The experience of survivors
The experience of survivors is the foundation of Sex, Power, Control: Responding to Abuse in the Institutional Church published by Fiona Gardner in 2021, In chapter 8 Gardner deals with the influence of the public school ethos within the institutional church. She notes that Dame Moira Gibb referred in her report An Abuse of Faith, the independent Peter Ball review, to the links between Bishop Peter Ball, another prolific abuser of young men and public school boy himself, and his involvement with public schools in his ministry. Gardner suggests that some of the unhealthy, supposedly ‘traditional’ values found in British public schools have also deeply influenced the institutional church. It is this influence and its devastating effects that are now exposed by Keith Makin’s Review into John Smyth and the failure of multiple individuals to identify, intervene and control Smyth’s abuse perpetrated over five decades.
Public school pathology
Giles Fraser has also commented that a tradition of violent abuse, emotional and physical, is part of the public school philosophy. There is a pathology at work here that for some pupils creates a feeling of abandonment, of broken parental attachments and suppressed despair. This experience results in the development of defence mechanisms, the denial and compartmentalising of feelings, cutting the self off emotionally. It’s this pathology that resulted in the rise of so-called muscular Christianity during the second half of the nineteenth century. John Smyth, Peter Ball and others are products of this toxic masculine culture.
Toxic masculinity infects the Church of England
Gardner (p93) also describes how in the context of the General Synod, this pathological culture is the origin of the easily formed self-organising network of shadow relationships embedded in the hierarchical structure of the Church of England where a significant number of the male bishops have been products of the public school culture. It is to be found in Church House, Lambeth Palace, the Archbishops’ Council and the House of Bishops. One active example of such a self-organising network is Nobody’s Friends, described at the earlier IICSA hearings as ‘centred on a strong core of bishops, ex-Tory ministers and former military top brass, a highly secretive, all male group’. Stephen Parsons says Nobody’s Friends suggests a toxic masculinity, ‘an opportunity for a privileged church group to network and sometimes lobby those in authority in the Church . . . an exclusive world of male privilege within the heart of the Anglican establishment.’
The Makin Review says there is evidence throughout the failures to act against John Smyth of groupthink, where people are receiving all their influences within a closed group and becoming blind to external influence and thinking and to other perspectives. John Smyth fostered such thinking himself, deliberately creating small, closed, groups, within which boys and young men felt special and party to a secret. The Makin Review explicitly proposes the need for the Church to ensure that such introspective groupings cannot be created, with training and policies and procedures geared to spotting and preventing their development.
The Iwerne camps
This culture of privilege and male hierarchy is an extension of the Iwerne camp strategy developed by E.J.H Nash, known as ‘Bash’. Nash had developed a soul-winning methodology of camps for boys combined with intense mentoring beginning in 1930. He felt called by God to ruthlessly target those boys who would go on to become powerful in society. In 1940, the location of the camps moved to Clayesmore school at Iwerne Minster. The list of young men who attended the camps reads like an A to Z of Conservative Evangelicalism, says Andrew Graystone: David Watson, John Stott, Nicky Gumbell and Justin Welby are among the many who were involved at some time in the Iwerne culture and were to a greater or lesser degree affected by it. In 1968 Nash handed over responsibility for the Iwerne camps to the Hon David Fletcher, a priest alongside his brother Jonathan Fletcher, another prominent conservative evangelical who had also attended the camps. Allegations of spiritual abuse were later levelled against Jonathan when he was vicar at Emmanuel Church, Wimbledon.
Eric Nash first met John Smyth in 1964 and recruited him as a Iwerne officer. In June 1975 Nash made Smyth chair of the Iwerne Trust. As Graystone describes in Bleeding for Jesus, Smyth developed an extreme version of the Iwerne culture. He had become involved with the Christian Forum at Winchester school, was obsessed with masturbation, formed close, dependent friendships with boys, and developed a system of beating boys with a plimsoll or cane, naked, as a punishment to purge them of their sins. The details are horrendous.
Substitutionary atonement
The salvation of individual souls was the first and only priority for every leader at the Iwerne camps, achieved through a philosophy of wholehearted, sacrificial, masculine Christianity. The focus of the camps was the evening Bible talk. The boys were taught that young Christians must be 100 per cent committed to Jesus. Anyone who wasn’t would go to hell. Over time, Smyth developed the idea that it wasn’t enough to repent of your sins; they needed to be paid for by beatings, beatings that drew blood. Parsons, in his 1990 book ‘Ungodly Fear’, describes:
“The tendency of generations of Protestant teachers to read into the New Testament a doctrine of [substitutionary] atonement in terms of a wrathful Old Testament God requiring in some way the hideously cruel death of Jesus. . . there are large numbers of Christians today who have a picture in their minds of God’s fatherhood involving violence against his child.”
The abuse perpetrated by Peter Ball, John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher and more recently Mike Pilavachi of Soul Survivor Watford is a manifestation of the distorted, unhealthy, prolific, sometimes violent and abusive suppressed homosexual desire related to the powerful influence of the conservative evangelical culture’s supposedly ‘biblical’ teaching on the atonement. This resulted in a sort of nostalgic infantilism that helped manage the insecurity, emotional and sexual immaturity and abuse of their public school experiences. Attempts to deal with the powerful internal conflicts set up between this false biblical teaching and strongly suppressed internal desires resulted for some in a masochistic complex leading to the physical abuse of boys and children. This was manifested in the extreme by Smyth and in a less aggressive way by Ball, Fletcher and Pilavachi. None of them were able to come to terms with their natural emotional and sexual desire for contact and intimacy with other men.
The misuse and misinterpretation of Scripture
The Makin Review shows how John Smyth was able to radicalise his victims by his misinterpretation and misuse of the Scriptures. He taught, preached, and exploited children and young people by applying a false theology, based on selected Scriptures taken out of context. He misused the writings and views of various conservative theologians, primarily from the United States. He contended that the way to Christ was through suffering, and he offered a “programme” which included ensuring that suffering was a route to the atonement of sins. This false thinking and perverted approach was known to the people around him and could have been challenged for what it was. The Review’s conclusion is that he was a skilled and determined narcissist, who derived pleasure from the sufferings of others. Makin says it is the responsibility of leaders in the Church and wider bodies and organisations to be able to identify such false and dangerous theologies and to make sure that they are not allowed to develop.
Scapegoating homosexuals
Homosexual men become the target of these public school educated men living in deeply conflicted neurotic denial of their own homosexual desires. Their incorrectly identified taboo feelings for other men become projected onto ‘those homosexuals’ who are disobeying God and undermining the teaching of the Church. No wonder there is such an ‘incredibly powerful antipathy towards homosexuals from part of the evangelical world’ as Parsons notes in Ungodly Fear. He suggests there is present in the conservative evangelical world a paranoid fear of homosexuality amongst people who believe that this behaviour is dangerously subversive.
One outcome of this paranoid fear is demonstrated in research published by the Oasis Foundation in 2018:
“the attitudes and pastoral practices of the Church and local churches are significantly contributing to a narrative that is causing serious emotional and physical harm to LGBTQIA+ people.”
Bishops’ attempts to suppress homosexuals
The January 2017 House of Bishops document Marriage and Same Sex Relationships after the Shared Conversations urged the establishment of a fresh tone and culture, recognising how difficult this will be because the Church encompasses people holding sharply differing moral judgments. Later in the document the bishops state:
“there are good grounds in law for holding the clergy to an exemplary standard of behaviour consistent with the Church of England’s doctrine . . . clergy who are same-sex oriented or are in a relationship with a person of the same sex may be questioned about the nature of their relationships, with the explicit expectation that they be celibate.”
The House of Bishops proposals were rejected by Synod. The bishops tried again in January 2020 with new pastoral guidance stating that sex in gay or straight civil partnerships ‘falls short of God’s purpose for human beings.’ Marriage remains the proper context for sexual activity.
The toxic anti-gay culture of the conservative evangelical substitutionary-atonement-addicted physical and emotionally abusive practice has continued to block the snails-pace movement towards removing barriers to the full and equal inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people in the Church of England. Judith Maltby and Helen King who watched the Living in Love and Faith process develop and participated in its early years concluded that there is no evidence of the bishops learning from the experience.
‘We’re no longer convinced that the House and College of Bishops are capable of breaking the repeated, destructive pattern of behaviour.’
Time to radically change attitudes
The toxic culture of prejudice and abuse advocated by conservative evangelicals is not going to be overcome until the Church of England Synod and in particular the House of Bishops and the Archbishops’ Council are shaken into a radically changed attitude in their understanding, teaching, practice, liturgy, doctrine and corporate life. The Makin review requires those responsible for this toxic state of affairs to be held to account.
A key finding of the Makin Review was that John Smyth was an appalling abuser of children and young men. His abuse was prolific, brutal and horrific. His victims were subjected to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks. Makin said the impact of that abuse is impossible to overstate and has permanently marked the lives of his victims. To end this systemic abuse Makin recommends that oversight of the implementation of safeguarding measures should be introduced, including the development of a wholly independent body, free from direct influence by senior Church officers, to guide the development of the Church's safeguarding procedures.
In my next blog, I’ll explore what is for me the even more essential question, untouched by Makin or LLF – what kind of God do we believe in?
Reading List
2000 Parsons, Stephen. Ungodly Fear: Fundamentalist Christianity and the Abuse of Power. Lion Books
2019 Ed. Fife, Janet and Gilo. Letters to a Broken Church. Ekklesia
2019 Harper, Rosie and Wilson, Alan. To Heal and Not to Hurt: A fresh approach to safeguarding in the Church. Darton, Longman and Todd
2021 Gardner, Fiona. Sex, Power, Control: Responding to Abuse in the Institutional Church. The Lutterworth Press
2021 Graystone, Andrew. Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of Iwerne camps. Darton, Longman and Todd
2023 Thatcher, Adrian. Vile Bodies: The Body in Christian Teaching, Faith and Practice. SCM Press