The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  At Euston Church, the building may be historic but the service includes some distinctly American strands. The worship band mixes classic hymns, such as Charles Wesley’s “And Can It Be,” with American Christian music hits like “The Lion and the Lamb” by the Mobile, Alabama–based band Big Daddy Weave. The emphasis is on sin, salvation, and evangelism of the “unchurched.” From the pulpit, Murdoch urged congregants to recruit other souls. “Wherever you go tomorrow, if you haven’t yet told them that you are a Christian, tell them that you are a Christian,” he said, his genial voice rising and falling. “Dare yourself to invite someone to church.” Murdoch acknowledged that evangelism isn’t always easy. “I feel very intimidated by secular London,” he confessed, then reassured the group, “Take courage. The Lord stands beside you. He is totally on it.”

  Euston Church’s Americanisms start to make sense when you learn that the church is a member of The Gospel Coalition. A powerful global alliance with nearly 8,000 affiliated churches in the U.S. alone, The Gospel Coalition was cofounded by the American pastors Don Carson and Tim Keller, the charismatic and influential guru of “church planting,” the practice of sending out ministers to establish new congregations, often in rented or inexpensive facilities. Presently there are The Gospel Coalition–affiliated churches in 130 countries, and, like the Child Evangelism Fellowship, the organization recently launched a Europe- and urban-focused initiative called City to City Europe. “Cities are strategic places for gospel ministry and should receive missional priority at this point in history,” Keller wrote.20

  The Gospel Coalition has placed a new emphasis on planting churches in countries where liberalism flourishes, as well as in cities identified as “centers of influence.” London checks both boxes.

  While many of The Gospel Coalition’s affiliated churches do a great job of emulating aspects of millennial culture, The Gospel Coalition teaches that same-sex relationships are sinful and insists on “male headship” at home and in church: “The man is the leader, and the wife is the follower,” according to an article on the organization’s online platform. In what reads like a form of Orwellian newspeak, the piece goes on to explain, “Her submissive role does absolutely nothing to diminish her equality with him as an image-bearer. In her humanity, she is his equal. In her role, she is submissive.”21

  The Gospel Coalition–affiliated churches are nevertheless often successful in university towns and areas where young professionals tend to congregate. The youth-focused culture of such church plants strikes some number of young people as fresh and authentic. In my experience chatting with younger congregants in the pews, I get a sense that some are there in search of an alternative to the present mating culture, with its consumerist orientation. Others are seeking refuge from the insecurities of the gig economy and even the existential dread of climate change, which offers them little vision or basis for creating a stable future. Smaller, midweek gatherings deliver instant fellowship. Such churches emphasize community and purvey doctrinal conformity in the language of personal growth. In an era of growing income inequality and diminishing expectations, they offer the hope of stability and purpose.

  True to its ideological roots, the Euston Church believes it has enemies, and they aren’t just “the homosexuals.” The evildoers are above all the nonbelievers—as well as anyone who imagines that church and state should be kept apart. According to Murdoch, “secular thinking” is the way to spot the “enemies of the truth.” In a sermon I attend, he advises, “Expect them to be divided among themselves, inconsistent in their arguments, expect them to overreach themselves … whether that’s dictators promising to eradicate Christianity from their countries, or counselors trying to eradicate religion from the schools, as some want to in this borough.”

  After my visit to the Euston Church, I decide to check out their science-focused presentation by Dr. Andrew Sach, now available online. It turns out to be an extended tirade against atheism.22 Sach, who represents himself as a reformed nonbeliever, alleges that questions about religion and science may be understood as a conflict “between two different philosophies. There’s a conflict between the worldview of the Bible on the one hand, and the worldview of naturalism of atheism.” Sach declines to clarify his own opinion of creationism, which is less acceptable in the UK than in the U.S. “I’m not going to tell you my view,” he says, “because I don’t want it to be the be-all and end-all today.” But in the question-and-answer period, he makes clear his opinion that physical disabilities, disease, and earthquakes are all a consequence of the sin of disbelief.

  “He made the world perfect,” Sach said, “and we stuffed it up.”

  International church-planting networks and the organizations that support them increasingly cross borders in all directions. Another London church plant called Grace London is affiliated with a church-planting network, called the Advance movement, which got its start in Australia and has now reached into the United States. The Advance movement was founded and led by a man named P. J. Smyth for the “primary purpose of taking new ground for the Gospel in small towns, suburbs, cities, and nations.” But, in an indication of the density of interconnections in the global network of new evangelists, Grace London periodically holds joint services, weekend retreats, and other activities with Reality Church London, a plant of the Carpinteria, California–based Reality Church, which also happens to be affiliated with The Gospel Coalition. Years ago, when I lived in Southern California, I periodically attended services at the Reality Church network’s original founding church, so I am eager to visit its outpost here in London and learn more about its relationship with P. J. Smyth’s Advance movement affiliate Grace London.

  On a Sunday evening I enter a community center near Waterloo and find the Grace London/Reality Church London service in full swing. The congregation is young and multicultural; about a quarter are Asian or of Asian descent. “From life’s first cry to final breath / Jesus commands my destiny,” they sing the tuneful worship hit “In Christ Alone” with full-throated joy, raising their hands heavenward. At my seat I find a card telling me that Dr. Andrew Sach is scheduled to give a lecture here, too.

  In front of me sits a woman with a flowing green top. A tall, androgynous friend is seated next to her. I strike up a conversation and ask the women their impressions of P. J. Smyth, the founder of the network to which Grace London belongs. They smile but indicate they don’t know what I’m talking about. I find this troubling.

  P. J. Smyth, now in his fifties, was raised in England, then moved with his parents to Zimbabwe and subsequently South Africa. P.J.’s father, John Smyth, an English lawyer who died in August 2018, once ran elite Christian summer camps for boys at Winchester College in Hampshire. But multiple allegations of physical and sexual abuse were lodged against him. Men who had attended the clubs as boys described how Smyth groomed them over time before compelling them to show him their genitals, then brutally beating them under the pretext that they were being punished for the “crime” of masturbation.

  One victim who attended the camp and estimates he was one of twelve boys targeted by Smyth for beatings at that time described his experiences in an article for the Telegraph. Smyth was “particularly interested in the usual teenage stuff—masturbation, indecent thoughts, pornographic magazines,” he wrote.23

  When Smyth initiated the beatings, the victim says, they were cast as a necessary consequence of sin. “Quoting from the Bible—Hebrews in particular—he said it wasn’t enough to repent for your sins; that they needed to be purged by beatings,” the survivor writes. “I had to bleed for Jesus.”24

  “I was stunned by how hard he hit me that first time and gasped with what little breath I had left,” the survivor wrote. “That was the first of the 8,000 or so strokes he would make on my bared bottom over the next four years; each and every stroke delivered with the same extraordinary ferocity.”

  Winchester College was made aware of the abuse but declined to report Smyth to the police. Instead he was
“warned off” from the schools. Free to go elsewhere, he left the UK in the early 1980s and moved with his family to Zimbabwe, where he set up the Zambesi Ministries and ran a summer camps for boys from well-to-do families.25

  At least five boys who had attended those Zimbabwe camps accused Smyth of abuse. Smyth was also formally charged with the killing of a Zimbabwe teen, Guide Nyachuru, whose body was found on the grounds of the school where the Zambesi holiday camps were held. In 2002, Smyth left Zimbabwe for South Africa, where he became an anti-LGBT activist.

  Advance movement founder P. J. Smyth has claimed he was unaware of his father’s behavior. “I never saw or heard anything that led me to suspect my father was engaged in the activities alleged,” he wrote in February 2017. “I had a happy childhood at home, and my father disciplined me in a manner consistent with the laws and cultural trends of the UK at the time.” He also said that “these are horrific allegations, and if proven true it is right that my father face justice.”26

  Some years previously, however, P. J. Smyth published a “Quick-Start Parenting” guide that was surely consistent with his father’s approach to child-rearing.27 In a section titled “Raising Obedient Children,” he writes, “I really want to stress the importance of demanding immediate obedience.” If a parent issues a request or order, and a child protests or even slightly delays in acquiescing, he continues, the father should hit the child.

  “If there is so much as a squeak …,” he says, “then I pull the car over (even if we are later [sic] or on a highway) and smack the offending son.”

  Tender age is no excuse to abdicate from a father’s apparent responsibility to beat his children. When his own children were still in high chairs, according to P. J. Smyth’s guidebook, he trained them to obey by striking them whenever they reached for the salt. “I would smack their chubby little hand,” he says, “just hard enough to sting them and shock them and provoke a few tears.” Their next attempt to reach for the salt was met with “a slightly harder smack. And so it would go on. Guess who won? I did. Every time with every son. The issue was never the salt shaker. It was obedience.”28

  P. J. appears particularly proud of his nine-point plan of ritualistic corporal abuse.29

  Tell them to “go to the bathroom,” he instructs parents.

  “Once the door is closed, I sit on the edge of the bath and they stand in front of me …”

  “Then say, ‘turn around and hold the basin with both hands.’ ”

  “Do not tolerate wriggling or trying to cover bottoms with hands.”

  “It should be hard enough to shock and provoke tears …”

  “Control the crying. No exaggerated or prolonged crying is allowed, and no sulking or bad attitude of any sort allowed.”

  If the process is not met with the expected response, according to the Advance movement founder, repeat beatings are necessary. “Go back to the bathroom and repeat the process until true repentance and submission is evident.”

  In what reads like a nod to his own father’s strategy for realizing “the benefits of smacking,” P. J. adds: “May I say at the outset that if the law of you [sic] country forbids this form of discipline, then I would recommend that you either fully obey the law, or move to another country where the government are not such a bunch of controlling sissies.”30

  What the pastor of Grace London leading today’s services, Andrew Haslam, makes of P. J. Smyth and his father I cannot ascertain, although his contribution to the Advance movement website makes it clear that he is a proud and enthusiastic member of Smyth’s organization. “I mentioned that we were looking at joining Advance,” he writes on February 23, 2016. “This is now official, and it feels like a match arranged by God.”31

  It is clear that questions of gender order and masculine power preoccupy Haslam, too. He has also praised the controversial pastor Douglas Wilson, titling a February 15, 2014, blog post, “Profound, provocative, and prophetic—doug [sic] wilson on marriage,” before it was taken down.32 “This is the most provocative and helpful book on marriage that I have read,” Haslam wrote, referring to a book authored by Wilson. “It is always a joy reading Doug Wilson …” Wilson, the prolific theologian and pastor from Moscow, Idaho, with a somewhat agitated style, is infamous for his particularly perverse brand of antifeminism. “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,” Wilson jabbers. “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Wilson also writes that “women who genuinely insist on ‘no masculine protection’ … tacitly agree on the propriety of rape.”33

  Haslam, nevertheless, rewards Wilson with praise. “Men don’t know how to lead, and they certainly don’t know how to teach their family. It is on these themes that Wilson really hits hard, and hits below the belt,” he wrote on his blog. “The tidal waves of cultural change have wreaked havoc with the family, and with godly masculinity, and it is now rare (in Britain at least) to find families that embody the scriptural values.”34 At the service I attend, he articulates his fervent wish to “see God revive family life along biblical lines.”

  Individuals with authoritarian dispositions tend to reinforce hierarchies in multiple spheres, and Haslam’s erstwhile guru Doug Wilson was no different. An admirer of Rushdoony and other Reconstructionists, he hailed the “unexpected blessings of slavery” and has said that he believes LGBT people could be executed in certain circumstances. To be fair, he added that “killing homosexuals is pretty much a non-priority for me,” since AIDS is claiming their lives already.35

  No doubt this is a bridge too far for Haslam, who says gay people ought to simply forgo intimacy altogether. “For my friends who have grown up experiencing homosexual attraction but have also come to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, they have been willing to trade their sexual fulfilment [sic] in order to pursue a deeper satisfaction in following Christ,” he says approvingly. “Literally every person who chooses to follow Jesus makes these painful and self-denying choices.”36

  I wave a friendly goodbye to the woman in the flowing green top and her androgynous friend on my way out the service. I wonder: Do they know about any of this?

  As for P. J. Smyth, it now seems that he will be bringing his version of the gospel to America. According to their website, the Advance movement has planted or partnered with churches in Texas, Utah, California, Florida, and other states. Some Advance-affiliated churches hold Sunday services in taxpayer-funded buildings such as community centers and public elementary schools. In September 2016, the day after Donald Trump won the election, P. J. Smyth tweeted, “Political instability is a proven ally to gospel advance.” Then, in 2017, he accepted an invitation to head up the Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland.37 Following a series of devastating child sexual abuse scandals, it seems Covenant Life was in the market for the kind of leadership that P. J. Smyth could offer. In 2012, the church had been hit with a class action lawsuit, and seven pastors were accused of engaging in a cover-up. A Montgomery County judge dismissed the suit citing various technicalities, “among them the state’s restrictive civil statute of limitations for child-sex-abuse cases,” according to a 2016 article in the Washingtonian. “The proceedings never delved into whether the allegations were true.”38

  The Child Evangelism Fellowship in its current, massive, global form is really a creation of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal advocacy nexus of Christian nationalism in the United States today. It was the ADF that guided the CEF through the American court system and toward the game-changing 2001 Supreme Court decision Good News Club v. Milford Central School, which effectively pried open the doors of every public elementary school in the nation to any Good News Club that wishes to be there. The Gospel Coalition, too, has drawn on the firepower of the ADF in building its network in the United States; the ADF has helped clear the way for the establishment of TGC-affiliated churches in taxpayer-funded spaces such as public schools and community centers. Not surprisingly, the international expansi
on of these groups also comes at a time of expansion for the ADF and its network.

  Through offices in Mexico City, Vienna, Brussels, Strasbourg, London, New Delhi and other locations, the Alliance Defending Freedom exports the revolution, showing considerable skill in adapting to new cultural environments and political frameworks. Legal concepts that are workshopped in the U.S. are disseminated throughout the world. The goals of ADF International are consistent with those within the United States and rely on some of the same novel legal arguments and conceptions of “free speech” and “religious liberty.”

  ADF offices tend to be strategically located near centers of power. In Geneva, “we focus our legal advocacy efforts at the Human Rights Council, the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, and the different bodies that monitor human rights treaties,” according to the Alliance Defending Freedom International website.39 In the U.S. the ADF’s Washington, D.C., office is “strategically positioned to effectively engage with the OAS, which consists of Member States from Latin America, the Caribbean, the US, and Canada.” New York offices, “just minutes away from UN headquarters,” provide legal expertise “to Member States to ensure that the UN upholds the inherent dignity of every human person. Our specific areas of focus are the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and the functional commissions.” The ADF also works “alongside a large network of allied lawyers throughout South Asia, Africa, and Oceana,” and partners with other organizations that share their “vision for transforming the legal culture.”40