Archbishop Justin Welby, the leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide, resigned on 12 November after eleven years in office. An independent investigation found that he had failed to take action against the late barrister John Smyth, who had supervised Church of England (CofE) boys’ camps in the 1970s and ’80s. Smyth would thrash boys’ buttocks until they bled, allegedly to deter them from masturbating.
The report into Smyth’s activities was written by barrister Keith Makin, who prefaced his catalogue of sadism by remarking, “The abuse at the hands of John Smyth was prolific and abhorrent. Words cannot adequately describe the horror of what transpired. … Despite the efforts of some individuals to bring the abuse to the attention of authorities, the responses by the Church of England and others were wholly ineffective and amounted to a coverup.” For that concealment, Justin Welby is now on the road out of Canterbury.
Marcus Walker, rector of the medieval Church of St Bartholomew the Great in London, has emerged as Welby’s sternest critic and believes that his resignation was overdue. Conceding that Welby had delivered a “masterful” sermon following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Walker went on to berate his former superior for his forays into political argument, which he said betrayed a “desire to create a shadow government in the church.” He concluded by reminding his successor that, “You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God.”
Walker believes that the primacy of the Church and the applicability of its doctrines in everyday life have been neglected. In an article for the Spectator, he discusses Libby Lane, the CofE’s first female bishop. In August 2023, when members of her congregation were torn between attending church on Sunday and watching the English women’s football team play, Lane offered the following counsel: “I know lots of people will want to watch the match live. That is fine from the Church of England’s point of view. Others will prefer to go to church and avoid knowing the score until they can watch the match on catch-up, and that is fine, too.” Walker rejects this reasoning entirely:
[A]t the risk of being a vexatious priest, there was a key factor missing from Bishop Lane’s statement, which Charles I did not miss: that church comes first. That the worship of Almighty God is, for Christians, the single most important thing we can do. Of course we were excited about the Lionesses, of course many of us wanted to bunk off church to watch them, of course the church doesn’t want to give the impression that “no honest mirth or recreation is lawful or tolerable in our religion”, but… there is an existential danger in implying that the absolute core of our religion—worship—can take a back seat when something really exciting comes along.
Many Christians, especially those clergy routinely described as conservative or evangelical, share Walker’s belief that the CofE leadership had decided to manage, rather than try to arrest, the Church’s decline. This has meant closing poorly attended churches, an approach that accelerated during the COVID pandemic. Welby was an oil-company executive for over a decade, a position that was rewarded with a six-figure salary, and this has lent credence to the view that his heart has always been in management not piety. That seems to be at least partly untrue—his early life in the church was spent among evangelicals. But in his primacy, he sought a compromise with liberals on gay unions that angered traditionalists.
Walker’s call for a more conservative successor to Welby has exposed one of the major chasms in the Church. Rehearsing his belief in more God and less social concern on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme, Walker contended that emphasising issues like poverty and food banks was “left wing,” and should give way to the centrality of worship and veneration of Christ. He was angrily interrupted by Michael Banner, a theologian and dean of Welby’s old Cambridge college, Trinity. Banner said that the issues Walker dismissed as leftist were precisely those that Jesus placed at the centre of his preaching about care for the poor. (In Luke 6:21–22, Christ is quoted as saying, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”) The irritable BBC spat was a brief glimpse into a debate that has roiled the CofE for years and will no doubt continue once a new Archbishop is chosen.
On the Sunday morning after Welby’s resignation, Walker gave the sermon in his church. Unusually for a CofE Sunday service, the church was nearly full. Set on one side of London’s largest wholesale meat market in Smithfield, St Bartholomew the Great is a massive building, constructed in 1123. Inside, one finds a mixture of grandeur, beauty, and some decay. Walker took his text from Matthew 24:2, in which Christ prophesied that the temple of Jerusalem would be destroyed: “there shall not be left one stone upon another.” Walker then observed that, “It is hard, after the week we have just had, not to see the same fate for the Church of England—there is no guarantee that it will not happen.” Walker—and the many clergy who think like him—cleaves to the belief that God will not let His Church die. His opponents believe that this ignores the power of human agency.
Welby has described his childhood as “messy,” but he refused to shape it into a source of victimhood. Both his father, Gavin, and mother, Jane, were alcoholics who divorced when he was three. He was placed in the custody of his father but later discovered that his real father was Sir Anthony Montague Browne, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, with whom his mother had a brief affair just before she married Gavin Welby. When she died in July 2023 at the age of 93, the Archbishop said, “It was a privilege to be her son.”
Welby was sent to a preparatory school, then to Eton, and then to Cambridge’s Trinity College, where his great-uncle, the Conservative politician R.A. Butler, was Master. Having been indifferent to religion, Welby underwent a deep conversion at Trinity, which included speaking in tongues. This is common and treasured on the evangelical wing of the Church. As he told conservative writer Charles Moore, “It’s just a routine part of spiritual discipline—you choose to speak, and you speak a language that you don’t know.” His conversion, he told Moore, happened while he was with a Christian friend. He suddenly felt “a clear sense of something changing, the presence of something that had not been there before in my life. I said to my friend, ‘Please don’t tell anyone about this,’ because I was desperately embarrassed that this had happened to me, like getting measles.” Of knowing Jesus, he said, “He’s both someone one knows and someone one scarcely knows at all, an utterly intimate friend and yet with indescribable majesty.”
Despite this experience, Welby became a manager in the oil industry for most of the 1980s, first for French company Elf Aquitaine, then for the British Enterprise Oil exploration group in Nigeria. In 1989, he could no longer defy the consequences of his revelation, so he left the oil industry and applied for ordination as a priest. He was rejected by the then-bishop of Kensington, who told him that he had “no future” in the Church. He tried again, this time through Sandy Millar, the priest at Holy Trinity Brompton, who had developed the evangelical Alpha course and served as a bishop in Uganda. As a fellow evangelical who had also time spent in Africa, Millar saw in Welby a comrade in Christ.
Welby’s rise through the Church hierarchy was rapid—from parish priest (an impoverished time with a large family) in the 1990s to Dean of Liverpool Cathedral in 2004 to Bishop of Durham in 2011. He became Archbishop of Canterbury after a little over a year in Durham, succeeding the poet-priest and polymath Rowan Williams. Evangelicals are often hostile to the idea of female priests and to gay marriage blessed by a priest in church. Welby supported the first of these, but balked at gay marriage—though he shocked fellow evangelicals by saying that, if Anglican gays were in a stable relationship and were married in a civil ceremony, they could “be able to come along to a church and have a service of prayer and blessing for them in their lives together.” This was, he maintained, “a long way from church same-sex marriage,” and no dissenting Anglican priest would be compelled to preside at the blessing.
Welby’s partial endorsement of gay unions is a testament to his efforts to unite a fractious church: permitting gays to be blessed in their relationship was a strike for the liberals, but the reservation that such a marriage cannot be sanctified in a church ceremony was intended to … read it all in Quillette
John Lloyd was a domestic and foreign correspondent for the Financial Times and a co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
