Radical progressive activism and the Church of England
by Archbishop Cranmer:
Civitas have published a new report: Rotting from the Head: Radical progressive activism and the Church of England. ‘Radical progressive activism’ is a slippery concept, not least because not all progressives would term their activism ‘radical’, and not all radicals would identify as ‘progressive’, but the focus of this report is on racism arising from ‘Black Lives Matter; the “climate emergency”, and unconscious bias training, which as Tom Harris says in his Foreword, is “symptomatic of institutional capture”. He writes as a Trustee of the Nigel Vinson Charitable Trust, which made this research possible, and concludes:
The result is a Church losing its ability to minister at local level because it is making expensive appointments at diocesan level while closing local parish churches and making vicars redundant. The focus on racism sits awkwardly with its apparent silence on things which a truly caring Christian Church might be expected to care deeply about. The breakdown of family life and absent fathers which disproportionately affects Caribbean Heritage families in the UK or the knife crime crisis which results in so many deaths of young black people in urban Britain. A Church informed by its Gospel mission rather than by Marxist ideology would surely not behave this way.
You can hear quite a few clergy spluttering over their cornflakes reading that. But those who do might like to consider a bit of unconscious bias training, because this paper’s thesis is essentially that the Church’s of England’s head has become detached from its body, perhaps nowhere recently better evidenced than in the 2016 EU Referendum, when the entire Anglican institutional machinery preached ‘Remain’, but the pews overwhelmingly voted ‘Leave’. Maybe this should come as no surprise when just 6% of Anglican clergy voted Conservative in the 2019 General election; and the Bishop of Burnley observes that the CofE’s agenda is set by academia, moneyed elites, and sections of the secular media.
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