be allowed to query this supreme principle.

It does not take much imagination to see how the doctrine of God’s sovereign will being the dominating truth fits well with conservative understandings of the supremacy of Scripture.  All ideas about infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible and its central authoritative place in Christian teaching sit alongside Calvin’s emphasis on the idea of the supreme sovereignty of God.  Just as the faithful cannot argue with the purposes of the Creator, neither can there be discussion or disagreement with the ‘plain’ words of Scripture which reveal God’s will.  The power of human reason is in any case compromised by the fact that human beings are, for Calvin, corrupted by the depravity of original sin.  Here he was following the teaching of Augustine.  Scholastic theology taught by the mediaeval Catholic thinkers had softened this doctrine so that the schoolmen allowed human reason to have some autonomous power in the scheme of things.  Eastern Orthodox thinking also never allowed the human capacity for sin to wipe away the potential for the exercise of reason and the possibility of ‘divinisation’ or transformation by God in this life.

Calvin faced a problem in his teaching of the utter corruption of human nature.  How was anyone ever to know anything about God in the first place if human nature was so depraved?  He introduced into his thinking the notion of a universal ‘awareness of the divine’.  Some, those who count themselves Christian, respond to this impulse.   Others ignore it to their destruction.  This binary distinction between the followers of God and the ‘God-haters’ is based on a passage in the first chapter of Romans (18-25).   It further creates the mind-set that those who respond to God are in one camp while everyone else is somehow an enemy of faith.

The way that Calvin’s binary thinking has been embraced by huge numbers of Christians today has, I feel, done enormous harm to the Christian Church.  Calvinists and those who come after them, have got used to thinking that the only way to respond to those who do not share their belief is to convert them, thus bringing the ‘other’ into the circle of their belief system.  ‘Preaching the gospel’ will always be understood to be like snatching burning twigs from a fire which would otherwise destroy them.  There is no sense that God is already at work in the world or among people who think in different ways.  An obsession with sin and destruction meant that Calvin and his followers had (have) little appreciation for the world of the arts and secular learning generally.  The 16^th-17^th century wholesale destruction of paintings, books and statues in Britain was inspired by such Puritan/Calvinist ideas.  The mediaeval church buildings in England survived for the most part; in Scotland, by contrast, the old worship buildings were, for the most part, deliberately destroyed in the frenzy of a more thorough-going Calvinist Reformation.  In the whole of Scotland only one small section of stained glass from before 1500 survives to this day.

Calvin, to his credit, did seek to apply what he believed about God to the world of civil affairs.  He gave 20 years of his life trying to work out the principles of ‘theocracy’ in the city of Geneva.  For Calvin, God was concerned for the detail of civil government and the administration of justice.   By modern standards Calvin’s theocracy was, however, experienced by minorities as a tyranny.  Any independent thinking, including the development of the scientific method, always has a difficult time in such theocratic settings. Linking ‘truth’ only to propositions found in Scripture made it difficult for the scientific method to evolve.  The contemporary hostility to Darwin and the study of Climate Change among conservative Christians in the States can be traced back to the religious hostility to secular knowledge encouraged by Calvin. 

The values of contemporary Christian liberals, which include tolerance, freedom and the ability to live with difference, are principles that are sadly opposed by the elaborate systems of Christian thinking based on Calvin and his ideas.  Those of us who value the principles of this liberal way need to be better informed about his system of thinking.  We also need to be ready to resist it when it tries to shut down our desire to think about Christianity and share its insights from quite different perspectives.