Hearing Justin Welby being interviewed by Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News somewhat took my breath away. It was the closest thing to Gladiator 3 The Interview as one could hope for.
She accused the Archbishop of being involved in a cover-up with the intention to save the institution of the Church.
Welby seemed to be deeply offended by the suggestion and he overreacted. His roots are in fact evangelical, and evangelicals are all the time suspicious of the institution of the church. They do not like the concept of the Church as an establishment, preferring to see it as collections of believers.
Falling back onto his evangelical instincts, and attempting to defend himself from the cover-up, Welby became incandescent and, ‘over-speaking’, spluttered that he had little interest in the Church as an establishment.
This turned out to be a mistake.
Newman: “Are you ever torn between doing what’s right and protecting the institution?”
Welby: “Never … I do not give a hang in regards to the institution. I actually, genuinely don’t. If this report was a lethal blow to the institution, so be it. God will raise up one other institution.”
Newman: “So your failing is incompetence somewhat than cover up – your personal failing?”
Welby: “Yes. Incompetence? Yes, all right, I’ll offer you that one.”
His mistake, though, lay at several levels.
The first was that despite his passion, it wasn’t necessarily true. The Makin report had taken five years to emerge and even at the top it needed to be leaked due to a reluctance by Welby’s office and Church House to place it in the general public domain.
It’s not unreasonable to suspect that they knew it was dynamite. It’s entirely possible that Welby mistook his anxiety about defending his own fame as having nothing to do with guarding the institution. But only too obviously, his fame and the institution are inextricably entwined.
But worse than that, it’s a incontrovertible fact that the Church is an establishment whether it likes it or not. It is a incontrovertible fact that it’s an establishment he’s accountable for as (he would see it) the CEO.
It was alarming to listen to an individual accountable for the entire complex institution of the Church that’s designed to deal with, protect, nurture, sustain and grow the body of Christ discuss being willing to have it destroyed straight away by a report that just happens to be critical of him.
It was a careless and irresponsible articulation of a pseudo-pietistic, half baked ecclesiology. Setting that to 1 side for a moment, he was too energised to note the trap that Cathy Newman had laid for him.
The jaws of the not very complex trap snapped shut on him. If it wasn’t a deliberate cover-up, the failure will need to have been as a result of his incompetence. In other words, he wasn’t a lot mendacious as just very bad at his job.
This was particularly wounding because he had been given fast track promotion precisely because he had spent his early life not within the hard, backbreaking, sacrificial ministry of the parish church and its intense demands, but as a substitute as a privileged corporate executive accountable for the accounts of an oil industry.
If he hoped that by admitting he was bad at his job, he could avoid resigning, he was in fact mistaken. A way of mistrust in the entire organisation grew over the times that it took for the entire nation to precise its growing discomfort along with his failure to oversee justice for Smyth’s victims, while he claimed his colleagues had told him to not resign, and while they remained publicly, and self-interestingly, silent – with the impressive exception of Dr Helen-Ann Hartley the tenaciously feminist Bishop of Newcastle.
It will need to have turn into clear after some time that their silence would have the effect of constructing his irresponsible incompetence contagious, and eventually, he resigned, having done incalculable damage to the Church he was imagined to have sorted.
So what happens now?
Inevitably, the victims are reminding the remainder of us that the incompetence was not only his. Other senior colleagues had compounded his mistakes. And in a somewhat unhappy way, lists of people that knew or have been suspected of knowing and kept silence, are growing longer.
In a way that just isn’t unlike the atmosphere surrounding the Grand National or the Derby, the alternative of an Archbishop of Canterbury seems to catch the interest of a giant section of the population and a lot of the media.
Impossible to interest with the query of the existence of God, life after death, judgement, forgiveness, ethics, and heaven and hell, hottest papers raced one another to publish the names, faces and biographies of probably the most fancied candidates within the archiepiscopal appointment steeplechase.
It was once a distinct game in all previous appointments. The Church of England was a hybrid organisation constructed with a political stability in mind. It set out initially to avoid religious civil war and civic turbulence by attempting to contain and cram into the state church as wide a spectrum of various Protestant spiritualities, theologies and non secular pressure groups as possible.
Over time they coalesced into high church and low church. The convention developed that their representatives would take turn but that is all modified within the last 10 years or so.
Over the last decade the Church has moved from defining itself historically and theologically to culturally and politically. Justin Welby saw to it that nearly the entire people appointed to be bishops shared his own profile; energised and enthusiastic about administration, little experience of running a parish, and either woke or very woke.
The alternative then is not going to be between high and low church, but woke and far more woke. High and low church may have been replaced by man and woman. Determined to introduce women bishops into the Church, it was something of an irony that one in every of them, refusing to be bullied by Welby backed by the grey suits in Church House, brought him down.
Sympathetic to the zeitgeist because the C of E is, it’s virtually a certainty that a faithful feminist will occupy the throne once used to enthrone St Augustine whose mission from Rome began the conversion of this country.
The obvious front contenders are the Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, and the Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Dehqani. Without pretending to have the option to evaluate their virtues and flaws, the longer term may as a substitute be determined by the secular criteria of identity politics. My money is on the Iranian-born Bishop of Chelmsford.
