‘I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.’
John 16:33
In the spring of 1974, an 18-year-old Justin Welby decided to climb Mount Kenya. He’d arrived in Africa following a turbulent year at Eton. Distracted by his father‘s spiralling alcoholism, Welby had performed badly in his A Levels, but to his schoolmasters’ surprise, had successfully landed a place at Trinity, Cambridge – a college presided over by his great-uncle, Rab Butler. Welby had a lot to think about on the way up, emerging, after days of hiking, at the summit. We don’t know what time of day it was, or how the earth looked from up there, but according to letters between him and his mother, as he gazed down at the world Welby became violently sick.
Almost half a century later in 2016, Archbishop Welby was approached by Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, who had a secret to share. Moore was convinced that Welby’s father was not Gavin Welby, as previously thought, but a man named Anthony Montague Brown, who had been working alongside his mother for Winston Churchill during the 1950s. A DNA test confirmed Moore’s suspicions and Welby had an important question thrust upon him – who are you? That same question has reemerged in the wake of his truncated career, one which saw him bury a queen and crown a king.
After a while, Welby released a statement on his contested parentage and, having a knack for this sort of thing, settled on a line. ‘I know that I find who I am in Jesus Christ’ he said, ‘not in genetics’. This, though effective, was not wholly true; Welby’s identity also lay in other places, such as the church he oversaw and helped to renovate. Welby’s church was constructed for efficiency, public perception and also, one assumes, God – albeit a somewhat strange version of Him.
As a student at Cambridge, Welby found himself alone in his room, reading chapter three of The Gospel of John, when he arrived at verse 16 – ‘for God so loved the world that he gave His only Son that all those who believe in him should not perish but have eternal life’. The words had a profound spiritual effect on Welby, who suddenly began speaking in tongues. His ‘words of knowledge’ were not recorded, but Welby was understandably confused by the experience and sought the advice of a priest named David Watson, who reassured him.
Watson was a champion of Charismatic Christianity, a movement that emphasises the active presence of the Holy Spirit and subscribes to the idea that God intervenes personally in the lives of his followers. For David Watson, speaking in tongues was not an uncommon feature of spiritual life. Welby now speaks in tongues early in the morning as part of his daily prayer, though, in supremely British fashion, his possession by the Holy Spirit is ‘very seldom ecstatic’ and ‘not something to make a great song and dance about’.
The pews of Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) in Knightsbridge, where Welby was baptised and married, are lined with the wealthy. Russell Brand, Bear Grylls and Miranda Hart show their faces on occasion, and are all part of its orbit. Grylls is an ex-squash partner of the church’s former vicar, Nicky Gumbel; Hart contributes ten percent of her merchandising profits to HTB’s youth employment wing and Brand’s evangelistic conversion — the one we’re all still dealing with today – began when he took one of the church’s introductory programs. At HTB, you’re likely to hear guitar music or attend something called a ‘love lesson conference’. This happy-clappy sensibility derives from HTB’s position as the nucleus of British Charismatic Christianity, a religious umbrella that also encompasses the American televangelists.
