THE Makin review of the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth and its cover-up requires not only repentance and lament, but additionally “culture-changing motion”, the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) said this week.
The review, which found that “powerful evangelical clergy” had covered up the abuse (motivated partly, it suggests, by a desire to “protect the broader popularity of Conservative Evangelicalism”) lists amongst those that knew of the abuse former leaders of lots of the powerhouses of the conservative Evangelical constituency in England. They include All Souls’, Langham Place; St Ebbe’s, Oxford; St Aldate’s, Oxford; and the Round Church (now St Andrew the Great), Cambridge.
On Tuesday, the diocese of Gloucester confirmed that permission to officiate (PTO) had been faraway from the Revd Hugh Palmer, a former Rector of All Souls’, while a safeguarding review was conducted. His PTO in London diocese has also been withdrawn. Mr Palmer told the Makin review that he didn’t know of the abuse until 2017, despite having visited in hospital a Smyth victim who attempted to take his own life in 1982.
Among the conclusions reached by Dr Elly Hanson, the clinical psychologist whose psychological evaluation of Smyth is appended to the review, is that “the beliefs and values of the Conservative Evangelical community through which John Smyth operated are critical to understanding how he manipulated his victims into it, the way it went on for thus long, and the way he evaded justice.”
On Tuesday, Ed Shaw, who co-chairs each the CEEC and its “cultures, power and abuse” workstream, said: “This is a time for continuing repentance and lament on the horrific abuse that was carried out by an Anglican evangelical, after which covered up by others.”
In 2021, the CEEC created the “In Lament” resources in response to 2 independent reviews of abuse in Evangelical churches, including Emmanuel Proprietary Chapel, Ridgway, in Wimbledon, led by the Revd Jonathan Fletcher (News, 3 December 2021). The workstream behind that is meeting this week to debate the contents and suggestions of each the Makin review and the Scolding review of the Pilavachi scandal (News, 4 October).
“In the mean time, [we] urge other groups including evangelicals to have interaction with each the Makin Review and our culture-review questions [part of “In Lament”] that seek to show our lament into culture-changing motion,” Mr Shaw said.
Dr Hanson’s evaluation includes the conclusion that Smyth’s “narcissistic strategies” were “highly successful inside the Conservative Evangelical community . . . and this was pivotal to him achieving his abuse and evading justice. This community was hierarchical and status-oriented.”
Within the Iwerne Trust, she writes, “particular individuals were seen as endowed with unique leadership qualities,” and a few, corresponding to Smyth, were “perceived as having the extra gift of spotting leaders in others”. There was “an explicit strategy of attempting to convert to it boys that were deemed of high rank . . . because such individuals were seen as having more potential to influence society. . . In this process, boys were arguably somewhat objectified, seen partly as instruments to realize higher ends (just as how narcissists approach others).”
She warns that the conservative Evangelical community’s “them and us” mentality (through which the bulk is “seen as a threat, motivated to undermine the community”) could also be “particularly vulnerable to the charms and combative leadership of a grandiose narcissist”. When a frontrunner is seen as chosen by God, she warns, “misgivings and concerns feel like a disloyalty to God . . . Furthermore, fears about lack of popularity are compounded by the priority that individuals will lose their faith and fewer might be drawn to it.”
The review itself concludes that Smyth was “capable of radicalise his victims, by utilizing his misinterpretation and misuse of the Scriptures. . . This false considering and perverted approach was known to the people around him and might have been challenged for what it was.”
It includes several quotes from victims recalling his use of the scriptures. One remembered him saying: “Let’s take a look at some verses from the Bible about how the Lord disciplines those he loves. You haven’t yet resisted sin to the purpose of shedding your blood, from the Letter to the Hebrews.”
Dr Hanson’s evaluation is that, “whether Smyth believed these ideas or not, they played their part in his abuse by supporting, legitimising and amplifying deeper driving forces.”
In total, she lists 17 “organisational and cultural aspects that will have assisted or contributed to John Smyth’s abuse”. While presenting them as “common” inside the conservative Evangelical community through which Smyth operated, she acknowledges that “many were (or are) also present in the broader Church and/or British society”.
Among the aspects are: an “authoritarian culture”; “obedience and loyalty highly valued”; “a deal with personal sinfulness, producing a default sense of guilt, defectiveness, submission and indebtedness to God”; “muscular Christianity”; “misogyny and patriarchy” (“potentially worthwhile perspectives from women were absent”); and “intrusive and intense one-to-one mentoring of boys and young men”.
The review considers how theology could have shaped the response of those that were aware of Smyth’s abuse. There was a belief, it says, that “God will provide you with a plan”, when it comes to tips on how to manage Smyth. “Critical decisions were made inside the context of deference to this theological belief, reasonably than to contemplate the actions of the abuser and responses to this, inside the law or policy and guidance in place on the time.”
The review features a letter from Sir Jamie Colman — who then chaired the Zambezi Trust (UK), which oversaw Smyth’s activities in Zimbabwe — offering reassurance that Smyth was now subject to a “pastoral arrangement” with an ordained minister, and citing scripture in defence of his not being “disqualified”.
Mr Makin also identifies “theological differences inside the Church” as vulnerable to exploitation by abusers, saying that Smyth “modified his allegiances” to the Charismatic wing of the Church after facing challenge within the Conservative Evangelical one.
In an ad clerum issued on Thursday of last week, the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Revd Rob Munro, said that it was “vital and urgent” to present “serious attention” to Mr Makin’s 27 recommendations, “with particular attention to lessons particular to the Ebbsfleet Network”. Some of the review’s findings, he said, “reinforce lessons already identified” within the aftermath of the report into Jonathan Fletcher”.
This had shown evidence of “how an abuser can exploit organisations that allow leadership to have unaccountable power and influence; that institutionalise an implied personal elitism or theological superiority, and which might be more concerned for organisational popularity than for people. Where those characteristics are observed, there may be an urgent need to handle those cultures, even at an episcopal level.”
He continued: “It can be vital, at a time when there may be a serious theological rift within the Church over sexual ethics, not to permit our biblical call to contend for the religion to be done in a way that amounts to our own version of unaccountable power, theological elitism or organisational group-think. Scripture should be our supreme authority.”
The ad clerum drew attention to the “Principles for commending ministry”, formulated in response to the Fletcher review and revised last yr. “We don’t consider that Conservative Evangelical churches are especially susceptible to the event of unhealthy cultures, but it is vital for all churches that their leaders are more fully aware of how their ministries are being received,” it says. “We have to be ‘all the time reforming’.”
A review of the culture on the Titus Trust (into which the activities of the Iwerne Trust were assumed in 2000), published in 2021, suggested that work remained to be done to handle various risk aspects (News, 10 December 2021). Identifying “very clear links” between the trust and the conservative Evangelical wing of the Church of England, it described a “symbiotic relationship, which to some extent reinforces the theology and cultural views on the camps, resulting in a greater risk of a narrowness of considering or a scarcity of diversity amongst its leaders”.
On Wednesday, the Church Society welcomed the Archbishop of Canterbury’s resignation because the “right response”. There were others named within the review who “bear some responsibility for the mishandling of the case and the continued suffering of Smyth’s victims” and who “must consider their very own responses”, the society’s statement said.
“Conservative evangelicalism is a far wider a part of the church than the elite, public school camps with which Smyth and Fletcher were associated. There are Church Society members and partner churches across all parts of the country, and across all social and cultural backgrounds. Many of the problems raised within the Makin Review pertain to the general public school, elitist world through which Smyth operated, reasonably than the evangelical theology he professed.”
In the wake of the report on Jonathan Fletcher, “culture changes” had begun across the conservative Evangelical networks, the statement said. “There is a transparent understanding that God doesn’t need us to ‘protect’ the gospel, or the expansion of the dominion. We have seen how reputations can crumble when cover-ups fall down and we all know that Christ’s light will expose sins committed in darkness. Safeguarding is taken extremely seriously and nobody is allowed to set themselves above it.”
Several of the individuals named within the Makin review have said that they weren’t aware of Smyth’s abuse — or the seriousness of it — until 2017. They include Canon Vaughan Roberts, who succeeded the Revd David Fletcher (identified within the Makin review as at the guts of the cover-up) as Rector of St Ebbe’s, Oxford. He was a trustee of the Titus Trust, and, in 1989, read the autobiography of his former head teacher at Winchester College, John Thorn, which referred to the physical punishment administered by Smyth.
A press release by the churchwardens of St Ebbe’s, which maintains that it was only in 2017 that Canon Roberts had “any awareness of the extent and brutality of what happened”, has been criticised in a blog by the Revd Bernard Howard, a former staff member on the Titus Trust who worshipped at St Ebbe’s, and who has published 21 further questions on the extent of Canon Roberts’s knowledge.
In her report, Dr Hanson writes that “a big number of beliefs and values . . . might be conducive to abuse after they are held ‘ideologically’ — followed on the expense of a core care and regard for each human being.” In 2017, the Bishop of Guildford, the Rt Revd Andrew Watson, himself a victim of Smyth, expressed the “concern of myself and a few of my fellow survivors that we’re seen as people and never used as pawns in some political or religious game [News, 10 February 2017].
“Abusers espouse all theologies and none; and absolutely nothing that happened within the Smyth shed was the natural fruit of any Christian theology that I’ve come across before or since. It was abuse perpetrated by a misguided, manipulative, and dangerous man, tragically playing on the longing of his young victims to live godly lives.”
This week, he stood by his comment, but said that he agreed entirely with Mr Makin’s conclusion that the Iwerne regime “enabled” Smyth’s abuse, and with Dr Hanson’s call for the Church — and particularly its conservative Evangelical constituency — to “reflect on that ‘enabling’ and the actual cultural, social, theological and protectionist assumptions that lay behind it”.
Among the parish clergy engaged in such reflection is the Vicar of the New Forest Edge Benefice, in Winchester diocese, the Revd Dr Ben Sargent, who spoke throughout the General Synod’s July debate on Soul Survivor, about learning “deeply and radically” from the Jonathan Fletcher review (News, 12 July).
“As I speak to Evangelical friends and colleagues concerning the Makin review, there may be a widespread feeling of lament and shame at our cultural complicity within the failure to hunt justice for victims and survivors of John Smyth,” he said on Tuesday. “Many recognise the reality of the observations about popularity management and the necessity to protect ‘the work’. All are immensely grateful to victims and survivors for his or her courage in bringing to light deeds of great darkness.
“It is true that abuse doesn’t belong to at least one a part of the Church. Abusers can take any value or ideal, theological or not, and manipulate it to their very own ends. Perhaps Evangelical doctrine has proven especially vulnerable to this, however it also calls us to work together to make the Church a secure place for everybody.”
Among the examples of such doctrine was the sovereignty of God, he said, which meant “that ‘the work’ doesn’t need protecting, especially by lies and wickedness”. Substitutionary atonement, meanwhile, meant that “nobody should ever be told that they should suffer as a way to atone for his or her sin,” while the priesthood of all believers “should make Evangelicals rightly wary of exalting anyone to a position above criticism and scrutiny”.
The idea of common grace, he said, “tells us that we now have no right to a siege mentality — us against ‘the world’ — relating to safeguarding. Wisdom, integrity, and justice belong to the diocesan safeguarding officer, the police, and people with whom we would disagree on some theological or ethical subjects, just as much because it belongs to us. We have to work together.”
