Sexual Abuse in Churches: A Turn to Healing

When Sarah Mullally was formally installed in a historic ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral on March 25, 2026, a former nurse became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Her vocational background highlights the importance of healing, which was appropriate because her predecessor, Justin Welby, had stepped down because he had failed to address a serial sexual-abuse scandal. It had been important most of all to the victims—boys at a church camp who were sexually molested by a gay man volunteering at the camp—that Welby go. Close to the day of the ceremony, Mullally promised explicitly to attend to such victims, as is fitting and proper for a Christian cleric to do. It is what Jesus Christ would do, whereas he would not recognize the sexual predators or their enablers in the hierarchies of Christian denominations. The contrast itself bears witness to just how far some denominations had fallen from being justified in claiming to follow the principles preached by Jesus in the Gospels. That those sects had been able to do so even while representing themselves as distinctly Christian institutions shows just how power clerics have in beguiling laity.

Mullally emphasized her commitment to “do all I can to ensure that the Church becomes safer and also responds well to victims and survivors of abuse.”[1] Being safer refers to the Church proactively policing its own, whereas responding to victims is a reaction to past abuse. Regarding the latter, she said the Church was “seeking to become more trauma informed, listening to survivors and victims of abuse.”[2] As a former nurse, she could have gone further by saying that she would make her Church into a facilitator of victims getting connected to therapists so the healing process could really begin, for being listened to is just a first step in the help that victims of sexual abuse need in order to heal.

Psychology not being my field, I can only surmise that victims of sexual abuse avoid commitment and instead may engage in anti-commitment behavior, such as having sex with friends and anonymous men or women. Of course, this is not to say that every man or woman who is sexually promiscuous has been sexually abused. Using rampant sex to push commitment away is a defense mechanism that only needs a fear of emotional intimacy to be able to control a person’s life and serially thwart genuine (i.e., intimate) romantic relationships. For some victims, sex itself may just be too painful.

It is precisely because sexual abuse can scar its victims so deeply that Welby’s abject failure to properly handle the case of John Smyth, “who sexually and physically abused young men at Christian camps in the UK, Zimbabwe and South Africa over five decades,” is so damning, especially as Welby was a Christian priest (and Archbishop).[3] This is not to say that such enabling and lack of accountability on such a crime only occurs in religious institutions. Penn State University’s athletic director and football coach looked the other way as an older men molested student football-players in the showers for decades. Even so, it is more shocking when older men molest younger men under a Christian flag.

Sexual abuse by an older man can be tacit, or subtly legitimated because it is camouflaged by a relationship arrangement that gives the younger man the go-ahead to be sexually promiscuity that keeps emotional intimacy away. There is, in other words, a cost to the younger man in being what is known as a trophy. An older man having such a “trophy” younger man bears no cost, as the older man can even be living with another man romantically. That the trophy is being kept from having an emotionally intimate partner of his own is of no concern to the older man who gets to have his cake and eat it too. The trophy may even be deluded into thinking that the older man is his partner. In short, this is sadly very unfair to the younger man, and thus I contend that the arrangement is a subtle form of abuse.

A fear of emotional intimacy, such as motivates a person to push people away when they get too close (such as by using sexual promiscuity), fits well with being in a trophy role. It can be caused by sexual abuse or from having witnessed abusive relationships, or even simply a low self-esteem. Such fear is, I suspect, very difficult for therapists to heal because people who don’t think they are worthy of emotional intimacy will lash out to thwart it in its tracks. This is precisely why Christian institutions could play such an important role in connecting victims of sexual abuse with psychological clinics, rather than merely be good at listening. The damage done mentally is surely very deep. That a former nurse became the Archbishop of Canterbury is a good indication of where Christian Churches could go in emphasizing healing in such cases. After all, Jesus heals in the Gospels.  

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1. Gavin Blackburn, “Sarah Mullally Makes History as First Woman Enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury,” Euronews.com, 25 March, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Oman Al Yahyai, “Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby Resigns amid Sexual Abuse Scandal,” Euronews.com, 12 November, 2024.

Sarah Mullally as the Archbishop of Canterbury

On January 28, 2026, Sarah Mullally became the first woman to occupy the seat of the archbishop of Canterbury, which is the spiritual leader of the Church of England under its governor, the British King (or Queen) and of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which includes the Episcopal Church. The King (or Queen) being above the archbishop in the Church of England is in line with Thomas Hobbes’ seventeenth-century theory that the sovereign should be in charge of church and state lest civil war break out (again). Just as a British king is a man and a queen is a woman, so too, as of 2026, the Archbishop of Canterbury could be a man or a woman. This of course set the Anglicans even further off from the Roman Catholic Church, where only men can be priests and bishops, including that of Rome (i.e., the Pope). I contend that the intransigence on this point is due to a logical error involving a category mistake just for added fun.

The Confirmation of Election service out of which Mullaly became the Archbishop of Canterbury “marks a milestone for the Church of England, which ordained its first female priests in 1994 and its first female bishop in 2015.”[1] That was not long before 2026, so progressives in that Church had reason to be astounded as the swiftness of the change. In no small measure, the relative progressive stance of King Charles after his conservative mother, Queen Elizabeth, enabled the first woman to occupy the position in just a decade after the first woman was made a bishop in the Church of England. The tremendous change in the societal role of woman in the West since the early 1970s and the effect of this change on how all of Jesus’s disciples being men in the Gospels has been perceived differently can also be said to be factors in Mulally’s confirmation as the archbishop. Seeing in the contemporary world that women are perfectly capable of leading large organizations and even governments, Christians would be more likely to view the all-male discipleship in the Gospels as reflecting the societal context of Jesus or the writers of the Gospels and thus as not bearing for the contemporary world. Additionally, the point that just because Jesus selects only men in the Gospels doesn’t in itself mean that only men could be disciples could back up the historical-context argument.

Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus say that only men can be disciples; were that line in the stories, then adjusting to the modern context would be more difficult from a theological standpoint. One of the problems with the notion of scripture is that everything in it must be taken as truth, so distinguishing, for example, between Paul’s personal opinion on women as leaders and a theological point that women should not be leaders in the Church is unfortunately difficult to do, if not utterly forbidden. That Paul’s stance on female leaders is so obviously his opinion, likely reflective of the world in which he lived, raises the thornier problem of including letters written to churches as part of scripture. Once a document has been declared to be scriptural, separating the wheat from the chaff becomes very difficult if not impossible from a theological standpoint. This is reflected in the opposition to Mullally’s appointment.

“Gafcon, a global organization of conservative Anglicans, says Mullally’s appointment is divisive because a majority of the Anglican Communion still believes only men should be bishops.”[2] In the Gospels, however, Jesus does not say, “Only men should be bishops,” and that he chooses only men is descriptive rather than normative. Hume’s naturalist fallacy holds that you can’t get normativity from a statement that is only descriptive. In other words, you can’t get “ought” out of “is”; something more is needed to say that what is, should be. If, for example, Jesus is to say, “only men should be my disciples” in the Gospels, the readers would expect a justification to also be stated as to why only men should be in the religious role. If there is a theological justification, readers would naturally expect Jesus to state it.

These problems aside, that the Roman Catholic Church had come to recognize Mary Magdalene as the Apostle to the Apostles may undercut that sect’s insistence that only men can (and should) be priests and bishops, especially since the discovery of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene in which she occupies a significant place in Jesus’s ministry. So perhaps more stunning than the swift change in the Church of England in the appointment of Mullally is the utter stubbornness of social-religious conservatives in that Church as well as in the Church of Rome.

Moreover, that matters given scant if any attention in the Gospels (hence excluding Paul’s personal letters to his congregations) have been so easily blown out of proportion many centuries after the Gospels were written, such as homosexuality, gender and the priesthood, and even abortion, demonstrates the vulnerability of the human mind’s self-check mechanism in the domain of religion (and politics). Religion loses its core element of transcendence and is instead so easily filled with personal ideology, in which is none other than self-love as self-idolatry. Rather than having compassion for “thy enemies,” ideological worship of oneself belies Jesus’s message in the Gospels on how to enter the Kingdom of God. Ironically, compassion even to the marginalized is in line with Paul’s dictum not to cause one’s brother (or sister) to stumble.

Lest this be viewed as an unabashedly progressive stance, it should be observed that feminist interpretations of the Gospels’ contents can easily replace theology with (feminist) ideology, such that the religion that results is in the very image of the feminists themselves. The same can be said of remaking Christianity according to queer theory. Such extravagances are just as damaging as reducing Christianity to opposition to abortion and homosexuality even though those two topics are not mentioned scarcely at all directly in the Gospels, and blowing one’s inferences out of proportion such that the religious text is distended beyond recognition is itself a manifestation of self-idolatrous ideology. 

I contend that were Christian sects to actually follow Jesus’s principles, conservative clergy would be oriented to serving the groups despised rather than fighting against them, and feminist and gay laity would serve conservative men in the clergy in respect to their humane needs. The last are first, and many of the first are actually last unless they put themselves after those whom they loath. Therefore, the conservative Anglican clergymen who opposed Mullally’s appointment were actually obliged as Christians to become servants of the female Archbishop of Canterbury, essentially washing her feet rather than castigating her as if being a female bishop rendered her as the Anti-Christ. Compassion for one’s detractors and those whom one dislikes does not imply agreement; rather, it is to begin the chore of expanding human nature to become a bridge of sorts to the Kingdom of God already in this world.

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1. Danica Kirka, “Sarah Mullally Confirmed as Archbishop of Canterbury, First Woman to Lead the Church of England,” APnews.com, January 28, 2026.
2. Ibid.