#LamentToAction: making the invisible, visible

 

‘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.