Living in Love and Faith in crisis: the latest manifestation of abuse in the Church

Changing Attitude England believes a moment of crisis has been reached in the sixty year period in which the Church of England has been addressing homosexuality, lesbian and gay sexuality, trans issues and LGBTIQ+ issues (the scope has changed over the years). The Church is confronted with a critical challenge: is it able to engage fully with the presence of LGBTIQ+ people and create a healthy environment in which we are treated as adults and equals or is it systemically unable to do so and will continue to abuse us.

Four books about abuse have been published recently that ought to be compulsory reading for those wanting to understand how deeply entrenched abusive attitudes, theology and practice are embedded in the Church. 2019 saw the appearance of the collection Letters to a Broken Church edited by Janet Fife and Gilo as well as Dr Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys’ Escaping the Maze of Spiritual Abuse: Creating healthy Christian Cultures. In recent months, two more books have explored the problem: Sex, Power, Control: Responding to Abuse in the Institutional Church by Fiona Gardner and Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of the Iwerne Camps by Andrew Graystone, both published in 2021.

The Church of England, systemically abusive

This blog draws on the first section of Fiona Gardner’s book. Valuable and significant lessons are to be learnt about how the institution behaves at the top level of Archbishops and bishops and within the House of Bishops who ultimately and significantly are solely responsible for the Living in Love and Faith process and its outcome for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer people. People assume some open, democratic, genuine process of conversation, listening and consultation is taking place. It isn’t, says Gardner. The College of Bishops is in control and will remain in control, determined to avoid allowing any outcome that might grant a genuinely radical new Christian inclusion for LGBTIQ+ people. There is no reference at all to radical new Christian inclusion in GS Misc 1306, Living in Love and Faith: a guide for members of General Synod.

In his Foreword to Fiona Gardner’s book, Stephen Parsons, Anglican priest and blogger writes that in the perspective of the 1990s, when he wrote Ungodly Fear, he was unable to see the “evil of abuse as being deeply embedded within aspects of the Church’s own culture.” He can now see that “patriarchy, deference, sexism and negative attitudes towards sexuality inherited from our Puritan ancestors, all fed into the culture that enabled this abuse.” “The Church, by combining institutional blindness, naïve optimism and malevolence in itself, has unwittingly come to be a major part of the problem.”

Changing Attitude England’s alert to abuse

Changing Attitude England’s steering group includes lay and clergy members, straight, gay, lesbian, trans, some active in parish ministry, some retired, one with direct experience of the LLF Co-ordinating Group, one a member of the LLF History Thematic Working Group, two members recently elected to General Synod. Comparing the analysis and descriptions of abuse found in these books with the information about abusive practice that we are receiving has brought us to the point where we want to alert the wider Church to the dangers present in today’s Church of England for everyone, and not LGBTIQ+ people alone. Fiona Gardner writes that:

“The current maintenance of the protective structure and arrangements that allow those who do not accept women priests to continue to have a role remains damaging to women’s status in the Church and is deeply insulting. Imagine how repellent it would be if part of the Church would openly not allow black and ethnic minority people to be ordained and this apartheid was seen as ‘mutually flourishing’, the term used about the current arrangements with women.”

Indeed, and in another recent book, Black, Gay, British, Christian, Queer, the Revd Jarel Robinson-Brown writes about the abuse of Black and Brown LGBTIQ+ Christians in today’s Church.

Gardner writes about “the institutional church, the national and diocesan organisation of the Church of England, where hierarchy, structure, systems and factions take precedence over relationship.” There is within the institutional church, she says, ineptitude, a lack of urgency and poor levels of empathy. It is a closed-system with hierarchical thinking, which accompanies a closing of ranks and the protection of the institution.

She relates the idea of defence mechanisms to today’s Church, the ways in which an individual or an organisation avoids or resists having to think about something that causes anxiety. This might include denial or repression but, usually, projection, which involves unconsciously pushing onto others one’s own unacceptable thoughts, motives or feelings. This can also take place at a collective level against groups or types of people that threaten the organisation’s well-being. The Church of England has in the past and is today anxious about opening itself as an equal space for women, black and brown and LGBTIQ+ people. It is highly defensive with a deeply embedded structure of power and control.

The church hierarchy has responded to accusations or reports of abuse with secrecy and deception managed discretely within the church hierarchy. There is, says Gardner, a sense that the hierarchy closes around one another to minimise the damage this might be caused. Dr Helen King has blogged about this. In her own work as a safeguarding advisor Gardner was left with the feeling that her presence was not welcome. Anxiety-provoking institutional dilemmas give rise to defensive projective processes.

Repeatedly reframing the LGBTIQ+ problem

Gardner came to see that the difficulty for the Church in finding out, let alone being able to disclose the truth, is that it might expose shadow aspects of the institution and uncover deeper malaise. One way of managing and avoiding this discovery has been to repeatedly reframe the presenting problem by commissioning the reports, inquiries and reviews. This is exactly what has been going on in the Church of England at least since 1979 when the Gloucester Report, Homosexual Relationships: A contribution to discussion, was published. Since then we have been through a series of reports and processes of which Living in Love and Faith is but the latest – and one destined not to reach an end point.

Abusers protected, victims ignored and repeatedly re-abused

At his hearing before IICSA in July 2019, the Reverend Matthew Ineson, who contributed the chapter Rape followed by bureaucracy in Letters to a Broken Church, testified that between 2012 and 2013 he had disclosed that he had been raped by the Reverend Trevor Devamanikkam in 1984 when he was sixteen years old to Archbishop John Sentamu, and then to Bishop Stephen Croft, Bishop Peter Burrows, Bishop Martyn Snow and Bishop Glyn Webster. None of them took appropriate action about the disclosure. Ineson wrote to Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for the thirteenth time, in 2017, saying:

“The Church of England has made me fight at every step to try to achieve both justice and the further prevention of abuse by my abuser. By doing this, you have added to my abuse. The bishops have actively colluded together to attempt to ignore, discredit and get rid of me.”

In November 2019 the Church of England announced a review over its handling of its response to the allegations related to Trevor Devamanikkam. The abusive institution set out to review its own abusive practices. Matthew Ineson commented: ‘I don’t believe the Church should be appointing anyone to investigate it – it should be truly independent, which it isn’t. The Church, the ones being investigated, are trying to control the whole thing.’ The way the Church responded to this situation reveals the power and control dynamics that characterise the mind of the narcissistic institution. The Church became dominated by its own internal self-preoccupations, the need to protect its reputation and the reputation of bishops and archbishops.

This is visible now in the functioning of the Living in Love and Faith process, specifically in the workings of the Next Steps Group, and in the actions and inactions of bishops, most notably in the Diocese of London.

In the next blog we will describe the systemically abusive culture in the Church of England that has arisen from the work of Eric ‘Bash’ Nash, John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher and others, an abusive culture that is infecting the work of LLF and the Next Steps Group today.

Gardner, F. 2021. Sex, Power, Control: Responding to Abuse in the Institutional Church. Cambridge, The Lutterworth Press