Justin Welby’s woke hubris

So the Archbishop of Canterbury has fallen on his sword. Today Justin Welby announced that, with ‘the gracious permission of the King’, he will vacate Lambeth Palace. It follows the fury over the Church of England’s mishandling of the case of John Smyth, the vile abuser of boys at Christian summer camps organised by the church. Last week, a report argued that the CofE ‘covered up’ Smyth’s sadistic crimes. Damningly, it found that when Welby volunteered at Smyth’s camps in the Seventies, it was possible he didn’t know about Smyth’s depravity, but it’s ‘unlikely’. The head of the Anglican Communion may have been aware of unspeakable horrors? He had little choice but to go.

It’s a horrific tale. Smyth was a British barrister and moral crusader. He died in 2018. Through the 1970s he ran Christian camps in Dorset. He visited tyranny on the boys who attended. He subjected them to ‘traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks’, said the independent review published last week. He caned boys so badly that their bottoms were left dripping with blood – some had to wear nappies for days until the bleeding stopped. On the side, he was a legal adviser to the morality campaigner, Mary Whitehouse. So one minute he was helping to ‘clean up’ cultural life in Britain, the next he was brutalising boys with horrific physical and spiritual violence.

His abuse was identified in the 1980s, yet the church failed to take steps to stop him. In fact, last week’s review found they took action to ‘prevent’ his crimes from ‘coming to light’. This culture of silence is one of the reasons he was able to continue battering boys: he relocated to Zimbabwe in 1984 where between 85 and 100 boys found themselves on the receiving end of his bestial urges. It’s unclear what Welby knew. He was a close contact of Smyth’s for many years. He says he was ignorant of the terror. He may not have known of the ‘extreme seriousness of the abuse’, says the review, but it is ‘most probable’ he knew Smyth was ‘of some concern’.

I think we should give Welby the benefit of the doubt. I think we should trust that if he knew of Smyth’s barbarism, he would have said so. And yet it is nonetheless striking how unwilling, initially, Welby was to take responsibility for this moral catastrophe in his own institution. He said last week that he had been giving resignation ‘a lot of thought’, but after speaking with ‘senior colleagues’ he decided against it. ‘I am not going to resign’, he insisted. This is a man who thinks us plebs bear moral responsibility for crimes that occurred long before we were born, yet he was unwilling, for a while, to take responsibility for horrors committed by a man he knew and ‘covered up’ by the institution he now runs. Hypocrisy much?

Welby is wokeness personified. It sometimes feels like he has greater fealty to the god of PC than to the God of Christendom. And as part of his zealous woke crusading he has often called on us little people to reckon with our moral culpability for the ills of the world. So after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, and the explosion of the BLM movement, he called on ‘white Christians’ to ‘repent’ of their ‘prejudices’. Do the ‘urgent work’, he said, of ‘becoming better allies to our brothers and sisters of colour’. How striking that Joe Public was expected to feel the twinge of moral guilt over a policeman’s slaying of a black man 4,000 miles from England while Justin Welby thought he could ride out the CofE’s own hiding of vile crimes of child abuse.

In 2021, he called on the CofE’s 12,500 parishes to scour their churches for any monuments that ‘contain historical references to slavery and colonialism’. ‘Some will have to come down’, he said. It was like a secular exorcism, the expulsion from village churches everywhere of the merest mention of the sins of history. How striking that Welby was so keen to cleanse churches of ‘problematic’ monuments in order to please the overlords of the BLM ideology, but he seemed less keen, initially, to have a real reckoning with his own responsibility for offences committed in and ‘covered up’ by the CofE.

Just last month, Welby was quick to reveal that his late father, Sir Anthony Montague Browne, had an ‘ancestral connection to the enslavement of people in Jamaica and Tobago’. His noisy confession was part of a broader ‘public acknowledgement by the Church of England of its historical benefit from transatlantic slavery’, as the Guardian described it. Indeed, last year the church published a self-flagellating report on its historic links to the slave trade, with Welby saying he was ‘deeply sorry’ for it all and we must all ‘take action to address our shameful past’. How striking that he showed more vim and interest when apologising for crimes that happened long before he was born than he did for crimes committed by a man he knew in an institution he now leads.

This is the moral fashion: to pontificate over a past we can do nothing about in an attempt to distract us from a present we feel we cannot fix. It’s the hubris of woke, where one makes loud, pseudo-virtuous cries about unchangeable history in lieu of having any solutions for the here and now. That Welby feels more comfortable apologising for slavery and colonialism than he does with seriously thinking about the problems and the crises and the future of the CofE is entirely of a piece with the aloof, distracted nature of our at-sea elites. A church that turned a blind eye to the savage beating of boys in the 1980s now tells the rest of us to atone for the enslavement of men in the 1700s. It is ridiculous. And a little sickening. Get your own house (of god) in order.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy