To be a conservative is to respect institutions. They constrain us and shape us, pass customs and knowledge through the generations, inspire loyalty and collective effort, and teach us to be social not solitary beings. “To love the little platoon we belong to,” Edmund Burke explained, is how “we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind”.
What makes institutions a force for good, however, can also make them a force for ill. Their ability to constrain can stultify debate and silence dissent. Their custodians can, with their own agenda, attack customs and undermine an institution’s very purpose. Sometimes devotion to an institution can trump decency, reason and even a commitment to the rule of law. Individuals can hide within an institution to avoid scrutiny and accountability.
From MPs’ expenses to bankers’ bonuses, cancel culture on campus to the capture of the National Trust, there are many such examples. Scandals such as Hillsborough, the mistreatment of postmasters and the long failure to compensate those whose blood was contaminated all make the point. Even the best institutions can err, and none should be untouchable. This is why pluralism, free enquiry and expression, and good laws and governance are so important.
When moral leadership is the purpose of an institution, or an institution has stepped beyond its remit to condemn others, but has been found to be hypocritical, the failure is all the greater. Unfortunately, so it is with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Justin Welby says he “considered resigning” over an independent report, published last Thursday, which detailed how a leading Anglican evangelical had physically and sexually abused at least 115 children and young men, unchallenged, over decades. The Church of England had identified abuse by John Smyth, a barrister who ran Christian youth camps, but covered it up in the 1980s.
The report confirmed that Welby had known Smyth in the 1970s. He was overheard by a contributor to the review having a “grave” discussion about him with Rev Mark Ruston in 1978, four years before Ruston wrote a report detailing Smyth’s abuse. And Welby admits being warned to “stay away” from Smyth in 1981. But he continued to send him Christmas cards and made donations to his mission in Zimbabwe, where Smyth went to live after abruptly leaving Britain in 1984. In Zimbabwe, a 16-year-old boy died in mysterious circumstances at a holiday camp run by Smyth in 1992.
Welby was not ordained until that same year, and cannot be held responsible for the failures of the Church in the 1970s and 1980s. But the report found, “from July 2013, the Church of England knew, at the highest level, about the abuse in the late 1970s and early 1980s”. It said, “Smyth should have been … reported to the police in the UK and to relevant authorities in South Africa,” where he then lived, and that the failure to do so endangered children around him.
Welby was elected Archbishop of Canterbury in February 2013, and the report finds that he was aware of the allegations against Smyth by August of that year. Its conclusions about his response are damning. He held a “personal and moral responsibility” to make sure the case had been reported to the police and investigated by them, but did not do so.
A commitment by Welby to meet abuse victims was not met until four years later. An eventual personal apology “came too late to … offer any closure or relief to victims”. And his promise to investigate all the clergy who had not acted on information about Smyth was not kept. “Several victims,” the report says, “feel a sense of personal betrayal by Justin Welby.”
We should be fair to Welby and acknowledge that under his leadership, the Church has introduced safeguarding policies to protect children and vulnerable adults with whom it comes into contact. But we should also remember the context of July 2013. Rolf Harris had been arrested in March. The crimes of Jimmy Savile and others had been known and discussed from 2011. The failure of institutions to respond to child abuse was a matter of national debate that led to a public inquiry announced in 2014.
We should also recall what Welby has said about other institutions and their response to allegations of abuse. In 2017, he attacked the BBC, saying, “I haven’t seen the same integrity over the BBC’s failures over Savile as I’ve seen in the Roman Catholic Church, in the Church of England, in other public institutions over abuse.”
In fact, Welby has been unembarrassed about involving himself in contentious political issues. Ignoring the possibility that there is more than one moral perspective in judging a problem, he attacked the last government for its asylum policies, saying they could not “stand the judgment of God”. He leapt into the Black Lives Matter controversy by inventing a dubious new doctrine of forgiveness based on inherited collective national guilt, saying “there can only be forgiveness” for the actions of past generations “if there’s justice: if we change the way we behave now”.
Within the Church, Welby has presided over declining congregations, the closure of thousands of churches, and “pastoral reorganisations”, which critics worry will kill off the local parish. He launched a divisive Archbishops’ Commission on Racial Justice, which last week accused some rural parishioners of racism. The Commission is chaired by Lord Boateng, a Labour peer, who has accused the Church of being rife with structural and systemic racism.
If Welby believes the Church he has led for more than a decade is systemically racist, perhaps he should take responsibility for that. More likely, he, like other liberals, has gone along with ideological fashion, knowing he will not be among those who suffer the purges and punishments that follow his decisions.
It was, perhaps, a similar carelessness that led to the personal and institutional failure to respond in 2013 to clear evidence of child abuse. Smyth, now dead, has escaped justice. But for the sake of his victims, and the Church itself, Welby should show the integrity he once said was missing in others – and resign.
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