In Welby's Wake

In June 2017, Archbishop Justin Welby asked his predecessor Dr George Carey to step down as an honorary assistant bishop. He cited the findings of an independent report investigating the handling of abuse, years earlier, by Peter Ball, sometime Bishop of Gloucester. This found that the Church of England had ‘colluded over a 20-year period with (the) disgraced former bishop who sex ually abused boys and men’. In relation to this, ‘Both Carey and Rowan Williams, also a former archbishop of Canterbury, had apologised to the victims of Ball after being criticised for their failures in relation to him’.¹Both quotations being from a Guardian report of 22nd June, 2017 by Harriet Sherwood. https://www.theguardian. com/world/2017/jun/22/church-of-england-colluded-with-bishop-peter-ballwho-abused-boys-says-justin-welby

Neither of the former Archbishops, it should be made very clear were in any way accused of any sexual misconduct themselves. Rather, Lord Carey in particular was singled out for criticism of how he had handled the processes and response of the Church. The judgment of Justin Welby upon all involved was strikingly fast, loud, and clear, stating, ‘This is inexcusable and shocking behaviour’. The Bishop of Oxford then announced that Welby had written to Lord Carey asking him to ‘carefully consider his position’ and that he had ‘voluntarily agreed to step back from public ministry’. It later emerged that Lord Carey’s Permission to Officiate (PTO) had then been withdrawn by the Bishop of Oxford and was only much later restored. 

In a separate instance, the former Archbishop of York, John Sentamu was ‘forced to step down from his Church of England role after a review into how he handled a child sex abuse allegation’ where a safeguarding report by ‘a senior social care consultant’ Jane Humphreys, had, ‘found Lord Sentamu should have sought advice when the victim made his disclosure’.²BBC online report of 14 May 2023, ‘Lord Sentamu: Former Archbishop of York told to step down from Church’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englandtyne-65588621.amp https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-65588621. amp In that article The Church of England’s lead bishop for safeguarding, Joanne Grenfell, told BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme those within the organisation needed to be answerable to each other. ‘We all have a bigger, moral duty when it comes to a safeguarding matter to really look at it, to refer it, to ask questions, to hold each other to account, to be curious about how things have concluded’, she said. ‘Because of that moral imperative, I think all of us today with good training would know that we need to act differently’ Thereafter ‘Church safeguarding officials met the former archbishop and concluded he would now “respond appropriately” to any disclosures made to him’. Despite this, the Bishop of Newcastle (former Bishop of Waikato in New Zealand), Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, suspended him from all public ministry, as she felt his initial response to the review was ‘inconsistent with the tone and culture I expect around safeguarding in Newcastle Diocese’ and because ‘she had asked Lord Sentamu to apologise and was “extremely disappointed” that he would not’.³BBC online report, ‘Ex-Archbishop of York John Sentamu banned from preaching in Newcastle’. 29 July 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-englandtyne-66350342 Lord Sentamu meanwhile made clear that he ‘rejected the findings, insisting there had been a “fundamental misunderstanding” on Ms. Humphreys’ part of the “jurisdictional, pastoral and legal responsibilities of diocesan bishops and archbishops in the Church of England”’.⁴BBC online report, 11 May 2023: ‘Former Archbishop of York rejects child sex abuse review’, https://www.bbc.com/ news/uk-england-leeds-65560859

All of this sad history was in the background when yet another independent review, the Makin Report, commissioned by the church in 2019, was finally published publicly on 7 November this year. It addressed the now notorious case of John Smyth, a barrister who ran Christian summer camps in the 1970s and 1980s. He committed physical, psychological, and sexual abuse against more than 100 boys and young men over a forty-year period. These camps were widely attended by figures later prominent in Evangelical circles in Britain, including Justin Welby himself and such others as John Stott, bishops David Sheppard, Timothy Dudley-Smith, and Maurice Wood, as well as the founder of Alpha Course, Nicky Gumbel of Holy Trinity Brompton. The first allegations made against Mr Smyth go all the way back to 1982 when an internal report by the Iwerne Trust, which was the body responsible for the camps, referenced ‘horrific’ beatings of boys and young men that left some of them bleeding.

The Makin report found that senior figures in the Church of England knew about the sexual abuse claims at the camps in 2013 and that Welby became aware of the accusations in the same year, just months after his elevation to Canterbury. It further held that if the claims had been reported to the police in 2013, there could have been a full investigation and that Smyth might have faced charges before he died.

In the course of the inquiry, Welby apologized for ‘failures and omissions’ but added that, he had ‘no idea or suspicion’ of the allegations before 2013. The report however concluded this was unlikely and went on to accuse him of failing in his ‘personal and moral responsibility’ to ensure a proper investigation.

On the day the report was published Welby wrote: 

I am deeply sorry that this abuse happened. I am so sorry that in places where these young men, and boys, should have felt safe and where they should have experienced God’s love for them, they were subjected to physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual abuse. I am sorry that concealment by many people who were fully aware of the abuse over many years meant that John Smyth was able to abuse overseas and died before he ever faced justice. The report rightly condemns that behaviour. I had no idea or suspicion of this abuse before 2013. Nevertheless the review is clear that I personally failed to ensure that after disclosure in 2013 the awful tragedy was energetically investigated. Since that time the way in which the Church of England engages with victims and survivors has changed beyond recognition. Checks and balances introduced seek to ensure that the same could not happen today.⁵https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/news/news-and-statements/ john-smyth-review-personal-statement-archbishop-canterbury

At that stage he evidently saw no occasion to resign. But a growing subsequent outcry ensued, with Bishop Hartley (who had previously suspended Lord Sentamu) saying openly that ‘Welby’s resignation would not “solve the safeguarding problem,” but would “be a very clear indication that a line has been drawn, and that we must move towards independence of safeguarding’”.⁶BBC online report, ‘Bishop calls on Welby to resign over Church abuse scandal’, 12 November 2024, https://www. bbc.com/news/articles/c5yx90q0v31o

Bishop Hartly then accused both Archbishop Welby and the current Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, of writing to her (regarding the case of Sentamu) a few days before the publication of the Makin Report, a letter she experienced as ‘coercive’ – ‘their letter indicates a complete lack of awareness of how power dynamics operate in the life of the Church’.⁷https://www.newcastle.anglican.org/ news/a-statement-from-the-rt-revd-dr-helen-ann-hartley-bishop-of-newcastle.php

The Makin Report left Welby facing three layers of difficulty which, in the end, caused him to resign on 12th November:

1. he had been found by the Makin Report to have erred in his handling of the John Smyth abuse case when it became more widely known in 2013, as it found him to have been insufficiently zealous in making sure that the claims were reported to the Police;
2. the Report threw serious doubt upon his claim to have known nothing about the abuse before 2013, a conclusion that questioned his honesty;
3. there was a striking inconsistency in his so stridently condemning others who had been adjudged to have failed to process abuse claims properly and his consequent expectation of them at once to step back from public life, whereas, when faced now with parallel allegations, he was refusing to do the same.

Accordingly, looked upon now with hindsight, the final outcome of his resignation looks inevitable, despite it being a sad end to his term as Archbishop.

All of this does, however, have wider implications that merit consideration.

1. Theological Implications

One consequence will be yet more pressure to grant ever larger powers to safeguarding officials and further stress upon the view that they must be entirely independent of the church itself (exactly as bishop Hartley conspicuously urged above). This of itself invites the point made in Juvenal’s famous question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’⁸Juvenal, Satire VI, lines 347–348.

Naturally, all this is being proposed with the highly laudable intention of ensuring that the church is indeed a safer environment for all and that it has effective measures for ensuring this. Nonetheless, there is a need to pay attention to what this way of addressing the problem implies about the church and its structures and their relation to the state. It seems to be implicit, and even taken as a given, that episcopal oversight is inadequate, most especially regarding morality. This is no small thing: it requires urgent theological reflection.

While Anglicans have always tended to modesty where the status and authority of bishops is concerned, that they each have a particular responsibility to teach concerning faith and morals, as well as serve as a focus for unity is not in doubt. While always nuanced, Richard Hooker in Book VII, of Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity writes firmly that,

A thousand five hundred years and upward the Church of Christ hath now continued under the sacred Regiment of Bishops. Neither for so long hath Christianity been ever planted in any Kingdom throughout the world but with this kind of government alone; which to have been ordained of God, I am for mine own part even as resolutely perswaded, as that any other kind of Government in the world whatsoever is of God. (Laws, VII.I.4; 3:147.11-21)

Hooker recognizes that custom (or tradition) plays an important role in justifying the continuation of the episcopacy, yet it is extremely important to understand too here, the way in which custom, for Hooker, is related to divine approbation.⁹Daniel F. Graves, ‘Iure Divino? Four Views on the Authority of the Episcopacy in Richard Hooker’, in Anglican and Episcopal History, Vol. 81, No. 1 (March 2012), pp. 47-60. While there is a further point of present relevance, in that Hooker plainly acknowledges¹⁰Laws IV.viii. that reason plays a role in determining what parts of the church have been corrupted, and such reason is no special preserve of the church and its episcopate. It follows – to treat of the present crisis– that obtaining outside counsel upon such matters as church safeguarding need not be problematic, especially when engaged by episcopal invitation.

But what is at risk is recognition of the salience of specifically religious moral insight.

In this regard, a presentation the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger made in 1984 to the Fourth Bishops’ Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center is of relevance here.

On that occasion, he specifically set out to examine the relationship between bishops and theologians in seeking to forge a balance between external perceptions of progress and morality and he argued that the Church must be a moral power by setting standards and awakening both the will and the power of the people to respond to the moral standards it articulates.

This led Ratzinger to wrestle with certain key tensions of our time, in recognition that the worlds of religion and morality are related to the world of the subjective. More specifically, there is a challenge to be faced when it is held that each individual decides what this subjective reality is since the moral answers required for objective concerns are then impossible.

Ratzinger sought to explore the way in which morality, as an area of the subjective, has been linked with the Christian tradition of the teaching on the conscience. This last he considers to be ‘a personal primitive knowledge of good and evil which appears in the individual … as a source of his ability to make moral judgments’.¹¹Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Bishops, Theologians and Morality’, On Conscience, San Francisco 2007, 51. But for the Christian, the idea of conscience cannot be separated from the idea of the responsibility of man before God. He even went so far as to assert that conscience expresses thought that comprises a kind of co-knowledge of man with God. And that it is by virtue of this that conscience can assert its superiority over any and all authorities, for conscience signifies the voice of God within us and has thus a right to assert its subjectivity. Nonetheless, by virtue of this subjectivity, this is not an absolute right, since in some cases that right is sacrificed for an objective common good.

Under natural law, according to Ratzinger, morality means the conformity of man to the will of God, at the same time as being the correct perception of things as they are. Within such a deontological perspective, the whole question of how God makes His desires known and how we acquire knowledge of divine commandments becomes central to Christian claims. If this is based on revelation, then how we know what is authentic revelation becomes a key question.

Ratzinger’s response suggests that morality does not belong to the area of individual subjectivity, but rather, is guaranteed by and has reference to the community, where the mores or habits, customs, and lifestyle of a people express the wisdom of generations. Nonetheless, what is thus captured are merely signposts for human behavior, not sources of morality of themselves. It is in the mores ecclesiae that the Christian finds the customs that are the source of moral knowledge for a new society which is yet explained through revelation of the divine transcending and subordinating all local societies. Some echoes with Richard Hooker here are manifest, since it will be recalled that in Hooker also custom and tradition have an important role while nonetheless also requiring what he called divine approbation.

For Ratzinger, the Church’s magisterium is responsible for the correct formation of this conscience and thus provides that needed divine approbation. This gives rise to a tensive polarity or dialectic since the magisterium cannot simply make statements in opposition to conscience, and it is the magisterium that appeals to the inner dimensions in the process of the maturing conscience. This has the consequence that it is within this struggle that the conscience can be trained and come to be rightly formed – and the church along with the magisterium has the right to expect that the conscience will be open to it in doing so.

In short, taken together, objectivity, conscience, and tradition point to the divine ordinances which are the basis of the Church’s teachings. Together these form a reality perceived by the rightly informed conscience that is the true revelation of the divine will and, in this way, a path to moral knowledge.

The role of the bishop, in unity with all the clergy, is then to be a witness to the habits and customary teachings of the church (in Hooker’s language) which together comprise the mores ecclesiae catholicae. Bishops must remain in discussion with experts who seek the correct applications of faith to the circumstances of a particular time. It is for moral theologians to join them in articulating the reasonableness of faith, the church’s moral teachings and a critical evaluation of the prevailing wider society and its culture – a continuous dialogue striving to render the church’s teaching and message of salvation plausible anew for every particular time.

2. Philosophical Considerations

What has been created in the safeguarding structures now present at all levels of the church will likely further expand in the wake of a resignation by the most senior figure in the Church of England on account of an administrative safeguarding failure. This will merely enhance a process that has been underway for some time, establishing what is essentially a new custodial body, charged with nothing less than the moral oversight of the church itself – at every level from that of parishioners all the way up to Canterbury. This may well have a wider impact in creating opportunities for seeking to unravel the uniquely English constitutional settlement that sees the church placed at the heart of the nation, since it will be used by critics of any engagement with religion on the part of the state.

To draw attention to this is not to repudiate of itself the need, worthiness, or even propriety of this new oversight structure. We are, after all, entirely accustomed to there being agencies and professionals that handle matters that closely affect but remain outside the devotional domain of the church itself, ranging from accounting to lawyers and even the police. Yet there is a transition underway here where the insight of Bishop Hartley is shrewd and telling. Namely when she points out firmly to the Primates of Canterbury and York that new ‘power dynamics operate in the life of the Church’ now.

Two dimensions in all this are striking: the fact that the role and competence of bishops in regard to teaching and upholding morality within the church is now adjudged to be wanting can only diminish their standing outside the church (After all they are being formally set aside in running church safeguarding, so this may well cause people to ask why the bishops are likely be more successful in other domains). Secondly, there is the striking point that key actors are viewing all this through the very particular lens of power and power structures.

It is deeply telling that bishop Hartley analyses the new era for the church in terms of ‘power dynamics’. This reflects a way of looking at the church which would understand itself as merely making explicit what was previously perhaps unclear and even obscured by the more traditional language of the church: namely that is a power structure. This view is strikingly secular and stands in relation to some quite complex prior theoretical understandings which surely merit wider attention by virtue of their expanding use in this context.

Central here must be the concept of power itself, which is unfortunately (if it is to be used as so basic an explanatory concept) far from univocal.

In everyday life, the concept of power is often used as if it only had a single connotation: hence we think of power as possessed by someone (the powerful) while exercised over someone else (the powerless). In this perspective, power can readily be considered as a (potentially) repressive force and ascribed to a person, a culture, state, or society. This seems to be the sense the Bishop of Newcastle had in mind, though it could be thought of as a very ‘Western’ way of looking at things. Indeed, it is itself often firmly rooted in a worldview that sees power as all about dichotomy, conflict, and individual possession, much as we see when we look at Marx and his theory of dialectical materialism or even the philosophical implications of Immanuel Kant.

Such brief considerations make rather interesting the critique that Habermas offers of Michel Foucault whom he accused of reducing everything to power: ‘Under the premises of his theory of power, Foucault so levels down the complexity of social modernization that the disturbing paradoxes of this process cannot even become apparent to him’.¹²See ‘Questions concerning the theory of power’, in Kelly M (ed.) Critique and power: recasting the Foucault/Habermas debate. Cambridge, UK and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994 and also Christensen, G., “Three concepts of power: Foucault, Bourdieu, and Habermas.” In Power and Education, 16(2), 182-195, 2024.

By contrast, someone like Bourdieu would differentiate between material and symbolic power. For him, material power is primarily to be understood as economic power, while symbolic power is the form that material power takes when viewed through the social categories that represent it as legitimate.¹³Cronin C., ‘Bourdieu and Foucault on power and modernity’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 22(6), 1996, p. 55–85. This is different from the individualism of the Western philosophy of consciousness as central hitherto as it is expressly not (in the tortured prose of the genre) ‘…a property or a set of properties of an agent considered in isolationbut a generative scheme of practices that functions only in relation to an appropriately structured social space’, which is to say systems of durable dispositions, predisposed to function as structuring structures, that organize practices and representations.¹⁴Which Bourdieu calls collectively habitus, a word echoed by the usage above from Hooker and Ratzinger even though very different in meaning here. See, Bourdieu P., The logic of practice, p. 65, Cambridge, 1990.

However, things are very different in the case of Michel Foucault who distinguishes between juridical and disciplinary power. In the juridical model, power (1) is possessed (by individuals, a social class, the citizens, etc.), (2) flows from a central source from the top to the bottom (from the economy, the state, etc.), and (3) when exercised, is primarily repressive (e.g., when a ban is supported by sanctions). All of which fits quite well with our everyday conceptualization of power.

The disciplinary model of power relates to a completely different form, namely a generative power, characterized by power as (1) exercised rather than possessed and thus consists of action upon actions, (2) analyzed as something that can descend from the bottom and move upwards (i.e. it is not conditioned by the sovereign but by discourse, and (3) is not primarily repressive but productive, (it produces the subjects who submitted to their own subjectivity (which one might be tempted to describe as like participants in a language game).

According to Foucault the juridical was insufficient to grasp the myriad of power relations at the micro level of society, so he developed the disciplinary model as well, even though both models can usually be found existing simultaneously (as Foucault argued was the case in institutions such as prisons, schools, hospitals and the army), where oppressive power seems to merge with productive power. It is precisely this amalgamation that makes the subjects their own governors.

With the disciplinary model, power is converted from a question of having or not having power to the question of how, in what forms, and with what effects power is exercised. According to the disciplinary model, power is an entirely discursive and productive phenomenon, whose main product is the human subject: ‘The individual, that is, is not the vis-a-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects’.¹⁵Foucault M., ‘Two lectures’ in: Gordon C (ed) Power/knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972- 1977. New York, USA: Random House, p. 98; (original italics) 1980.

In this form, power is inextricably linked to knowledge. Not that ‘knowledge is power’; power and knowledge are still considered as two separate domains, but there is never a field of knowledge without a simultaneously involved field of power.

To take the analysis of such perspectives further would be to go beyond the scope required here, but their already manifest convoluted nature and complexity should not be allowed to obscure the fact that such approaches have been enormously influential – even though they actually risk – and sometime overtly intend – reduction of all else to various forms of constructivism.

This is what makes the phrase of Foucault above so telling ‘The individual, that is, is not the visa-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects’. It is also why it should be so surprising that church leaders are taking it up, even if their doing so is nothing new. It is a paradox previously encountered in such domains as feminism, when the world was reduced for the purpose of analysis and critique to power relations, and the complaint was at one time made that women had been historically oppressed as a result of such systems. The paradox emerged on a practical level when – as has been seen in the church – women were enabled through reform to enter the formerly critiqued power structures since it could well have been asked if, in doing so, they were not simply embracing and becoming part of the structures they formerly critiqued. This could risk placing in question the authenticity of that earlier critique. If the structure was inherently and wrongly oppressive by virtue of being a power structure as such, can becoming part of that power structure be an adequate solution to its failings?

But a key issue underlying all this is the seeming adoption of a secular philosophical framework of power relations theorizing, for understanding the church and its relation to the wider world. While it may relate well to those who understand the purpose of the church to be societal change, it can only relate uneasily to the historic philosophical frameworks within which classical Christian theology has been expressed.

In terms of the self-obstructive language of this genre, it is hard to see ‘agentic thrust, processual nature, formative impetus, and self-organizing capacities’, even if they are indeed ‘co-productive in conditioning and enabling social worlds, expression, human life and experience’ allowing for much by way of theology. Then again the avant-garde has already moved beyond even postmodernist constructivism and positivist scientific materialism towards co-constitutive ‘intra-actions’ between meaning and matter, which leave neither materiality nor ideality intact – prompting suspicion that there is nothing left accessible beyond the realm of discourse itself.

3. Implications for the Concept of Trust

Trust is a concept that seems both to be under suspicion and in short supply. This is a circumstance that recalls the oddity of someone complaining about a restaurant and saying both that the food is bad and that the portions are too small. Is there not a parallel if we bemoan the lack of trust while being unsure if we still believe in it?

Then there is a further confusion when we are often told that the way to create more trust, both in people and institutions, is through being ‘ever more transparent’. But the objective is then to avoid any situation where we might need trust – on the basis that trust is only required where there is incomplete transparency. In such a view, optimal transparency will have been achieved only when no trust is needed, such a goal is actually unattainable, and worse, fosters distrust and ultimately a profoundly negative view of what it is to be human.

Paradoxical as it may seem, being trustworthy is by its very nature contingent upon having the capacity to breach trust. As soon as one has no liberty to fail, the questions of trust and trustworthiness no longer arise.

What this points to is the clear need for trust to be possible and maximal. We actually do need to be able to rely on people to do what is right when they are not compelled to do so. That this is possible is part of what it means to believe that we humans can do what is good and what is right, and thereby practice and exhibit virtue. Being trustworthy is not about entangling ourselves in constraints and sanctions to the point that whatever we then choose is out of our hands and involuntary, like pre-programmed automata. There is thus a real relationship between trust and freedom, such that a world with no freedom will have no room for trust and a world with no trust is unlikely to be free.

In 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Velvet Revolution, Vaclav Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia. He then made a characteristically passionate speech declaring that, to reconstruct society in the wake of the communist era, ‘we have to trust one another’. It was received as a startling request, seeking to undo fifty years of ruthless suppression and exploitation that had resulted in a widespread and disabling distrust and paranoia—a world that Havel had powerfully explored in his own writings, as had the works of Milan Kundera.

At heart, his plea was to rebuild the preconditions necessary to establish a free society, in place of the suffocating state-run one of the past. What Havel understood and needed his countrymen to embrace, was that trust and not fear, cooperation and not control, were the path to a more harmonious, authentic and ultimately prosperous society. 

At present, people seem to feel increasingly uncomfortable talking about trust, except in abstract terms when it always receives polite approbation before we turn hastily to other things. This reflects a sense that with trust comes risk and danger. And indeed, it is true that creating trust does involve taking on elements of risk. Both for institutions and individuals, trust entails ceding a degree of control in proportion to the level of autonomy permitted and needful. Thus too, there is in trust some element of power transfer, since power is ceded to the person or institution trusted. Certainly, the degree of trust it is appropriate to have in them should relate to the maturity and capacity for reasoning displayed by the person or institution to be trusted. This does entail that there can be such a thing as too much trust, and that blind trust, without warrant, is misplaced trust.

But the fact remains that while as human beings we can and all too often do fail to do as we ought, this is no reason for abandoning the aim of doing what is right, and still less for denying the possibility that we can. All this holds too for the institutions we are part of and create. Believing in the viability of human commitments is a presupposition of making ourselves and our institutions worthy of trust, and it is the presupposition of trusting as well. 

This means then that we need to focus, not upon trying to create a world of ever more constraints and universal surveillance in the name of transparency, but rather upon the moral foundations and training needed to ensure that we are grounded in the moral and those habits conducive to the practice of virtue. For then, we have reason to trust that our leaders – and indeed all of us – will seek to do what we ought.

The response to instances of failure and lapses, even at the highest levels and when very grave errors have been made, should be to redouble the work of moral education that will allow the rebuilding of trust, not its abandonment. We must remember too that our Christian faith recognizes most profoundly that we are human and that we will err, while always offering a path through honesty and repentance to forgiveness, recovery, reconstruction and redemption. 

In the words of 2 Corinthians 5:

If any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.