“A DISTURBINGLY pervasive culture of denial, silence, a refusal to take heed of the lived experience of others and the avoidance of confronting and acting upon unpalatable truths” characterises the Church of England’s attitude to racial justice, Lord Boateng has warned.
He chairs the Archbishops’ Commission on Racial Justice, and was writing in its sixth and final biannual report, dated December and published on Tuesday morning, shortly before it was presented to the General Synod.
In it, Lord Boateng is highly critical of the Church, describing a lack of co-operation in supplying requested information, and a “marked disinclination to engage” that has, at times, “engendered tears of grief and frustration on our part”.
The Church is at a kairos moment, he says. It is, the Commission says in its report, “called to offer an alternative vision and to change the reality of the day-to-day lives of all those it is called to serve. To do that, it must address gaping wounds of racial injustice that afflict it, and reach out and welcome all comers.”
This requires an internal culture change, the Commission says. Priorities include nurturing a worship culture that, Sunday by Sunday, reflects diversity within communities; a “robust structural governance” that ensures a sustained and adequately resourced focus on racial justice; and an adequate complaints system.
“Church leaders need to move from a defensive stance where complaints are ignored or managed away,” it says.
The C of E, the report suggests, wavers between the assumption that “God is an Englishman” and a guilty acknowledgment that “God is not a White Man.”
“The patterns of thought and imagination that arrange the world in racial ways . . . have a history that is deeply entangled with that of the Church. The poisoned river of racism has tributaries in the long story of Christian antisemitism and in the violent relations between Christians and Muslims. . .
“It was deepened by the ways in which so many Christians drew upon Scripture and tradition as they taught themselves that the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans was acceptable and even beneficent.”
The report continues: “If it is important to remember those members of the Church of England who worked toward the abolition of slavery, it is no less important to remember how deeply the Church was involved in supporting and profiting from it.”
The Commission had heard a catalogue of testimonies from people who have experienced racism within the Church and who have, it says, often sought in vain for their experiences to be acknowledged and their concerns addressed.
“There are all too many respects in which the Church of England today remains shaped by a theological and ecclesial imagination that enables those who do not experience racism themselves to downplay the cries of those who do and to deny that those cries are symptoms of deep and pervasive problems in our life together.”
The 1920 Lambeth Conference had acknowledged conscious and unconscious racism, while the 1985 Faith in the City report had reported that members of minority-ethnic groups left out of mainstream British society felt equally ignored and relegated to the peripheries of church life. Many Black Christians had told the Commission that they had felt frozen out of the C of E by “patrician attitudes”.
The pace of change that the Commission and the Racial Justice Unit had continued to encounter is described as “glacial”. The report highlights the absence of data, the reluctance to share the little data that did exist, and — within the National Church Institutions and diocesan authorities — the “secrecy and opaqueness” of their practices and processes. Those described as being on the front line in dioceses and parishes lacked support, it says.
Theological educational institutions (TEIs) need to deepen their racial-justice focus to meet the future needs of the Church, the report says. It calls for diversifying and decolonising the theological education curriculum.
“It is striking that, while there have been a number of GMH bishops appointed in the Church of England in recent years, there has never been such a leader heading up a TEI, and the number of GMH people employed full-time in teaching posts within the TEIs remains tiny. That needs to change.”
It identifies “a culture of non-engagement” from TEIs and their leaders, who “tended to be white individuals who did not always see the need to engage with antiracism and decolonial discourses. Accordingly, TEIs are perceived to perpetuate institutional and structural racism through a predominantly white curriculum delivered by predominantly white staff.”
Reparation, as it has suggested in previous reports, is “a matter of restorative or reparative justice, not of retribution. That is, it is not about punishing people for creating or benefitting from the original evil, but about repairing the breach in the present that it has caused.”
A section on slavery-linked monuments quotes the chair of the Church Buildings Council, Novelette Aldoni-Stewart: “It is my continued purpose to advocate for those who feel unheard. To ensure that they are heard, I understand that our scrutiny must look beyond the aesthetic value of historic bricks and mortar, especially if such regard for the tangible is at the expense of others.
“Hearing people also means being receptive to the stories these memorials tell of pain, and disenfranchisement and their legacy in conveying emotional harm.”
Calls to action in this final report include an acknowledgement in remembrance services of “huge contributions of Africans, Asians and so many other people groups in conflicts which can easily just be seen in terms of white and European protagonists”.
Church leaders also needed to ensure that work around Black History Month was not “tokenistic or merely performative ‘virtue signalling’.”
In the report, senior clergy describe their experiences of racism. This is reflective of the report Behind the Stained Glass, published in November, which found evidence that a combination of individual, interpersonal, institutional, and structural factors created barriers for UK minoritised-ethnic/global majority heritage (UKME/GMH) people in the ministry and leadership of the Church.
The Commission’s latest report suggests that the Church’s failures to move racial justice forward are enabled by “a culture, cascading from the top down, of deference, subservience, acquiescence and silence”.
Locally and nationally, it says, the Church should ensure that those who are considering raising complaints about racist incidents have well-signposted access to impartial, confidential advice from people who know both racism and the Church well. “Where people are in a situation of asymmetrical power, they may well be concerned that the very fact of their raising a complaint could be used against them.”
The report concludes: “Racial Justice in the Church of England is the classic curate’s egg, but ‘good in parts’ is not good enough for the Kingdom of God.”
Of the 42 dioceses, 14 were found to have “extensive practice” in racial-justice work, 14 had partially addressed the issue of racial justice, 12 had plans in place to do so, and two had done “little or nothing” on racial-justice issues.
Church schools came out best. The National Society for Education is commended for making significant strides in these areas. “Education’s success in teaching Christianity as a ‘world faith’ leads the way in a journey which the wider church needs to make,” it says.
“In the imperial past, the English may have felt they had the right to define what Christianity is — but the retreat of the Church within English society in recent decades shows that this narrow approach has in fact damaged Christian witness here. The English faith of the future must be one that is inspired and informed by the wisdom and experience of the world church.”