Why has the Archbishop resigned?
A grim Anglican scandal
This week, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, announced his resignation. Welby is the most senior cleric in the Church of England and the figurehead of the worldwide Anglican Communion. It is unprecedented for an Archbishop of Canterbury to have to resign due to a scandal in the church.
It is as well to take a look at the story behind Welby’s departure. His decision to resign was prompted by his role in the mishandling of the case of John Smyth, a prolific sex offender. The report of the review that the church commissioned on the Smyth case was published last month.
The Smyth case
John Smyth (1941-2018) was a Christian evangelist and a deeply sinister individual. The evidence attests that he was a sadistic, narcissistic control freak; a man seemingly incapable of emotions other than anger. He was also charismatic and charming - a handsome barrister who dressed in smart, expensive clothes and was able to make a deep impression on vulnerable teenage boys. He was a success in the secular world. He became a QC at 37 - the youngest in the country at the time - and he served as a part-time judge. He was almost certainly homosexual, although he was in extreme homophobic denial about it. His abuse was not only about sex but also about power. Perhaps such things always are. Smyth probably assaulted 26-30 boys and young men in the UK, followed by a staggering 85-100 in Zimbabwe. He was perhaps the most prolific sex offender in Anglican history: the Jimmy Savile of the Church of England.
When a religious abuser is exposed, some people may be tempted to say that they never had any real faith and that their religiosity was a cynical cloak for their criminality. But this is not necessarily the case (it seems not to have been true of Jimmy Savile). There is no reason to doubt that Smyth was a sincere Christian, nor that he sincerely drew on his Christianity to justify his abuse to himself and to others.
The story of John Smyth is the story of a man who avoided the mainstream of the Church of England and developed power and influence in small and relatively closed fundamentalist subcultures. It is fair to say that the conservative Evangelical wing of the church has a reputation for being somewhat clannish and clubby (of course, it is not alone in that). Subcultures within this subculture are inevitably more insular still. Dysfunctional dynamics can develop in such communities, offering openings for abusers to exploit.
The first subculture that Smyth insinuated himself into was the circle around the Iwerne Trust, an organisation founded in the 1930s by an Evangelical cleric, Rev. Eric “Bash” Nash. Nash focussed his evangelistic efforts on organising camps for boys from élite public schools, in the expectation that they would go on to become fundamentalist Christian leaders in the church and the nation. The camps were militaristic and patriarchal. This suited Smyth down to the ground, and he became involved with Iwerne from the 1960s onwards. Nash was impressed with the younger man even though he had not gone to an élite public school - something about which Smyth had a chip on his shoulder. By 1974, Smyth had risen to become the chairman of the Iwerne Trust.
Smyth’s malign influence spread through his Iwerne contacts to Winchester College, where he was instrumental in leading a controversial Evangelical revival in the 1970s. This was centred on the ‘Christian Forum’, a cult-like organisation whose members considered themselves superior to the official school chaplains, not to mention the teachers. Concerns from parents, staff and students inevitably followed, but Smyth was not reined in. In addition, he interested himself in universities, particularly Cambridge.
Smyth started grooming young men at least as early as 1974, and he was assaulting them by 1977. There is no point in going into the harrowing details, save to say that he administered beatings that were severe enough to cause bleeding and scarring. It all had clear sexual overtones. Some have pointed out that caning was still legal in British schools in this period; but that offers no defence. The particulars of what Smyth did would not have been tolerated in schools in the 1970s, even if he had been a teacher acting in loco parentis - which he was not.
The cover-up
By 1981, concerns and rumours were circulating in Evangelical Land. In that year, the Church of England refused Smyth ordination as a priest. The relevant records do not survive, but the rejection seems to have been an unusual decision; it was said that a bishop had misgivings about Smyth’s “character”.
By February 1982, the concerns about the man had become impossible to ignore - not least because one of his victims had attempted to take his own life. A group of figures from the Iwerne community got together. One of them, Rev. Mark Ruston, spoke to some of the victims, along with a psychiatrist and a lawyer, and wrote a short report. Ruston was not a wet liberal. He was a conservative Evangelical Christian who had no problem in principle with corporal punishment. But he was driven to describe Smyth’s conduct as “horrific” and as “cruelty... in the name of the Lord”. In his report, he set out a list of theological and practical reasons why it was wrong.
Ruston’s report was not perfect, but it could have formed the basis of serious official action against Smyth. What followed instead was a classic cover-up. Leaders of a small religious subculture tried to deal quietly and informally with a villain in their midst, without having any grasp of how far they were out of their depth in trying to contain a ruthless criminal like Smyth. Smyth was approached and was asked to cease contact with his victims, to stop working with young men, and to see a psychiatrist. It is said that he signed a written commitment to this effect, but no copy has been discovered. If he did sign a commitment, he did not keep to it. He reacted with anger and manipulation to the attempt to control him. It seems that he contacted victims and tried to find out who blew the whistle on him.
To repeat, this was a textbook cover-up by members of a paternalistic community who did not want an embarrassing problem exposed to public scrutiny. It could be dealt with instead through a gentlemen’s agreement. The Evangelical leaders involved had only limited concern for the victims. The latter were not asked for their views, even though they were adult men at the time. Most of their families were not consulted either; a couple of the families seem not to have wanted the matter pursued with the police, but one definitely did.
It is not sufficient to say that 1982 was a different time and that people didn’t report stuff like this back then. The evidence shows that the parties to the cover-up knew at the time that they were taking a risk in not going to the authorities. Their motives were, at least in part, to protect their subculture. Rev. David Fletcher spoke for others when he told the inquiry team: “I thought it would do the work of God immense damage if this were public.” You do not have to be a profound theologian to see that this sentiment has less to do with the interests of God than with the interests of men.
The cover-up was not entirely successful. From 1982 onwards, news of what Smyth had been doing spread to some extent. He was banned from Winchester College, and various people were informally warned about him. He was forced to resign as chairman of the Iwerne Trust and as an Anglican lay reader. Nevertheless, the Iwerne leaders continued to show some deference towards him: amazingly, they did not attempt to sever his association with their community completely.
Britain was now getting too hot for Smyth, so in 1984 he relocated to Zimbabwe. It is difficult not to see this move as an echo of the imperial age, when assorted failures and sociopaths who had made a mess of their lives in Britain would try their luck in the colonies, where the locals were less able to object to them. There were some ineffectual attempts by those in the know to warn people in Zimbabwe, but they came to nothing. Nevertheless the imperial age was over: the people of Zimbabwe got wise to the violent and sexualised conduct that Smyth was carrying out against boys in their country. He ran into serious trouble with the law, something that had never happened back in jolly old England. Somehow, he managed to avoid two attempts to prosecute him, as well as an attempted deportation by the Zimbabwean government (there is some suggestion that Robert Mugabe intervened personally to protect him).
Smyth moved to South Africa in 2001, where he lived a comfortable lifestyle until his death in 2018. Whether his offending continued during this period is unclear, but he continued at least to groom young men. He was thrown out of his church in Cape Town in 2017.
The church fails to act
From around 2012, rumours about Smyth’s behaviour in the UK began to escape from Evangelical Land into Normie Land. Jimmy Savile had recently been exposed, and historical sex offences were being re-examined by police and journalists. The Mail on Sunday published an article referring to Smyth as an abuser, although without naming him. Smyth’s conduct went from being a partially open secret within the Evangelical subculture to being known to the senior leadership of the Church of England. The church became officially aware of what had been going on. Which brings us to Justin Welby, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013.
Matters are complicated by the fact that Welby himself came from the Evangelical wing of the church. He had attended the Iwerne camps as a young man and had been acquainted with Smyth. He had apparently found him impressive, although he seems to have become aware of some of the concerns surrounding him in the late 70s and early 80s. He later donated to Smyth’s ministry in Zimbabwe. This should probably be seen as a routine part of the business of fundraising for Evangelical projects rather than as a personal endorsement of the man.
In 2012, one of the victims in the Diocese of Ely disclosed their abuse, and by July 2013 they were talking to the church’s local safeguarding officer, Yvonne Quirk. Quirk in turn told the Bishop of Ely, Stephen Conway, and had two conversations with Cambridgeshire Police. The police were apparently reluctant to take the case because of concerns about the difficulty of extraditing Smyth to the UK. For his part, Conway took the view that matters had been handled by Mark Ruston and his friends appropriately “according to the standards of the early 80s”. This was untrue, not to mention complacent. Nevertheless, Conway did write a letter about the case to a bishop in Smyth’s home diocese of Cape Town.
By August 2013, word of the case had reached Justin Welby at Lambeth Palace. Welby should not in fact have been told about it, because it was Stephen Conway’s responsibility and information about abuse should not have been shared in this way because of the risk of tipping-off. Nevertheless, Welby now knew about the abuse, and he could not un-know what he knew. He stated his opinion that the matter was “disclosable”, although it is not clear what he meant by this. He was told that Cambridgeshire Police were investigating - which they weren’t. The contact person on Welby’s staff was his chaplain, Rev. Jo Bailey Wells. She did not follow up developments in Ely. The reason that she gave for this was that a lot of abuse cases were coming in at this time and there was nothing particularly remarkable about Smyth’s.
Back in Ely, the diocesan safeguarding team decided that the case needed to be referred to the church’s national safeguarding adviser, Elizabeth Hall. This happened in October 2013. But the case was not pursued at national level, and the Ely safeguarding team did not chase developments, although they continued to discuss the case amongst themselves.
Separately, an official connected with Iwerne referred Smyth’s conduct to Hampshire Police in 2014. The Met ended up getting involved, and a crime reference number was issued: this would allow victims to contact the police and give their details. The official gave the crime number to Yvonne Quirk in Ely, but she does not appear to have given it to the victims - by now two of them - whom she was talking to. Hampshire Police dropped the matter, and reopened it only when a Channel 4 programme in 2017 brought Smyth’s conduct to general public attention.
Institutional malaise
The John Smyth story is a sorry catalogue of failures by the institutional church. A tragedy of errors. Hence Archbishop Welby’s resignation.
Welby’s defenders say that he was told in 2013 that the matter was being looked into by the police, so there was no need for him to do anything further. The review didn’t buy this. It concluded that Welby should have been more active in ensuring that the case was being progressed with the police and with the South African bishop: he had “a personal and moral responsibility to pursue this further”.
But the true significance of this case is not about whether Justin Welby should have chased people harder in 2013. It is a tale of the kinds of institutional errors that are banal in themselves but can in the wrong circumstances cause disasters - miscommunications, failures to action things, failures to follow things up, improper disclosures, complacency. Plus the structural pathologies of incestuous, élitist subcultures like Iwerne that gave Smyth the scope to commit his abuse in the first place. The secular authorities, in the shape of the police and Winchester College leadership, did not exactly cover themselves in glory either. There was a general failure to put victims’ interests first.
The Archbishop’s responsibility is essentially corporate and not personal. A man who may have been the Church of England’s biggest ever sex offender was allowed to get away with it on Welby’s watch. John Smyth has escaped justice (in this world, at least - for those who believe in Hell, it is not pleasant to contemplate what may be happening to him now). The closest that he got to being made answerable for his crimes came about not through anything that anyone in England did but through the actions of the Zimbabwean police and courts. Under those circumstances, it was not easy to see how Justin Welby could have remained in office.
The review report has made recommendations; it remains to be seen whether they will be followed. Initial sentiment among the victims seems not to be optimistic - the church has been here before, and this is not the first safeguarding report to be published. Perhaps the fall of an Archbishop will bring church officials to an awareness that failings will not go without accountability, even at the highest levels. If not, there may yet be more John Smyths.