ONE of the most misleading demands in the debate on safeguarding is the claim that the General Synod should be “sending a message” to someone — usually the victims and survivors, but sometimes to the nation at large. It was not the Synod’s job to cast its messages in elaborate bottles on to the indifferent tide of history. It needed to decide on the most effective way to manage safeguarding within the Church.

The fatuous irresponsibility of trying to “send a message” came home to me vividly on Sunday morning, when I found myself in a BBC studio discussing whether the Church could “regain trust” after last week’s vote to stop short of transferring all safeguarding functions to an external organisation, at least in the short term (News, 14 February). The other participants were the Revd Dr Charlie Bell, a Synod member with whom I disagree, but on the basis that we can have a productive argument; Lucy Duckworth, from the Survivors’ Trust; and another priest, who was so confidently incoherent that it’s kindest not to name him.

If you were to pick one time slot when the audience for a discussion of the General Synod would be at its smallest, you would pick 10.30 on a Sunday morning — so, naturally, that is when the programme went out. Ms Duckworth claimed that a million children were at risk in C of E schools as a result of the Synod’s decision. That’s certainly sending a message, whose only problem is that it’s completely false. No one would be allowed to get away with that kind of statement if it were made about an organisation that mattered, such as a football club.

Still, her message will have got through, at least as far as the television screens muttering unregarded in the corners of minicab offices all across the nation.

This is a kind of disestablishment that matters. In fact, you might argue that it is only those who care about the Church of England, either because they love or hate it, who still believe that it is established.

A nice example would be the decision by the House of Bishops to close churches during Covid. I am told by someone close to the process that the Government had not considered churches at all when it was trying to ban public gatherings. What it was worried about was mosques, since they were most often small buildings crammed with people all breathing together. From a public-health standpoint, these had to be shut down; and yet to shut down mosques but not churches was thought — by a Conservative government — to be wrong and discriminatory. The churches, then, were shut down to set an example: an argument that appealed to the Church’s own faith in establishment, but resulted from the Government’s complete indifference to it.

As far as I can see, the only argument for formal disestablishment is that it should lead to the abolition of the General Synod and its replacement by a body with powers over money and over the executive, like a real parliament. There’s no reason to believe that that would work very well, but it couldn’t possibly work worse.

AND so to Cathy Newman, whose piece in The Sunday Times arguing for formal disestablishment had a perfectly extraordinary quote from Andrew Graystone about the Bishops: “They ‘wear long robes and a crown designed to suggest that the Holy Spirit rests on your head. When you walk into a room, people bow to you. People call you “my lord”. It’s mediaeval. It has an extraordinary effect on people. They start to believe that they really are put in place by God.’”

Who are these bishops who take it seriously when they get called “My lord”, and who expect people to bow when they walk into the room? As for believing that they have been put in place by God, isn’t this what is known as a vocation? Presumably Mr Graystone thinks that he was put in place by God to advise Channel 4 News on the John Smyth scandal.

That was not the only confusing line in the piece. Newman wrote: “The role is in flux, with many speculating that the new Archbishop of Canterbury will have diminished powers, which could see a break-up of the Church of England.”

It is all enough to make me sympathise with Charles Moore, who wrote in The Spectator: “Obviously, it is difficult to defend the leadership of the Church of England, and I am inexperienced in that art; but I do feel strongly that its episcopal appointments should not be controlled by Channel 4 News and Cathy Newman.”