That the scandal has brought down Welby is interesting, not least because he may well be one of the less guilty parties involved. His sins are those of omission. He was not beating young men to within an inch of their lives. But it is also ironic. Welby had been oh-so courageous in the early 2010s when it came to allegations against the long-dead Bishop Bell, even though they came to nothing. That he was pontificating about Bell when he could have been making a real difference makes him look less like an inept man out of his depth and more like a hypocrite.

Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, resigned on Tuesday after an investigation found he’d mishandled the John Smyth abuse scandal. The resignation is a shock but, for those aware of the story, not a surprise. One of the vices I developed as a teenager and have maintained for over forty years is reading the British satire and investigative magazine Private Eye. The Eye has been writing for years about Smyth; about how he brutalized young men at the Christian Iwerne Minster summer camps, where he volunteered; about his convenient departure to Zimbabwe; and about the very real possibility that he was involved in the death of a child there.

Iwerne Minster camps were a peculiarly English cult. Leaders exerted remarkable control over the promising young men unfortunate enough to come under their sway. The camps were specifically designed to train young men from the most elite public (that is, extremely expensive and rather private) schools for leadership in the Anglican evangelical world. They were deeply suspicious of theology, of intellectual engagement with the faith, of traditional Anglican forms, and were focused almost exclusively on evangelism. Ecclesiology was virtually non-existent: One was loyal to the big personalities who dominated Iwerne culture, not to bishops or archbishops.

Lower middle-class riffraff such as myself need never have applied. Iwerne was, thankfully, not open to us. The camps do deserve credit for giving the world Rev. John Stott, but they also established an old boy network that dominated Anglican evangelicalism in England for decades. And under cover of this, they gave the world John Smyth and his ilk.  

Because the English ruling establishment looks after its own, Smyth and his fellow abusers enjoyed diplomatic immunity, not merely in the church but, if the Eye is to be believed, at the highest level of the English establishment. After all, Smyth’s escape to Zimbabwe in 1984 after his crimes were exposed within elite circles in the church was very easy and convenient. As I watched the Eye’s reports over time, it became patently obvious that other names would be pulled into the scandal, names of men that had been revered in the Iwerne-dominated Christian world. Iwerne trained its men for the plumb jobs.

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