Cross Purposes

Religious people and journalists rarely speak each other’s languages well. The farewell interview of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg demonstrated this admirably. It left me with a range of responses.

Of course journalists were doing their job when they uncovered the unspeakably evil actions of religious leaders in the Church of England and other religious groups. They were right to focus the news spotlight on those who have abused their power to destroy the lives of younger men and women in their care. The abusers and those who sought to cover up the abuse at all levels both individual and institutional deserve the opprobrium which has been heaped upon them.

The problem for religious groups when it comes to media is that the discrepancy between what they teach which is often quite complex and what they practice which can sometimes easily be categorized as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ offers the journalist that most simple of opportunities. to compare simplified teachings and obvious failures in practice, find a woeful discrepancy and write delicious finger-pointing headlines grabbing stories about hypocrisy. And hypocrisy sells! It’s lowest common denominator journalism with binary values about people who are either good or bad, either moral or immoral.

Kuenssberg seemed intent on extracting what one commentator called ‘The Confessions of Justin Welby’.  For me, it was hard to watch him simply taking the personal blame for failures which have deep and tangled roots not just in human nature but in the traditional teachings and hierarchical culture and synodical structure of the international and fractured group which Anglicans still call the Anglican Communion. In the church he has led for twelve years, his power to achieve the changes that he would have liked to make was, as he pointed out, limited by the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury is not CEO of Anglicans PC. It is a much more complex business than that which certainly doesn’t fit into simple media categories.

Media deals in bold colours  - in this case – black and white – and Welby was black! He was wrong. He confessed it with honesty and humility.  He had been inexperienced and overwhelmed. He had to resign. End of...  As in crowd think and media think: ‘It is necessary for one man to die for the people.’

At the end of the interview, Kuenssberg asked a simple-sounding question for Welby about the serial abuser who combined a distorted kind of evangelical faith with physical and spiritual abuse of the worst kind in the UK and South Africa. ‘Do you forgive John Smyth?’

Welby’s almost immediate answer was a response which seemed to me to express the kind of assumptions about clerical power which help to create a climate for abuse in the first place. ‘Yes!’ he said – as if it mattered that he as a priest forgives Smyth.

The Christian doctrine of forgiveness is simply stated in the prayer which Jesus taught his followers to pray, ‘ Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Welby’s reflex answer was probably a product of Christianity 101 – we must all forgive. But it was only once he had pronounced his own response that he recognised the irrelevance of his reply and pointed out that the response of the victims and survivors was what mattered here.

What does forgiveness mean in cases of abuse? It’s one of the trickiest questions for anyone to answer. It’s especially difficult for victims and survivors to know what forgiveness means in their lives. How long might it take to struggle to such a place? Is it a matter of will or emotion or both? Victims and survivors can be troubled by such questions decades after the event and the death of the abuser.

End of term report for both Kuenssberg and Welby: ‘Must try harder to learn each other’s languages’!