ViaMedia

Category: Sexual Abuse

  • Lesbians, Sex and the Church of England

    by Jayne Ozanne, Editor of ViaMedia.News, Director of the Ozanne Foundation and Member of General Synod

    I could see that the bishop was going red, and as he did so nervous giggles spread across the Synod Chamber.  I stood, pan faced, at the speakers’ microphone and said: “I’m deadly serious, bishop.”

    The Church of England’s Synod Question Time is supposedly an opportunity for General Synod members to raise questions of the various Chairs of the Church of England’s Boards and Councils and is one of the few mechanisms available for us to try and hold these senior leaders to account.

    It was February 2017 and I had just asked the Chair of the House of Bishops, or more precisely the bishop tasked with overseeing the Church’s work on sexuality and gender identity matters, the following:

    “Bishop, given we understand that the Anglican Communion might break over “it”, that the Church of England faces a split over “it” and I cannot get ordained because of “it”, what actually is “it” for a lesbian like myself?”

    Of course, I didn’t get an answer.

    You see, we don’t tend to really think about lesbian sex within the Church of England, dare I say we don’t really tend to think about lesbians at all!  Most of the focus has, I’m sorry to say, been on the supposed sex acts between our gay brothers in Christ.  That is undoubtedly because both Old and New Testament have a few lines of text about certain sex acts, which sadly are normally taken completely out of context and are frequently mistranslated.  Sparing the fact that anal sex is far more prevalent amongst heterosexuals than homosexuals, what the Bible is clear about is that there is absolutely nothing that focuses specifically on the whether the love between two people of the same sex is right or wrong – that is, unless you think of that between David and Jonathan.

    Today is Lesbian Day of Visibility, and I believe it is right and indeed necessary to stop and think about the plight of lesbians within faith communities, and sadly what so many have had to endure through the ages.

    Lesbianism is not a new thing – it has just been far more covered up, due to cultural taboos and the dominance of patriarchal power structures that have subjugated women throughout the ages and kept them “in their place”, or worse, just out of sight.

    In some ways I think many have, like Queen Victoria, just not considered the fact that women might be attracted to each other.  Men may have been far more aware, not least I fear to say because of the prolific amount of online porn (evidently, many men find it more satisfying to see two women together than to watch another man having sex).

    Be that as it may, faith communities have not, it seems, really thought through their stance on lesbianism.  It is just “tucked on” to their position on all LGBT+ people, mostly informed by their position on gay men – the “L” is just another letter in the LGBTQI alphabet.

    So, what is “it”?

    In trying to force this question in Synod, I admit that I was trying to get the Church of England to see how utterly futile and meaningless their internal discussions actually are about sexuality.  Can we really boil down the whole of the future of the Anglican Communion to how two people choose to express their love for each other?  If that really is the case, then I would argue that what we should be focusing on is the actual love between two people – the fact that they have deep feelings for each other and have decided that they have found a life mate who they want to commit to, cherish and honour.

    For centuries, lesbians have had a stark choice.  For most, they could either stay as spinsters (the archetypal “maiden aunts”) tasked with either looking after aged parents or (if they were lucky) hiding behind the fact that they dared to have their own career; or they could enter into heterosexual marriages and just “put up” with it.  This happened and still happens at great cost. The “just putting up with it” has sadly led to years of marital rape, or worse, forced rape – and sadly has led to some taking the only way out they know, that of tragically taking their own lives.

    Many churches still teach that that is “the best way forward”, with many advocating that LGBT+ people should enter into mixed-marriages, little thinking of the significant harm this does – to both parties.  On the one side you have someone who is having to endure a sexual act that they do not desire, the other because they are not experiencing the sexual desire that they deserve.

    It is a pitiful state of affairs, but all too common – trapping both parties in a misery of hell.

    Moreover, worse stories are now coming to light – particularly, sadly, within the minority ethnic religions.  Here a lesbian’s plight is far more dangerous – with an untold number being subjected to “corrective rape”, often by family members, in order to try and “make” them straight.  Few, understandably, will ever speak out about this for fear or shame.  Even fewer will try to seek justice – they have been traumatised enough already, and they are all too aware of the state’s appalling record of getting any convictions.

    So, what should we do?

    Well one of the critical things, I believe, is for more lesbian women to become far more visible and to speak out about their experiences.  That is why I am so keen to support #LesbianVisibilityWeek.  We need to find new ways of profiling good role models, who can challenge stereotypes and show that we, women who are attracted to women, exist everywhere – in all cultures, age groups, social structures and backgrounds.  We are a force to be reckoned with and we will not be silenced.

    As for defining what is “it”…

    …well, I shall await an answer from the House of Bishops on that.  For, as I said, so much seemingly seems to rest upon it – even the future of the Church of England!

  • Is God Inhuman?

    by the Very Revd Dr David Ison, Dean of St Paul’s and Vice Chair of the Ozanne Foundation


    I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s book The Body. It’s a fascinating read about the wonders of the human body and how much of it – of us – is incredibly complex and still little understood. But in Chapter 11 he refers to things medical science learnt about the body through experiments carried out during the second world war by Nazis in concentration camps and by occupying Japanese forces in a huge experimental facility in China. He doesn’t dwell on them, but they were horrifying in their cruelty. Some experiments were supposedly to help soldiers wounded in battle, but others were to satisfy doctors’ curiosity by doing things unspeakably unethical just because they could. And although many Nazis were brought to justice for their cruelty, the director of the research centre in China was debriefed by the Americans to get his medical knowledge and then allowed to return to normal life, while the existence of the Japanese facility was hidden for forty years.

    The Uighurs and Rohingya. Political and religious terrorism. Black Lives Matter. Child poverty and homelessness. Violence and discrimination against women, LGBTI and disabled people. Cruelty continues, and those with power who do it will find ways to justify the unjustifiable. We even do it in the Church – not only with repeated safeguarding failures, but by being complicit with society at large in structural discrimination against black people and poor people and women and LGBTI people. The Church goes further now than society does in maintaining exemptions from discrimination against women and gay people, and we justify it in the name of what is acceptable to God – which makes the Church and its God appear inhuman to many.

    What is ‘humane’? What is ‘inhuman’? After all, it’s human beings who act ‘inhumanly’ some of the time. Being cruel and discriminatory is something which every single human being is capable of. That’s you and me both. Which of us is without sin and can say that we have never acted in a way intended to be hurtful? Who has never done something which another person experienced as cruel and unkind?

    A healthy human body is a dynamic balance of many different systems and needs, where too much or not enough salt or other nutrients can be fatal. Like our body, our humanity is a balancing act, full of difficult compromises to enable life to happen at all, more or less good or evil. Being human means we are capable of being, not either good or bad, but both good and bad, both humane and inhuman. And yet we define acting ‘with humanity’ as being solely good: as the Oxford Dictionary puts it, being human or humane is having ‘attributes or behaviour proper or befitting to a man.’

    Why do we do think that being good and kind is ‘proper’ and ‘befitting’ human behaviour, when experience is that human behaviour includes so much that we want to reject as ‘inhuman’? Discrimination, violence, misogyny, racism and slavery come from dehumanising those who are ‘different’, excluding them from being our fully human neighbour, treating them as ‘other’ or as evil or to be eradicated like germs from the social body, acting as we do so out of the evil that has not been eradicated in us. (See the useful reflections by John Root around racism and binary thinking).

    The view that ‘acting with humanity’ or being ‘humane’ describes only the morally good aspects of human behaviour is not derived from the reality of the world around us. It is in the person of Jesus Christ that Christians believe humanity in its fulness is fully realised: the human being without sin, the Son of God who shows us what is ‘proper’ and ‘befitting’ to a human being, without hatred or cruelty or exclusion, bringing us together into the love of God in our redeemed humanity.

    It is no coincidence that the goodness of humanity is defined by the one who takes on himself our sin for our salvation. Repenting of our sins, cruelties and lack of love, and inviting Christ to dwell in our hearts in love to transform us, frees us to acknowledge both past and present evil in us; it enables us to become more humane, by letting go of the inhumanity of believing that we are good and others are bad.

    The case of Jonathan Fletcher is yet a further example of how avowedly orthodox faith can inculcate an atmosphere of fear and repression in which our humanity in Christ is denied and abused, and God is modelled in ways which are more inhuman than humane.

    It’s crucial to Christian faith that God is the God we see in Jesus: that God is humane, human, abounding in steadfast love. God is not the inhuman deity who many have experienced through the Church, and of which we must repent. Any Church or Christian disciple making either God or other people become less rather than more human and humane needs to repent and change.

    My former colleague Canon Mark Oakley often asks: ‘What do people become in my presence?’ More human, or less? And we might add, ‘What do people become in the presence of the God I worship?’

    Through your church and through encounter with you, do people and their God become more or less human?

  • International Women’s Day – Choose to Challenge

    by the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester

    In 2019, on a visit to the Holy Land I visited the church in Magdala and found myself faced with an enormous and extraordinary modern painting by Daniel Cariola depicting larger-than-life sandaled feet which are those of Jesus Christ and those around him. There is also the hand of a woman stretched out so that it is just touching the hem of Jesus’ robes, and at the point of connection there is a vibrant, almost electric, circle of light. As I recall that picture now, it is not only deeply poignant as we live a time when close proximity and touch are things many people long for, but it also seems pertinent this week as we mark International Women’s Day (IWD) with the theme ‘Choose to Challenge’.

    We have had a bucketful of challenges over this past year and little of it has been of our choosing. Yet I am also aware that even when there is not a viral pandemic, for many people across our world there is continual and overwhelming challenge, not least for many girls and women. Not much of their challenge is chosen, good or life-giving – unlike the sort of challenge which is the focus of IWD.

    The hand in the Cariola painting is that of the woman who had been suffering for 12 years from a continuous flow of blood.  She knew much about isolation, trauma, and loss, not due to a viral pandemic but due to her gynaecological condition. I suspect her mental health was affected as well as her physical health.

    As the woman touches Jesus, he feels power go out of him and he voices a challenge, ‘who touched me?’. The question would have sounded absurd to Christ’s disciples given they were being jostled by a crowd, but it could also be heard as critical and disapproving. Yet I wonder if it was more about ‘choosing to challenge’ in order to make this woman visible, such that the ‘who’ in his question was inviting the woman to be revealed as someone with a unique identity and story. Here is a woman who has been hidden, rendered irrelevant and even stigmatised, and now she is about to be deeply noticed as a significant and loved individual.

    The gospel writers, as is so often the case where women are concerned, refer to her simply as a woman (unlike the men named by Mark and Luke in their chapters recounting this incident). We will never know if Jesus actually used her name in the moments of their encounter, but he does call her ‘daughter’, reflecting value and intimacy in relationship.

    It is this challenge to notice and recognise that the Church is called to join in with wherever people are hidden, stigmatised, labelled, or condemned as ‘other’, not only as we live a viral pandemic but as we emerge from it and shape the future we want to see.

    Yet there is another challenge in that circle of light, and it is that of the woman herself. Amid her desperation, isolation, and pain, she shows great courage in acknowledging her need and taking a decision to reach out.

    In my recent book ‘Encounters’ (which has Cariola’s painting on the cover), I reflect on this gospel story in the context of women in prison. It is not easy for those women to reach out for help, yet rehabilitation and restoration are not possible until that moment comes.  Indeed, it requires a woman’s story to be heard and her trauma to be recognised.

    This week as the Domestic Abuse Bill reaches Report Stage in the House of Lords many of our proposed amendments and challenges to the government are endeavouring to recognise the people who are powerless to challenge and remain hidden, most of whom are women, but not exclusively so.

    I am acutely aware that whenever one speaks out specifically for women and girls there is nearly always a backlash from people who want to critically point out that boys and men should not be left out. I agree. Yet, I also want to say that sometimes we need to shine a light more strongly in particular areas to change a pervasive culture which has been perpetuated down the centuries. And working for that kingdom-of-God-shaped shalom means sometimes unashamedly choosing to shine the spotlight on women in order to bring challenge so that their potential and equality can be recognised and fanned into flame.

    It is all part of the bigger picture in which we need to choose to challenge injustice, inequality, and discrimination, not least when it comes to disability, sexuality, background and colour.  At the same time,  we must never forget of course that the category ‘women and girls’ is of a different shape –  as all of those other listed categories of ‘difference’ include women, girls, men, and boys.

    As we mark IWD this year I hope that we might all be challenged about how we challenge to make visible those who are hidden in the crowd of our communities and further afield, and how we do so in a way which enables those unique individuals to recognise their own worth and needs such that they can dare to challenge the narrative they have of themselves.

    And today it is about women.

     

  • Independence & Safeguarding: Marking Our Own Homework?

    by Prof Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University and member of Living in Love and Faith project

    The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) issued its final report on the Church of England last autumn. Now, the heat is on, because the deadline for the church’s response to the various recommendations is 22 March.

    That explains a lot. It explains why the document on Independent Safeguarding Structures for the Church of England presented to General Synod last Saturday was only sent out two days before the meeting. It also explains why it has so many typos: I’m all in favour of getting on with sorting out the safeguarding mess, but typos don’t give me much confidence. This document was clearly completed in a rush. The House of Bishops and the Archbishops’ Council each had just one week in which to suggest changes. One revealing typo features in a section about how ‘club mentality’ is “exacerbated in an institution where ordination conveys authority which can leads to a culture of clericalism in which challenging the authority of the ordained becomes a kind of spiritual offence”. “Can leads to”? I’m guessing that this started out as “leads to” but someone didn’t like the suggestion that clericalism is an inevitable part of ordination and wanted to add that “can”.

    It’s a good point about how we weaponize the spiritual, but was it right to make that change? Fiona Gardner’s Sex, Power, Control: Responding to Abuse in the Institutional Church (2021) notes how difficult it is to challenge the authority of the ordained. In 2005, while Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser for Bath and Wells, she was shut out by the diocesan hierarchy as it closed ranks to protect itself when the abuse carried out by Rev. David Smith became known. In her words, she was “seen as peripheral (not ordained and female and not, as it turned out, ‘in the know’ about what had been going on)”. Smith’s crimes finally came to public attention in 2007.

    That point about how the hierarchy failed to see someone who was “not ordained” as a peer and a professional is revealing; even more, the combination of being “not ordained” and female. Independent Safeguarding Structures includes a point made by the survivors who worked on the current proposals; namely, that clergy training needs more on “the causes and nature of abuse”. For more on that, again, see Gardner, who uses her psychoanalytical experience to think about how the culture of deference – clericalism – protects abusers. She quotes David Runcorn on the role of boarding school values in shaping abusers: “devotion to the team” but also “distrust of women, suppression of emotion, assumptions of patriarchal and hierarchical social ordering, mocking of any feminine trait in men and minimal empathy for the weak and ordinary”. Can the Church of England name and reject these values?

    I was reminded of boarding school culture again when listening to the presentation on Independent Safeguarding Structures made to General Synod. We were told several times that the aim of a new Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) is to avoid the church “marking its own homework”. The phrase was used by Richard Scorer, representing 21 people abused within the Anglican Church, at the end of his submission on the first day of the public hearings at IICSA, 5 March 2018. It has since featured in media headlines about the Peter Ball abuse case, and after the Dean of Lincoln Cathedral had failed to report a disclosure made to her. It has also appeared in headlines around the inquiry into historic child sex abuse in Scottish football.

    But marking your own homework – self-assessment – is a recognised part of teaching at all levels: here is a 2017 document from Trinity College Dublin. And it can be a very good idea. Assessment has traditionally been something from which students are excluded, so that self-assessment changes the dynamics of power as the teacher becomes a facilitator rather than the mysterious source of grades which determine your future. When I’ve used self-assessment as an educator, I’ve found that students are often harsher when marking themselves; they are more aware of the shortcomings of their own work. Self-assessment helps students to understand how they learn. But – and it’s an important ‘but’ – it requires humility and honesty, and those have been qualities in short supply as the Church of England has covered up abuse.

    Independent Safeguarding Structures is certainly an improvement on the usual unconvincing claims that ‘The church has come a long way…’ or ‘That was the past and it’s all fine now’. In Bishop Jonathan Gibbs’ presentation to Saturday’s Synod, he talked about “things we are not doing well now”. Wording like “Given the church’s past failings and present weaknesses in safeguarding…” is far more realistic. Other good things include the acknowledgement of inconsistency between dioceses on safeguarding arrangements; that it is the “internal cultures of the Church of England which too often have resulted in preventing best practice”; the involvement of survivors and the intention to involve them even more as Phase 2 develops; the realisation that it is at the very least problematic to expect someone to trust the institution through which their abuse took place to provide a fair investigation into what happened to them.

    Bishop Jonathan said that the aim of independent safeguarding is to rebuild trust. It’s clear from the document that they are expecting people to be suspicious; even needing to say how important it is to “demonstrate that the appointment process is not being manipulated in favour of ‘safe’ candidates” shows the basic lack of trust that has resulted from this long and sorry history of failing to deal with abuse, as does the wording that this is a search for “a structure which the church may put in place, but which it cannot frustrate”.

    Will this document be enough to satisfy IICSA? It isn’t clear to me whether the aim of Phase 1 of Independent Safeguarding Structures – an Independent Safeguarding Board – is quite what IICSA had in mind. IICSA specifically asked for Diocesan Safeguarding Officers to be able to make decisions independently of the bishop; the present document envisages them instead appealing to the ISB if “difficulties arise within the diocese which compromise their effectiveness”.

    Even if it is enough, we can’t abdicate all responsibility to an independent body. In some ways, we are still going to need to mark our own homework. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it requires not just honesty, but self-knowledge. Marking our own homework can be part of our reflection on how we are doing. Every one of us needs to be aware of our role in preventing abuse. Renaming safeguarding ‘training’ as safeguarding ‘learning’ – something else mentioned on Saturday – isn’t enough.

    As for those who have already suffered at the hands of church abusers, listening, repentance and redress must be prioritized.

  • LLF: The Cost of Careless Talk and Needless Silence

    by Savitri Hensman, community worker, author of “Sexuality, Struggle and Saintliness” and LGBTI+ equality activist

    The damage often done to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI+) people in the Church of England has been much discussed lately. At the same time there has been serious concern about failings in safeguarding as well as ongoing racism, despite numerous promises from senior church leaders to do better. Some people have been trying to understand what keeps going wrong across a range of issues where power and status are involved.

    There is much that is good, especially at local level. Congregations and clergy are often caring, worship can be profound and moving, thinking and witness impressive, including service to some of the poorest amidst the pressures of the pandemic. But there is a strong element of chance about whether someone who is part of this church will be nurtured or harmed.  It is a little like wandering through an often beautiful landscape with crumbling tunnels underneath which cause the occasional cave-in. It is only by recognising the underlying weaknesses that the structures can be made safer.

    Recent media coverage has largely focused on controversy over certain study materials that were launched in November 2020 to encourage conversation on sexuality and gender identity, entitled Living in Love and Faith (LLF). This was followed by a pushback by those most opposed to greater equality, including several bishops, which made dialogue that much more difficult. The weak response of the vast majority of all other bishops deepened the sense of alienation felt amongst many affirming Christians.

    Yet for me, the most disturbing recent reminder of the grave cost of the official line on sexuality and gender identity came in answers to questions at General Synod, on a preventable tragedy in Maids Moreton. What happened there was indeed exceptional, but the response is revealing about harm routinely done to LGBTI+ people. This has been made worse by the depth of denial among leaders, which also undermines the Church’s mission in various ways. But to make sense of what happened in that Buckinghamshire village, the broad context is perhaps needed first.

    Making choices and passing on the costs

    Numerous theologians have been making the case for affirmation for many years. In fact, it is now over half a century since the Church of England began its formal study of LGBTI issues. Today, whilst only a small minority of Anglicans in the UK now believe that same-sex sexual intimacy is always wrong, the institutional Church seems largely focused on not displeasing this faction too much. Indeed, it often refused to accept inclusive recommendations by its own working parties and downplayed the strength of the case for change. This made it easier for anti-affirmation campaigners to promote the hollow claim that ‘Bible-believing’ Christians necessarily agree with them and so fend off greater equality.

    This was the backdrop to the grim events in Maids Moreton and nearby Stowe, described in an independent safeguarding review by Adi Cooper for Oxford diocese. Peter Farquhar was an active member of a theologically conservative parish church, sharing those beliefs. “He was a homosexual and celibacy was his way of reconciling his beliefs and sexuality”, but when he retired, despite a network of friends and family, he was deeply lonely. Sensing his need for emotional intimacy, a ruthless young man, Ben Field, pretended to love him.  He wrote that this had “given me happiness that I have long since never expected to enjoy”. But Field defrauded and poisoned him, then moved on to his next victim, Anne Moore-Martin, before being arrested.

    In one of the questions at Synod, Canon Rosie Harper quoted the review: “’The policies of the Church of England regarding homosexual practice and the approach to sexuality and relationships continues to put people at risk because it forces people to hide, lie and become vulnerable to exploitation, as was PF’ and asked what steps will the LLF implementation group take to ensure that Dr Cooper’s concerns about both praxis and theology are comprehensively addressed?”

    The Bishop of London replied on behalf of the Chair of the House of Bishops, stating that LLF resources “emphasise unequivocally that every person is equally loved by God and made in the image of God”, leading to “welcome, love and care” and an unprecedented openness “which will help to break the perceived need to hide, lie and so become vulnerable to exploitation.”

    Prejudiced insensitivity and unkindness should indeed be discouraged. But the reply sidestepped the main issue: a theology which ruled out love like that which Peter Farquhar’s heterosexual neighbours might enjoy. The review indicated that he was respected and welcomed by his fellow-worshippers, who tacitly also knew him to be gay. Would he really have wished to open himself up to their disapproval and guilt, however caringly expressed?

    Perhaps, as someone who grew up in a deeply hostile era when sex between men was criminalisedand who had internalised the message that acting on his sexuality was sinful, nothing done in the present would have prevented his victimisation by Ben Field. Moreover freedom of speech and belief mean that views that are potentially harmful cannot always be prevented without an overreach of state power which could be even more damaging. Anyway, penalising non-affirming opinions might have marginalised him yet more, since he was ‘conservative’ himself. But if the institutional Church had stopped pretending that suffering caused by inequality can be solved with “niceness” and instead embraced an affirmative stance (while allowing space for theological diversity), maybe he would have survived. So might many others whose mental or physical health  has been eroded by ongoing discrimination.

    Of course, some LGBTI+ Church members are in affirming congregations. Others feel called to celibacy or have adapted to the constraints of a non-affirming stance. But not all can do so without considerable damage, just as some over-75s can safely run marathons but not all can! Yes, following Christ does mean taking up the Cross, even if this ends in pain or death. But this is not about heaping more burdens on the oppressed, rather the opposite: Jesus becomes a target because he champions those marginalised by the powerful and pious (Mark 3.1-6).

    Undermining witness

    While LGBTI+ people continue to pay a high price for Church leaders’ choices, the failure on this issue points to wider institutional weaknesses which leave others damaged or disadvantaged.  It also harms our mission.

    In particular, official statements often reflect a theological perspective in which justice is not recognised as a practical expression of love, though this is a key biblical theme (taken up also by the early Church).

    Showing love is not just about being kind and supportive but also taking action where some have been deprived of or refused, without adequate cause, what others can rightly take for granted (James 2.14-16, 5.1-4)  This Church failure to recognise the need to challenge misuse of power and privilege helps to explain why survivors of abuse and those facing racism, sexism, disability and class oppression have been repeatedly failed. This unwillingness to confront injustice also gets in the way of sharing the good news (Luke 4.16-19).

    Change is needed, now.

  • LLF – Power, Fear & Our Inability To Do The Right Thing

    by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham, Member of General Synod and Trustee of the Ozanne Foundation

    Barak Obama has written the first volume of his memoirs.  In a fascinating interview about A Promised Land he speaks to David Olusoga about America and how change and progress happen. In many ways it is a very hopeful story. He identifies some central fault lines in the country’s history: slavery, treatment of Native Americans, internment of Japanese POW’s after W2 and he names them as their Original Sins. Then he tracks the progress and why he feels hope.

    There is a long list including the Abolitionists, Suffragettes, the Union Movement, LGBTQ activists. As each step forward is taken there remain people who sincerely believe in slavery, patriarchy etc……but……once the country had decided what is right they are disempowered. In other words it is not possible to change everyone’s mind, but it is possible to do what is right.

    Interestingly a change in America’s gun laws is not yet on that list. Why? Because of power. The gun lobby wields so much power that even the good guys like Obama were not able to do what is to clearly right.

    Reading Living in Love and Faith (LLF) made me realise that LGBTQ reform in the Church of England is our “Gun Law” point. Slowly, inch by inch we have progressed. There is still huge racism in the Church, but we name it and admit that it is wrong. Women are not remotely equal. There was for example not a single female clergy candidate for the election to Archbishops’ Council last week. The rules however have changed and the wrong has been named.

    What is stopping us from doing the right thing with regards to LGBTQ people?

    We don’t do it because – like with the gun lobby – we are afraid. Afraid of the power that some at the far right extreme purport to wield. But is it true?  Do they really have so much power that we continue to collude with institutional homophobia because we are afraid?

    Undoubtedly even before Covid-19 the Church of England was facing an existential challenge. Numbers were plummeting, both attendance and income. The scariest statistics were in the collapse of young people’s engagement with “church”.

    Somehow the story we told ourselves was that the only place where there was any hope for growth was in the “HTB model churches”. This was a far easier sell as we got a new Archbishop who had been groomed in that world. Sorry if you don’t like the word “groomed”, but in a way it is compassionate. The avowed intent of the hierarchy of the top private school ‘Bash Camp’ world was to equip these boys for high office in the church and in the country.

    I can see how good it must feel – as if they have all the power. That easy manner. That self-deprecating, but entitled way of occupying centre stage. It must be true. They are the only hope of the survival of the Church of England. Even to suggest otherwise is to betray the church I love.

    But we urgently need to challenge this myth of power. In the area where I live the most catastrophic collapse in numbers and giving have been in churches that have lurched to the right.

    As LLF has now landed I suppose we need to respond, although part of me just wants to yawn and reference ‘Groundhog Day’. Here is my reply anyway:

    This is a valiant effort to try and keep the Church of England together. It makes a very deep mistake in its conception. A pink and fluffy middle ground is neither moral nor achievable . Dr Adi Cooper a senior national social worker and academic, has just published her Oxford Diocese commissioned report on the murder of Peter Farquhar.

    She said: ‘The policies of the Church of England regarding homosexual practice and the approach to sexuality and relationships continues to put people at risk because it forces people to hide, lie and become vulnerable to exploitation.’

    LLF is simply not an adequate response to this ongoing fault line in the Church. As with slavery or apartheid, so long supported by warped readings of the bible, we will have to reach a point where we see that these sincerely held theologies are profoundly wrong.

    We cannot hope to change the hearts and minds of people who think that being homophobic is their God given right. What we can do is be bold in naming it as shamefully wrong.

    In other words the time has come to do what is right.

    If we wait till we all agree that time will never come and meanwhile on a daily basis God’s children are being hurt, shamed, driven to the point of suicide and beyond. It is not sustainable to preach a God of love and allow this state of affairs to continue.

  • Collusion, Hypocrisy & the Greasy Pole to Success

    by Dr Charlie Bell, Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge and ordinand at St Augustine’s College of Theology

    For those with ears to hear, the past few weeks have highlighted a very clear theme in the abuse scandal in the Church of England, whether that be in the IICSA report or the Diocese of Oxford’s review into the murder of a gay churchwarden of a ‘conservative’ church: it’s almost a truism – to quote Oxford’s review, ‘while people continue to feel forced to hide or lie about their sexuality, they can become vulnerable to exploitation’.

    The topic has been covered in an excellent blog by Prof Helen King on this site, yet the silence from the Church of England’s authorities is deafening. The Bishop of Oxford may have said that this was a ‘clarion call for improvements to our work on LGBTI+ inclusivity’, yet where have the great statements of repentance been from the House of Bishops?

    Same-sex spouses continue to be excluded from the Lambeth Conference, and meanwhile there hasn’t been a peep of recognition from the wing of the Church that would align itself with these ‘traditional’ views, with the usual woe-is-me ‘bullying’ accusations made yet again and again against people who honour the humanity of LGBT people. 

    It really is time for this to change.

    The lying, silence, dissembling and wink-wink nudge-nudge way of ‘managing’ homosexuality in Church circles is not only embarrassing, but a grave sin. It moves the church into a place of hypocrisy and collusion, and it is one we are far too willing to tolerate.

    After writing my last blog, I was told by a priest that it was a virtue to ‘tolerate hypocrisy’. By no means is this true – and what is more this is fundamentally different to recognising and living with paradox and different theological positions.

    We live in a Church that thrives on hypocrisy – where ordinands are told not to ‘rock the boat’ by being ‘too vocal’ about being LGBT, and where clergy have ‘special friends’ or ‘lodgers’. This pressure to dishonesty thus forms the backdrop for being LGBT in the Church, and it is hardly a surprise that such a culture can be manipulated by those who are looking for vulnerabilities in the system. That an elderly gay man was abused and murdered is not a shock – it is the inevitable result of a culture of lies.

    Anyone who is young, gay and in the Church has lived this reality; I am quite sure that other LGBT people similarly face the consequences of this culture. All of us know of the inappropriate clergy, the unacceptable taking of liberties that are just the right side of ‘explainable’, and the abuse of power by those in authority. Not being straight makes this whole structure a lot more threatening – not only because of the threats of ‘disclosure’ that can be made against you, but also because there is a deeper underlying culture of ‘being gay in the Church’ that is deeply damaging, and is directly the result of the tyranny of silence and lies.

    This culture is like something from the 1950s, where never a word is spoken about ‘the love that dares not speak its name’, where gay clergy form elaborate pretences and where public intimacy is frowned on and sex commodified. LGBT people are thus made both victim and perpetrator, and the culture continues to level its destruction. This culture blurs the line between acceptable and unacceptable, producing and hiding perpetrators of abuse.

    Of course, some clergy, like many others in society, need a level of discretion in consideration of elderly relatives or similar, such is the history of homophobia in this country (aided and abetted by the Church of England) – this is not the issue. Clergy who are not in this position and yet still deny their partners, or describe them as ‘special friends’, are, however, colluding in the toxic Church culture – as are leaders telling LGBT people to hide, or to ‘be careful about’ their true selves. We even have senior theological educators who actively sponsor and head up organisations that recommend heterosexual marriage to ‘same sex attracted’ people’ – and we wonder why we have a problem?

    Yet here is the Catch 22 – those who are honest end up losing their licences or being thrown out, whilst those who hide and collude climb up the greasy pole of promotion. This is the very culture that the actions and words of our bishops and other leaders are perpetuating. Power, lies, fear and opacity are a heady cocktail – and it is high time the church took some responsibility for sponsoring this scandal.

    Yet there is a desperation not to deal with this issue – how often have we heard that speaking out, or even simply being honest, will ‘embarrass the bishop’ or ‘bring the institution into disrepute’? Bishops seem very willing to talk about this issue and urge change over lasagne, yet are far too often silent at the Lord’s Table. Yet their silence and collusion, and that of those who continue to promulgate this culture of hypocrisy, is not only wrong, but sinful – abuse, threats and dishonour continue apace.

    Perceived unity is not more important than keeping people safe and treating them as human beings. The word ‘traditional’ cannot be used to cover evil. Any senior cleric reading this might want to ask themselves – have I done enough? Indeed, have I colluded, and what am I going to do about it?

    In Poland this last weekend, LGBT people – yet again the target of vicious hatred, abuse and oppression by a populist state – protested outside church property and called for an end to the church. The Polish Roman Catholic hierarchy have taken the side of the oppressor, and colluded with the state. In the UK, the state is light years ahead, yet the Church of England continues to sponsor and collude in a culture of hypocrisy.

    The only reason people aren’t protesting outside our buildings is because they’ve stopped listening – we are an irrelevance. The secular world has grasped the nettle and respected the dignity of LGBT people.

    There have been enough reports – it’s about time we started to listen to them, because until we do that, we are stopping the people’s ears and participating in dishonour.

  • World Without End…?

    by the Bishop of Buckingham, Rt Revd Dr Alan Wilson

    On 13 August 2012 ministry took a new path for me. A journalist had alerted me to untoward goings on in Sussex. Young peoples’ lives had been damaged. The Church shied away from taking proper responsibility. Survivors felt they were being treated as an embarrassment, sidelined then blocked.

    As a result, my colleague Revd Rosie Harper and I were invited to meet some of the people concerned and listen to their stories. When all is said and done the Church is a pastoral organisation. It exists to bring the grace and truth of Christ to a generation within its care. This calling had been massively betrayed, and I felt ashamed of the Church I represent.  Things had to change.

    More and more people were getting in touch. Very often what they craved was someone to listen to their story and take it seriously. I realised that very often the most healing thing was truth about what had actually happened and, above all, honesty.

    One emerging common theme shocked us. Male or female, high or low, recent or not, every person we listened to told us things had got worse for them after they reported.

    In 2013 Pope Francis saw the Church as a field hospital. Imagine a field hospital in which all the wounded soldiers leave more shot up than they were when brought in. That couldn’t be entirely their fault.

    I was comforted in July 2013, though, by our new archbishop’s recognition of the problem. He apologised and seemed to understand the systemic dimension of our failings as he articulated for General Synod “a profound theological point. We are not doing all this – we are not seeking to say how devastatingly, appallingly, atrociously sorry we are for the great failures there have been, for our own sakes, for our own flourishing, for the protection of the Church. We are doing this because we are called to live in the justice of God and we will each answer to him for our failures in this area”.

    Time passed by. Budgets for training and advisers began to grow. I was encouraged.

    In 2015 our archbishop told us “We failed big time, we can do nothing other than confess our sin, repent and commit ourselves to being different in the years ahead.”

    Time passed by. A new project was in the air, collaboratively developed with survivors — “Safe Spaces”

    2017 seemed less hopeful. News broke of John Smyth’s sadistic abuse of teenage boys whose trust he had betrayed as he blighted their lives. But at any rate the Archbishop was still sorry. We were told he “apologises unequivocally and unreservedly to all survivors.”

    January 2018 saw preliminary hearings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse. Rightly, our Archbishop had lined up the Church for early examination, a brave and honourable act.

    And when the atrocious Chichester tale was revealed, giving substance to what we had heard on 13 August 2012, we were as sorry as he:

    “You can apologise and apologise to survivors, and I would want to put on record again — I don’t know how to express it adequately — how appalled I am and ashamed I am of the Church for what it did.”

    Time Passed by.

    More money was spent, training improved and Safe Spaces underwent a reboot and would soon start for real. That was the good story. We continued to hear not so good stories from survivors, all of whom wished they never had reported to Church authorities.

    We wrote a book, taking survivor experience seriously across a very broad spectrum of church abuse. We tried to understand the roots and cultural context of our failures, and proposed a fresh approach. It was mentioned by enough survivors for IICSA to call for material from it as evidence in 2019.

    When our archbishop read the latest IICSA report last week, he was still sorry not only for what had happened but for the Church’s failure to respond pastorally.  “We cannot and will not make excuses, and I must again offer my sincere apologies to those who have been abused.”

    After 8 years of sorry, then, from our Archbishop at least if not others, how do I feel about the post-IICSA future?

    I am encouraged to see that our new Archbishop of York whom I like and respect very much as a former close colleague, is sorry too. He said on national radio how shocked he was by the report. Rosie pointed out he’d known about what was in it for years.

    He replied personally “Shocked to read it again, Rosie. I suppose what I’m saying is I hope I’ll never stop being shocked and distressed until we have changed. I am in a position to really help make that change. I am determined to do so. And quickly.”

    I am sure he will be supported, as will survivors, by Rt Revd Jonathan Gibbs, the Church’s new safeguarding bishop. Not only in General synod, but in a really helpful Religion Media Centre IICSA report briefing with survivors and advocates, Jonathan clearly demonstrates fresh commitment to drive change at every level.

    Oh, and Safe Spaces actually started, albeit with a few learner driver’s kangaroo jumps, on 29 September 2020.

    I return to Archbishop Justin’s words in 2012. But… How long O Lord?

    Jesus said “If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”

    Martin Luther King said “It is always the right time to do the right thing.”

    Rosie and I have met many survivors, courageous and wise people, who have often tolerated years of being ignored, patronised, lied to and blamed. They feel they have been going round and round in circles for ever.

    After multiple forced apologies from a surprisingly small selection of bishops, a few training and cosmetic changes have happened at vast cost. Dr Josephine Stein reminds us this all dwarfs provision for survivors. Then somehow all the regret ends up back the too-difficult box…  until the next shameful revelation.

    As it was in 2012, is now…. and ever shall be? world without end? Really?

  • Why the Church of England Must ‘Connect the Dots’ – IICSA and LLF

    by Prof Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University and lay preacher in the Diocese of Oxford

    Life in 2020 has been very much about uncertainty. I’m not just thinking about the pandemic.

    In narrower Church of England terms, in 2020 we’ve waited for two very important documents to be released: last week, the IICSA final report on sexual abuse of children in the Anglican Church, and in early November Living in Love and Faith (LLF), delayed from spring 2020. This delay changes the original sequence of events. Now it’s October: IICSA, then November: LLF.

    What’s the connection?

    While a member of LLF, I was one of those who asked over and over again for IICSA to be taken into account in the documents being produced. Yet the last LLF draft I saw still gave the impression that the questions such abuse raises were not really LLF’s concern. Yet you’d think some sort of liaison would be useful between these two large and costly processes – costly in terms of both money and emotional pain.

    The extensive IICSA transcripts mentioned LLF twice on 1 July 2019, but only in passing. “The church has also been confronting issues concerning its teaching on human sexuality” said Nigel Giffin QC, representing the Archbishops’ Council. In his second witness statement to IICSA, the Archbishop of Canterbury had stated “I am informed by Mr Tilby that these [LLF] resources will be reviewed by the NST before they are finalised to ensure that they sufficiently address safeguarding related issues”.[1] I have no idea whether that review happened. Did anyone join the dots? The error in the IICSA final document, the claim that LLF – described as a “large scale teaching document around the subject of human sexuality” had been published in 2019 – suggests not.

    I think the two documents are more closely related than the failure of an internal Church process to join forces with IICSA would suggest, and that the links need to be better understood.

    In the Executive Summary of the IICSA final report, we read that: “Deference to the authority of the Church and to individual priests, taboos surrounding discussion of sexuality and an environment where alleged perpetrators were treated more supportively than victims presented barriers to disclosure that many victims could not overcome.”

    What were, or are, these ‘taboos’?

    Let’s go back to Fiona Scolding at the IICSA inquiry into Chichester Diocese, on 5 March 2018. She asked, “How far did the reaction of some within the church to homosexuality possibly inhibit the reporting of child sexual abuse?” DI Wayne Murdock, involved in the Peter Ball case, made it clear that “one of the factors that influenced his view of the public interest in bringing a prosecution was the risk that some church witnesses would be exposed as homosexuals in court. That would, in his words, have seen their roles within the church effectively finished.” As Murdock put it: “I believe that the issue of homosexuality had a detrimental effect in encouraging witnesses and potential complainants within the church to come forward” (IICSA, 23 July 2018).

    So homophobia within the church deterred the reporting of sexual abuse.

    When Fiona Scolding was interviewing the Bishop of Chichester, Rt Revd Dr Martin Warner, on 14 March 2018, she asked: “Do you not think that the Church’s difficulty in coming to terms with the complexity of self-identity when it comes to sexual orientation may have contributed to the misapprehensions you have identified because, you know, certainly amongst conservative individuals, homosexuality is seen as sinful?”

    He answered “Yes.” She then asked, “The idea of civil partnerships is seen as anathema and the idea of getting married within the church is anathema. Do you think the church may have, albeit unwittingly, contributed to that by its approach to sexual orientation in the past?” Bishop Warner replied: “I think there has been contribution from the church on this”. He went on to talk about how covering up homosexuality contributed to a culture in which sexual abuse was also kept secret.

    On 24 July 2018 Fiona Scolding, interviewing the former Archbishop, Lord Carey of Clifton, proposed that: “The church was so uncomfortable in dealing with and managing same-sex relationships that it didn’t really have an understanding of what was an appropriate same-sex relationship and what was an inappropriate same-sex relationship.”

    Finally, at the 11 July 2019 IICSA hearing, Archbishop Justin Welby was asked whether “there is sufficient openness about  human sexuality in the church now so that there is, and can be, proper debate and discussion with victims and survivors and proper work on minimising risk within the church?”

    He responded, “Yes. I think there is far more openness than there was. I think the Living in Love and Faith Project has enabled a culture of transparency in ways that didn’t exist before.”

    When I re-read that, I was taken aback. Openness? A culture of transparency? Really?

    I don’t get the impression that there’s any less fear now of being ‘exposed’ as gay. Rt Revd Nicholas Chamberlain, the Bishop of Grantham,[2] remains the only out, gay, partnered bishop. If people still think their roles within the church would be “effectively finished” if their sexuality were known, that shows that the church is still not a safe place.

    That has implications for safeguarding as well as for LGBTI+ people in all roles in the church. Despite the impression given in the key cases explored by IICSA, sexual abuse is certainly not only about men abusing boys: far more such abuse involves men and girls, or men taking advantage of their power to abuse women who know that nobody will believe them. The church’s history of secrecy, pretence and denial is one of the reasons why the terrible harm revealed by IICSA happened.

    We need to join up the IICSA evidence of why sexual abuse was not reported, and the opportunity LLF offers to understand how the church continues to fail those who are not ‘pale, male, stale’ – and straight.

    Refusing to acknowledge that, in the words of Stonewall, “Some people are gay. Get over it” has contributed to the shameful history of abuse in the Church of England.

    [1] Graham Tilby: former National Safeguarding Adviser. NST: National Safeguarding Team.

    [2] On the reactions to his coming out, I recommend Grace Davie and Caroline Starkey, ‘The Lincoln letters: a study in institutional change’, Ecclesial Practices, 9 (2019), 44-64.

  • Safeguarding, ‘Reabuse’ and LGBT People

    by the Revd Canon Simon Butler, Prolocutor of the Province of Canterbury and member of the Archbishops’ Council

    Last Tuesday was perhaps the most shameful day in the history of the Church of England for hundreds of years. Forensically, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) catalogued the personal and institutional generational failures which led to the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults by people in trusted positions in the Church. Whilst many say that the failure to address this issue over decades amounts to ‘reabuse’, some even saying that it is worse than the sexual offences once committed, none of us can escape the responsibility that this has taken place on our watch and that we have the duty to put it right. Some are even calling for a Truth and Reconciliation process like that of post-apartheid South Africa. It’s an idea worth exploring.

    I was struck therefore by a forceful response to what seemed to me to be sincere statement of sympathy for survivors and victims of sexual abuse by Bishop Sarah Mullally from one of her priests in the Diocese of London. Father Robert Thompson described Sarah’s words on Twitter as ‘virtue signalling vacuousness’, pointing out that he has raised 4 safeguarding concerns with the Diocese of London concerning the treatment of LGBTI+ church members in some evangelical and charismatic congregations and has not had a proper response to any one of them. Lest this should seem like special pleading from him (or me) for a particular group within the life of the Church of which we are part, we should note that the IICSA report makes specific what we have known for a long time: that our hypocrisy and dishonesty about sexuality has without doubt contributed to the culture in which sexual (and I would say) emotional and spiritual abuse has been allowed to exist.

    To be fair, however, we must not assume that being LGBTI+ in and of itself makes one a vulnerable adult in safeguarding terms. Still, for as long as I can remember I have had to listen to simply dreadful stories emerging from certain evangelical and charismatic churches, usually when a church member comes out or refuses to toe the line taken by ‘the leadership’ (which usually means the clergy). They find themselves silenced, removed from every ministry and leadership role, and generally treated like pariahs. The failure of many of these congregations to be able to discuss matters of sexuality or to live with diverse opinions has wreaked a dreadful emotional toll on many LGBTI+ church members and has contributed to what can only be described as a culture of fear, the subtle and overt withholding of love or placing conditions on it, and silencing of dissent. It is, by any stretch of the imagination, a form of abuse. 

    Some within the tradition have felt uncomfortable about this for a long time. David Runcorn, a long-standing and respected Evangelical theological educator and spiritual director, has attempted to provide an Evangelical theological narrative based on openness, generosity (including to those who take a conservative view) and pastoral care. His recently-published Love Means Love addresses these concerns with an eirenic spirit that is admirable and biblical, although as a straight man he cannot necessarily summon the sense of righteous anger that those of us who see the damaged lives that have resulted do. Other evangelicals within General Synod, effectively kicked out of the Evangelical Group in General Synod (EGGS) for simply wanting to explore a line similar to Runcorn’s, have coalesced into a new group in which a different, honest expression of dissent can be aired, within a caring atmosphere far different from the stifling atmosphere of EGGS which, over my twelve years as a member, became increasingly reminiscent of a Soviet-style party meeting. It gives me no pleasure to admit I often felt afraid. Father Thompson notes the way in which especially some large churches in this tradition use their financial clout to exert leverage over dioceses: do what we want, or else, is the message.

    The tragedy for the Church of England is that there is much within evangelical and charismatic traditions that the rest of the Church of England desperately needs. Missional zeal, social justice and deep personal faith were once the hallmarks of Evangelicalism, things that attracted me to Christian faith, even if these days I feel excluded from the evangelical tradition. Ever the optimist, I remain hopeful that the tradition most committed to the theological concepts of personal sin and repentance can see the beam in its own eye instead of projecting it onto its LGBTI+ members and their friends. Some of those most urging change in the Church’s traditional position are senior evangelical bishops who have come to see that for themselves.

    In the meantime, we await the publication of Living in Love and Faith. I am committed to the process, more perhaps than many sceptics among the LGBTI+ community in the Church. But even I want to sound a word of warning. As we engage with scripture, science, theology and much more in the months ahead, we must not forget that, within parts of the evangelical and charismatic wings of our church, brothers and sisters face emotional and spiritual abuse. Conservatives and hard-liners within these traditions will want to focus on the intellectual issues – many will immediately want to rebut anything that smacks of a chink in the wall. But we must hold them and the wider church to account for this often unacknowledged abuse that is being inflicted in the name of “truth” and “sound doctrine” – including persuading those like Bishop Sarah who are I think very sensitive to issues of abuse that this is unfinished safeguarding business. I urge her and other bishops to take seriously the sort of allegations and concerns that Father Thompson has raised. There are plenty more where they came from.

    We must not forget those who are most vulnerable to bad religion and who remain at risk of the ongoing abuse that has shamed the church so obviously in recent days, and continues to do so where so-called ‘truth’ silences love. As I said at Archbishops’ Council recently, any defence of the gospel or the church that sees that as more important than protecting the vulnerable will lead us back to the place we are being shamed into leaving hopefully once and for all. Ironically, the evidence of such abuse is the clearest example of why the theological position held by conservatives is biblically untenable. 

    By your fruits you shall know them.