Never Trust a Convert
By Ed Dutton
The Church of England has, in recent weeks, been severely damaged, perhaps fatally, by revelations about the barrister and Anglican evangelist John Smyth (1941-2018). This Narcissist, sadist, and pederast was able to seriously psychologically and physically hurt hundreds of young men during a career of abuse which lasted around forty years. While Smyth did so, many fellow evangelicals, including the current Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and the former Primate of All England George Carey, basically turned a blind eye, allowing his manipulative abuse to continue. You see, most of these young men consented to “bleed for Jesus.”
As a result, Welby – also known as the Archbishop of Wokeness, who preached during the BLM anarchy that we should all repent for being white - has ignominiously become the first Archbishop of Canterbury to be forced from office since William Laud during the Civil War. Overtly, his removal is because an independent report, the Makin Report - “Independent Learning Lessons Review: John Smyth, QC” - found that Welby was told about Smyth’s behaviour when he was enthroned in 2013 and he didn’t specifically and quickly act to ensure that Smyth was brought to justice, meaning Smyth died in his bed. However, if you read the report, it’s obvious that this is a fudge. Welby was almost certainly forced out because he covered up or overlooked what was going on.
I have found this particularly fascinating because my original area of research, in fact the topic of my doctoral thesis, was student fundamentalist Christianity, especially a group called the Christian Union. This was a social organisation for evangelical Christians which aimed to preserve them from the worldly temptations of undergraduate life and to convert “Non-Christians.” This thesis was inspired, in part, by my living with such people as an undergraduate; with their being some of my closest friends, even if they did think I might have a different eschatological destination from them. In the CU, each year, the following year’s Executive Committee would emerge when the outgoing Exec prayed and God inspired them regarding whom to select. Interestingly, He never seemed to tell them to select a convert – someone who had undergone a dramatic conversion experience, from atheism or liberal Christianity to evangelicalism – such as Smyth. Even God knows such people are bad news.
As part of my research, I met people who knew Smyth and who worked with him. Smyth is illustrative of something crucial which is that William James was right: there is the religion of healthy-mindedness and the religion of the sick soul. The two are psychologically very different: the latter is mentally unstable and may adopt extreme religiosity as a way of fulfilling Narcissistic needs for adoration and to allay his insecurities. Profoundly insecure, he may swing between different identities to make sense of his haunted world and then adopt a very extreme one, such that his frightening reality seems to make sense. But he is also very confident and persuasive to the innocent followers of the religion of healthy-mindedness.
Smyth was converted to evangelicalism by the Anglican curate Eric “Bash” Nash (1898-1982), who, in 1930, began so-called Iwerne Camps, named after their location in Dorset. These became known as Bash Camps. Bash’s plan was to take evangelical pupils from the best public schools (for Americans, prestigious, private boarding schools), inculcate them with evangelical or fundamentalist ideas and then have them become ministers so that they could take over the Church of England and drive out all its woolly liberals and Anglo-Catholics. Interestingly, Bash had not attended a public school and despite two curacies was unable to get himself a job as a vicar; implying some kind of as yet unclear “issue” with him. The movement became known as the Iwerne Trust and a young barrister called John Smyth became involved in 1964, having been converted to Bash’s form of evangelicalism by Bash. Between 1974 and 1981, as was Bash’s wish, Smyth was in charge of the whole operation. At the same time, he had unfettered access to boys at the public school Winchester, and it is some of them, in particular, who were victimized.
Smyth, in effect, built a kind of charismatic cult around himself. He, and only he, had the power to make these impressionable upper-class boys into true Christians who could be saved from Hell and who could save others from Satan’s fires. It needs to be recalled that these teenagers had been indoctrinated with this form of Christianity all their lives, corporal punishment was ritualistic and normal at public schools until 1998, and that evangelicals had a particular penchant for ritualized corporal punishment; I found this in my own research on them.
Smyth would groom these boys, telling them how special they were, while preaching this theology, and especially the idea that if they thought about masturbation, let alone did it, then they must confess this to him such that he could help them atone for their sin via severely flogging them on the bare buttocks. They would thus “bleed for Jesus,” and were encouraged to call out to the Lord for forgiveness during these ostensibly voluntary beatings.
They would be taken to a special shed at the bottom of Smyth’s garden outside Winchester where he would thrash them with incredible severity; administering 100 or more strokes with all his strength. Many boys submitted to this numerous times. One boy endured an all-day beating of 800 strokes, starting at 10am and ceasing at 10pm, with tea breaks, to cleanse him of his masturbatory transgressions. Smyth’s wife would provide them with adult diapers to soak up the copious amounts of blood. There was a definite sexual element as well: Smyth would kiss them and rub himself against them during the beatings. And it was all highly manipulative: he’d throw lavish parties for these boys, make them his kids’ god-parents, take them on skiing holidays . . . but shun them – cast them out of his cult of one - if they refused to be thrashed. In some cases, their “relationship” with him continued while they were undergraduate students at such old-school-tie universities as Cambridge and Durham, such was Smyth’s power over them. One undergraduate received a special super-thrashing for his 21st birthday.
By 1975, a 19-year-old Welby, an Old Etonian, was working at one of Smyth’s camps and, in that such a system of the thrashings was not socially unacceptable, it seems unlikely that it wasn’t discussed and that he didn’t hear about it in the incestuous world of upper-class English evangelicalism. Someone testified in the Makin Report that in 1978 Welby was definitely told about what was going on, something Welby claims he can’t recall. It’s clear from letters quoted in the Makin Report that many people knew what Smyth was up to and were appalled. In 1981, Smyth was rejected for ordination. Considering his prominence, this was remarkable; and we can guess why he was rejected. In 1982, the Ruston Report investigated what was going on, interviewing 13 of his victims. Privately circulated, it was considered so embarrassing for evangelicalism and so generally dreadful that it was felt best to cover it up. Smyth was packed off to Zimbabwe to run boys' camps there, where his abuse continued. Then a boy in his care died, found dead in a camp swimming pool – Smyth had written to parents to justify why he needed to beat their boys and why they needed to swim naked – so off Smyth went to South Africa to continue his abuse cult, dying in 2018.
What we have in Smyth is something of an archetype: a Narcissist and a psychopath. Highly mentally unstable, he undergoes a conversion, but to an identity that, within his community of the English upper class, gives him status. It also allows him to have power, including a kind of symbolic sexual power, over young men, boosting his sense of dominance. Oozing charisma, for this is his niche, he manipulates people into symbolically sexually and physically submitting to him, dressing it all up theologically. Healthy-minded but naïve religious types are dragged into his cult. Smyth becomes too big to fail, so people, including Welby, cover up for him or turn a blind eye, hoping the furore will pass.
But it doesn’t and now the Church of England, which has been collapsing for decades, has had all its confidence shaken, and many people who were part of the cover-up are being banned from officiating at Anglican services. If only the Church of England leadership had listened to those Christian Union Exec members who themselves supposedly listened to God. Never trust a convert. A convert is unstable; a convert is adapted to an environment of kill or be killed; a convert will be high in Dark Triad traits. Shun he who has undergone a dramatic change in identity.
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Ed. Take care of yourself. I'd be lost without my science fix that looks into the core causes of seemingly inexplicable behavior.
I'm praying for your recovery 🙏