The scandal of grace

Unpacking Justin Welby's final TV interview, more electoral mayhem in the Diocese of Canterbury, and why did the police raid a Quaker meeting house?

Hello! The big story in churchy world is of course Justin Welby’s interview last weekend on the BBC. Today we look at what he said that was new, surprising or controversial, and what we might learn about how society views the church and the faith from the mainstream media’s reaction to it.

Then we return to the controversial elections taking place in the Diocese of Canterbury, feeding into the process to choose Welby’s successor but rankling a lot of conservatives in the process.

And finally, what prompted the Met Police to raid a Quaker meeting house, and are they right that precious rights of protest are being whittled away?

Then there’s my latest podcast (should all Christians be as worried as right-wingers are about collapsing birth rates?), and a chunky list of interesting church news stories from around the web, featuring stubbornly persistent monks in a fascist mausoleum, the most controversial whitewashed church tower ever, eucharistic adoration at Mar-a-Lago, and a clever tax wheeze turning old pubs into ‘prayer rooms’.

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The scandal of grace

It’s a cliche, but there really is only one place to start today: Justin Welby’s weekend interview with Laura Kuenssberg. If you somehow have missed this, you can watch it in full here, or read my initial take on it for the New Statesman. But let’s face it, you’re really here for my extended and at times utterly self-indulgent thousands-of-words-long analysis. So let’s get into it.

First up, why do we think he agreed to do an interview at all? Towards the end, as Kuenssberg asks him what is next, Welby said this:

“In my ideal world, I would like to focus very much on mediation and reconciliation in this country and abroad, which I've done for over 20 years. I would love to be more involved in that, and never - after today - to be on telly again. I'm looking for total obscurity.”

It is a little strange to purportedly seek “total obscurity” and yet begin this journey of fading away into the background by first giving a 30-minute TV interview to one of the UK’s most famous broadcasters. Perhaps Welby saw this as his last chance to try and set the record straight, to get his side of the story over now the Smyth dust is just about starting to settle. And this he certainly tried to do. But before he put his case, he was very, very, very apologetic:

“I think it's easy to sound defensive over this. The reality is, I got it wrong. As archbishop, there are no excuses. Being overwhelmed is a reason, it isn't an excuse. There are no excuses for that kind of failure.

I am so sorry for what I failed to do, for what the church did do with John Smyth, with members of the church since the early 80s who covered it up, and I am so ashamed of my own failure. And I am so sorry that I did not serve the victims and survivors, nor did the church, as they should have done and I should have done, and that's why I resigned.”

As you will no doubt recall, Welby initially tried to tough it out after the Makin report was published (a week earlier than planned after someone first leaked it to Channel 4). He said on the day it came out that he’d thought long and hard about whether he should resign, and taken soundings from senior colleagues, and concluded - no. An apology was sufficient, his errors were not so grievous only resignation would do.

We all remember what happened next. Petitions were launched, his enemies in the church mobilised, the media storm erupted over the weekend, and then on Monday the Bishop of Newcastle Helen-Ann Hartley broke ranks and called for him to go. So what sounded like a reasoned decision on Thursday to stay, by Tuesday had collapsed and he went.

I’ve argued in the past that presumably Welby continued to believe Makin had not uncovered a smoking gun and that he did not need to resign on principle, but had reluctantly concluded the pressure had grown too strong. Resignation was the only way to preserve the Church of England’s tarnished image and the only way to resolve the crisis. This impression was only reinforced by his ballsy and jocular valedictory speech in the House of Lords a few weeks later, where he pretty explicitly said as much:

“There comes a time, if you are technically leading a particular institution, when the shame of what has gone wrong - whether one is personally responsible or not - must require a head to roll. There is only, in this case, one head that rolls well enough.”

But, Welby told Kuenssberg on Sunday, this interpretation is wrong. He had actually genuinely changed his mind over the weekend. He hadn’t been pushed into resigning by the Twitter mob or Hartley’s stab in the back. He barely even paid any attention to the newspapers, apparently. Instead, he claimed he had reflected and re-read the report and concluded that “to respond adequately” to the “horrible suffering of the survivors which had been more than doubled by the institutional church's failure” he had to quit.

I suppose we have to take him at his word. But I remain a little sceptical of the neatness of this account. Welby said his initial response was rushed, because Makin was leaked a week early. And yet he still had hours and hours to read it and reflect on what it said before he gave his first interview, confirming he wouldn’t resign (and, let’s face it, even before he read it he must have already pondered what he was going to do). Even on Monday afternoon, four days later and after the whole weekend to mull it over, a Lambeth Palace spokesperson was quoted in The Guardian saying:

“As he has said, he had no awareness or suspicion of the allegations before he was told in 2013 – and therefore having reflected, he does not intend to resign.”

Less than 24 hours after that statement, he was gone. And only a few weeks after that, he was joking about infuriating his diary secretary and medieval predecessors who got their actual heads cut off in the House of Lords. For what it’s worth, Welby did deliver the necessarily grovelling apology to Kuenssberg for that cloth-eared car crash of a farewell speech on Sunday:

“I am profoundly ashamed of that, and I remain deeply ashamed. It's one of those moments where, when I think of it, I just wince. It was entirely wrong and entirely inexcusable. I wasn't in a good space at the time. I shouldn't have done a valedictory speech at all.”

Let’s pause for a moment to credit Welby with the decency to make an unreserved apology, not just for the House of Lords speech, but his actions on Smyth in general. Public figures who are prepared to do a real, genuine apology are few and far between these days. We are so used to politicians and celebrities wheeling out the tried and tested ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ and ‘This was regrettable’ and ‘I had no intention of causing any harm’, so it is both noteworthy and heartening Welby chose to front up and meaningfully apologise.

Having got the apologies out of the way, the former archbishop did then go on to offer some context - reasons, not excuses, as he put it - for what really happened back in 2013 when the first reports of Smyth’s abuse crossed his desk at Lambeth Palace.

His core argument is that he was overwhelmed by the volume of safeguarding cases which consumed him and his team, just weeks after taking up the job. As a sidenote, this is probably just my ultra-cynical journalist brain talking, but am I alone in perhaps detecting here a very subtle coded critique of the previous Rowan Williams regime? An archiepiscopate too cerebral or too distracted to get a handle on the ever-increasing reports of abuse landing in the Lambeth Palace mailbag? Leaving the more pragmatic Welby and co to wade through a mess which had accumulated over the years…

Maybe, maybe not. But it is, in my view, quite fair to point out that at the time, the single and vague report which came via the Diocese of Ely about Smyth from a single victim did not seem as pressing as, for instance, the Peter Ball case. That was a story of a former bishop literally on trial for years of abuse against dozens of young men. And a former bishop, we might add, who was very ably protected by an establishment cover-up in the 1990s (including by Welby’s predecessor but one, George Carey) when his crimes first came to light. I think I also probably would have focused my attentions on the Ball case rather than this unverified account of over the top physical discipline in a Hampshire shed.

Welby also explains in the interview other reasons why he did not give more attention or priority in 2013 to the Smyth report. He was new and inexperienced at the job, having only been archbishop for a matter of weeks and a bishop of any kind for little more than a year. The rules at the time said it was the job of the Bishop of Ely, whose diocese had received the first victim’s report, not the Archbishop of Canterbury, to investigate further and take the lead. And, as Makin shows, Welby had been told that his colleagues in Ely were on the case, so he pretty reasonably let them get on with it.

Welby also notes that the police warned him explicitly not to poke his nose in while they investigated themselves. This is, again, a very fair explanation. And it also tells the lie to the core claim which has settled in the public consciousness - that Welby failed to report Smyth to the police. In fact, as we now know, several police forces were informed between 2013 when modern reports of Smyth first came to the church’s attention and 2017 when the story was broken by Channel 4.

Welby objectively did not lead a cover-up. He did not even personally drop the ball on telling the police. He was informed by his colleagues, correctly, that the police were on the case. And later on, he himself was told by the police to not do anything which could jeopardise their own investigation. Welby told Kuenssberg he now regrets not pushing back at the police, asking them what exactly they were doing. He said if this had happened a few years later, with more experience under his belt he would have felt on stronger ground to be more robust with the authorities.

But is that really his fault? And how have the police managed to escape the Smyth fiasco without a stain on their reputation? Makin documents that on several occasions referrals were made to several police forces. He suggests that these were not formal reports to the police as no crime number was recorded, but this has been pooh-poohed by experts as a meaningless distinction. The police were told, and they ultimately mostly sat on their hands and did nothing. The people whose actual job is to catch bad guys (unlike the relatively powerless church safeguarding teams), who could have stuck Smyth behind bars years before he went to meet his maker, failed entirely. And yet have got off pretty much scot-free.

All in all, I have a big dollop of sympathy with Welby’s predicament. Of course it was, with hindsight, a big mistake not to have pushed harder on the Smyth case when it first came across his desk in 2013. But he had very reasonable grounds for believing it was being dealt with by other church colleagues, had very reasonable grounds for believing it was already in the hands of the police, and was very reasonably distracted by what seemed more important safeguarding cases (and in general overwhelmed by the volume of the crisis).

And yet he has paid a pretty high price for this understandable and, in my view, reasonable error of judgement. For all his communication errors, though, Welby is smart enough and well-trained enough not to fall into some of Kuenssberg’s traps during the interview. He deftly declines to describe himself as having been “cancelled” and explicitly rejects the idea he was “unfairly treated”. But he does make more general points about the gracelessness of contemporary culture:

“I think there is a rush to judgment. There is this immense distrust of institutions. And there's a point where you need institutions to hold society together. And there's an absence of forgiveness. We don't treat our leaders as human. We expect them to be perfect. If you want perfect leaders, you won't have any leaders.”

Whatever your views on Welby per se, I think it’s hard to disagree with this analysis. Particularly when the biggest news line picked up by the secular media from his 30-minute chinwag is him forgiving Smyth. Kuenssberg first asked him if he would like to be forgiven by the victims, to which he says yes but he would never demand it - it remains their choice. She then asks him if Smyth were still alive would Welby forgive him, and again he said yes. He goes on to immediately point out he hadn’t endured the brutal barrister’s garden shed and so whether he forgave or not was irrelevant.

But it is this almost throwaway remark which has become the standout moment for many. It was the headline for the BBC’s own story about the interview. And it bemused and infuriated others, as this Independent editorial shows. Putting aside the litany of factual errors and bizarre leaps made in that Independent piece and others (I would agree with most of Andrew Brown’s castigations here), we should not be surprised that forgiveness, even when couched appropriately and sensitively, is so scandalous.

It is shocking to suggest that even someone guilty of the most horrendous crimes against vulnerable young men, causing lifelong emotional and psychological harm, can be forgiven. It is outrageous for Welby to have the temerity to offer grace out to someone as bad as Smyth. It’s also fundamentally Christian. Welby speaks as one who has known forgiveness from God for his own sins, and rightly knows his task is to offer on that same second chance to others. This gospel of grace will always, has always, upset people. But this is Christianity, like it or lump it. We are the forgiveness people.

And Welby is not, as some in the incredulous media have suggested, demonstrating yet again his poor judgement or that he’s living in some hyper-spiritual cloud cuckoo land. He has known the real, earthy battle that is forgiveness in his own life. His father was an alcoholic and emotionally distant, and then died young. His mother was also an alcoholic, and had, he later discovered, an affair of which he was the unknowing product. His first daughter died as a baby in a car crash. Several of his other children have struggled with poor mental health, as has he. For all his faults, Justin Welby is not a man who is ignorant of the true suffering bound up in our broken world, he is not unfamiliar with the deep cries of pain to a God who seems silent, nor is he a man who has never had to forgive anyone anything serious. As he told Kuenssberg:

“I've struggled with forgiveness and the issues of forgiveness so much over the years in the family, my own father, in the loss of a child, in wars, in sitting and weeping with people who've watched their whole family wiped out. I remember a man in Nigeria whose seven children and his wife had been murdered and the girls had been raped. And you don't say ‘Oh, now's a good time to forgive’. You sit, you hold hands and you weep. I should have done more of that, and I didn't.”

Moving on from Smyth, Welby also said some interesting things about other hot potatoes in the church he led until recently. He said he had been in favour personally of independent safeguarding since 2016, which is news to me! But it’s only coming in now almost a decade later, he explained, because he was not an Anglican pope and needed the backing of the General Synod. Now it is true that the Archbishop of Canterbury cannot always have their way, but it’s also a little too convenient for Welby. Independent safeguarding was not voted through until February this year because it had never previously been put on offer to the synod. It’s very much not the case that Welby spent the last nine years pushing the C of E to adopt independent safeguarding but being stymied by a recalcitrant synod. I don’t recall any proposal for independent safeguarding being brought by the hierarchy to the floor of synod before, despite it being a key demand from many survivors for years.

The same excuse was offered up on gay marriage, something Welby was happy to say he supported in the interview but, again, couldn’t get the necessary two-thirds majority in synod. This is undoubtedly true, and he also very fairly points out that there is even less support for the idea in the wider Anglican Communion, which he also has responsibilities towards.

Kuenssberg then turned to the women bishops settlement and the fact that it remains possible for parishes to opt out of having both women vicars and a woman bishop. Welby’s response is, again, without this provision the package allowing women to become bishops wouldn’t have got the two-thirds majority in synod. This is, again, absolutely the case - the reason his predecessor Williams failed at the last hurdle to get women bishops passed in 2012 is because some synod members voted it down believing its protections for conservatives were insufficient.

But what is new here is that Welby is, for the first time I can recall, openly criticising the 2014 settlement which broke the logjam. He’s always been personally in favour of women’s ordination, but has previously been careful to state that those with theological objections are valid and honoured members of the C of E. And he’s defended the settlement (which creates the right in perpetuity for parishes to request a male ‘flying bishop’ if their diocese is led by a woman) as the right and good thing to do. Now, however, his argument has developed:

“I would have loved to be able to wave a magic wand and get it all right. I would love to have been able to at least have blessings for partnered lesbian and gay people in the church, and I would love there not to be this process of different values for bishops who are men and bishops who are women. But that isn't the reality, and I didn't have the votes.”

He seems to be saying that the provisions for conservatives over women were a regrettable bit of horse-trading needed to get whole package over the line, and not something he defends as right in principle. This may not surprise some of the more mistrustful elements of the complementarian wing of evangelicalism. But it does undermine a lot of his previous messaging, on women and also on sexuality.

Welby and the hierarchy have been at pains in the last two years to stress that while they disagree with conservatives over the gay blessings, the other side are good, true, honoured Anglicans who must always have a place in the C of E. But if he no longer believes that about the settlement needed to pacify conservatives a decade ago so women could become bishops, did and he colleagues ever really believe that about today’s stand-off over gay blessings?

And finally, it was impossible to miss just how much Welby kept bringing the interview back to God. When Kuenssberg asked him about the coronation, he immediately went to the moment he anointed King Charles where he felt “an overwhelming sense of the presence of God by the Holy Spirit”. Later on he described the essence of his job as archbishop being to tell people about Jesus:

“I'd spent 12 years seeking to bring people to faith in Christ and the church. To tell people about the overwhelming love of God that is at the door, that they need only open their lives to. As someone wrote recently, a love so intense that it would be unbearable were it not for the cross of Christ.”

And his final words were similarly spiritual, rather than dwelling on the politics of it all:

“I don't look back and see triumphs and disasters. I see failures. I see good moments. But I see above all the presence and love of God, who has been with me, is with me, and will be with me, and will meet me on the other side of death. And that is what matters above all.”

It’s easy to skim over this stuff, especially as a journalist. Not newsworthy, earnest but uninteresting to everyone else, what he’s expected to say - after all, he is an archbishop. But nobody is making Welby steer the conversation towards Jesus time after time. Kuenssberg is not going to pull him up short and demand to know why he hasn’t spoken more about the love and presence of God during his time at Lambeth Palace.

Welby chose to use what he says will be his last ever media appearance to express just one more little bit of the gospel. In fact, he spent his entire tenure trying to squeeze Jesus’s name into every interview and TV appearance - it was an unofficial rule at Lambeth Palace that all his media had to also include just a smidge of evangelism. Taking off my journalistic hat for a moment, I have to applaud this. Love him or loathe him, Welby is a heartfelt sold-out follower of Jesus. He understood the core of this ultimately impossible job which ate him up and spat him out to be sharing his faith in Jesus with as many people as possible, and I for one will always be grateful for that.

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We can do better

We must briefly pick up the thread from last week’s newsletter on the shenanigans in the Diocese of Canterbury, as the slow-moving process to select a new archbishop grinds on. The election for the new, one-off Vacancy in See Committee (VISC) did indeed take place last week. There’s still not been, as far as I can see, any formal announcement of the results by the diocese publicly, but the new VISC has already met and elected three from among themselves to sit on the Canterbury Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) and help choose the next archbishop.

As feared by many conservatives, the highly complicated procedures for electing the VISC and the CNC Three have created confusion and somewhat broken down. For those interested in the nuts and bolts, Andrew Goddard (not a synod member as last week’s newsletter claimed, sorry my mistake, but his wife and fellow vicar Lis is, and is also a central CNC member) has another lengthy blog working through all the ways the vote was both chaotic and, for some, dubious.

The Single Transferable Vote (STV) system the C of E uses for all its elections is a very good electoral system (we should in fact use it for parliamentary elections, it’s way fairer than our current broken first past the post system). You vote by ranking all the candidates in order of preference, and then a clever formula is applied to reallocate ‘surplus’ votes from candidates who have already got enough backing to be elected to your other preferences. In elections with lots of voters it works very well to produce a result which fairly represents the overall preferences of the electorate.

But the church has hamstrung the VISC elections by larding them with a whole bunch of extra conditions, which we discussed in detail last week - most notably, the new rule that you cannot have two people on the VISC who worship in the same parish. The details are complicated, but this seems to have distorted the results considerably resulting in a number of strange outcomes, as Goddard reports:

• ‘Two candidates managed to get elected despite nobody having them as their first preference.

• Four were elected with only one person having them as their first preference.

• One candidate who got 10 first preference votes (behind one with 16 and two with 11 and ahead of all the other 19 candidates) was not elected.

• The majority (8) of the 15 candidates elected had gained two or less of the 88 first preferences and another 3 had received only 3 or 4 first preferences.

• In fact 11 of the 15 finally elected had between them only 21 of the 88 first preference votes.

• The only ordained woman whose first preference votes were counted (the other on the ballot was excluded as explained below) was standing to represent the clergy of Ashford Archdeaconry and got 10 votes but a clergyman from that Archdeaconry with 8 votes got elected instead of her.’

I’ve also been contacted by sitting VISC members who say their own diocese will still not provide them with the full numbers behind the election results, to explain how the complex transfer of votes worked under STV. One member said:

“You don’t need to be George Smiley to think they’re up to no good. It’s a total liberal scam.”

Now, to be crystal clear - I am not claiming the Diocese of Canterbury has intentionally manipulated the VISC election to get more liberals onto the committee. There is not enough evidence for that theory. This is simply a flavour of the conclusions some conservatives are drawing.

And it’s not just about the VISC election, because barely a week later the VISC elected its three-person delegation to sit on the CNC. This election too is bounded up with complicated overlapping rules, as discussed last week, which have created all kinds of distortions (most notably that male clergy are de facto barred from being chosen).

I suspect in the long run this will be a bit of a storm in a teacup. We are, after all, only talking about three of the 17 people who will sit on the CNC and appoint the next Archbishop of Canterbury. By the time that name emerges in the autumn, I doubt we will still be agonising over how exactly the Diocese of Canterbury elected those three people.

But good process still matters. Even if it’s just one small cog in the machine, it’s important that the VISC process is above board, and seen to be above board too. It has to retain the confidence of the whole church, but it very clearly has lost the trust of large swathes of conservatives. And so, whatever the result is in the CNC and however significant or insignificant those three Canterbury reps turn out to be, we probably shouldn’t just move on and forget all about this story.

I really hope the synod and House of Bishops come back to the issue of VISC and CNC elections in time to try and fix the problems unearthed over the past few weeks. Choosing new bishops and archbishops didn’t have to become mired in factionalism, backbiting and mistrust. Despite the divisions caused by the Prayers of Love and Faith, I still think we could design a system which militated against partisan conspiracy theories. We can do better than this.

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Tremble before the law

That’s quite a lot of internal C of E politics, so now for something completely different. Last week, the Metropolitan Police raided a Quaker meeting house and arrested six people who had gathered for a meeting of a protest movement called Youth Demand.

According to the Quakers, about 20 officers - some armed with tasers - broke their way into the Westminster Meeting House to break up the meeting on Thursday evening last week. The protesters had apparently simply hired a room on the premises and it wasn’t part of an official Quaker event, but the organisation has strongly condemned the police’s actions. Paul Parker, the recording clerk (the closest thing the hierarchy-phobic Quakers have to a leader) for British Quakers, said:

“No-one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory. This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a society criminalises protest.”

According to this video from Youth Demand, the event was a “welcome talk” explaining what the group were all about. As well as the six people arrested, others present had their laptops and phones seized. One member of the group said:

“This is insane - this is the level of state repression we are meeting and this is a massive wake-up call. But it means that what we’re doing is working. They are putting massive resources into shutting us down before we’ve even started.”

Youth Demand describe themselves as non-violent resistance movement, focused on pro-Palestine activism and action against fossil fuels. Their demands are:

• A total trade embargo on Israel

• Tax £1tn from the “super rich” by 2030 to pay damages to countries affected by the burning of fossil fuels.

And if these demands are not met? Well, the good people of Youth Demand will be in “non-violent resistance against this rigged political system and the people with blood on their hands”.

The Met Police, on the other hand, said Youth Demand were planning to try and shut down London throughout April using “swarming” tactics and road blocks. It said the six in the Quaker meeting house (plus another five arrested elsewhere in London and Exeter the following day) had been arrested on suspicion of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”:

“While we absolutely recognise the importance of the right to protest, we have a responsibility to intervene to prevent activity that crosses the line from protest into serious disruption and other criminality.”

If you’re not familiar with the Quakers, why not read this fact sheet I pulled together about them a few years ago? In a nutshell, they are a non-hierarchical sort of Christian movement, which has a long history of involvement in pacifism and social justice activism. Unlike most churches, they don’t really have a common set of beliefs, but instead are united around their distinctive mostly silent worship style and having no ministers or leaders.

In Britain in the past century, Quakerism has evolved to become a liberal and inclusive movement (they were the first church to allow same-sex marriage), happy to welcome a wide range of spiritualities and traditions. Many British Quakers would not even call themselves Christians - some don’t believe in God. Others happily blend their Quaker identity with being part of other more mainstream denominations. There’s even a unspeakably ugly neologism to identify those who have a foot in both the C of E and Quakerism: Quanglicans.

Their formal name is the Religious Society of Friends, and - much like the Mormons - their Quaker name was originally an insult from their enemies. Some believe the jibe derived from the habit of some early Quakers to shake in religious ecstasy as they were filled with the Holy Spirit during their meetings. Others suggest it comes from the trial for blasphemy of their founder George Fox in 1650, when he famously urged the judge to “tremble at the word of the Lord”.

From their first press release about the arrests, the Quakers have drawn links between the police raid and recent tough new laws barring some kinds of protest. Two acts in 2022 and 2023 have criminalised some kinds of demonstrations and given the police new powers to intervene if a protest group is planning major disruption (even if entirely non-violent).

These laws were passed by the previous Conservative government in response to Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil’s campaigns of civil disobedience (blocking motorways and roads, locking themselves to infrastructure etc). But the Quakers argue they have made it harder and harder to “speak truth to power”.

‘Quakers support the right to nonviolent public protest, acting themselves from a deep moral imperative to stand up against injustice and for our planet. Many have taken nonviolent direct action over the centuries from the abolition of slavery to women's suffrage and prison reform.’

A second statement this week (after those arrested had been released on bail) described the police raid as a “massively disproportionate response to the legitimate concerns of UK citizens”.

‘Since the story broke, Quakers have been overwhelmed by messages of support, from other faiths horrified at the violation of a place of worship, from people around the world, from the public who clearly see this for what it is: appalling police overreach.

Vague and sweeping definitions mean that even discussing peaceful protest can be criminalized. This is not just about the actions of the police but about laws that undermine democracy itself. In a democratic society, people must have the right to assemble and to speak out, even when their views challenge those in power.

People talking and peacefully demonstrating is not a threat to society; but stopping them is.’

You could boil the dispute down to very simple terms. Bleeding heart liberal group which never found a barricade it didn’t want to clamber upon is upset the police are trying to enforce the law. But there is a more interesting divide here: it’s not just the usual suspects of bearded lefties who are opposed to the strict new laws limiting protest in Britain. Whatever your views on Extinction Rebellion and climate change, the police now have sweeping and vaguely-worded powers to clamp down on “serious disruption” (whatever that means) caused by demonstrations.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, how about parliament’s joint committee on human rights? They warned before the Public Order Act 2023 passed that the law could criminalise protesters simply for linking arms with each other, and would have a “chilling effect” on people trying to exercise their democratic rights. The UN’s human rights chief has also criticised the new laws.

Christians of good faith will clearly have differing views on how to strike the balance in a democratic society between the right to protest and preventing excessive disruption to everyday life. But there’s another angle here too: the violation of a place of worship.

Quaker meeting houses are effectively churches, although they eschew traditional features such as spires or stained glass windows and normally just look like houses. Should meeting houses and churches (or mosques, synagogues and temples for that matter) have special protection in law? Is it fair that the police can raid a place of worship just as easily as a private home or business premises?

There is a long tradition of the idea of sanctuary - that people on the run can flee to a church and while inside are protected to some extent from the civil authorities. Interestingly, this is not an especially Christian idea - there is evidence of people claiming sanctuary in temples in Ancient Greece. But it was adopted by Christendom, and indeed by the medieval era in England had become formalised to an extent in law. If you had committed a crime and were being sought for trial you could flee to a church building and stay for 40 days without fear of being dragged out.

In modern times, this concept of sanctuary has been picked up by churches in the United States, which have developed a ministry of care towards irregular migrants without legal right to remain (sometimes this has literally meant housing a migrant on the run from the authorities within the building). While there is no formal sanctuary system in America recognising churches as sacred spaces beyond the arm of the law, for over a decade the government did have a rule which prohibited its agents from carrying out arrests at what it called “sensitive locations” - primarily schools, hospitals and… churches. So there was a de facto protection you got as a migrant if you claimed a modern version of sanctuary inside a church.

The concept of sanctuary has now also bled over from churches to whole cities, who can declare themselves a Sanctuary City and pledge not to share information on their citizens - legal and illegal - with the federal immigration authorities. But, as I have mentioned before in this newsletter, one of the first things Donald Trump did after coming into office in January was rip up the sensitive locations rule - putting pastors who have offered sanctuary to irregular migrants in a dilemma.

As far as I know, there is no comparable rule for the police or immigration enforcement in the UK, and they are free to rampage through churches looking for migrants to deport if they wish. And, as we’ve seen, they are certainly free to burst into churches to arrest people for other offences too.

I doubt many vicars (or even Quaker recording clerks) seriously want to wind the clock back 800 years and make churches totally inviolable again. Do we really think God wants the church to harbour domestic abusers or muggers on the run from the police, just because they managed to cross the threshold before the long arm of the law clapped them in handcuffs? There have even been very rare cases where a church leader themselves shamelessly abuses their position and the sanctity of their church for criminal gain, such as the Sussex vicar who was convicted in 2010 after he oversaw more than 360 sham weddings as part of an immigration fraud.

But it seems sensible to consider places of worship sensitive sites. We should be rightly wary of the state appearing to interfere with citizens’ religious practice. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the police to take a moment before kicking in the door of a peace-loving minority sect and reflect if there really is no better place they could arrest those inside.

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Is this the end? Plummeting birth rates, the future of humanity and the meaning of children

With unerring regularity, birth rates are dropping in almost every country on Earth. What was once assumed to be a rich world problem is now a reality in places as diverse as Chile, Russia, Thailand and the Caribbean. Almost everywhere people are having fewer and fewer children. Many nations, including the UK and the US, are now well below the magic number of 2.1 children per woman, the ‘replacement rate’ needed to maintain a stable population. In this episode we talk through the various theories proposed to explain why this is happening (is it about expensive childcare, birth control or cultural shifts in gender roles?) and also what the implications will be for our societies. And we end by discussing whether Christians should be joining those sounding the alarm about declining birth rates, and what our faith might have to say about the enduring value of having children.

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Quickfire

• A Nigerian trainee priest has reportedly been killed after he and a fellow seminarian were abducted. The other victim was released after 10 days in captivity, according to the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need. The abductions took place in Edo state, which is far from the hotbed of Islamist terrorism in the north of Nigeria, but has still seen six priests kidnapped in the last ten years from a single diocese.

• A Christian teacher who was sacked and banned from teaching after she told her Year 7 class that being gay was a sin has lost her legal battle with the Department for Education. Glawdys Leger taught at a C of E school in South London but was suspended and later barred from the profession after she told pupils during a Religious Studies class they should put God before LGBT identity. Leger has now failed in her attempt at the High Court to overturn this ruling.

• The military junta in Myanmar is ramping up its violent attacks on the country’s Christian minority, Christian Solidarity Worldwide has warned. The latest reports are that government soldiers - who have been engaged in (and losing) a civil war with ethnic and political opposition forces - set fire to St Patrick’s Cathedral in Kachin State, just before the local Christians were to celebrate the patron saint’s day last month. Earlier, the junta had reportedly bombed church sites and razed a priest’s home and diocesan school.

• Last week, the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell led the fifth anniversary service for the C of E’s online Sunday worship scheme. The weekly online service was first started during the covid lockdown in March 2020, but has carried on ever since as an offer to people who cannot make it to their own parish church. It moves around from church to church each week and has been hosted on a lifeboat, in a stable and even on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. Last year, the service got 21m views, apparently.

• The Observer has unearthed what appears to be a clever tax scam, whereby old pubs, dentists offices and retail units are converted into supposedly religious sites, freeing the landlords from paying business rates in the interim. A company called Faithful Global has set up what appears to be a register of sites where anyone can for free hold a worship service, which enables landlords to claim a tax break intended for empty buildings given over to a faith group.

• There’s a growing group of right-wing Catholic priests (and even a former bishop) in the US who have been ostracised or even defrocked by the church for their deep hostility to Pope Francis, amongst other things. This amorphous movement is now deeply ensconced in MAGA-land, and recently held a bizarre service, including adoration of the sacrament, at Mar-a-Lago (Trump’s Florida estate) with over 100 renegade priests, praying for the president to embrace Catholicism (or at least their extremist version of it).

• Speaking of the pope, one of his doctors has revealed they considered letting the 88-year-old pontiff die during his lengthy hospital stay as he battled serious respiratory problems. There was apparently a discussion among the medical team as to whether the intensive treatment needed to bring him back from the brink would be too destructive on his other organs. For what the future holds for the elderly and frail pope as he tries to convalesce after his near-death experience, I would recommend this piece from CNN.

• Just Stop Oil are one of the radical protest groups which prompted the previous Tory government’s harsh new anti-demonstration laws, but a vicar who supports them has just been acquitted at trial. Tim Hewes was accused of conspiring to block the M25 motorway for a 2022 protest, but was found not guilty.

• A new survey from Pew caught some attention last week: it suggests about 38% of those brought up as Christians in Britain have lost their faith. There were similar trends in most other Western countries, with the highest attrition rate coming in South Korea (43% were no longer believers and a further 7% had converted to another religion). If anything, that 38% figure feels a little low to me!

• A rural church in the Yorkshire Dales had a persistently leaky and damp tower, so after much pondering decided to whitewash the Grade-I listed 15th century structure. But the locals are aghast - having been promised by the vicar the final colour would be a “soft honey” hue, now the scaffolding has come down it looks a lot more like… white. This is ruining the bucolic views, the villagers fume to the Daily Mail, which has collected some typically bonkers quotes. My favourite: “This whole process puts me in mind of the ninth commandment, Exodus 20:16 - thou shalt not bear false witness.”

• A traditional new year parade by Iraq’s Assyrian Christian minority was sadly the scene of what appears to be an Islamist terror attack. A man wielding an axe and shouting pro-Isis slogans attacked the procession, injuring three people before he was restrained.

• A Benedictine monastic order which is based in a fascist monument in Spain has won a reprieve from the government’s efforts to evict it, but at the cost of expelling their leader. Spanish dictator Francisco Franco erected the vast Valley of the Fallen (using forced labour) as a mausoleum to his soldiers who died in the civil war of the 1930s, and the monks have been keeping watch at a church built into the enormous structure ever since (the longest church in the world, as it happens, and also home to Franco’s own tomb).

• Speaking of enormous monuments, a Leicester pastor claims he is one step closer to building his Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, a 50-metre high extravaganza next to the M6 motorway. Richard Gamble’s million-brick-long Mobius-strip style public artwork was supposed to open in 2022 but has been hit with constant setbacks. It’s not yet clear if he actually has the money to build it at all, but is now claiming construction will start this summer. I’ll believe it when I see it.

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