BY STEWART SLATER
Educating in a few short years a Prime Minister who resigned in disgrace from the highest office in the land and, later, from Parliament, and the first Archbishop of Canterbury to fall on his pectoral cross, there was obviously something in the water at Eton back then. For it will not have escaped your notice that Justin Welby has resigned to take the blame/atone for the Church’s failings in the John Smyth abuse case.
While who knew what and when they knew it is not yet entirely clear, it is indisputable that the Church (and individuals within it) failed to bend every sinew to see Smyth brought to the temporal justice he so richly deserved, trusting instead to the posthumous justice which many (including no small number in the organisation itself) believe does not exist.
One might have expected that an institution with an avowedly moral purpose, and an archbishop no stranger to condemning Conservative governments in explicitly moral terms, would have pursued the matter with all possible vigour but instead it seems that, having passed the matter on to the police, they took a leaf from the book of a prominent character in its sacred text (not one who, it must be said, emerges well) and washed their hands of the affair.
This apparent paradox is explained by the journalist Isabel Hardman, who spent time in her youth in the milieu of Christian summer camps, as deriving from a desire to “protect the work”. The church is in the business of saving souls and that task must take priority over all else. Scandals are to be avoided as they might reduce the number of souls offering themselves for salvation and they might reduce the funds available for it to pursue its mission.
Hardman points out that this is theologically dubious – if God is all-powerful, he will accomplish his ends no matter which individual is involved, but more fundamentally, it reflects a category error about the nature of Christianity.
Moral systems are divided into three broad types: deontological accounts offer a set of rules to be followed in all circumstances, virtue ethics tell their followers to pursue virtue at all times (leaving up to them the exact actions this will entail) and consequentialist approaches assign value to actions by referring to the consequences they will entail.
Christianity is, straightforwardly, a deontological system. The Bible offers a set of rules and believers are expected to follow them. Fiat iustitia et ruat caelum – “let justice be done though the heavens fall” – is often ascribed to Roman law, but the first recorded use of the term is by a mediaeval Roman Catholic. There were clear grounds for believing that Smyth was guilty of an offence, and it was the clear duty of those aware of the suspicions to do everything to bring him to justice. That was all there was to it.
Instead, however, those in the hierarchy appear to have chosen to behave as consequentialists. While the precise motivations remain unclear, the outcome suggests a prioritisation of institutional (and possibly personal) preservation over justice for victims. Faced with a problem, they seem to have considered how its exposure would impact their broader aims and decided that they were more important than doing right by the victims. Not doing good in this case was an acceptable price to pay for the ongoing ability to do good in other cases.
In Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger, faced with his illegal, covert war against the cartels being made public, the President decides, as the Church did, that “it should all just go away.” The good he can do in office (“they want what all first term administrations want – a second term”) justifies condemning a small number of soldiers to their deaths. Jack Ryan, of course, disagrees, rescuing the surviving troops and exposing the scheme despite a show-down in which he is warned of the consequences and offered blandishments to toe the line.
The church needed (and might be expected to have) a cohort of Ryans, but instead it had a hierarchy of Presidents.
It would be easy to condemn them for this simple but devastating misunderstanding. But while Clancy gives his hero enough flaws to make him believable (he never entirely quits smoking and a part of him which, I have been told, can trouble men of a certain age, sometimes refuses to do what he wants when he wants) he is a fictional character, an idealised American Catholic created by a devout American Catholic.
The members of the church hierarchy, by contrast, are human (all too human perhaps, in the words of a well-known German non-believer). And although consequentialism does not work (few philosophy students make it out of their first year without comprehensively taking it apart), it is seductive. It speaks to something in the human psyche. Not just because it offers a single correct answer to every problem, but because it reflects how we relate to the world.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced the notion of a “hierarchy of needs” – there are certain things necessary for human flourishing and we pursue them in a rough order. As any good Californian knows, self-actualisation is important, but we turn our minds to it only once we have secured shelter, food and warmth.
Similarly, we have a hierarchy of desires. At any time, there is a range of things we want. Some of these may be short-term and easily satisfied – if I wish a coffee, I can go to the kitchen and put the kettle on – others will be longer-term and take some effort – the People’s Front of Judea realise that their desire to overthrow the Roman Empire will require five years of hard graft. Sometimes these desires will conflict – in the minds of many Boomers, Millennials’ longer-term desire to own houses battles with their short-term desire to eat avocado toast – in which case a choice will have to be made, establishing an order. This is something we learn early on – most toddlers’ mealtimes feature a struggle between their desire to experience the sweet, sugary goodness of pudding, and their desire to avoid the healthiness of vegetables.
As a result, we think of the world as a place of trade-offs, not absolutes. Faced with multiple options, we choose the one most likely to satisfy the desire we consider most important at the time, ascribing value to actions not in themselves but as means to our further ends.
Consequentialism merely extends this mode of thinking to the moral sphere. The Church’s most fervent desire was to keep spreading the word (and the individuals within in doubtless had a strong preference that they personally should keep spreading the word) and it chose the option it thought most conducive to that aim. In a world where it believed that publicising Smyth’s abuse would have had no impact on its overarching mission or, perhaps, its officials, it would doubtless have behaved differently. In the world we have, it behaved like a child grudgingly munching a mouthful of carrot on its way to the Promised Land of Pudding.
We might expect more from our religious leaders, but they are human and will act like humans. And perhaps we should wish them to be so. For the upstanding figure who always does the right thing can be an off-putting character so different from his fellows as to be unrelatable – even Clancy has one of his characters describe Ryan as a “goddamn boy scout”. It may be that to convince consequentialists of the benefits of Christian deontology, we need deontologists prone to the temptations of consequentialism. After all, nobody likes a zealot.
The Smyth affair has not been the Church’s finest hour. And it would be a bold man who would declare that it will be its worst hour. Those in its hierarchy might do well (as we all would) to remember the words of a Roman pagan and student of virtue ethics, during whose reign, coincidentally, the soon-to-be-former archbishop’s namesake was martyred – the action is important, the context indifferent.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.