Recently, we discussed an ongoing scandal within the UK’s Anglican Church (also called the Church of England). Its highest-ranking clergyman, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, had to resign after everyone discovered he’d egregiously mishandled sex abuse complaints and shielded a particularly-serious abuser from consequences for years. His last day in office was January 6th this year (2025).
The second-highest-ranking clergyman, the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, stepped in as interim leader of the Anglican Church. Of course, he wanted more than just interim leadership. He really wanted to become the next official leader, too. But he faces some opposition in his ambitions.
The story of the internal struggles of the Anglican Church reveal some very deep dysfunction in its leadership ranks. Here, we’ll cover its leaders’ fights over power and discuss what believers should—and very likely will, at this rate—learn from it all.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 2/14/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: More leadership trouble in the Anglican Church
On January 6th, 2025, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby celebrated his very last day as the Anglican Church’s highest-ranking clergyman. He resigned-before-he-could-get-fired, essentially, over a shocking sex abuse cover-up he’d perpetuated for years on behalf of a predatory friend of his, a lawyer named John Smyth.
As Welby stepped back, an interim leader stepped in to fill the void. This leader, Stephen Cottrell, is the Archbishop of York—and therefore the second-ranked clergyman in the Anglican Church. Until the leaders of this denomination could choose another leader, he’d take on most of Welby’s duties.
However, Stephen Cottrell quickly ran into controversy. It seems he had allowed a known sex abuser priest, David Tudor, to operate freely in one of his former dioceses for years. Of lesser but still important note, he’d also apparently “bullied” a hiring committee to get his preferred candidate, John Perumbalath, into a bishopric. Recently, Perumbalath had to resign after two women raised sexual harassment charges against him (one of those women was another bishop).
In the wake of all these scandals and crises, the leaders of the Anglican Church are meeting this week in a General Synod. Though it’s not finished until Friday (February 14, 2025), they’ve already discussed a number of topics, including reforming how they handle sex abuse reports and abusers within clerical ranks.
So far, Stephen Cottrell stubbornly refuses to let go of the reins of power. But he might not be able to hang onto his prize much longer if the winds of outrage keep intensifying around him.
Stephen Cottrell is the very picture of why his entire religion deserves decline. He’s hilariously unwilling to do what’s right, hilariously furious that his ambitions might be thwarted at the eleventh hour, and hilariously incapable of recognizing what a dealbreaker his behavior is for the few remaining Anglican Church members in the United Kingdom (UK).
The Anglican Church leaders vocally opposing their new hypocrite-in-chief
Ahead of the Synod meeting, Bishop of Newcastle Helen-Ann Hartley raised serious and very vocal objections to Stephen Cottrell’s role as interim leader of the Anglican Church. Of him, she said in an interview recently:
“I do not think that it’s appropriate for the Archbishop of York to be in post, and certainly to be leading change that the Church needs at this time. [. . .] I think he (Mr Cottrell) is the wrong person. I think to be in that position of leadership, you have to talk the talk and walk the walk, and you can’t have one without the other. And I think for him to have allowed that to be the case, to allow [David] Tudor to remain in post, I do find abhorrent.”
In that interview, she also noted that another Anglican leader has described her as “the bishop of negativity” for her objections to Cottrell’s leadership. She has implied that fear of retaliation keeps other Anglican leaders from voicing similar opposition. As far as I’ve found, she is indeed the only voice of objection in Anglican leadership so far.
That said, a sizeable minority of Anglican leaders clearly oppose Cottrell’s leadership. He gave the opening speech at their Synod on Monday—after a vote to stop him from doing so failed. (73 wanted to stop him, 273 wanted him to give the speech, and 43 abstained from voting.) That’s about a third of Anglican leaders refusing to support him with their votes.
Stephen Cottrell’s response to these criticisms illustrates the deep rot within the Anglican Church
First and foremost, Stephen Cottrell did, indeed, shield a predatory priest working in one of his former dioceses. Yes, he sure did. The priest, David Tudor, had already paid restitution to a victim, done prison time for molestation in the 1980s, got suspended two different times (for three entirely separate grooming/abuse cases) before bouncing right back into ministry each time, and was permanently banned from being alone with children. But it doesn’t look like anyone was enforcing that last rule—not even when the aforementioned victim came to Cottrell to inform him of Tudor’s past.
She did this in hopes that Cottrell would take action against Tudor.
Obviously, he didn’t.
In fact, Cottrell insists that he’d only inherited the entire David Tudor problem and that some rule or another forbade him from firing Tudor or taking action to ensure he didn’t hurt anyone else. Until 2019, he says, he literally couldn’t do anything about David Tudor despite the victim’s information. (Tudor finally got permanently banned from ministry a few months ago.)
Making himself look even worse at every turn appears to be a hobby of Mr. Cottrell’s. Remember that speech I mentioned that he was set to give on Monday? Here’s what he said during it:
I know that trust has been broken and confidence damaged. And I am more sorry about this than I can say. I know mistakes have been made. I know that I have made mistakes.
As we’d have said in the 1980s, excuse YOU, dude.
Accountability isn’t just a problem for Catholics and Southern Baptists, it seems
In the above quote, Stephen Cottrell’s use of passive phrasing clearly marks a desire not to take personal blame for the personal dark deeds he personally committed in allowing David Tudor to work as a priest long after learning Tudor shouldn’t have been anywhere near vulnerable people.
Stephen Cottrell broke Anglicans’ trust.
Stephen Cottrell damaged Anglicans’ confidence in their church and its leaders.
Nobody else did exactly what he did. He alone is the problem in his particular case.
These were also not mistakes. A mistake is trying to carry too many dishes at once and losing strength midway back to the kitchen. A mistake is heading to the store thinking it closes at 9 when it really already closed at 8.
What Stephen Cottrell did is learn that a serial sex abuser was working as a priest in his then-diocese, then doing nothing about it. He still refuses to admit that what he did was actually a knowing breach of ethics—that he knew he was protecting a serial sex abuser instead of the vulnerable people in his ministerial care.
It also seems that Anglican Church members themselves are better people than their leaders
A recent YouGov poll of UK residents discovered a remarkable slide in opinion regarding the official Church of England:
In just three months, opinions of the Anglican Church declined by about 10% across all categories. Worse, the number of people who really didn’t have much of an opinion either way shrank a bit as well—for the worse.
Only about a quarter of Britons generally have a “favourable” opinion of the official, state-supported religion of their country. And only about half of that religion’s own members do.
Additionally, about half of responding Britons support “disestablishing” the church, meaning tearing their government free of this religion. Only a quarter of those polled were antidisestablishmentarians who wanted to keep the Church of England as an official state-supported religion. But as YouGov notes, those numbers have remained fairly steady. They changed very little over the past three months.
The Synod-related press releases
So far this week, the General Synod has been issuing a lot of press releases about the decisions they’re making. In general, a “synod” is simply a meeting of Christian leaders to figure out collective responses to current questions. The Catholic Church holds these all the time. In fact, in 2023 Catholic leaders held a “Synod on Synodality.” That is about as meta as one can get, I suspect.
Here’s a sampler of what the Anglican Synod has issued so far, all in archive form:
- Stephen Cottrell’s mealy-mouthed excuse-parade of an opening speech
- Assurances that Anglican leaders will totally “redouble work to implement best safeguarding practice”
- Rejecting the idea of allowing an external group handle all oversight and examinations regarding sex abuse
- Adoption of a new “Clergy Conduct Measure” (CCM, and this idea was almost universally supported)
It’s downright offensive to any good person to see Stephen Cottrell still in power throughout these votes about abuse. A guy who shielded an abuser leads the Anglican Church. Nothing else they say about abuse matters. Or about morality, or how to live one’s life, or how to conduct one’s relationships, nothing.
Their system allowed evil people to flourish and fester unchecked.
Nothing forced Cottrell to take steps to ensure his flocks were safe from David Tudor. So he didn’t. And he didn’t even think to try to reform that system so it would force those in power to act. He just wafted his palms heavenward: A divine shrug on par with that his god has always given abusers and predators. What’d you expect me to do, fight with all my strength to protect the innocent? Make my actions reflect my stated beliefs? HAHA, then I wouldn’t have gained all this power! Talk some sense, friend.
Folks, the foxes already guard the henhouse. The hens can’t do anything about these foxes—and worse, about 2/3 of those hens have demonstrated that they don’t even want to try.
Why the Anglican Church’s leaders need a take-no-prisoners, zero-tolerance policy on sex abuse
In recent months, I’ve seen a lot of news stories and editorials about the Anglican Church. None of them sound very happy with their leaders.
A French Catholic site, La Croix, seems to sympathize entirely with abuse reformists and victims, though they quote Stephen Cottrell as having wanted a fully independent oversight and auditing system. Apparently, he’s sad that the Synod’s voters rejected that idea.
But if Anglicans had had one in place years ago, Cottrell probably wouldn’t be the interim leader of his denomination right now. Then again, this wouldn’t be the first two-faced thing he’s said. I trust him about as far as I can throw him (roughly 3 Planck lengths, for the curious). Anglicans need to adopt similar distrust. After all, it’s crystal-clear that Jesus doesn’t want to help. So it’s up to them to decide if supporting the Anglican Church is worth their leaders’ endless stream of abuse and cover-up scandals.
At the moment, the flocks seem to be slowly moving toward considering the idea of contemplating the only ethical action to take here. I hope they continue to move in that direction, because it’s the only thing that can rein in their religious leaders. Money and power are really all Anglican top leaders care about.
Like evangelicals and Catholics alike, Anglican leaders cannot do the right thing unless they are forced to do it. They’re incapable of recognizing and then ejecting leaders who abuse their power. They’ve shown many times that their crony-network connections and obligations tie their hands. So almost without fail, we can expect Anglican leaders to prioritize their gravy train and their cronies far above their flocks.
Without a fully independent, third-party group watching Anglican leaders and holding them fully accountable for their actions, they cannot be trusted either. They simply have too much to gain from the cover of darkness—and too much to lose from the truth.
NEXT UP: How power makes everything different. Later, I want to show you the liminal nature of rituals—and how they hijack our brains’ earliest hardwiring. It’s gonna be a fun week next week! See you soon! <3
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