by The culture wars on transgender issues caused some significant casualties, especially the Harry Potter writer JK Rowling, but there were also many others who were bored going about their daily lives. “I’m clearly not in the same league as JK Rowling,” says the Reverend Bernard Randall. “She is a proper person. I’m just me.”
But for one 48-year-old father, the personal cost of being caught up in battle is just as traumatic. After causing outrage in June 2019 when he preached in the chapel of a Derbyshire private school, where he was an inviting chaplain – “in a place where he is instructed,” he says – he informs students to consider the Church’s teaching on sex and marriage, the post is barred from main services anywhere in the Church of England, and referred to a range of official bodies from the local authority designated protection officer (the “LADO”), authorities national educational regulation, and the Government’s anti-radicalisation programme, Prevent. .
The three saw no reason to take any action against him, to give him relief, but still it looks like he won’t be able to work again or follow his religious vocation to ministry. “Who will give me a job when I have no references from a previous employer and when I bring all sorts of baggage with me?”
He tells me from his home in Nottinghamshire that he is “not angry, just disappointed. The support of my wife and daughter has kept me in one piece”.
It all started with a training day in September 2018. He had already done three years at Trent College at Long Eaton in Derbyshire, an independent boarding school founded as an express Anglican foundation at the end of the 19th century.
A former university chaplain at Cambridge, Reverend Randall moved into schools because he wanted to convey to younger children some of the religious literacy he lacked among undergraduates.
Before the students came back for the new term, the team gathered to improve their skills by attending a session from Educate & Celebrate, a charity that works with school communities to tackle and reduce homophobia, biphobia and transphobia.
It was named in a list of useful resources by Valuing All God’s Children, a 2014 Church of England report on education, although it has no religious affiliation itself.
“There were aspects of what they told us that were fine,” he recalls, “that we shouldn’t accept bullying for example, and things to do with diversity, but I found that the references they made to ‘heteronormativity smash’ [the assumption that most or all people are straight] did not sit well in a Christian school.”
A High Anglican by upbringing, but one who has become more “mainstream” in his ministry, the Reverend Mr. Randall is not an Evangelical firebrand. Instead, he gently tries to make his own opinion clear that it is “right that the Church should be more relaxed about people being gay or same-sex, or whatever words you want to use, than as it used to be, and that is. the vitriol that used to be poured on gay people was disgusting”.
But at the same time he points out that the “good and wholesome” teachings of his Church do not allow gay marriage, nor allow those who have sexual relations with other people of the same sex to be priests. And that is the attitude he wanted to promote in talks with the senior leadership of Trent College regarding how far to go to implement the Educate & Celebrate program in the school to combat transphobia.
He saw some – but not all – of what they suggested as a “problem”. However, he soon realized that, as a chaplain, despite the school’s stated ethos, he was being excluded from the emerging plan, “because, as one person told me, it might not agree you with him”.
It should be noted that the school subsequently disputes that anyone has ever used those exact words – and other aspects of the case it lays out against them. “I clearly remember them saying that,” he insists, adding that he was not the only member of staff “not impressed” by the Educate & Celebrate programme, “although some of them were very keen”.
So, was he worried that a type of brain was going to happen? Among the areas where he would disagree with trans activists is biological sex rather than gender, and what he would call gender reassignment and what they would refer to as intrinsic “gender identity”.
“I would be careful about the word ‘brainwashing’,” he begins. “What a school cannot do is lie to children. You cannot change sex. That comes from a particular worldview that includes a belief in this thing called gender identity without question. When you start lying to children, all sorts of bad things happen.”
No policy document was ever circulated at Trent College to allow it to formally object to the implementation of the Educate & Celebrate scheme. Therefore, he addressed the issues in the sermon that have cast such a cloud over his life for the past four years.
“Every summer term I would ask the students to suggest topics for church services. One Year 10 boy (aged 15) asked me, ‘can you explain how we are told that we have to accept all this LGBT stuff in a Christian school?’ That was a very good question for me and that’s what I mentioned in my sermon.”
He admits, when I ask him, that “it has to be accepted” is “a very strong way of putting it”, but at the same time insists that his sermon “wasn’t saying right or wrong, or all gay people are condemned. “. Instead, “it allowed for a much more neutral and fair debate: freedom of conscience, freedom to believe what you believe is important. I was fully aware that many LGBT activists from the school were ‘no debate’”.
He says he was a Church of England chaplain telling students in a Church of England school to think about the Church of England view”. Nothing to object to that? Well, an employment tribunal over three years later, using phrases like “you may believe”, ruled that it was “persuasive and inappropriate”. For his part, he feels that “every sermon is basically meant to be a little persuasive”.
After he delivered the sermon twice, complaints were raised, including that he was saying it was okay to be homophobic.
A meeting was called the following week with the deputy head and the defense commander. “I knew there was no defensive element. So, I felt it was quite scary. Defense can ruin people’s careers. I was not in a good position at the meeting. I was angry. It wasn’t fair.”
As a result he was immediately suspended, pending an investigation and disciplinary hearing which took place before school broke for the summer.
The verdict was delayed due to the long holiday. That summer was “extremely difficult” in his home three-quarters of a mile from the school, he remembers with gloom. In September 2019, days before he was due to return, he was handed a letter stating that Trent College had fired him for “gross misconduct”.
“Part of me was really shocked, and part of me wanted to laugh at the absurdity. How could this happen to me? How could it happen to anyone?”
He appealed the dismissal, and the “huge surprise” was reinstated in the autumn of 2019 by an internal panel. Instead, he was given a written warning, his teaching schedule (delivering lessons in classics and religious education) was terminated, and he had to agree to have any sermon he preached checked before delivery.
When the Covid lockdown began, the school initially laid him off but then restructured itself and he was made redundant in December 2020. However, the ordeal continued. Now that a defense in his local diocese in Derby has been involved, his investigation is “still ongoing” and, he fears, has reached an impasse, with the Bishop’s advisers calling for defense mistakes to be admitted before he goes ahead. , while sticking to his guns. did nothing wrong.
And while that contempt remains, it cannot take its place at the altar. “I’m thought to be too dangerous.”
Some priests find ways to obtain such an unlimited liturgical state in private. But not Reverend Randall. “I still say my prayers alone, but service requires an assembly.”
The employment tribunal decided in September 2022, due to unfair dismissal against him. He believes he was flawed and biased. He is appealing.
“He quoted all kinds of documents in detail but only 20 words of my own sermon, and no context. They didn’t discuss what I said and I find it hard to see that as a fair judgement.”
He is also, with the support of the campaign group Christian Concern, taking legal action against Trent College and its principal, alleging victimization, harassment and discrimination on religious grounds.
How is it coming together? “A secular meeting I don’t want to do. I am teaching arts and humanities at a university. My wife works part-time as a music administrator, but our income has dropped significantly.”
That’s not really the point though, he continues. “The main thing is that we can’t plan for the future because I don’t know what I will be allowed to do.” Or for that matter, what is allowed to be said, either from the pulpit or as a teacher.
“After everything that happened, my confidence is very low.”
