THE creation of diocesan posts with a remit to promote racial justice does not mean that the Church of England is fighting “a culture war”, the C of E’s Racial Justice Director, the Revd Guy Hewitt, has said.
Fr Hewitt was responding to reports in national newspapers about the advertising of posts in dioceses such as York, which is seeking a “Racial Justice Education Adviser” — a new post funded by the Racial Justice Unit.
The diocese “is a predominantly white community with around 3% of the population of 1.4m who are Global Majority Heritage”, the job description says. “This is reflected in our churches and in our ordained ministers, of whom we have 6 who would describe themselves as GMH.”
The post-holder’s responsibilities would include using “the ‘Being White’ programme to work with senior leaders to address issues of white fragility” and giving “unconscious bias and diversity training”.
Fr Hewitt told The Times on Tuesday: “This is not about a culture war. This is about the very epicentre of what the gospel calls us towards.” It was vital, he said, that the Church “stand against the evil and pernicious sin of racism”.
He said that, for example, Yorkshire Cricket Club had had “serious problems around racism. . . It’s simplistic to try to suggest that because a place is predominantly white, or of one race, that there are no issues.”
The fact that the post was funded by the Racial Justice Unit meant that money was not being diverted away from front-line parish ministry, he argued: it was not “a zero-sum game”.
The Times quoted the Revd Dr Ian Paul, a member of the General Synod and the Archbishops’ Council, and associate minister of St Nicholas’s, Nottingham, as saying that terms used in the job description appeared to have been “imported from the culture wars in the US, in which all society is understood in a binary of conflict between ‘black’ and ‘white’. This whole approach is alienating ordinary members of the Church of England; it creates more division rather than unanimity.”
The Bishop of Kirkstall, in the diocese of York, the Rt Revd Arun Arora, was quoted by the paper as saying: “The good news of the gospel challenges the sin of racism both as practised and in its lasting impact. In Yorkshire we see that challenge in the activities of groups such as Patriotic Alternative, whose regional organiser was recently jailed for stirring up racial hatred and encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage.”
A spokesman for the diocese said that its “racial justice charter” had received the support of 97 per cent of the diocesan synod, and that the post was “funded nationally by the Church of England’s racial justice unit”.