Welcome, as questions of race get more and more featured in the press, tv and elsewhere, forming a Christian mind on the matter becomes more urgent. This blog seeks to warn of some of the pitfalls that can be encountered.
Pitfalls for Christians in Thinking About Race.
Concern about questions of ‘race’ in the churches has increased exponentially over the past few years, notably since the death of George Floyd in May 2020 and the resulting increased salience of the Black Lives Matter movement from that point, though arguably such events only increased the momentum of a process which had been building force for a few years previously. One small, personal indicator was that I wrote a short the article on ‘race’ for the New International Dictionary of Theology that was published in 1988. When a revised edition, though with a slightly altered focus, came out in 2016 I was annoyed to find that my article had been republished without any consultation with me or the opportunity to change the text or brief bibliography. When I protested the editor kindly agreed that they would check with me before any future new edition. However it is notable that whilst it could be thought there was little significant change to Christian reflection on ‘race for the twenty-eight years from 1988-2016, now – a mere seven years later – it would be unthinkable to publish something on ‘race’ without greatly expanding the coverage, and by expanding the bibliography to a size that would overwhelm me.
This increase of concern, activity and publishing is all to be welcomed. There has been growing recognition that encompassing cultural and ethnic diversity in the one body was both a major concern in the earliest churches, and a central expression of the new people that God had called into being. But ‘fools rush in’. It is one thing to pay more attention to both issues of ‘racial justice’, and the trickier challenges of building ethnically diverse but united churches; it is less easy to think carefully and deeply how those things might be done. At first sight the ethical and pastoral issues of giving expression to different ethnicities being ‘all one in Christ’ seems straightforward but, as with many other areas of human endeavour, the closer you engage with the topic the more complex it becomes and the responses less simple, indeed perhaps even counterintuitive. So this article, Whilst welcoming the increased focus of attention on race, also sets out some of the pitfalls facing white people as they engage with the issue.
1. Unthinking progressivism.
As noted above, concern about race and racism has been muted in most churches. Whilst there has been lobbying from concerned pressure groups, they largely failed to impact the concern and outlooks of both the majority of ministers or the policies of leaders, further than being, to quote the leader of one national voluntary organisation, ‘politically correct but ineffective’.
Thus the churches are now very conscious that they have some serious catching up to do, and in such situations the temptation is to opt for the most accessible and fastest vehicle to compensate for our lagging. The result is that the churches have tended to come behind the most widespread, ‘secular’ understanding of race and racism. This has meant focussing on societal issues as being the heart of the problem, with phrases such as systemic/structural/institutional racism coming to the fore, along with talk of unconscious bias or white privilege. The structural nature of the Church of England, with policies set centrally by bishops or synod, but very largely implemented (or ignored) by parish clergy with, thanks to clergy freehold, a very high degree of independence from the centre. This gives to the church a biased inclination – across a whole range of issues, including race – to give much attention to theories and policies, but far less attention to actual outcomes. As a result there has been significant central concern about the church being ‘institutionally racist’ alongside virtually no attention to what actual practices do (or do not) generate effective multi-ethnic and racially just congregations.
Therefore, the short-cut to pick up on currently widely touted views about race has strong appeal by way of indicating to the wider society that we are no longer off the pace. As an example, when the report of the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities (or ‘Sewell’) was published in early 2021 there was an immediate outcry from progressive sources, misleadingly claiming that it denied the existence of institutional racism and was, more broadly, a ruse by the Johnson government to deny that the problem of racism needed attending to. In an on-line discussion of the report hosted by Krish Kandiah, the overwhelming majority of participants were hostile to the report, mostly it would seem without having read it. Meanwhile the seven bishops of London Diocese publicly criticised it.
Yet the Sewell report raised issues that needed serious debate and attention which was entirely lost in the blizzard of criticism. Most centrally, the question of whether ethnic disparities or shortfalls were quite simply indicative of deep-seated racism in our society, or were they also accounted for by other factors as well – questions of geography, social class and family structure which also needed attending to. Thus the very different, and clearly evidenced, trajectories of Britain’s diverse ethnic groups were pointing to issues of what caused groups to thrive, and from which all could learn. These were issues which ‘progressive’ thinkers had largely ignored (marked by their holding on to the uselessly broad umbrella term of ‘BAME’) and yet were obviously areas of significant learning for everyone in a multi-cultural society.
Sewell himself had turned from an earlier ‘progressive’ position by the simple weight of his experience in education, as had the government adviser behind the Commmission, Munira Mirza, and significant other ethnic minority figures such as Trevor Phillips, formerly head of the Commission for Racial Equality, or Katherine Birbalsingh, founder of the controversially traditionalist and successful Michaela Academy in Wembley. The Equiano Project in Britain, and several leading black American academics, such as Professors Glenn Loury and John McWhorter have come to similar conclusions.
The upshot, then, is that there is not just one standpoint from which one can be ‘anti-racist’, but rather other and (to use the American term) ‘heterodox’ understandings of the situation might lead to better outcomes and greater justice for black people than the ‘orthodox’ progressive line which despite successes in the increasingly distant past, now urgently needs interrogation. At the very least, a responsible Christian assessment needs to recognise this diversity of approach, rather than assume that only a ‘progressive’ line can be adopted with good conscience. A passion for racial justice and for intercultural church growth requires a sharply critical analysis of what the underlying issues are, rather than simply accepting that the ‘orthodox’ or progressive line, as put forward by critics of the Sewell Report, such as the Runnymede Trust, is the only show in town.
2. Binary Thinking.
Games work well by being two-sided – a three-sided football match would be chaos. So social issues are much easier to understand, and especially to formulate moral judgements upon, when there are two sides. Conventionally ‘race’ has been formulated in terms of ‘black’ and ‘white’, partly because when post-1948 Britain became an increasingly visible ethnically diverse society, it was through the migration of black people from the Caribbean, paralleling the situation in the United States where the growing Civil Rights movement was receiving increasing attention in Britain. Such polarity easily meshed with other polarities – the majority of early immigrants came from poor backgrounds seeking to make a better life in Britain. Again, the USA provided a ready albeit simplified, black/poor, white/prosperous analogy. This fitted too with another major story running through the 1950s, of the movements for independence in black Africa, so adding a third ‘powerless/powerful’ thread to the binary.
In addition the rise of Marxist and neo-Marxist thinking in the 1960s gave undergirding to a two-sided view of society. As, in that period, ethnic diversity in Britain increased with the large-scale entry of immigrants from South Asia, they too were co-opted under the ‘black’ label as being similarly oppressed, despite the increasing salience of cultural, and more specifically religious, identities.
For Christians, such a stark binary scenario had obvious attractions – surely it was clear what side our concern for justice and compassion would call us to side upon? The leading Christian thinker on the issue at the time, the Rev Kenneth Leech - Race Relations Field Officer for the Church of England in the 1980s - was strongly influenced by Marxism and vigorously anti-capitalist. The titles of some of his books – ‘Struggle in Babylon’, ‘The Sky is Red’ – were indicative of his adherence to a ‘two-side’ understanding, such that opposition to racism and concern for justice for ‘black’ people involved lining up with the black/poor/powerless option.
But, in reality, the binary was crumbling. The idea that Britain had a coherent ‘black’ population began to dissolve as South Asian migrants asserted their separate cultural identity, and what had been hitherto a secular formulation had to come to terms with people seeing their faith as their leading identity characteristic. Further the economic binary also came under strain. This was intensified by the influx in the early 1970s of South Asian refugees from East Africa, who were in substantial numbers in professional occupations, and whose profile in business, social and then political life was to increase decade upon decade. More widely what in the early days had been very largely the migration of poor people, generally from rural backgrounds, was increasingly being given added complexity with people migrating for business or professional reasons, of for study, including from the Far East or from Africa. The concept of ‘super-diversity’ arose to indicate that ethnic specificity, context of origin, social class, educational level, age and gender meant that what had once wrongly been seen as a cohesive, immigrant ‘black’ population had become fragmented to the point that few generalisations about Britain’s ethnic minorities carried any substance.
Certainly this did not mean that racist behaviour and attitudes disappeared, but by the end of the century the moral simplicity that a binary view of ‘race’ once offered as the solution – so naturally seductive to Christian consciences - was simply unworkable. The multiple cross-currents swirling across Britain’s fragmented, super-diverse society meant that simplistic, binary patterns were simply lost their footing.
3. Avoiding moral judgements.
As noted above, one shaft of insight from the Sewell Report was that the very variety of cultures in Britain’s multi-ethnic society meant that it could be a place of cross-cultural learning as various patterns of behaviour and social formation were seen to lead to some groups thriving and others struggling. Along several measures, notably in education, but then also career progression and income it was obvious that Chinese immigrants in particular but also Indians, and to a lesser extent Africans and Bangladeshis were moving forward, others – notably African Caribbeans and Black British – as an overall population -were making little progress.
The implication that cultures should be evaluated or compared was anathema in a multi-cultural society. It was a no-go area. Behind documents such as the 2000 Runnymede Trust sponsored report on ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain’ (the ‘Parekh Report’) was the dogmatic assumption that ‘the differences between different cultures don’t make any difference’. But in fact they do, as the increasingly clear differences of outcome indicate. So broad-brushed differences between how many hours of homework a child does, or involvement in school’s parents’ evenings, in attention laid on norms of courtesy or restraint in public places, respect for rules or boundaries all effect outcomes in educational achievement or success at work.
Sewell rather mutedly mentioned family structure as an issue. Other research has pointed more explicitly to the marked impact that parenting has on not only schooling, but subsequent issues of mental health, criminality, work progress, or future marital stability. This is spelled out in a book by an American economics professor, Melissa Kearney in ‘The Two Parent Privilege: How the decline of marriage has increased inequality and lowered social mobility, and what we can do about it’.
Kearney writes: ‘I am not diminishing the pernicious effects of racism in the United States. I'm not saying that everyone should get married. I am not dismissing non-resident fathers as absent from their children's lives or uninterested in being good dads. I'm not promoting a norm of stay-at-home wife and a breadwinner husband. What I am doing is arguing, through an appeal to data and rigorous studies, that two parents tend to be able to provide their children with more resource advantages than one parent alone. And furthermore, that a two-parent family is increasingly becoming yet another privilege associated with more highly resourced groups in society’.
This is a question of social class more than race. Educationally the most serious under-achievers in our society are white British children on free school meals, however the large size and wide social range of the ‘white British’ ethnic group obscures this reality when statistics are assessed simply on ethnicity, without cross-cutting attention to social class. Unmarried parenthood is now the norm in African Caribbean, Black British and working class English families, very often being non-cohabiting as well; and these are the social groups that are struggling in our society. To quote Melissa Kearney again: ‘It is not only that lacking two parents makes it harder for some kids to go to college and lead a comfortable life; in the aggregate, it also undermines social mobility and perpetuates inequality across generations’.
The up-shot ought to be, then, that a concern for social and racial justice would lead in both church and state to strong encouragement to create both a mind-set and policies that strengthen the likelihood of children being brought up by both parents (strong features of both the Chinese and Indian communities). But whilst there is a general tendency in media, education and government to discourage, for example, obesity and encourage healthy eating (though there is now a growing ‘fat-shaming’ lobby against it) making moral judgements on family and sexual patterns is held to be impermissible. Thus the Church of England’s recent ‘Commission on Families and Households’ argued – in disregard of substantial statistical evidence – that all patterns of family life should be seen as having equal value. Ironically for a church that claims to be concerned to ‘speak truth to power’, we are silent on publicly stressing the need for Government to use its resources to encourage two-parent child-raising.
Quite simply the evidence is incontrovertible that single parenting has a major negative impact on ethnic or social groups where it is common. So that even if racism at both personal and institutional levels were to be removed the African Caribbean and Black British ethnic groups would still suffer major disparities until the major disadvantage of having two-thirds of young people growing up without a father in the home is removed.
The black American economist, Professor Glenn Loury, has recently expressed the issue forcefully, discussing Pat Moynihan’s report ‘The Negro family: the Case for National Action: ‘Pat Moynihan was mostly right about the Negro family in 1965, both in his diagnosis of its condition and in his forecast of the likely implications. Looking across the social landscape today, nearly sixty years after his dire warning, we can see the plain fact that conventional family relationships in the black urban ghettos have collapsed. What is more, nothing approaching social inclusion for the lower classes of the black American population has been, or soon will be, achieved. More speculative, but still entirely plausible, is the conclusion that these two undeniable facts are closely linked, with the former being a primary reason for the latter. Defining deviancy down comes at a price. And that price is being paid mainly by the deviant, not the definers’. (Loury’s full comments are well worth reading – accessed on ‘The Glenn Show’ substack account).
Similarly, the veteran black American economist Thomas Sowell has argued over the years for the damaging consequences of our desire to be ‘non-judgemental’. Christians concerned about racial justice need to feel the force of these arguments – our understandable desire to avoid seeming to be moralistic is in fact immoral. Whilst the situation in Britain is not as dire in the USA the similarities are strong. By staying silent on a major cause of ethnic disparities in our society we allow a damaging and unjust situation to fester.
Related Blogs:
# 105 & 106 How the Church of England can get race wrong 1 & 2.
# 81 The Church of England, Race and the ‘Second Error’
I've just been reading this
Confounding the Mighty: Stories of Church, Social Class and Solidarity Kindle Edition
by Luke Larner (Author) and think it is very good as it's one of the first collections where the intersections of ethnicity, social class, gender and other factors are considered theologically and in terms of implications for the church. Very much in the tradition of Ken Leech...
I think the problem with flagging up marriage and parenting as a major driver of differnces in outcomes is that it pushes the discussion back onto individual morality. There are so many structural factors that push back against stable relationships, economic precariousness, housing and employment pressures, the cost of weddings (even church fees for them) as well as the cultural stuff of instant personal gratification. In ethnic diversity there are also different models of marriage and family life, including the history of slaveru and colonialism, the caste and honour syste,, arranged marriages and dowries, patriarchal assumptions all of which can bring unhealthy features into marriage and family life and make lifelong marriage seem unattractive. Is their really a universal pattern for Christian marriage and family life - behond a call to faithfullness and self giving love?
In urban and estate churches...whether superdiverse or mainly white working class, there is a big issue here around theology and Christian etihcs.. or is it just church culture... One of our local churches has stopped a divorced woman who is getting together with a new partner from being a Sunday school teacher. Meanwhile in our parish we have just recognized ttwo ALMs living in households where they are not married and have children from earlier partners... But we delight in their growing faith, and their evident gifts.. and that their current relationships seem more stable, caring and loving than previous ones and many in the local estate. And some of our pastoral work has been about supporting women (including local Muslim women) in ending abusive and violent relationships.
I cannot do justice to your rich and detailed essay. You are onto the truth of the matter. My quibbles, and they are quibbles, go to word choice. Prejudice and bigotry at the individual level seem more fundamental to solving the problem than abstract words like "structural," and "institutional racism." Individual choices are more central in the year 2023 than systematic analysis. Thank you for this essay, a nice contribution to the public square.