Private, but not secret
Is the long awaited replacement for the C of E's reviled disciplinary system fatally flawed?
Hello! Our main story this week is all about how the Church of England might try to chart a way out of its safeguarding morass. After many years of work and angst, a brand-new system for disciplining vicars and bishops has been approved by the church’s own governing assembly, but it now has to be signed off by parliament too. Yet a range of voices is warning against the new Clergy Conduct Measure, arguing it shares with its discredited predecessor an excessive emphasis on secrecy which might undermine the whole attempt to wipe the slate clean.
Then we look at the two big conscience bills working through parliament at present, on the decriminalisation of abortion and the legalisation of assisted suicide. Does the church have a seat at the table in these critical discussions around ethics and morality, and if not, whose fault is that?
There’s also my latest podcast (an interview with the writer and podcaster Elizabeth Oldfield about evangelism and living in countercultural gospel community), plus a list of links to interesting church news stories from around the web: Christian worship music’s ‘accountability problem’, an undignified spat in Armenia, and fake miracle babies, among other things.
Private, but not secret
A rare point of unanimity in the almost always divided Church of England these days is the clergy discipline system. The current procedure in place since 2003, the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM), is universally reviled. Liberal or conservative, evangelical or Anglo-Catholic - everyone agrees it’s terrible and has to go. I’ve touched on the reasons why it’s bad on many occasions in the newsletter, so let’s not dwell on that and instead talk about what’s going to replace it.
The new Clergy Conduct Measure (CCM) is inching its way through the interminable C of E legislative process to becoming church law. It passed its final hurdle at the General Synod (the C of E’s governing assembly) in February, but that doesn’t mean it’s now law. If only it were that simple.
Because the C of E is the established national state church, parliament retains ultimate legal authority over the church. The entire panoply of the synod is in effect a bit of delegated self-government given to the church about a century ago by parliament. Before then all church laws were debated and passed directly by MPs.
Thankfully, MPs handed over that primary legislative function to the synod, but they retained final sign off. So once a synod law has got through its various stages - first consideration, amendments in committee, revision in the full synod, final approval - it then must be signed off by parliament. This happens via the Ecclesiastical Committee, a special group of MPs and Lords who go over the text of a synod law and decide if they want to recommend it or not to parliament. If they do, it must then be passed by a vote in both the House of Commons and House of Lords, and then it has to be given royal assent by the King. And only then does it actually come into force.
The CCM is at the Ecclesiastical Committee stage, and earlier this month they held a session taking evidence on how the procedure will work. In brief, it will divide complaints made against vicars into three categories, each with their own pathway to resolution. Low level grievances will be dealt with informally by the local bishop, with no meaningful penalties on the table. Mid-level complaints will be handed over to an investigator outside the diocese, and if misconduct is confirmed the bishop can impose some minor sanctions, but not at the level of booting a cleric out of office or the priesthood itself). And finally, allegations of serious misconduct will be automatically referred to a new national investigations unit, and only they can trigger if necessary the full-blown judicial tribunal process with lawyers, judges and church trials which the current CDM uses.
It’s unambiguously a much better system than the CDM, which lacks any flexibility to handle different complaints differently and relies heavily on the local bishop throughout. The CCM is being eagerly anticipated by vicars terrified of having their careers ruined in a years-long Kafkaesque quasi-judicial process simply because a parishioner in hospital was annoyed they didn’t visit (that’s a real example that actually happened). But not everyone is happy.
Gavin Drake, a long-time campaigner against church abuse ever since his late wife was the victim of an infamous rape in her father’s vicarage, has called on the Ecclesiastical Committee to take the nuclear option and simply bin off the whole law. This would be a remarkable step. Not only is it basically unheard of for parliament not to accept laws passed by the synod (the CCM was passed in February unanimously, 298-0), it would also blow up about five years of patient, detailed work to undo the reviled CDM, leaving the church back at square one with its not-fit-for-purpose disciplinary procedures.
So why does Drake think the committee should take this momentous step? Because the CCM is going to continue with what he considers a fatal flaw of the CDM - a presumption of secrecy. When cases reach the tribunal phase, they are by default held in secret, with no journalists or activists allowed in the building and the papers not fully published either. All we on the outside normally get is the published ruling by the judge at the end.
Copied over from the CDM, the CCM tribunals will also sit in private unless it is deemed necessary to open the doors for a particular case. The synod was offered the chance to change this by an amendment during its own debates, but decided against it. However, Drake argues these “secrecy provisions that are not supported by law and are contrary to the established norms of legal practice in England”.
Secrecy is not just a theoretical problem either, Drake continues. He was personally involved in a case where a woman alleged sexual assault by a vicar. But when this was taken on by the archdeacon (a senior cleric in the diocese) the charges laid in a tribunal against the vicar were that he had broken his marriage vows by engaging in a consensual affair. The alleged victim has been denied her request to view the documents sent on to the tribunal because they are confidential and so does not know exactly how or why her complaint became twisted in this way.
Drake is not the only person concerned that the CCM will carry over the presumption of secrecy from the CDM. Several MPs on the Ecclesiastical Committee said they also thought this was the wrong way round. In particular, Christian Conservative MP Danny Kruger said:
“My understanding is that most comparable tribunals in the secular space – whether that’s in respect of medical practitioners, even police misconduct hearings, the bar, military court service – the default setting in those cases is that the proceedings will be public.”
The chair of the committee, a highly experienced judge called Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, also urged the church to think again about opening up tribunals, telling the witnesses there from the C of E to “to look at sitting in public, because that’s an issue which a number of people have raised, and I share the concern”.
The point Kruger makes about other similar disciplinary tribunals being open by default is especially relevant. At several times during the synod debates on the CCM when this issue of secrecy came up, sceptical members were assured that plenty of other groups like doctors also held confidential hearings.
But it turns out this isn’t true. When doctors are hauled before a tribunal it is public by default. The same is true for police officers, teachers, solicitors, social workers and others - all who might be dealing, like vicars, with potentially sensitive evidence or vulnerable witnesses. So, you could argue, the synod was mildly misled when it agreed to the church’s plans for the CCM to continue to ordinarily hold tribunals in private.
Under pressure from the committee, the church’s top legal advisor on disciplinary affairs Edward Dobson, hinted that the rules governing the tribunals could evolve over time. It was, apparently, “likely” that precedents would be established to hold many cases in open court, he told the committee. I’m not really sure how he could possibly know this, but there you are. He also pushed back in general on the accusation of secrecy:
“These are not secret hearings. These are private hearings, where the evidence is taken in private, and it is important to distinguish between those two concepts.”
He’s not entirely wrong (secret hearings would not be acknowledged to have even taken place, while private ones are known about but take place behind closed doors), but it’s also a fairly specious distinction for the purposes of journalists, activists and the general public.
The committee has yet to say whether it will recommend parliament sign off on the CCM or not. My gut instinct is that they almost certainly will, despite the ruckus over private hearings - it would just be way too disruptive to block the whole thing (parliament can only vote yes or no, it cannot amend specific parts of a synodical act) and there is so much else that is a huge improvement elsewhere in the law.
But either way, this stuff really matters. I’ve not gone into the weeds of one element of how ecclesiastical disciplinary tribunals work for fun. Getting discipline right, and crucially being seen to get discipline right really matters. A church which is constantly stumbling across yet more examples of abuse and misconduct by its priests and bishops and is battered by endless safeguarding rows cannot afford to drop the ball twice in a row.
The CDM was supposed to be a big leap into the future 20 years ago, and instead turned into a bit of a nightmare, for clergy, victims and church hierarchy alike. I’ve lost count how many times in this newsletter alone we’ve covered a story about abuse or safeguarding and had to note how badly the church’s procedures failed. If the CCM turns out to be fatally flawed as well and cannot speedily regain the confidence of survivors, of ordinary worshippers in the pew, and of the clergy, then the C of E is in big trouble.
In the last week alone we have been grappling with how clumsy and erratic the CDM is. Recall that ten clergy were referred by the church to disciplinary proceedings for their role in the John Smyth scandal, following publication of the Makin Report. But the official charges against all ten were being brought “out of time”, as it was way more than 12 months since the events in question, which is the standard time limit in the CDM.
This 12-month limit has been the source of deep heartbreak and anger, because it serves to make it very difficult to hold to account clergy for their misdeeds of the past (it often takes a lot longer than a year for the victim of abuse or assault to feel able to come forward). However, you can request permission from the top tribunal judge to be allowed to bring charges out of time in certain circumstances, and last week we found out seven of the ten’s cases will move forward.
They include the former Bishop of Durham Paul Butler. This is despite Butler having - in my opinion - only a highly tangential involvement in the Smyth case as the former president of Scripture Union which technically oversaw the Iwerne Trust, the charity actually running the summer camps where Smyth recruited and groomed many of his victims (and whose leadership kept the abuse quiet once they discovered it in 1982). But among the three given a reprieve is the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, who Makin concludes was given the full Iwerne dossier on Smyth’s abuse in the mid-1980s and did nothing with it.
No explanation has been given by the church judge who decided seven CDM cases could go forward out of time, and three could not. Nobody really knew why these ten (out of the dozens of clergy named in the Makin report) were those chosen after a lengthy legal process by teams of church lawyers to be disciplined in the first place. And now nobody really knows why three of the ten have been let off, while the other seven cases can proceed despite being outside the 12-month window. The C of E is saying nothing further while the seven CDM cases are progressing, and as we know, the tribunal hearings themselves will be closed. It may well take many months if not longer before they are all concluded and we get the final judgements handed down, which will mark the eventual end of the Smyth saga.
If it drags on into 2026 as I suspect, that will mark two years since the Makin report was published, seven years since Makin was commissioned, nine years since Channel 4 News broke the Smyth story, 14 years since the first survivor formally reported the abuse to a church body, and a bleak 44 years since the vicars responsible for Smyth at the Iwerne camps found out what he was doing in his garden shed. The moral arc of the universe may indeed bend towards justice, but it doesn’t half take its time.
All of this is to say, getting discipline right - making it faster, fairer, simpler, more responsive to victims, less deferential to the hierarchy - is essential for the modern C of E. So let’s pray the CCM, if and when it does eventually get going, sets the church up to deal with the next Smyth scandal and associated litany of red-handed vicars and bishops much better than it’s dealt with this one.
Questions of conscience
In a curious coincidence (or perhaps symptomatic of shifting cultural mores?), the British parliament is debating two quite radical shifts in medical ethics policy at the same time. As mentioned before in The Critical Friend there has been a lengthy debate around assisted suicide since a Labour MP last year won the ballot for private members’ bills and committed to using her time to try and legalise euthanasia for the first time. Kim Leadbeater’s bill passed its first hurdle back in the autumn, but is coming back today for its third reading in the House of Commons (after many months of detailed scrutiny and revision in the committee phase).
And on Tuesday, an amendment to decriminalise abortion was tacked onto an unrelated government bill and passed with a sweeping majority of MPs after less than an hour’s debate. This is the culmination of a period of quite rapid change in Britain’s abortion regime, after decades of stasis. We first got abortion legalised in Northern Ireland for the first time in 2019 by Westminster MPs over the heads of the then not sitting Northern Irish Assembly. Then during the covid era, telemedicine abortions (sometimes referred to as ‘pills by post’) were temporarily legalised as a lockdown expediency. And then shortly afterwards that regime, which allows pregnant women to procure abortions at home without having to have an in-person appointment at a clinic, was made permanent.
Then buffer zones (much discussed in the newsletter) preventing protests outside abortion clinics were implemented nationwide last year. And now this latest law change. If passed by the House of Lords, it will mean that women cannot be prosecuted for procuring an abortion after the 24-week time limit has elapsed. In addition to the pills by post scheme, it in effect permits women (if they are prepared/coerced to lie about how many weeks along they are) to get an at-home abortion at any time up to full term, as there is no longer any risk of being arrested or prosecuted for a late abortion.
This isn’t a newsletter about medical ethics (although if that’s your thing, why not subscribe to my podcast Matters of Life and Death), so what has been the churchy reaction to these two meaty ethical matters coming to parliament at the same time? The way the two issues have been debated couldn’t really be more different. With assisted suicide, everyone basically acknowledges this is a big deal, a sea change in UK law, and deserving of weighty consideration. With the decriminalisation of abortion… not so much. Hence it being tacked on to another bill and rammed through with less than an hour of debate (having appeared on precisely zero party manifestos at the election just last year).
Both issues were treated by the government as conscience issues, and therefore MPs were given a free vote and not whipped one way or the other. This acknowledges these are not simply decisions about public policy, but strike deeply at morality and values which often cut across political affiliations. And yet despite this, the church has often struggled to have its say.
We discussed in the autumn when assisted suicide was first being debated in the Commons about the ways in which some pro-euthanasia activists were desperately trying to stop Christians (or those of other faiths) from speaking into the discussion, as though their perspectives have somehow less legitimacy than non-believers.
Just last month, the leading campaigner for the Leadbeater bill, Esther Rantzen, wrote in a letter to MPs that many had only voted against the bill last time because they harboured “undeclared personal religious beliefs which mean no precautions would satisfy them”. Or in other words, the nefarious Christians are hiding their fanatical religious objections which truly motivate them to oppose this bill behind a figleaf of concerns around coercion, consent, capacity and disability rights.
Now, the Christian think tank Theos has released a report exploring this idea, just as the assisted suicide debate is heating up again. Theos argue that religious opponents of assisted suicide were widely accused of being dishonest, or at best, that their arguments rested on ‘religious’ grounds which makes them either illegitimate in 21st century British society or intellectually inadequate.
However, the report’s author Nick Spencer goes on to argue in much better terms than I managed, what a nonsense this is:
‘[This report] argues a religious reason in a policy debate like assisted dying is made religious not by the language used but by its deep (and usually invisible) roots. The religiousness, or otherwise, is what ultimately powers the argument rather than what it looks like or even where it ends up. It emphasises that this is no different from any serious non-religious public arguments of this nature. All (good) arguments adopt a similar pattern of reasoning and every serious argument rests ultimately on an underlying, foundational philosophy or worldview.
When it comes to advocating or opposing assisted dying, or any number of other comparable public issues, there is no view from nowhere. The answer to the question “how much have your religious views influenced your decision?” is “completely” precisely because every (carefully reasoned) argument has been “influenced” – indeed, more than influenced: ‘fuelled’ or ‘powered’ – by the philosophy or worldview that underpins it.’
The foolishness of Rantzen and others’ attacks on Christian anti-euthanasia activists or MPs is not just that their are unfairly casting aspersions on people of faith. It’s that they fail to realise their own arguments are fundamentally no different. They too have a worldview and set of values, just like Christians do. And their beliefs about assisted suicide flow from these, just like Christians’ do. The only difference is that their worldview and values have not cohered around a particular religious tradition, with a name.
‘The idea that one kind of belief system — the religious one — should be named, outed and treated like it was a compromising factor, but that other (non-religious) belief systems need not do so is based on the conviction that some belief systems (essentially contemporary liberal secularist ones) are normal, obvious, uncontroversial, rational, and straightforwardly compatible with ‘conscience debates’, whereas others are not. This conviction is historically, sociologically and philosophically unsustainable.’
The other reason wider society might have an interest in what churches and Christians are saying about assisted suicide is because they have quite a sizeable stake in our healthcare system. This was made explicit by the Catholic bishops of England and Wales in their intervention this week - if you legalise assisted suicide without an institutional opt-out, then a whole bunch of Catholic care homes and hospices are going to be faced with a dilemma. Risk getting dragged into the business of ending your patients’ lives against your convictions and consciences, or shut down entirely:
‘We call attention to the fact that the future of many care homes and hospices will be put in grave doubt if the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill becomes law. Minister Stephen Kinnock MP, Kim Leadbeater MP, as well as other MPs, indicated that the rights that this bill will give to individuals to seek assisted suicide, and to employees to participate in an assisted suicide, are likely to trump the mission and values of institutions such as hospices and care homes.
In other words, a right to assisted suicide given to individuals is highly likely to become a duty on care homes and hospices to facilitate it. Institutions whose mission has always been to provide compassionate care in sickness or old age, and to provide such care until the end of life, may have no choice, in the face of these demands, but to withdraw from the provision of such care. This tragedy can only be avoided by the defeat of this Bill on Friday.’
Now, to Rantzen no doubt this reads as a cynical threat, an attempt by the Catholics to bully parliament into rejecting a bill they already oppose on principled grounds by threatening to take all their hospices away. But it’s also true - a disproportionately large part of the care home and hospice sector are institutions with a Christian heritage and identity. And given proposed amendments which would allow them to opt out of assisted dying were not included in the bill, there is a real chance they conclude they have to get out of the old age business entirely. Leaving the wider nation in a bit of a hole (and no doubt pushing yet more people towards assisted suicide in the absence of a nationwide, properly-funded palliative care service).
We will have to wait and see if these objections make any difference to how MPs vote later on today. When it comes to the decriminalisation of abortion, the Catholic church has been (as you’d expect) very upset about it. The Archbishop of Liverpool John Sherrington said he was “deeply alarmed” by the vote in the Commons:
“[The amendment] significantly reduces the protection of unborn lives and will result in grave harm for pregnant women. Women will be even more vulnerable to manipulation, coerced and forced abortions. This legal change will also discourage medical consultation and make the use of abortion pills for dangerous late-term, at-home abortions more likely.”
The Church of England’s spokesperson was (as you’d expect) more circumspect, although not exactly brimming with enthusiasm for the direction of travel:
‘Whilst women ought not to be criminalised, it is worrying that this very significant change to the law may lead to more late-term abortions, including sex-selective abortions. So it is right that providing an abortion outside the amended 1967 Act remains a criminal offence for abortion providers. We recognise that this is a hugely difficult and important decision for women which is not taken lightly, and we must ensure that they are given the care and support that they need.’
It would ordinarily be very unusual for the House of Lords to reject a law passed with such a chunky Commons majority (the amendment passed 379-137), but then again it appeared in no party’s manifesto and was rushed through with barely any debate attached to a largely unrelated bill. So, peers may feel more emboldened to question the decisions of their elected colleagues this time round. It was also be interesting to see if the bishops who sit in the Lords (who include the C of E’s chief spokesperson on health and former chief nurse Sarah Mullally, Bishop of London) decide to weigh in on decriminalisation.
Assisted dying, as a ‘new’ reform, seems to me to have been less stuck in the same old culture war trenches and therefore attracted quite an array of churchy attention and campaigning over the last year (encouragingly). Abortion, however, is such a polarised and polarising issue that I suspect the C of E’s mealy-mouthed response above might be more representative. Apart from those denominations who are famously anti-abortion (most notably the Catholics), many other churches and Christian figures steer clear of the abortion debate to avoid controversy and dividing their flocks.
Unlike assisted dying, in which the debate feels fresh and hard to predict, we’re all so jaded on abortion and long since locked into our pro-life or pro-choice bunkers, I wonder if some churches will conclude there is little to be gained by opening up another round of angry shouting and talking past each other on decriminalisation. Which could see one of the most significant changes to how Britain approaches a pivotal question of ethics and morality in a generation slip by without hardly any of the UK church actually joining the conversation.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Intriguing non-believers and life in intentional community
This week we’re joined by the writer and podcaster Elizabeth Oldfield. Her new book Fully Alive is a series of essays trying to introduce riches of the Christian tradition and its wisdom on everything from feminism to loneliness to non-believers who may have never considered Christianity before. We discuss trying to tap into what many see as a crisis of meaning and associated new openness to faith in culture. Is there really, beyond the tiny intellectual elite debating these ideas, a genuine curiosity and yearning for spiritual answers to life’s biggest questions among ordinary people? Elizabeth also lives in a 21st-century monastic-style community house in South London, and we drill into how sharing your home, money and life with another family can possibly work – and the costs and benefits of radical early church-style hospitality.
Quickfire
The US Supreme Court was evenly split 4-4 on whether to approve the nation’s first religious public school, meaning the decision was bounced back down to a lower court which had already ruled against it. Oklahoma wanted to use taxpayers’ money to fund a virtual online Catholic charter school, which many said would breach the constitution’s separation of church and state. The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority, but one conservative had to recuse herself because of a potential conflict of interest, while another unexpectedly joined the liberals leaving the court deadlocked.
A charlatan prosperity gospel ‘archbishop’ who became famous after pretending he could miraculously cause women to fall pregnant without even having sex has died in a car crash in Kenya. Gilbert Deya rose to prominence while leading a church in London 20 years ago after claiming he had helped numerous infertile women conceive miracle babies. Desperate women would travel to Nairobi with him to ‘deliver’ their babies, which Deya’s organisation actually stole from poor Kenyan families. His UK church was connected to a child-trafficking ring and he was eventually extradited back to Britain after a long legal battle, but his trial ended in his acquittal in 2023.
The conservative Global South Fellowship of Anglicans has written to the former head of MI5 who is chairing the committee which will select the next Archbishop of Canterbury to ask him to ensure an ‘orthodox’ (i.e. conservative on sexuality) bishop is chosen. The letter notes that the GSFA churches had already declared the ABC no longer their de facto spiritual leader because of the Church of England’s decision to bless gay couples. But if Welby’s successor is conservative, they say, they might yet come back around. And they also criticise the way the global Anglican reps who sit on the committee have been chosen, suggesting not enough weight was given to the large and conservative churches in their movement.
This month’s C of E abuse scandal revolves around three sisters, who have strongly attacked the church authorities for “fobbing them off” on multiple occasions after they reported historic sexual abuse by their father, a church warden and a curate. The sisters say they were regularly attacked by this trio in a church but despite trying to report this three times (including to the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams) in the 1990s and 2000s, got nowhere. A lessons learned review by the church has concluded many mistakes were made by both them and the police (who similarly failed to investigate) but denied any suggestion of a cover-up.
Meanwhile, in Armenia the prime minister has got locked into a remarkable squabble with the country’s national church after he accused the celibate head of the church, Catholicos Karekin II, of secretly fathering a child. Nikol Pashinyan has also attacked other senior clerics, accusing one archbishop of having an affair with his uncle’s wife. Reports suggest the falling out might be related to the church’s growing hostility to the government, after it joined opposition calls for the prime minister to stand down.
Famous Christian musician Michael Tait, a founding member of iconic 90s group DC Talk, has been accused of sexual assault and the grooming of a series of young men over his many decades at the top of the Christian music industry. After this piece was published, Tait admitted it was true and confessed to living a “double life”, using cocaine, drinking too much and “touching men in an unwanted sensual way”.
Sam Hailes from Premier Christianity has an interesting piece which asks if the Christian music industry has an “accountability problem”, after news broke about Tait alongside other stories from the well-known band Needtobreathe, and allegations of financial misconduct by the worship leader turned Christian Nationalist MAGA activist Sean Feucht.
Thanks for reading. If you’re enjoying The Critical Friend, I’d be really grateful if you could share it with a friend.
And please also consider if you could upgrade to a paid subscription for just £5 a month (or £50 a year). This really helps support me to write the newsletter each week, and in return you get access to the comments, the back catalogue of posts, and occasional bonus material too.