LONDON (UNITED KINGDOM)
Church Times [London, England]
November 22, 2024
By Madeleine Davies
Leaders of conservative networks respond to the criticisms in Makin review
THE Makin review of the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth and its cover-up requires not only repentance and lament, but also “culture-changing action”, the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) said this week.
The review, which found that “powerful evangelical clergy” had covered up the abuse (motivated in part, it suggests, by a desire to “protect the wider reputation of Conservative Evangelicalism”) lists among those who knew of the abuse former leaders of many of the powerhouses of the conservative Evangelical constituency in England. They include All Souls’, Langham Place; St Ebbe’s, Oxford; St Aldate’s, Oxford; and the Round Church (now St Andrew the Great), Cambridge.
On Tuesday, the diocese of Gloucester confirmed that permission to officiate (PTO) had been removed from the Revd Hugh Palmer, a former Rector of All Souls’, while a safeguarding review was conducted. His PTO in London diocese has also been withdrawn. Mr Palmer told the Makin review that he did not know of the abuse until 2017, despite having visited in hospital a Smyth victim who attempted to take his own life in 1982.
Among the conclusions reached by Dr Elly Hanson, the clinical psychologist whose psychological analysis of Smyth is appended to the review, is that “the beliefs and values of the Conservative Evangelical community in which John Smyth operated are critical to understanding how he manipulated his victims into it, how it went on for so long, and how he evaded justice.”
On Tuesday, Ed Shaw, who co-chairs both the CEEC and its “cultures, power and abuse” workstream, said: “This is a time for continuing repentance and lament at the horrific abuse that was carried out by an Anglican evangelical, and then covered up by others.”
In 2021, the CEEC created the “In Lament” resources in response to two independent reviews of abuse in Evangelical churches, including Emmanuel Proprietary Chapel, Ridgway, in Wimbledon, led by the Revd Jonathan Fletcher (News, 3 December 2021). The workstream behind this is meeting this week to discuss the contents and recommendations of both the Makin review and the Scolding review of the Pilavachi scandal (News, 4 October).
“In the mean time, [we] urge other groups including evangelicals to engage with both the Makin Review and our culture-review questions [part of “In Lament”] that seek to turn our lament into culture-changing action,” Mr Shaw said.
Dr Hanson’s analysis includes the conclusion that Smyth’s “narcissistic strategies” were “highly successful within the Conservative Evangelical community . . . and this was pivotal to him achieving his abuse and evading justice. This community was hierarchical and status-oriented.”
Within the Iwerne Trust, she writes, “particular individuals were seen as endowed with unique leadership qualities,” and some, such as Smyth, were “perceived as having the additional gift of spotting leaders in others”. There was “an explicit strategy of trying to convert to it boys that were deemed of high rank . . . because such individuals were seen as having more potential to influence society. . . In this process, boys were arguably somewhat objectified, seen in part as instruments to achieve higher ends (just as how narcissists approach others).”
She warns that the conservative Evangelical community’s “them and us” mentality (in which the majority is “seen as a threat, motivated to undermine the community”) may be “particularly vulnerable to the charms and combative leadership of a grandiose narcissist”. When a leader is seen as chosen by God, she warns, “misgivings and concerns feel like a disloyalty to God . . . Furthermore, fears about loss of reputation are compounded by the concern that people will lose their faith and fewer will be drawn to it.”
The review itself concludes that Smyth was “able to radicalise his victims, by using his misinterpretation and misuse of the Scriptures. . . This false thinking and perverted approach was known to the people around him and could have been challenged for what it was.”
It includes several quotes from victims recalling his use of the scriptures. One remembered him saying: “Let’s look at some verses from the Bible about how the Lord disciplines those he loves. You haven’t yet resisted sin to the point of shedding your blood, from the Letter to the Hebrews.”
Dr Hanson’s analysis is that, “whether Smyth believed these ideas or not, they played their part in his abuse by supporting, legitimising and amplifying deeper driving forces.”
In total, she lists 17 “organisational and cultural factors that may have assisted or contributed to John Smyth’s abuse”. While presenting them as “common” within the conservative Evangelical community in which Smyth operated, she acknowledges that “many were (or are) also present in the wider Church and/or British society”.
Among the factors are: an “authoritarian culture”; “obedience and loyalty highly valued”; “a focus on personal sinfulness, producing a default sense of guilt, defectiveness, submission and indebtedness to God”; “muscular Christianity”; “misogyny and patriarchy” (“potentially valuable perspectives from women were absent”); and “intrusive and intense one-to-one mentoring of boys and young men”.
The review considers how theology may have shaped the response of those who were aware of Smyth’s abuse. There was a belief, it says, that “God will come up with a plan”, in terms of how to manage Smyth. “Critical decisions were made within the context of deference to this theological belief, rather than to consider the actions of the abuser and responses to this, within the law or policy and guidance in place at the time.”
The review includes a letter from Sir Jamie Colman — who then chaired the Zambezi Trust (UK), which oversaw Smyth’s activities in Zimbabwe — offering reassurance that Smyth was now subject to a “pastoral arrangement” with an ordained minister, and citing scripture in defence of his not being “disqualified”.
Mr Makin also identifies “theological differences within the Church” as vulnerable to exploitation by abusers, saying that Smyth “changed his allegiances” to the Charismatic wing of the Church after facing challenge in the Conservative Evangelical one.
In an ad clerum issued on Thursday of last week, the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Revd Rob Munro, said that it was “vital and urgent” to give “serious attention” to Mr Makin’s 27 recommendations, “with particular attention to lessons particular to the Ebbsfleet Network”. Some of the review’s findings, he said, “reinforce lessons already identified” in the aftermath of the report into Jonathan Fletcher”.
This had shown evidence of “how an abuser can exploit organisations that allow leadership to have unaccountable power and influence; that institutionalise an implied personal elitism or theological superiority, and that are more concerned for organisational reputation than for individuals. Where those characteristics are observed, there is an urgent need to address those cultures, even at an episcopal level.”
He continued: “It is also important, at a time when there is a serious theological rift in the Church over sexual ethics, not to allow our biblical call to contend for the faith to be done in a way that amounts to our own version of unaccountable power, theological elitism or organisational group-think. Scripture must be our supreme authority.”
The ad clerum drew attention to the “Principles for commending ministry”, formulated in response to the Fletcher review and revised last year. “We do not believe that Conservative Evangelical churches are especially prone to the development of unhealthy cultures, but it is important for all churches that their leaders are more fully aware of how their ministries are being received,” it says. “We need to be ‘always reforming’.”
A review of the culture at the Titus Trust (into which the activities of the Iwerne Trust were assumed in 2000), published in 2021, suggested that work remained to be done to address various risk factors (News, 10 December 2021). Identifying “very clear links” between the trust and the conservative Evangelical wing of the Church of England, it described a “symbiotic relationship, which to some degree reinforces the theology and cultural views on the camps, leading to a greater risk of a narrowness of thinking or a lack of diversity among its leaders”.
On Wednesday, the Church Society welcomed the Archbishop of Canterbury’s resignation as the “right response”. There were others named in the review who “bear some responsibility for the mishandling of the case and the ongoing suffering of Smyth’s victims” and who “must consider their own responses”, the society’s statement said.
“Conservative evangelicalism is a far wider part of the church than the elite, public school camps with which Smyth and Fletcher were associated. There are Church Society members and partner churches across all parts of the country, and across all social and cultural backgrounds. Many of the issues raised in the Makin Review pertain to the public school, elitist world in which Smyth operated, rather than the evangelical theology he professed.”
In the wake of the report on Jonathan Fletcher, “culture changes” had begun across the conservative Evangelical networks, the statement said. “There is a clear understanding that God does not need us to ‘protect’ the gospel, or the growth of the kingdom. We have seen how reputations can crumble when cover-ups fall down and we know that Christ’s light will expose sins committed in darkness. Safeguarding is taken extremely seriously and no one is allowed to set themselves above it.”
Several of the individuals named in the Makin review have said that they were not aware of Smyth’s abuse — or the seriousness of it — until 2017. They include Canon Vaughan Roberts, who succeeded the Revd David Fletcher (identified in the Makin review as at the heart of the cover-up) as Rector of St Ebbe’s, Oxford. He was a trustee of the Titus Trust, and, in 1989, read the autobiography of his former head teacher at Winchester College, John Thorn, which referred to the physical punishment administered by Smyth.
A statement by the churchwardens of St Ebbe’s, which maintains that it was only in 2017 that Canon Roberts had “any awareness of the extent and brutality of what happened”, has been criticised in a blog by the Revd Bernard Howard, a former staff member at the Titus Trust who worshipped at St Ebbe’s, and who has published 21 further questions about the extent of Canon Roberts’s knowledge.OTHER STORIESAngela Tilby: Beware the habits that lead to abuseTHE devil is not often mentioned in Church of England liturgy. Like “He who must not be named,” he appears only at significant moments: at the baptismal renunciations, at the climax of the Litany, in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s temptations
In her report, Dr Hanson writes that “a large variety of beliefs and values . . . can be conducive to abuse when they are held ‘ideologically’ — followed at the expense of a core care and regard for every human being.” In 2017, the Bishop of Guildford, the Rt Revd Andrew Watson, himself a victim of Smyth, expressed the “concern of myself and some of my fellow survivors that we are seen as people and not used as pawns in some political or religious game [News, 10 February 2017].
“Abusers espouse all theologies and none; and absolutely nothing that happened in the Smyth shed was the natural fruit of any Christian theology that I’ve come across before or since. It was abuse perpetrated by a misguided, manipulative, and dangerous man, tragically playing on the longing of his young victims to live godly lives.”
This week, he stood by his comment, but said that he agreed entirely with Mr Makin’s conclusion that the Iwerne regime “enabled” Smyth’s abuse, and with Dr Hanson’s call for the Church — and particularly its conservative Evangelical constituency — to “reflect on that ‘enabling’ and the particular cultural, social, theological and protectionist assumptions that lay behind it”.
Among the parish clergy engaged in such reflection is the Vicar of the New Forest Edge Benefice, in Winchester diocese, the Revd Dr Ben Sargent, who spoke during the General Synod’s July debate on Soul Survivor, about learning “deeply and radically” from the Jonathan Fletcher review (News, 12 July).
“As I speak to Evangelical friends and colleagues about the Makin review, there is a widespread feeling of lament and shame at our cultural complicity in the failure to seek justice for victims and survivors of John Smyth,” he said on Tuesday. “Many recognise the truth of the observations about reputation management and the need to protect ‘the work’. All are immensely grateful to victims and survivors for their courage in bringing to light deeds of great darkness.
“It is true that abuse does not belong to one part of the Church. Abusers can take any value or ideal, theological or not, and manipulate it to their own ends. Perhaps Evangelical doctrine has proven especially vulnerable to this, but it also calls us to work together to make the Church a safe place for everyone.”
Among the examples of such doctrine was the sovereignty of God, he said, which meant “that ‘the work’ does not need protecting, especially by lies and wickedness”. Substitutionary atonement, meanwhile, meant that “no one should ever be told that they need to suffer in order to atone for their sin,” while the priesthood of all believers “should make Evangelicals rightly wary of exalting anyone to a position above criticism and scrutiny”.
The idea of common grace, he said, “tells us that we have no right to a siege mentality — us against ‘the world’ — when it comes to safeguarding. Wisdom, integrity, and justice belong to the diocesan safeguarding officer, the police, and those with whom we might disagree on some theological or ethical subjects, just as much as it belongs to us. We need to work together.”