IT is not only about sex and religion. It is also about power and class.

As we approach the end of 2024, the Church of England is in chaos. Just weeks after Justin Welby resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury, his colleague Stephen Cottrell is facing calls to resign as Archbishop of York. A swathe of senior church leaders are accused of failing to address sexual abuse.

We are at a decisive moment in the history of Christianity in Britain.

As the Bishop of Rochester, Jonathan Gibbs, put it, “This is one of the biggest existential crises that the Church of England has faced since the Reformation.”

The question is: which direction will churches go in now?

The answer will affect the whole of society. Will churches be allies of progressive people of all faiths and none in resisting abuse and injustice? Or will they side with privilege and power?

Ever since the first century, Christians have been pulled in contrary directions. Some Christian movements have championed Jesus’s example of solidarity with people who are poor, oppressed or marginalised. Others have accommodated themselves to wealth, war and empire.

These struggles affect all Christian denominations. All churches are tainted by the Church of England scandal. Other churches cannot dismiss it as a problem for Anglicans alone.

The hideous abuse that has come to light is a stomach-churning reminder of what happens when powerful and influential people twist Christianity to justify violence and obedience.

Welby resigned in the wake of the Makin Report into abuse perpetrated by John Smyth, a prominent right-wing barrister. Smyth was influential on the conservative evangelical wing of the Church of England.

Welby rightly, if belatedly, accepted his responsibility both as an individual who should have done more and as the Church of England’s leader. Some who behaved far worse remain in office.

In 1977, John Smyth prosecuted Gay News for blasphemous libel. In public, Smyth condemned loving same-sex relationships between adults. In private, he abused teenage boys in his shed.

Many of these boys came from the elite Winchester School near Smyth’s home, which he visited regularly to talk to Christian students.

Some boys were invited back to Smyth’s home — although he was accused by one member of staff of taking only “the good-looking boys.”

Such was Smyth’s influence over these teenagers — living away from home and deprived of emotional expression — that he was able to persuade many of them that they should accept severe canings as punishment for sins. Makin concluded that there was no doubt that Smyth gained sexual satisfaction from beating boys until they bled.

Smyth’s power base was the Iwerne Trust, a conservative evangelical group focused on privately educated boys and young men who were likely to go on to top careers. They aimed to change society by influencing people at the top. That was how they thought society worked.

The theology of Iwerne camps is described as “banal, stern and cruel” by Charles Foster, an academic who attended them as a boy.

Looking back with horror on the snobbish culture, Foster recalls how participants were effectively discouraged from following Jesus’s teachings about feeding the hungry and welcoming strangers. “If someone was a stranger, we wouldn’t dream of taking him in,” recalls Foster. “He might not have gone to a strategically significant school.”

Rev David Fletcher was one of a small group of influential conservative Anglicans who learnt of Smyth’s behaviour in the early 1980s. He later revealed the grotesque logic that led him to cover up the truth. “I thought it would do the work of God immense damage if this were public,” he explained (Fletcher died in 2022).

Caring for the needs of victims and preventing further abuse did not seem to fit Fletcher’s notion of the “work of God.” He and his collaborators helped Smyth to move to Zimbabwe, where he ran Christian youth camps — and continued to abuse boys.

Perhaps Fletcher and his colleagues thought that Zimbabwean boys were of less value than British boys. Such an attitude is utterly contrary to the teachings of Jesus.

No wing of the Church (or society) has a monopoly on abuse. I know of liberal and apparently progressive churches in which abuse has been tolerated.

But it was the theology and politics behind Iwerne that allowed Smyth to persuade teenagers to submit to beatings. They proclaimed a judgemental god who blessed hierarchy, obedience and brutal discipline.

Ironically, the most conservative wing of the Church of England is celebrating Welby’s resignation not because of their opposition to abuse but because they regard Welby as too liberal.

These people are now urging churches to respond to the current crises by becoming more conservative and more authoritarian.

The only positive way forward for British churches is to show real repentance by making root-and-branch changes. This means not only changes in safeguarding procedures — important though those are.

Imagine the impact if the Church of England and other churches demonstrated their repentance by giving up their privileges. The bishops would walk out of the House of Lords. Faith schools would give up exemptions from workers’ rights legislation. Military chaplains would tear up their oaths of loyalty.

This is the way forward for Christianity — showing solidarity with people of all faiths and none against the sinful structures of capitalism, militarism and other abusive systems, as well as the victims of abuse in general.

Churches must choose whose side they are on: abusers or abused, oppressors or oppressed. It is not just the reputation of Christianity, but the future of progressive causes and of society itself, that will lose out if the wrong choice is made again.

Symon Hill is a Baptist minister-in-training and a chaplain at Aston University.