How the Church blew it on race
by Charles Wide, The Critic:
A secretive Church of England commission is intent on seeing bigotry everywhere.
In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York felt they had to act. They had a golden opportunity to set in train an inclusive, broadly representative, generous, open-minded process to examine whether there are things about the structures of the Church, or the ways they are operated, which impede the Church’s mission due to conscious or unconscious racism and, if there are, to propose effective remedies.
It would be motivated by love of God and neighbour, uninhibited by preconceived theories and categories. It would foster mutual understanding across the whole Church, as a widely-shared endeavour. Any proposals would be based on carefully gathered, objectively evaluated, contemporary empirical evidence. It would, by this, achieve a lasting, generally agreed settlement of this potentially explosive issue and avoid the bitter divisions which can be seen on the other side of the Atlantic.
The Archbishops could have done this. But they blew it.
Hurriedly, they set up an “Anti Racism Taskforce” which, as the Archbishop of York said, was “not intended to be a broad representation of different church contexts”. Its starting point was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sweeping assertion that the Church is “deeply institutionally racist”.
Hampered by Covid, the taskforce never physically met, had limited specialist expertise, conducted no critical analysis of work done (often many years ago) by the Committee for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns, commissioned no contemporary research, delegated topics to small groups of its members or even a single member, never considered the possibility of causes of disparity other than racism, and did not evaluate or conduct cost-benefit analysis of any of its 47 “actions”, which are now treated as Holy Writ.
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