One had hoped that the civil wars within the Church of England and the political wrangling over appointments that one reads in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles were a thing of the past; but as Justin Welby steps down from his position as Archbishop of Canterbury after the Makin report, Trollope’s world does not seem to be that different. For example, the diocese of Rochester passed a no confidence vote in the Archbishop’s Council and the bishop of Newcastle had no hesitation in accusing her colleagues of ‘careerism’ for failing to agree with her calls for change.
Various commentators pointed out that the Safeguarding crisis is not disconnected to another controversy, namely the managerial corporatisation of the church. They point to the drainage of resources in administrative and corporate restructuring of the institution in central authority whilst Church attendance seems to drop. The importance of the local that underpinned the mystical celebration of the Book of Common Prayer across the centuries in parishes seems to slowly disappear; therefore, several of the Church’s own clergy warned about the possible demise of the Church.
The review of the parish system started, of course, at the time of Welby’s predecessor; Rowan Williams noted that the parochial system needs some reform in facing mobile populations in contemporary England and that a healthy church needs to scrutinise what it has to be at the service of others. But back then it was recommended to let each diocese deal with the implications of that locally rather than assume that there was a one-fit-for-all system imposed from the centre. Anglicans have a deep rooted scepticism about clerical hierarchical centralised structures in the way some have felt the system was going. It is right and proper to raise questions about the dangers of arguably secular unified managerial attitudes to running the Church that leads to juridical and bureaucratic distortions.
Truth and Perception
However, wherever we stand on such matters, the various critics have neglected to comment on an arguably more important theological and anthropological issue. The verdict of the Makin report on Safeguarding in the Church of England has some similarities with the verdict in the Post Office scandal investigation that, regrettably, involved another Church of England priest. Both inquiries have uncovered the danger of words, when some try to say things to hide other motives or assume that they can say what they wish, not knowing what the consequences are. In both cases, the issue has to do with faulty perception and vision. Sooner or later, the fantasy filled balloons with self-justifying pure reactive sentiments (as with Archbishop Justin’s unfortunate valedictory speech in the Lords) are going to hit the thorn bushes. But faulty perception is in fact a human crisis overall. Those who have reacted to the report in anger at the Archbishop have shown the same problem. Often human beings don’t like to confess that they have agendas when reacting to crises. The question of perception and healthy engagement with one’s environment is the real overall corporate original sin that needs confessing whether for Justin Welby, the Safeguarding system, the Church of England more widely, as well as for all those politicians who suddenly seem to be wiser than everyone else, wishing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The pictures drawn by everyone involved is vulnerable to a different kind of theological language. In his book, Looking East at Winter, Rowan Williams explores the various writings of Church Fathers from around 400-700 AD that produced tools of diagnosis for faulty human seeing. The writers of this era, he explains, were fascinated by the ways in which what they called our ‘passions’ interfere with our perception. ‘Passions’ in this instance refers to instincts that are not properly educated. One of the Church Fathers mentioned in the book, is the fifth century Mark the Ascetic, who reminds us in his treatise on ‘No Righteousness by Works’ that
He who hates the passions gets rid of their causes. But he who is attracted by their causes is attacked by the passions even though he does not wish it. (1)
An uneducated instinct continually pulls us back within the framework of either ignoring what we see or constructing our environment in terms of our own agendas, to save face or protect our institutions.
The first lesson, therefore, we have from Justin Welby’s unfortunate end of tenure is the fallacy that the key to virtue is knowledge, assuming that when you know what to do, then you can do it. In his interview with Channel 4 on November 7th, 2024, Justin Welby confessed as much. The Church Fathers, Rowan reminds us, taught that virtue is connected with proper perception, proper vision. What we see shapes who we are. We, therefore, need to constantly ask ourselves: What do we see? And how do we see it? What are the things that we allow to drop off the edge of our vision? How far do we see things in terms of ourselves and our immediate agenda; or are we simply trying to defend ourselves or our institutions? We assume that deep down there is a pure primordial self that we can uncover through knowledge – a fantasy.
Self-knowledge is not about going inwards to discover a pure primordial self. It is about being connected with the human environment around us that challenges and enlarges us. Self-knowledge requires ‘Communion’, living in conversation with others. Mark the Ascetic gives a rather useful description of what goes wrong with our unexamined imbalanced instincts, especially when we ‘feel good’ about ourselves. He says:
He who does not understand God’s judgments walks on a ridge like a knife edge and is easily unbalanced by every puff of wind. When praised, he exults; when criticised, he is bitter; when he feasts, he makes a pig of himself; when he suffers hardships, he moans and groans; when he understands he shows off; and when he does not understand, he pretends that he does; when rich, he is boastful, when in poverty he plays the hypocrite. Gorged, he grows brazen; and when he fasts, he becomes arrogant. He quarrels with those who reprove him and those who forgive him, he regards as fools. (2)
This is a perfect fifth century diagnosis of twenty first century ailments, not just of what went wrong with the Archbishop, but with a great deal of public figures whose behaviour is generally burdened with such imbalances. This is not simply because they are ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ but more because they have an imbalanced perception.
What settled the picture in both the Post Office scandal and the Makin report case was the mixture of personal testimony, documentations and the building up of a whole world of details, pointing to clear distortions of fact, producing a context within which the denials of justice could not be sustained. This suggests again that there are things that words or ‘knowledge’ cannot change: the things that are contained in the hurt and blurred recollections of sub-postmasters, or in the parenthesis of a forgotten message from an abused child. This is the kind of language that ideology is afraid of. Words cannot have the final verdict. We might think that we have silenced the dissenting voices, but we carry with us traces of what we have tried to deny. The truth eventually emerges again from the margins.
If words alone change our perception and transform our world, then the liar and the terrorist would have things their own way. The tradition of the Church stands to remind us that God’s transformative speech to the world is not simply a political party manifesto; it’s not words; it is the baby in the manger and the body of a victim. Both Church leaders as well as politicians need to ask, why is it that we have not managed to learn that kind of language to aid our perception? The answer to this last question lies with the acknowledgment that to ‘perceive’ and ‘see’ that the babe in the manger and the man on the cross is in fact the revelation of God himself requires a particular type of humility and caritas, as Augustine of Hippo reminds us in his Confessions. Precisely because of that call to humility and caritas, we too need to point to the good things that Justin Welby brought to the office of Archbishop of Canterbury.
Many will be quick to compare Welby with his predecessor Rowan Williams who was described as ‘the most distinguished occupant of Augustine’s chair since St Anselm (1033-1109)’ (3). Williams was someone who managed by the manner of his life and the quality of his writings and public engagement to combine the public face of Anglicanism in the midst of British social order together with a unique spirituality and hidden charisma glimpsed in his sermons and published poems. But Rowan’s extraordinary engagement has not always come over quite so benignly. He left one month after the failure of the Women in the Episcopate vote in Synod and the failure of the proposed ‘Covenant’ for the Anglican Communion to prevent an irreparable breach of trust in the Communion because of the seemingly unbridgeable views over human sexuality in Africa and America. Welby was able to get the Women in the Episcopate vote through and moved the Church of England closer to accepting committed loving gay relationships as equal before God. After his election as Archbishop, Welby had a positive beginning with the media, which described him as ‘straightforward’, of considerable seriousness, experience, humorous, and relaxed. It was also difficult to pigeonhole him. He suggested at the start of his promotion to Canterbury that he was a ‘spiritual magpie’, who feels at home with charismatic worship, but reveres the Eucharist and follows the routine of the Prayer Book’s daily offices of morning and evening prayer. Though described as ‘evangelical’, he uses Catholic models of prayer and has a Roman Catholic spiritual director. Like Pope Francis, he stood against contemporary capitalist ideology and had a concern for mission as he pointed out in his inaugural sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, quoting the Pope himself.
He capitalised on his own strengths and knowledge of the financial world through his previous work in the oil industry. In his public discussions and parliamentary interventions, he spoke of a model of economy that is based on virtue and trust, not simply on abstract professionalism. Money does not have its own abstract value but is there to build up the health of society. As such, society can be properly alive when it is not simply based on an abstract understanding of ‘contract’, but subordinate contract to gift, so that we become ‘protectors of one another’ to use his inaugural sermon again. The Cabinet supported his plans for the Credit Unions, reflecting a positive impact in matters where he showed clear strength.
Welby’s faulty vision?
There are justifications, however, for raising issues about perception and vision in the way the archbishop and bishops have engaged public debates. What he saw and what he failed to see, or instinctively allowed to fall off the sides of his perception are possible to argue about and possibly judge, as his interview with Channel 4 made perfectly clear. Before any of the current controversies appeared, he was quick to join the condemnation of the saintly War period bishop George Bell when there was no clear proof of the safeguarding accusations. When it became clear that the claims are not credible, there was no clear apology from Justin Welby.
The pandemic brought its own challenges. The vision of the Church being at the heart of public engagement got muddled up and lost very dramatically when churches were asked to close even for private prayer, which was not necessary under government provisions at the time. Instead of engaging with the spiritual hunger of the wider public in facing death and crisis with a rich theological foundation, the bishops focused on repeating what the NHS has called for, something they were not needed for. Indeed, instead of using one of his two beautiful chapels at Lambeth Palace to celebrate the televised Easter Eucharist in 2020 (which he could have done under the provisions), he opted for his kitchen table. One could not but feel the lack of insight here, replacing beauty with relevance, opting for a ‘style’ that was supposed to show solidarity with those stuck in their homes. But ‘style’, St Augustine noted long ago, detracts from seriousness (4). In his Easter sermon from the kitchen, he unfortunately referred to Lancelot Andrewes as ‘a previous Archbishop of Canterbury’, when he was in fact a former bishop of Winchester, Ely, Chichester and also the Dean of Westminster. This was a telling mistake that makes one wonder who and what kind of advice Welby had when making such public statements.
Welby’s experience in interfaith engagement seems to be formed mainly through his work in Nigeria for reconciliation. This characterised his various addresses and visitations to the different religious communities in England. He raised similar concerns for reconciliation during his various visits to the Holy Land, but as I noted in a previous blog, his knowledge of the intricacies of the political situation of Palestine has been highly questionable lacking the courage to name a spade a spade in the face of what the International Court of Justice and Amnesty International have deemed to be genocidal policy in Gaza. He changed his tone after various criticisms, showing that he did not lead but was more led in such cases, mostly by government policy.
Archbishops have always had their challenges in office; Professor Simon Lee pointed almost 20 years ago to the challenges faced by Rowan Williams, not at the end of his tenure, but at the beginning, noting how, for all his talents, Archbishop Rowan wavered over the nomination of his friend Dr Jeffrey John as the suffragan Bishop of Reading, eventually caving in to opposition (5). Some will argue that this might have been a point of strength for Welby.
Are we able to issue a final verdict? Traditionally, there has never been such a thing called ‘The Church of England’ as an institution; rather, we have the parish system. One should never forget the hard and good work that goes across parishes up and down the country who feel challenged by the weak perceptions of media coverage. But the Christian tradition makes it incumbent upon us to be aware that ‘we are in this together’, to use a cliché utilised by politicians. A good leader at the end is not one who has ‘power of control’, but one who is attentive, or as we started above, who has a healthy perception of the wider context, engaging in conversation with others. The attentive leader commands our attention and obedience. Good attention is a way of pushing back against ignorance and fantasy.
Church and State
The recent developments have also reignited the debate about the nature of the establishment of the Church of England and the place of religious voices in the public square. These debates are not new. Already in 2013, there were voices coming from familiar irritated secularists questioning the place of religious discourse in the public sphere, who perceived Welby’s engagement with economic policy to be interfering in ‘politics’. Such voices seem to think of the national Church as subordinate to the opinion of the state. At the time, bishop Nick Baines argued that these voices were naïve and condescending. Or, if we asked Mark the Ascetic, he would have said that they lacked that healthy perception of the world around them.
Indeed, to the extent that Welby made a positive impact on economic policy, he followed a very well-established tradition of Anglican identity, which sees the life of the Church at the heart of things public. Whilst the Church is a distinctive body in its worship, the tradition of the Church of England from Richard Hooker to John Wesley, William Wilberforce and William Temple, saw the boundaries of the Church fairly opened to relate to the health of the whole society. William Temple had warned us before that worship ‘divorced from life loses reality; life devoid of worship loses direction and power’ (6).
But, even William Temple, according to his biographer, had a phase in which he pondered the lessons of centuries of Establishment to ensure that the church is not comfortably politicized (7). Later in life, Temple will point again to the benefits of Establishment not simply for the Church, but also for the State, whilst distinguishing between the purpose of the Church and that of the State (8). The question, perhaps that Temple might have asked on this occasion, therefore, is ‘where is the anchorage of the state to be found?’ Given our faulty perceptions, not least in the realms of politics, what would happen to the soul of the nation if the Church were disestablished? Not because bishops and archbishops have all been perfect, far from it, but more to help keep the balance of insight and vision healthier rather than poorer for both Church and State, making each accountable to the other.
‘Anchorage’ is a point raised in fact by Justin Welby in his 2019 William Temple Foundation lecture, ‘exploring the balance between anchoring and movement for oil rigs and for people’. A point of orientation which is not shifting all the time, an understanding of our identity in terms of the health of our body politic, with all its religious and political diversity, is not a bad thing for the health of society; it is in fact what makes the system more humane. If it is not there, what would replace it? Secularism is not a neutral position; it is merely a point of view and as the philosopher John Gray once said, pointing to the rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe: ‘humans have given up an irrational belief in God, only to replace it with an irrational belief in man’. The fatigue of secularity after the excitement of the void is confirmed by other popularising philosophers such as Alain de Botton and Camille Paglia. Whilst disestablishment might give the Church of England the possibility of a less predictable voice that challenges authority according to some, the healthier question might be: Can the Church of England be within the establishment politically liberated in order to actually be constructively political, helping the State to generate ways of finding a proper anchorage beyond functionalist coercive secularism?
Revd. Dr Yazid Said is a Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Liverpool Hope University and Trustee of the William Temple Foundation
(1) Mark the Ascetic, ‘On Those who Think that they are made righteous by their works’ in The Philokalia, Vol. 1, p. 135.
(2) Ibid p. 142.
(3) Shortt, Rupert, Rowan’s Rule. Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2009, p.3.
(4) Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine, Book 4.
(5) Lee, Simon, ‘Ethics in the Dust?’, in Conversation in Religion and Theology, vol 1, issue 2, 2003, p. 218.
(6) Temple, William, Citizen and Churchman. Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1941, 100-103.
(7) Iremonger, F.A., William Temple Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters. Oxford, 1948, pp. 224, 358.
(8) Ibid, p. 357-359.
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