Religious persecution has made a comeback in the Church of England. This week, it was revealed that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the Bishop of Derby, Libby Lane, had repeatedly misused safeguarding processes to prevent a chaplain from returning to his ministry.
The Reverend Dr Bernard Randall didn’t piss in the font or gamble away the collection-plate money. No, he did something far worse in the church’s eyes – he preached traditional Christian views to students at Trent College, a private school in Derbyshire, where he was the chaplain.
In 2019, Randall gave a sermon he titled ‘Competing Ideologies’, during which he reassured his young flock that they ‘are not obliged to accept someone else’s ideology’. In his moderate and well-reasoned speech, he reminded students that they were at liberty to listen to other points of view, whether on religion, Brexit or ‘all this LGBT stuff’, as he put it.
Randall went on to say it was not wrong to think ‘that human beings are indeed male and female’. He also suggested that, according to the Christian church, marriage is between a man and woman and that a dim view is taken of sex outside of wedlock. His words, which until recently would have been considered mainstream fodder for a CofE chaplain, triggered complaints from pupils, parents and staff members. Some even claimed they were nearly left in tears.
Notably, Randall’s sermon was given in response to his school’s embrace of a programme by Educate and Celebrate, a now defunct LGBT educational charity. This was the organisation that boasted of its mission to ‘smash heteronormativity in the classroom’. To this end, it encouraged kids as young as three to read books about questioning their gender. Randall, understandably, called into question whether any of this was in line with church teaching.
Educate and Celebrate brought this bizarre, radical trans activism to classrooms. Yet according to both the Bishop of Derby’s safeguarding staff and Trent College, it was Randall’s views that supposedly put children in danger.
Shortly after he gave his ‘Competing Ideologies’ sermon, Randall was sacked from his position. He was even reported to the government’s anti-terrorism watchdog, Prevent, by the safeguarding lead at Trent College. It was later acknowledged that Randall’s views did not make him a threat to national security.
Following an investigation by the church, Randall was exonerated for the comments he made during his sermon. But the Derby diocese’s safeguarding team, under the watch of Bishop Lane, still stopped Randall from taking any position as a vicar. In 2021, the diocese refused to grant him a licence to officiate without first going through a risk assessment, effectively banning him from preaching.
Read it all at Spiked
