The columnists' prayers
Covering up child abuse? No, for the right-wing press, Justin Welby's greatest crime is being 'woke'.
Previously: Pods Damn America
Trump's podcast populism strategy made traditional media even more of an electoral irrelevance.
The Church of England covered up the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth against more than 130 young men over 40 years. It allowed him to travel to Africa where he continued that abuse. The Makin Review, published last week, says his victims were subjected to “traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks”. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, knew Smyth in the 1980s and worked at camps where the abuser met some of his victims, but he claims he didn’t know of the abuse until 2013. When he was told then, he didn’t check that the church had properly informed the police or ask to meet victims. The Makin Review concluded that he and other senior church figures showed “a distinct lack of curiosity”.
Finally, after media pressure and growing calls from within his church for him to stand down, Welby has resigned. You might have thought commentators and columnists reflecting on that news might focus on the fact that Welby at best turned a blind eye to child abuse and may have known for far longer that a cover-up was taking place. But instead of keeping the focus on the victims, the people failed by Welby and the Church of England, a significant section of the press sees the story as the answer to one of its most persistent prayers: “Oh Lord, please let me make this about being ‘woke’”. What’s ‘woke’ about papering over child abuse?
In her Times column, Alice Thomson writes:
[Welby] appeared happy to berate everyone but himself. Since becoming archbishop in 2013, he has railed against greedy bankers and Amazon with its zero-hour contracts, and he has deemed the Church of England institutionally racist and called for reparations for the slave trade. But predominantly, he has gone for politicians. He told us he disagreed with Boris Johnson for failing to curb the Covid parties at No 10 and Rishi Sunak over his Rwanda plans, but he has glossed over his own leadership failings.Were any of those statements wrong? As a non-believer, I don’t think Welby’s views should ever have been given any more credence than the next person’s, but he had to go because he allowed a child abuser to go unpunished. It was not about his thoughts on Amazon and zero-hours contracts or his position on Partygate. To make it about that is to trivialise and exploit a truly horrifying story.
There’s an interesting use of ‘woke’ from The Daily Telegraph. While the headline of Giles Fraser’s comment piece on Welby’s resignation reads How ‘woke’ Welby was undone, the priest’s copy says:
Welby received much praise for the brave and open way he dealt with discovering his family history – but divided opinion for the way in which he went about tackling the church’s historic links with slavery.
“Woke” became an unexpected tag that began to follow him around, though he was never really any sort of Left-wing radical. Earnest, yes. Roundhead not Cavalier, certainly. But he wasn’t political in any sort of strict ideological sense.Perhaps the sub-editors are hoping that Telegraph readers won’t make it that far into the piece. Certainly, the headline on the paper’s roundup of readers’ views on Welby suggests they won’t: ‘Justin Welby is a destructive Left-wing liability’. In another comment piece, Madeline Grant goes in harder on the ‘woke’ line:
“Wokeness” was certainly part but not all of this problem. For it itself embodied the remoteness between parishes and the church hierarchy – which often descended into active hostility. The recent Boateng race report, commissioned by the central Church of England, attempts to codify different types of parishes in a bizarre chart, deeming some of them to be essentially racist. High Anglicans are accused of preferring “white male leadership”, while rural parishes are described as being uniformly “conservative/traditional”, and their congregants casually smeared as “[viewing] UKME/GMH [Minority Ethnic/Global Majority Heritage] people… with suspicion” purely on the basis of their living in the countryside. The contempt is striking.
When the Church of England pledged £100 million to help redress the wrongs of historic slavery, it wasn’t simply the cause that irked some worshippers. It was also the contrast with the institutional Church’s eternal stinginess whenever a medieval roof needed replacing or a parish wanted a vicar who actually lived there, rather than having to dash between seven other parishes on a half-stipend.
Having so often claimed poverty when faced with such requests, suddenly the Church found itself flush with cash for “reparatory justice” and endless dubiously-titled DEI jobs. Like the explosion of business jargon within ecclesiastical structures, all this proved alienating. Inevitably, the conservative press is lobbying for an even more conservative Church of England at this point of historic weakness. Richard Kay in The Daily Mail is even more blatant. Under the headline Downfall of the woke Archbishop and one-man opposition to the Tories who saw 3,000 churches close on his watch, he writes:
As Archbishop of Canterbury, he could not resist the lure of speaking out, fuelling an apparent desire to weigh in on political issues, including Brexit, which he said had ‘divided the country’.
He described austerity as ‘crushing the weak’ and blamed Conservative cuts to benefits for a surge in the use of food banks. These were not matters on which archbishops traditionally became vocal.
Welby also attacked energy companies for raising prices and accused Amazon, the online giant, of ‘leeching off taxpayers’.
He derided payday lending sites only to be accused of hypocrisy when it emerged that the Church‘s pension fund was linked to one such site, Wonga…
… Inevitably, of course, Welby had strong views on immigration. In an Easter sermon, he thundered from the pulpit at the last government’s plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, a policy that he declared could not ‘stand the judgment of God’.Again, Kay uses Welby’s egregious behaviour in the Smyth case as a way to dismiss the positions he took on other issues. He didn’t fail to take action on Smyth because he was ‘woke’. He played a role in that decades-long cover-up because he was self-serving and a coward. That doesn’t mean he was wrong on Amazon, the Church of England’s historic role in slavery, or the Tories’ Rwanda policy.
Right-wing papers and columnists using the story of hundreds of young men being abused as an excuse to ride their usual ideological hobby horses is both grim and inevitable. Notice how questions about why we listen to the Archbishop of Canterbury at all and allow bishops to sit in the House of Lords aren’t part of their arguments. Welby’s downfall was not because he was ‘woke’, it was because he was weak.
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