The announcement that Justin Welby is to hand in his mitre was inevitable. I've formed the impression in recent years that his lack of candour and lack of action over the crimes of John Smyth have made it harder for the Church of England to act against abusers more generally.
I am left with two questions.
The first is to ask if there wasn't something unchristian about the practice of the Iwerne Trust (and of the Titus Trust that succeeded it) of holding camps only for boys from expensive public schools.
Their ambition was to change society by changing its future leaders. But their actions look like a parody of Christ, who included fishermen and a thief among his companions.
Did they imagine there was a separate heaven for those who'd been to the same schools as them?
My second questions is why Evangelicals are so unhealthily keen on corporal punishment. They continued to fight the ban on it when even the teaching unions had given up:
John Friel, acting for the claimants, told Mr Justice Patrick Elias that the group "believe as part of their religious worship and part of their religious belief, that corporal punishment is part of their Christian doctrine".
Meanwhile, students of human nature will not be surprised to learn that Smyth was an admirer and confidant of Mary Whitehouse.
These are good question, but the snobbishness has not passed: the Titus Trust still operates exclusively for children at independent school (although I think now girls as well as boys): https://www.titustrust.org/
ReplyDeleteJesus ate with sinners and tax collectors (Luke 5 29-39 and elsewhere) on the grounds the rich needed his ministry more than the poor; and one of his disciples (Matthew) was a tax collector.
ReplyDeleteFlagellation and self mortification generally has been a practice in Christianity of all sorts, and from near the beginning, often as a self punishment in this world to avoid/reduce punishment in the next, and no doubt also as an advertisement of one's own rightiousness. As for other religions, flagulation is apparently practiced by some Shi'ite Muslims (on the holiday of Ashura to commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn at the Balttle of Karbala). I expect there are other examples out there. Human nature is indeed very odd.