This is the fourth in a series of blogs being written to lay the foundations for the Changing Attitude England gathering on 2nd March 2024 at St Andrews’ Short Street, Waterloo.
Healthy and unhealthy Christianity
I have become increasingly aware that there are contemporary versions of Christian theology, teaching, life and practice that are fundamentally unhealthy and other, more elusive versions that are fundamentally healthy. This blog addresses unhealthy Christian theology. The next blog will outline a healthier theology.
In the decades of my life lived in the twentieth century it didn’t occur to me to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy Christian churches and teachings. It was a question of which ‘tribe’ I belonged to – the liturgically catholic, non-judgmental tribe of St Barnabas Southfields in the Diocese of Southwark. It is only over the last decade and a half that awareness has grown that some churches are very unhealthy for me as a gay man and others comparatively healthy. At the 1998 Lambeth Conference the widespread manifestation of vitriolic homophobia in the Anglican Communion became shockingly apparent but I didn’t understand that there might be a distinction between healthy and unhealthy Christian belief underpinning the sexuality wars. Prior to Lambeth 1998 I had been a member of a group of people, gay, predominantly male, whose emotional and sexual desires were different from heterosexuals and whose presence in the Church of England was significant, closeted, beneficial, and quietly but very positively welcomed and affirmed in many quarters.
Safeguarding – a brief timeline
Thirty years ago in January 1993, a joint meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates of the Anglican Communion passed a resolution which urged all Provinces to work to end the sexual abuse and exploitation of women and children throughout the Anglican Church and expressed shame at the evidence of sexual abuse within the Anglican Church. In the same year the Rt Revd Peter Ball resigned as bishop of Gloucester following allegations of abuse. No prosecution was brought. The Church of England introduced its first child protection policy in 1995.
In 2002 the House of Bishops created the Church Central Safeguarding Liaison Group. The group published a past cases review in 2010. It was criticised for not giving a comprehensive picture of the problem. Promoting a Safe Church, a policy for safeguarding adults was published in 2006. In 2010 Protecting All God’s Children: The Policy for Safeguarding Children in the Church of England, 4th edition, was published. The Elizabeth Butler-Sloss Review of Roy Cotton’s and Colin Pritchard’s abuse of children in the 70s and 80s in Chichester Diocese was published in 2011, In November 2012 Bishop Peter Ball was arrested. He was jailed for 32 months for abusing 18 young men over 15 years.
After a failed launch in 2014 the Independent Inquiry for Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) was reconstituted and launched in 2015. In 2017 the House of Bishops published Promoting a Safe Church and Church of England Safeguarding Overview, saying the church would appoint a safeguarding officer in each parish. In 2022 the Church of England found 383 new cases involving allegations of abuse of vulnerable adults and children by clergy, Church officers and volunteers. IICSA’s report published in October 2020 was highly critical of a culture within the Church that is portrayed as still not adequately dealing with abuse. Since then the Church of England’s Safeguarding regime has been in a state of chaos, repeatedly failing to respond effectively to criticism.
In the last five years a number of books have been published relating to abuse in the CofE:
Fife, J., and Gilo (2019) Letters to a Broken Church
Harper, R. and Wilson, A. (2019) To Heal and Not to Hurt: A fresh approach to safeguarding in Church
France-Williams, A. D. A. (2020) Ghost Ship: Institutional Racism and the Church of England
Gardner, F. (2021) Sex, Power, Control: Responding to Abuse in the Institutional Church
Graystone, A. (2021) Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of Iwerne camps
Harvey, N. P. and Woodhead, L. (2022) Unknowing God: Toward a Post-Abusive Theology
Thatcher, Adrian (2023) Vile Bodies: The Body in Christian Teaching, Faith and Practice
Abuse founded on Christian theology
I referred to Adrian Thatcher’s recently published book Vile Bodies in a blog on 12 December 2023. Adrian’s book is (or should be) dynamite for the Church of England. He identifies with clarity and for the first time for me, the way in which foundational Christian theology and reliance on scripture, tradition and reason is responsible for creating and justifying a core theology and culture that underpins abuse in the Christian Church. Abuse has become systemic. Perhaps it has been systemic from the earliest days of the Church. We human beings have an innate tendency to be abusive. It’s a sinful characteristic.
Vile Bodies identifies abuse and prejudice against women, LGBTQIA+ people, black people, people of other faiths and cultures (and in the not so distant past, slaves). The same foundational Christian theology justifies and protects the power and authority of religious institutions and hierarchies. At the moment the Church of England hierarchy is failing to respond to and purge itself of the so-called Christian authority and teaching justifying prejudice and abuse related especially to questions of gender and sexuality.
What is shocking is the edifice on which and within which abuse has been built, an edifice that supports conservative Christian homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, racism, prejudice against other religions and cultures and particular categories of people. Shocking, too, is the failure of the majority to confront the corrupt nature of so much basic abusive Christian theology and practice - so many of us are unconscious and unaware of the extent and depth of abusive ideas and practice in the church. We do not see the damaging, dangerous effect of theologies and attitudes normalised, unexamined and unquestioned in the Church of England in particular and Christianity in general.
In the first quarter of the twenty-first century we are coming to recognise the fundamental contribution to abuse and prejudice in the church made by theologies accepted by many as traditional and orthodox.
Underpinning abuse - the Bible
Adrian argues that the idolatrous elevation of the Bible to divine status is ultimately responsible for the abusive authority of theology. The Protestant determination to elevate the literal meaning of the text of scripture above other possibilities, along with its determination to elevate and equate the written words of the Bible with the living Word made flesh, undoubtedly encouraged the owning of slaves and their cruel treatment. The Protestant God who sacrificed ‘His’ ‘Son’ is both unspeakably violent and unspeakably unjust, so it was perhaps inevitable that believers swayed by the image of this violent God themselves became violent and unjust in following ‘Him’.
The theology of penal substitution
The violence of God in the Hebrew Bible is frightening, but never seems to be repudiated by Christians of almost any persuasion. Its dark shadow remains permanently rooted in the heart of Christian theology. Jesus is known as the ‘Son of God’ sent by the Father to suffer and die on the cross for the sins of the world. In a leap of divine injustice, the punishing God cruelly abuses his Son for our sins instead of punishing us, and for that we should be grateful, sacrificing ourselves to God in response. These theories of ‘penal substitution’ are morally lamentable because they make God the Father the divine child abuser. The idea of the penal substitution theory of atonement took root in the Reformation and became central to Reformed evangelism in the Victorian era. Christ was God himself, and when he died on the cross he was acting as a substitute victim, taking on himself the punishment that each individual deserves and thereby placating the wrath of God (who is angry with us for our sins).
Atonement
The theology of atonement at its best is the idea of a seamless union between God and whatever is not God, seamless union of two natures, the divine and the human, invested in John’s Gospel in the union between us and all creation in the divinity of Jesus the Christ, the Word of God. Jesus achieves ‘at-one-ment’ between the created world and God in his own being.
Jesus and the majority of the first Christians were Jews, deeply conscious of the idea of Atonement when the high priest performed rituals to atone for the sins of the people. The early church eventually came to see Jesus as the ultimate and final sacrifice for sin, creating a theology that no thoughtful moral person can believe in any longer. The conservative evangelical theology of bodily atonement for sin slips so easily into the normalisation of violence at the heart of the Christian faith that results in physical, emotional and spiritual abuse.
Today, a refusal to acknowledge diversity in human sexuality adds a context of shame in which abuse has to be kept secret. Conservative pressure groups convince otherwise healthy people to hide their true selves and deny their inner feelings with the result that some become depressed and suicidal. In abusive theology, even the holy God engages in criminal, abusive behaviour. Strict Calvinist groups require an adherence to the fundamentals by signing a basis of faith that included doctrinal touchstones such as the infallibility of Scripture and the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. The characteristics this produces in fundamentalists includes anti-intellectualism (the rejection of scholarship and science), a mechanical view of the dictation of Scripture by God to its human authors leading to a rejection of biblical criticism, and for some, to a separatist ecclesiology.
The abuse of LGBTQIA+ people
What is particularly shocking has been the discovery of the extent of abuse against LGBTQIA+ people by respected, idealised spiritual religious leaders, some of them bishops, in the narratives that have been exposed over the past two decades. But the presence of grossly abusive behaviours in the church date from earlier decades. Eric Nash (known as Bash) was the founder (in 1930) and leader of the Iwerne camps network. Boys at the camps were intensively mentored throughout the year, especially with regard to their doctrinal beliefs and their sexual purity. The central message of salvation in Nash’s creed and the subject of the climactic talk at the end of every Iwerne camp was the conservative evangelical theology of bodily atonement for sin.
Nash was responsible for introducing John Smyth QC, an evangelical Anglican barrister, to the Iwerne camps. In 1970 Smyth became a trustee of the Iwerne Trust. He was later to be accused of serial abuse. A complainant known as “Graham” disclosed that he and others had been abused by Smyth in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Smyth’s shockingly abusive behaviour became known to other leading conservative evangelicals but only broke into the public realm in February 2017 when Channel 4 News broadcast a report alleging that Smyth had beaten and physically abused young men while leading Christian camps run by the Iwerne Trust. In a further development, the Rev Jonathan Fletcher, retired vicar of Emmanuel Church, Wimbledon and another renowned conservative evangelical, faced allegations of harmful behaviour to young men in a Daily Telegraph report of inappropriate behaviour at Emmanuel. Fletcher was also a speaker and leader at the Iwerne camps.
(Further reading: Graystone, A. (2021) Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of Iwerne camps)
Roots of sexism and homophobia
The Bible can be a dangerous as well as a profoundly inspirational book. Only now am I beginning to understand that homophobic and transphobic abuse and prejudice and the harm, cruelty and arrogance that can follow are the result of supposedly Christian theologies based on false, prejudiced interpretations of the Bible. So-called ‘traditional’, ‘orthodox’ interpretations of scripture (‘homophobic hermeneutics’) cause incalculable harm to LGBTQIA+ people and to the moral standing of churches that uphold this teaching. Trust in the authority of scripture, tradition and reason is never sufficient for doing theology. All three can be and are being weaponised. They become justifications for Christian misogyny, prejudice and violence.
Mary and Misogyny
Mary is not given special veneration in the New Testament. Her much later adoration is associated with the increasing revulsion for having sex and the need to remove the mother of the Lord from any suggestion of having had sex with Joseph to conceive Jesus. As a result she occupies a place where the hierarchy wanted her to be; pure, virginal, untouched, acting as the hierarchy want her to be, passive and obedient. The use of Marian theology based on unhealthy theologies has contributed to fear, disdain and the disparagement of women that poisons much theology and belief today. The ideology that allows husbands to dominate their wives has persisted for 2,000 years, and remains one of the roots of domestic violence.
Racism
For centuries, white Western Christian Colonial theology and practice dominated European Christian life and practice. Centuries of British and European trade and colonisation were responsible for the lynching and traumatising of black bodies. White theology was responsible for creating racial violence, vilifying black people, believing this to be approved by God and failing now to overturn the racism that continues to infect Christian churches. Human hatred appears almost limitless in the accounts of vengeful cruelty inflicted on innocent and silenced people. A perverse theological scheme offering self-delusion was required to pretend that racism like sexism and homophobia, is consistent with God’s will. A white male God and a corrupt doctrinal orthodoxy supplied the means by which these evils were justified.
(Further reading: France-Williams, A. D. A. (2020) Ghost Ship: Institutional Racism and the Church of England)
Spiritual abuse
Connections are not being made between abusive behaviour in the churches and the abusive teachings and practices that tend to legitimise it. In abusive theology, even the holy God engages in criminal, abusive behaviour. Adrian Thatcher’s book is hostile towards versions of faith that attempt to require of individuals unnecessary suffering and then vest it with spiritual significance or that retain violence and injustice in their very accounts of who and what God is, all derived from the Bible. There are versions of faith that are venomous, poisonous to body and soul. In abusive theology, even the holy God engages in criminal, abusive behaviour.
The over-valuing of ‘Christian’ identity
We now live with an inability to look honestly at and engage with the systemic prejudices entrenched in theologies that justify misogyny, homophobia and transphobia and a continuing racist mentality underlying the deeply homophobic coalition of English conservative evangelical Anglicans and the Global South Coalition of leaders and Provinces.
White Western Christians live with the mythological idea that Christianity has been a force for unambiguous good in the world. No matter what evil Christians commit or what violence Christian institutions justify, an idealised conception of Christianity remains. This conviction is so deep that evidence to the contrary is simply dismissed. We fail to see how we have become infected by a belief in our own supremacy, inoculated against self-criticism. Failure in love for others has led to failure in self-love and to dissatisfaction with our selves.
Because Christian identity is thought to exceed in importance all other identities, including those of race, sexuality and gender, the invalid conclusion is regularly drawn that other identities don’t matter, because ‘once we become believers our only identity is found in Christ’. Identity in Christ justifies regarding all other identities as less important, or even unimportant and unhealthy.
Next blog – healthy Christianity
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