Of late, the Anglican Church has been exposed in yet another sex abuse cover-up scandal. Nobody should even be surprised at it, either.
Over here in Freedom Land, we’re used to evangelicals being disgusting hypocrites. When an evangelical leader lands in the news, we already have a good idea of what those headlines will say. But in the United Kingdom, their official denomination garners isn’t all evangelical—and I get the impression that most Americans think that the UK Anglican leaders are aren’t much like evangelical leaders here.
Well, they are. The rot goes to the roots of religion itself—and its poisonous fruit blossoms forth at the highest levels of Anglicanism. I don’t mean that metaphorically, either, as we will find out today.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 1/10/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
(From introduction: Blackrock exits Net Zero and walks back some DEI stuff; Republican state leaders pull away; 2022 letter from Idaho AG criticizing BlackRock.)
Situation Report: The scandal sweeping up through the Anglican Church right now
A recently-published investigation has revealed horrific abuse from an evangelical lawyer closely associated with the Anglican Church of England and its top leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. Soon after the investigation report went public, Welby resigned.
Here’s how it all went down:
In 2017, the UK’s Channel 4 News reported on a shocking abuse coverup in the Anglican Church. John Smyth, an evangelical who ran an Anglican-affiliated charity in the UK, had horrifically and sadistically abused at least 22 boys over a period of decades. Church leaders had known about it for decades, but had done nothing about it.
Perhaps explaining the Church’s inaction, Smyth had tight ties to the leader of the Anglican Church himself, Archbishop Justin Welby. When Welby was just a lad of 22, he’d worked for one of the holiday camps Smyth ran. According to one news report, Welby described Smyth as “charming and delightful.” In 2013, when Welby became the Archbishop, he claimed that’s the first time he ever heard of sex abuse accusations against Smyth.
But many people doubted that.
Over the years, many people had tried to sound the alarm about Smyth. But as so many church-based abusers do, Smyth hopped around to escape the consequences of his deeds. By 2013, he’d already moved to South Africa to run charities for children there (where he continued to abuse boys, of course), so the UK police refused to deal with it. One victim claims that the Anglican Church didn’t provide “proper information” to the police. That accusation sounds all too credible to me.
Similarly, the 2017 Channel 4 News story utterly failed to provoke a timely and adequate response from Anglican leaders. In 2018 and because of that report, one police force began investigating at last. But Smyth died just ten days later of complications after heart surgery.
An investigation begins into Anglican coverups of sex abuse
In 2019, public outcry led to the Anglican Church launching an independent review into how church leaders had handled allegations against Smyth. Keith Makin, a well-respected director of social services (<– warning, link will pop a print window), led this investigation.
Over the next five years, we heard little bits and pieces of progress about that investigation. As new information came to light, though, it kept delaying the completion of the final report.
At long last, Makin published the report in October 2024. And it completely, utterly, wholly and without reservations condemned both Welby and the Anglican Church for knowing about Smyth’s long-term abuse and doing nothing about it. It’s as horrifying a read as the Pennsylvania Report about abuses within Catholicism, and for the same reasons.
This past Monday was Welby’s last day as the Archbishop of Canterbury. A new one has not yet been appointed.
One potential name quickly floated to the top of the candidate list: the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell. He was even named the interim leader of the Anglican Church. Then, his name evaporated from the running once everyone remembered that he’s seriously mishandled at least one sex abuser in his churches. As of the latest Anglican headlines, it seems Cottrell is still the interim leader. He is making it clear that everyone can just die mad about it.
Always remember:
They knew. They knew, and they did nothing.
A quick note about the structure of the Anglican Church
In the UK, the Anglican Church of England, also just called the Church of England, enjoys a great deal of power—even as its membership numbers continue to tumble to the ground. Unlike how Christianity operates—ideally, at least—independently of our government in America, in the UK the Church of England is an “established” church. That means it has formal, legal connections to government, with the government having an official interest in funding and advocating for the religion. Here’s a good introduction to how the Anglican Church is entangled with the UK government. (And here’s a summary of how the Church is structured.)
As such, the King rules the Anglican Church as its Supreme Governor. As such, he appoints bishops and archbishops. (Usually, the Prime Minister assists him.)
Twenty-six Anglican bishops serve in the House of Lords. These bishops are known as the “Lords Spiritual.” They lead daily prayers and act as actual Parliament members. As Humanists UK points out on their website, the only other country that allows clerics to act in this capacity is Iran—an Islamic theocracy.
By the way, in 2021 that comparison frosted the Weetabix of one of those bishops.
Officially, Parliament keeps a regulatory eye on the religion. But today’s story shows just how effective they are at it.
(Incidentally, Scotland has its own “established” church, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. A lot of what we’re talking about here doesn’t map equally to Scotland. For example, the King is only a lay member of Scotland’s official Church.)
Meanwhile, Anglican schools indoctrinate hundreds of thousands of UK children every year
In addition to acting in a legislative capacity in the UK government, the Anglican Church operates many thousands of religious schools across the UK. They all require students to attend daily worship meetings.
Taxpayer money pays for many of these schools, which angers some UK residents. Some parents have confessed to pretending to be Anglican for years to get their kids into a good school because the school’s Anglican owners refused to admit non-Anglican students.
However, Anglican Church membership numbers have been in decline for years. These days, fewer than half of UK citizens are Christian at all. By 2022, I was hearing calls for “disestablishment,” meaning an end to an official UK state religion.
Most importantly for today’s topic, some Anglicans—and Anglican churches—are evangelical and some aren’t. In 2008, one Anglican leader revealed that in his first ordination interview, one assessor said evangelical Anglicanism was “a dying movement.” But that has not proved to be true. In 2020, some guy at The Gospel Coalition (TGC) even unsuccessfully tried to defend all the extremely- and suspiciously-Catholic-sounding practices of evangelical Anglicanism.
All along, evangelical Anglicans have proven to be just as susceptible to American-style evangelical foibles—up to and including glomming all over big religious movements like the Toronto Blessing.
John Smyth was an evangelical Anglican.
It’s not coincidence that Anglican evangelicals are at the heart of today’s abuse story
I don’t see it as any kind of coincidence that Smyth was an evangelical Anglican.
Evangelicalism functions as a dysfunctional authoritarian religious system. Its leadership rises not through skill or aptitude, but through crony-style links to other leaders. Bonds of mutual interest and mutually assured destruction hold them all together. If one goes down, that threatens the positions of all the rest.
More than that, though, Christianity’s decline ensures dead silence about abuse. Nobody in power wants to threaten their money train. It doesn’t matter where the religion is. It doesn’t matter who its leaders are. They all know their power and income both depend on maintaining their religious privilege.
In the UK, religious privilege exists on a formal, state-supported level. It doesn’t matter how much cultural power they lose. Nor does it matter how few people support their churches. They have formal state support. If that’s withdrawn, the entire Anglican Church will likely implode. I don’t see any way they could support themselves or maintain any kind of cultural presence without significant government help.
If enough people in the UK clamor for dropping that help, then their laws might just change to reflect the will of their people. Abuse scandals like the Smyth case give a great deal of oomph to those calls for reform. So in an ironic way, the UK’s religious establishment system has created plenty of incentives for religious leaders to conceal and cover up abuse scandals.
(Related: Evangelicals in America are scared of losing their tax exemptions and legal perks.)
Even without evangelicalism in the mix, sex abuse scandals keep cropping up around Anglican leaders. When we add religious authoritarianism to those warped priorities, though, we get exactly the situation that the UK faces now with Welby and Smyth.
Nothing about this Anglican abuse case should surprise us
Just as American authoritarian religious abusers have for decades, John Smyth got himself into positions of power and authority. He forged links to other high-ranking religious leaders. Through these machinations, he thereby made it almost impossible for anyone to hold him accountable in any way for his abusive behavior.
Earlier, I mentioned a bishop who lost his spaghetti in 2021 over the UK’s religious establishment being compared to that of Iran. In his response, the Bishop of Durham hotly retorted that Jesus totally challenged earthly authorities and stood up for “those on the margins.” To him, that’s PROOF YES PROOF that bishops should be involved in lawmaking.
Alas for him, anyone can see just how much he and his fellow Anglican leaders care about sex abuse after finding out they spent decades concealing just one Anglican’s abuse. Even in 2021, Anglican leaders’ collusion to cover up sex abuse was well-known.
So I say to the Bishop of Durham:
If you’re the people Jesus really wanted in government to protect the helpless, find justice for the wronged, and advance the cause of righteousness, then I am glad that more and more people are finding their way out of your religion.
O, ye whited sepulchres! Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin*!
NEXT UP: Overpopulation might be a pressing concern for all kinds of government leaders across the globe, but population decline is a bigger one for some of them. Next time, join me as we check out conservatives’ moral panic about white women not breeding nearly enough wee babbies. See you soon! <3
Please support my work!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! Here are some ways you can support my work:
Endnote
* One translation of this post’s last sentence:
MENE: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end
TEKEL: you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting
UPHARSIN: your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians
0 Comments