by Tim Wyatt, The Critical Friend
What makes evangelicalism vulnerable to abusers?
When the Makin report into the prolific church abuser John Smyth came out in late 2024, almost everyone’s attention (including mine) was on the 253 pages of the main document, which in painstaking detail went through the decades of abuse and cover-up. But there were also appendices to Makin, and one in particular is worth returning to.
It was written by Elly Hanson, a clinical psychologist who specialises in trauma and abuse. She was asked by Keith Makin, who led the review, to try and pry inside Smyth’s mind and figure out what motivated him to sadistically beat dozens of boys and young men over many years. This she did, concluding he was driven by sexual gratification, sadistic pleasure from others’ pain and humiliation, a desire to be admired/revered, and a desire for dominance and control over others.
But then Hanson went slightly off brief. As she explored Smyth’s likely Narcissistic Personality Disorder, she could not but mention how the conservative evangelical sub-culture he inhabited enabled his abuse and assisted him in evading justice for his crimes. And, furthermore, did some of the religious convictions evangelicals hold dear also made it the movement vulnerable to an abuser like Smyth becoming embedded, and highly dangerous?
At the end she summarised these cultural factors which enabled Smyth’s abuse, and as someone who grew up in a major conservative evangelical church I found it was unerring how pinpoint accurate she was (you can read the whole list on pages 13-14 here). In fact, Hanson’s work has also been picked up by the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC), who have been trying to learn some lessons from the slew of abuse cases within their constituency in recent years (most notably Jonathan and David Fletcher on top of Smyth). They too were curious how Hanson had managed to put her finger on it, and it turns out she was brought up within a conservative evangelical church herself (although she is no longer a Christian today).
Read here (scroll down)