‘From Lament to Action’, the report of the Archbishops’ Anti-Racism Taskforce
published last week, is a specific, limited and vital contribution to a much
longer journey – for many members of the Church of England, a hugely painful,
costly journey – of wrestling with institutional racism in the Church of
England.
It is not
the role of this report to present the evidence of institutional racism.
The pile of previous reports published over more than 30 years, and countless
testimonies over a much longer period, have done that. That case has been well
and truly made – and merely affirmed and underlined by Archbishop Justin’s
declaration at General Synod in February 2020.
Neither is
this report the definitive statement of what needs to change and how.
The Racial Justice Commission that will be set up in response to this report
will take on this mantle, across seven areas of ongoing work: Theology, Slavery
(including Monuments), History and Memory, Culture and Liturgy, Complaints
Handling, Participation, and Patronage.
Critical to
that ongoing work is a theological conversation that neither begins nor
ends with this report. Racism is not just about hurtful words and actions, or
about excluding certain people from voice, participation, agency, power and
position. Racism affects, infects, how we see the world: what and whom
we notice, what and whom we hear, what and whom we believe and
trust, what and whom we value and receive as God-given gifts and
challenges. To the limitations and distortions of our perception by racism, the
Christian gospel responds with imperatives: to follow Jesus in the way of truly
loving and embracing our siblings and neighbours; to be led by the Spirit into
the fullness of truth; to see and hear with clarity; to know, even as we are
fully known.
Critical to
the work of change, then – and central to ‘From Lament to Action’ – is the
process of making the invisible, visible. To do this, the report foregrounds
two significant clusters of recommendations for action: quotas, and education.
Quotas first, then. These range from
co-optees onto General Synod and participant-observers in the House of Bishops,
to participants in the Strategic Leadership Development Programme and
shortlists for Senior Clergy Appointments, from the appointment of non-residentiary
canons to membership of PCCs. Quotas are often critiqued as a ‘blunt
instrument’. Within hours of the report’s publication, some early objectors
have suggested that they may be impossible to implement in some areas,
highlighting the uneven demographics across England. To these objections, I
want to offer two initial responses.
Firstly,
that we in the Church of England urgently need to rediscover a theology of the
interconnected, interdependent body of Christ: across geography, as well as
across the ethnic diversity of our membership. Augustine Tanner-Ihm’s
experience of being told, by a senior Church figure, that he was not – because
of his skin colour – an appropriate ‘fit’ for a predominantly white
working-class parish tragically illustrates how institutional racism and a
‘parochial’ (in the worst sense) ecclesial mindset go hand in hand.
Secondly,
building on this first point, what the report’s quota recommendations embody is
a practical outworking of a much deeper desire: that we, collectively as the
Church of England, really do want – really do deeply desire –
more UK minority ethnic / Global Majority heritage people and voices in our
churches, clergy, leadership, decision-making structures and theological
education institutions. Of course, with any proposed quota, there will be
failures to achieve the aim. But better that we ‘fail towards’ (to use the
philosopher Gillian Rose’s phrase) such goals with passionate intention, and in
such failure recognize our wider ongoing failures to achieve God’s just shalom,
than express vague, gradualist aspirations towards ‘more’ and ‘better’ that are
absolved of any sense of urgency. There is an analogy here with CO2 ‘net
zero’ targets: set ourselves a 2050 goal as more ‘realistic’ and we will
inevitably overshoot it; set ourselves a more ambitious 2030 goal and we may
still fail to achieve it by that deadline, but we will almost certainly be a
lot closer to doing the urgent work we need to do – and the ‘failures’ along
the way will reinforce the urgency of the task.
Another
area where there has been some resistant pushback has been around education
– at all levels from church schools to local churches to Theological Education
Institutions. Recommendations include formally adopting and resourcing the
annual Racial Justice Sunday (which ecumenical partners have been doing for
years!), racial awareness training for volunteers in children’s and youth work,
anti-racism learning programmes for PCC representatives on recruitment panels,
and, within Theological Education Institutions, intercultural placements,
celebrating diverse saints and martyrs, drawing on liturgy and theology from
the breadth and diversity of the Anglican Communion, diversifying the
theological curriculum and course bibliographies, and requiring ordinands to
participate in either an introductory ‘Black Theology’ or ‘Theologies in Global
Perspectives’ module (both already-established modules within the Common Awards
programme) within their ministerial formation.
Resistance
here seems to come from either a deep-seated suspicion of such learning and
training, or from a concern that it is somehow a ‘zero-sum game’ by which
including some aspects of learning and training will exclude other aspects – or
both. But the questions here are surely similar to the question of quotas: to
whom do we look for our learning and formation? what questions are we wanting
to consider, and which are we wanting to avoid? In short, who would we rather
remained invisible, inaudible, and to whom are we willing to pay attention?
Historically, English theological education institutions have paid
overwhelmingly more attention to the voices of white (and male) European or
American theologians. These voices have been treated as the weighty theological
‘centre of gravity’, to the exclusion of the gifts of theological wisdom and
challenge from those with darker skin, those from other geographical locations,
and – critically – those who have experienced the Church of England’s
entangling of mission, Empire, colonialism and whiteness from the receiving end
– with all the enduring material and spiritual effects of that entanglement.
To be sure,
there is more work to do on this disentangling – and the Racial Justice
Commission will continue to pursue these questions. But to refuse to pay attention
to the questions, and those well-established theological traditions that have
been asking them for decades, if not centuries – that is surely the kind of
complacent obliviousness that lies at the heart of the Church’s institutional
racism, and which the Spirit is summoning the Church, corporately, to now
acknowledge, repent, and begin to free itself from.
