The Church at a Crossroads
Whoever becomes the next Archbishop of Canterbury will face the arduous task of uniting the now-radicalised wings of the Church of England.
Archbishop Justin Welby, the leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide, resigned on 12 November after eleven years in office. An independent investigation found that he had failed to take action against the late barrister John Smyth, who had supervised Church of England (CofE) boys’ camps in the 1970s and ’80s. Smyth would thrash boys’ buttocks until they bled, allegedly to deter them from masturbating.
The report into Smyth’s activities was written by barrister Keith Makin, who prefaced his catalogue of sadism by remarking, “The abuse at the hands of John Smyth was prolific and abhorrent. Words cannot adequately describe the horror of what transpired. ... Despite the efforts of some individuals to bring the abuse to the attention of authorities, the responses by the Church of England and others were wholly ineffective and amounted to a coverup.” For that concealment, Justin Welby is now on the road out of Canterbury.
Marcus Walker, rector of the medieval Church of St Bartholomew the Great in London, has emerged as Welby’s sternest critic and believes that his resignation was overdue. Conceding that Welby had delivered a “masterful” sermon following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Walker went on to berate his former superior for his forays into political argument, which he said betrayed a “desire to create a shadow government in the church.” He concluded by reminding his successor that, “You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God.”
Walker believes that the primacy of the Church and the applicability of its doctrines in everyday life have been neglected. In an article for the Spectator, he discusses Libby Lane, the CofE’s first female bishop. In August 2023, when members of her congregation were torn between attending church on Sunday and watching the English women’s football team play, Lane offered the following counsel: “I know lots of people will want to watch the match live. That is fine from the Church of England’s point of view. Others will prefer to go to church and avoid knowing the score until they can watch the match on catch-up, and that is fine, too.” Walker rejects this reasoning entirely:
[A]t the risk of being a vexatious priest, there was a key factor missing from Bishop Lane’s statement, which Charles I did not miss: that church comes first. That the worship of Almighty God is, for Christians, the single most important thing we can do. Of course we were excited about the Lionesses, of course many of us wanted to bunk off church to watch them, of course the church doesn’t want to give the impression that “no honest mirth or recreation is lawful or tolerable in our religion”, but… there is an existential danger in implying that the absolute core of our religion—worship—can take a back seat when something really exciting comes along.
Many Christians, especially those clergy routinely described as conservative or evangelical, share Walker’s belief that the CofE leadership had decided to manage, rather than try to arrest, the Church’s decline. This has meant closing poorly attended churches, an approach that accelerated during the COVID pandemic. Welby was an oil-company executive for over a decade, a position that was rewarded with a six-figure salary, and this has lent credence to the view that his heart has always been in management not piety. That seems to be at least partly untrue—his early life in the church was spent among evangelicals. But in his primacy, he sought a compromise with liberals on gay unions that angered traditionalists.
Walker’s call for a more conservative successor to Welby has exposed one of the major chasms in the Church. Rehearsing his belief in more God and less social concern on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme, Walker contended that emphasising issues like poverty and food banks was “left wing,” and should give way to the centrality of worship and veneration of Christ. He was angrily interrupted by Michael Banner, a theologian and dean of Welby’s old Cambridge college, Trinity. Banner said that the issues Walker dismissed as leftist were precisely those that Jesus placed at the centre of his preaching about care for the poor. (In Luke 6:21–22, Christ is quoted as saying, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”) The irritable BBC spat was a brief glimpse into a debate that has roiled the CofE for years and will no doubt continue once a new Archbishop is chosen.
On the Sunday morning after Welby’s resignation, Walker gave the sermon in his church. Unusually for a CofE Sunday service, the church was nearly full. Set on one side of London’s largest wholesale meat market in Smithfield, St Bartholomew the Great is a massive building, constructed in 1123. Inside, one finds a mixture of grandeur, beauty, and some decay. Walker took his text from Matthew 24:2, in which Christ prophesied that the temple of Jerusalem would be destroyed: “there shall not be left one stone upon another.” Walker then observed that, “It is hard, after the week we have just had, not to see the same fate for the Church of England—there is no guarantee that it will not happen.” Walker—and the many clergy who think like him—cleaves to the belief that God will not let His Church die. His opponents believe that this ignores the power of human agency.
Welby has described his childhood as “messy,” but he refused to shape it into a source of victimhood. Both his father, Gavin, and mother, Jane, were alcoholics who divorced when he was three. He was placed in the custody of his father but later discovered that his real father was Sir Anthony Montague Browne, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, with whom his mother had a brief affair just before she married Gavin Welby. When she died in July 2023 at the age of 93, the Archbishop said, “It was a privilege to be her son.”
Welby was sent to a preparatory school, then to Eton, and then to Cambridge’s Trinity College, where his great-uncle, the Conservative politician R.A. Butler, was Master. Having been indifferent to religion, Welby underwent a deep conversion at Trinity, which included speaking in tongues. This is common and treasured on the evangelical wing of the Church. As he told conservative writer Charles Moore, “It’s just a routine part of spiritual discipline—you choose to speak, and you speak a language that you don’t know.” His conversion, he told Moore, happened while he was with a Christian friend. He suddenly felt “a clear sense of something changing, the presence of something that had not been there before in my life. I said to my friend, ‘Please don’t tell anyone about this,’ because I was desperately embarrassed that this had happened to me, like getting measles.” Of knowing Jesus, he said, "He’s both someone one knows and someone one scarcely knows at all, an utterly intimate friend and yet with indescribable majesty.”
Despite this experience, Welby became a manager in the oil industry for most of the 1980s, first for French company Elf Aquitaine, then for the British Enterprise Oil exploration group in Nigeria. In 1989, he could no longer defy the consequences of his revelation, so he left the oil industry and applied for ordination as a priest. He was rejected by the then-bishop of Kensington, who told him that he had “no future” in the Church. He tried again, this time through Sandy Millar, the priest at Holy Trinity Brompton, who had developed the evangelical Alpha course and served as a bishop in Uganda. As a fellow evangelical who had also time spent in Africa, Millar saw in Welby a comrade in Christ.
Matt Johnson
Welby’s rise through the Church hierarchy was rapid—from parish priest (an impoverished time with a large family) in the 1990s to Dean of Liverpool Cathedral in 2004 to Bishop of Durham in 2011. He became Archbishop of Canterbury after a little over a year in Durham, succeeding the poet-priest and polymath Rowan Williams. Evangelicals are often hostile to the idea of female priests and to gay marriage blessed by a priest in church. Welby supported the first of these, but balked at gay marriage—though he shocked fellow evangelicals by saying that, if Anglican gays were in a stable relationship and were married in a civil ceremony, they could “be able to come along to a church and have a service of prayer and blessing for them in their lives together.” This was, he maintained, “a long way from church same-sex marriage,” and no dissenting Anglican priest would be compelled to preside at the blessing.
Welby’s partial endorsement of gay unions is a testament to his efforts to unite a fractious church: permitting gays to be blessed in their relationship was a strike for the liberals, but the reservation that such a marriage cannot be sanctified in a church ceremony was intended to reassure conservatives. In most cases, neither party was satisfied. He sought stability through compromise, which was a reasonable aim. But now, the Smyth affair has shaken up the clergy, who will employ greater energy to have their version of the worship of God incarnated in his successor.
Welby’s departure has a number of implications, and these will only grow as the shock wears off. Conventionally, a retiring Archbishop of Canterbury keeps his place in the House of Lords, but this must surely be in doubt for Welby. The governing Labour Party has promised a series of reforms to the upper chamber, the first of which is to rid it of all its 88 hereditary life peers. This bill’s second reading was debated a few days after Welby’s resignation, and Labour’s vast majority is likely to ensure it becomes law. There is no explicit pledge to remove bishops, but the government is committed to “a long-term commitment to replace the House of Lords with an alternative second Chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations.” It could be argued that bishops, overwhelmingly ministering to a defined part of the country, satisfy that representative function, but it would be something of a stretch, since they are not elected and their loyalty is to God before the public.
The fallout from Welby’s resignation could extend far beyond the membership of Britain’s upper and lower chambers. Welby’s decision may have been reluctantly taken, but it was made by one of the most prominent world religious leaders, whose Church has Anglican communions in North America, Africa, and beyond. This development is unprecedented in one crucial respect. Professor Alec Ryrie, a religious historian and CofE lay minister, observed that, through the centuries, Archbishops of Canterbury had resigned on points of conscience or personal protests, or they had been burned at the stake and murdered by mobs. Never before has someone resigned this position by taking responsibility for abuse practised by another. In a BBC interview, Ryrie said, “Even 15 years ago, this wouldn’t have been seen as a resigning matter. But Welby changed the culture of the Church—and in a terrible irony, he has suffered from it.”
By coincidence, a cinematic adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel Conclave opens in UK cinemas this week. After the death of a pope, a gathering of cardinals convenes to determine his successor, and corruption, hidden sins, and blackmail all emerge. The winner is a cardinal who was born intersex. This fact is disclosed to the chairman of the conclave (played by Ralph Fiennes), but he does not reveal it. Would the precedent set by Welby’s resignation impel a future pope to step down in the wake of serious abuses by priests?
The Catholic Church has faced—and will likely continue to face—many such abuses. In October 2021, an inquiry in France revealed that, since 1950, 216,000 boys had been sexually abused by priests—that’s roughly eight a day. Pope Francis expressed his “pain” upon receiving the news, but his performance on this topic in office has been mixed. He ordered a report into allegations of multiple abuses on the part of the American cardinal Theodore McCarrick, which was published in 2018. It showed that Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were aware of the serious allegations against him, but effectively did nothing. McCarrick was immediately relieved of his post, and in 2019, he was barred from holding religious office. It is now possible that a victim of abuse, or a lawyer acting for such a victim, would see the parallel with Welby and demand a papal resignation.
Who will be the next Archbishop of Canterbury? As of this writing, the odds-on favourite would, if elected, be the first woman and the first non-British-born prelate. Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani is Iranian-born. Her father was a long-serving Anglican bishop in Iran, and separate attacks on the family after the Iranian revolution left her mother wounded and her brother dead. The remaining family escaped to the UK when Francis-Dehqani was fourteen. After ten years of further education, she was ordained as a priest in 1998, and consecrated—by Justin Welby—as a bishop in 2017. She is presently Bishop of Chelmsford (East London and Essex). A liberal, Francis-Dehqani calls for the removal of all restrictions on clergy entering same-sex civil unions, and has attached importance to support for minority clergy, lay workers, and congregations.
The second favourite is also on the liberal wing of the Church, but he is a more conventional candidate. Graham Usher is Bishop of Norwich and he was appointed by Welby as lead bishop on the environment. A possible indication of favour: he was appointed to the post of Lord High Almoner by King Charles a few days after Welby’s resignation. This a medieval post, the light duties of which involve helping the king to distribute Maundy money to the poor just before Easter.
These are the first guesses, and the process may yet take months and other candidates will emerge. In broad terms, a liberal would favour a prelacy engaged in social as well as religious matters, while a conservative would place more stress on worship and the service of God. Whoever the next Archbishop is, he or she will find uniting the now-radicalised wings of the Church an arduous part of the job. But closer attention will surely be paid to reports of abusive priests—sexual or physical molestation by public figures, even if it occurred decades in the past, now features at the top of bulletins, on front pages of the popular press, and in many thousands of posts on social media. Piety or the priestly cassock will no longer be able to defend the predator.
