Should the Church of England seek to ‘anglicise’ people from ethnic minorities? # 149. 27/02/2024.
Out of Many, One People
Welcome. A question that might be unfamiliar but is worth asking. Does this exploration develop understanding? Questions, comments, commendations to others all welcome.
Should the Church of England seek to ‘anglicise’ people from ethnic minorities?
I can hear the outcry. Stated baldly the question can sound outrageous. Is the Church of England to engage in cultural imperialism? Does it intend to devalue and undermine the culture of ethnic minorities in England? Is it, after all, intending to enhance even more the ‘whiteness’ of the Church?
The answers are all ‘No’! But does it have a calling to help people from minorities to live confidently and successfully in England? ‘Yes’! The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the term ‘ease’ to refer to the way that cultural and educational norms in France benefitted the upper classes. It is an ‘ease’ that is also easy to spot amongst certain groups in this country. Seeking to increase the level of ‘ease’ for minority ethnic groups living in Britain is a reputable concern for the Church.
Some examples.
* When I was a curate I ran a Pathfinder group of 60 or so of mainly African Caribbean early teenagers. They never stated it explicitly, but I had a strong sense from the parents that they were glad their children were being socialised in an English-led, English institution. They had come to this country to make a better life for their children; this seemed one aspect of helping them to feel more at home and confident in this society. Just as a wider context of racism and poor educational provision sadly damaged their aspirations.
* A vicar of a church in East London with a substantial West African membership spoke of his two-way role in helping West Africans understand the Church and England, and helping the Church to understand West Africans.
* A friend whose parish population is less than 1 in 20 ‘White English’, regularly takes his PCC on awaydays to experience very English areas, or to visit national institutions such as the British museum.
* A South Asian church leader encouraged members of an Urdu-speaking congregation to enrol their children at a Church of England primary school some distance away rather than in their local primary school as it would help them in later life to be more at home and confident in English working environments.
The intention of ‘Anglicising’, then, is not to cause people to develop a phoney ‘Englishness’ (remember the two families in ‘Goodness, Gracious Me’?) but to move with growing assurance and confidence in a predominantly English society. Which brings benefits to all.
Why ‘Anglicise’ ethnic minorities?
1. Because England is where they live. Whilst many people, especially leaders and young people, amongst ethnic minorities live fairly cosmopolitan lives, it is easy to overlook the extent to which a substantial proportion of minority ethnic people live ‘encapsulated’ within their own ethnic groups. This may be for religious reasons, including aversion to the alcohol-based socialising in the wider community, or insecurity, such as over language, or to avoid painful racist interactions. But such voluntary self-exclusion and suspicion is damaging both to work prospects, and the well-being of the next generation. For the church to play a ‘bridging’ role in encouraging people to transition into the social as well as educational or employment mainstreams is a worthwhile project.
2. Because England has good things to offer. The recent concern that the English countryside is inhospitable to people from ethnic minorities (over-played in my experience) implies, rightly, that there is an intrinsic good in visiting the countryside. The encounter with natural beauty and fresh air uplifts people. Equally the encounter with English culture brings much that is positive and life-enhancing. Polemical dismissals of the achievements of ‘dead, white men’ ought not to rule out of court access to the riches of literary, artistic and musical heritage that is available to all in this country, despite their being the products of a flawed society. Widening that access is a proper sphere of Christian activity.
3. It is good for the English. The more that people from ethnic minorities are also confident in their English identity, then the more widespread it becomes that people whose only identity is English have the benefit of encountering other cultures in a way that is accessible and not too threatening. The more that invisible barriers of division are dismantled then the more people slowly get the confidence to move and explore.
Identity and Belonging.
Behind the suspicion of such intentions is the fear that amongst ethnic minorities the sense of identity and self-worth – often bruised through racist encounters – will be further undermined if ‘Englishness’ is constantly lauded, causing a crisis for minority ethnic people, especially the young. But behind such suspicion is a zero-sum idea of identity – if Englishness is lauded then implicitly other ethnic identities are undermined. But it often does not work out like this. The report on ‘Racism and Ethnic Inequality in a Time of Crisis’, which although overall made a negative assessment of British society, nonetheless discovered: ‘Interestingly, the likelihood of reporting positive belonging to British society was highest for some of the groups who are also most likely to express strong sense of attachment to their ethnic identity’, with feeling part of British society reported by more than 89% of Arab, South Asian, Black African and Black Other groups (p 48). Deepening someone’s confidence in being British can go hand in hand with an equal confidence in one’s given ethnicity.
To think in terms of a Venn diagram, the pessimistic model is often that English and other identities form two separate circles so that the person must choose to be in one or the other, or risk being lost in a no-man’s land in the gap between the two. For the black American writer W E B Du Bois this was expressed as a painful ‘double consciousness’: the struggle African Americans face to remain true to black culture while at the same time conforming to the dominant white society. But in our present time and place, as the quotation and statistics above imply, the circles of British and other identities often overlap, and then people can productively occupy the shared common ground between the two. The church should be both seeking to enlarge the common ground of shared cultural interest and concerns, and also gently encourage people towards being able to enjoy the benefits of both identities. Thinking in terms of the Venn diagram, therefore, the Church has a mission to enlarge both circles. We want people from a very wide variety of distinct ethnic identities to experience that those identities are respected, cherished and valued (whilst nonetheless also interrogated, chastened and purified by the word and the Spirit of God) and for these identities to be welcomed into the church. And at the same time we need to be enlarging the ‘English’ identity so that it becomes increasingly cosmopolitan, enriched by the diversity of cultures in our midst. (Again, under the scrutiny of the word and Spirit of God).
Strengthening both Diversity and Inclusion.
It is the overlap of the Venn diagram’s two circles that makes reconcilable two of the elements of DEI – that is ‘Diversity’ and ‘Inclusion’ (but the assumptions about ‘Equity’ needs a lot more critical unpacking). People with significantly diverse cultural backgrounds can be included in the same organisation, business, team or church given that the area of overlap is sufficiently wide to include them all.
This emphasis on the two-way overlap of cultural exchange also helps avoid one of the traditional pitfalls of Christian world mission, the adoption of a one-way ‘civilising mission’. Whilst in many ways elite Christian mission schools performed a helpful task in training and developing a future generation of leaders, the model of producing ‘Christian gentlemen’ was too closely and unreflectively western in its orientation. It is notable that whilst for the historic denominations in China ‘civilising mission’ was seen as a worthwhile goal, it was the focus of the ‘faith missions’ such as China Inland Mission on direct personal evangelism, consciously seeking to be expressed within the forms of indigenous culture, that has had the stronger and more resilient consequences in the survival and then re-growth of the Chinese church during and since Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Therefore for the Church of England to seek to ‘anglicise’ people from ethnic minorities is one half of a process, which needs a corresponding movement of the Church being peopled and shaped by people from diverse cultures. Together these two movements help align us with the New Testament church, where, as people are ‘renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator’ so the consequence is that ‘In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!’ (Colossians 3:10,11). Churches which develop a triple confidence – in Christ, in our ethnic heritage, in being English – grow both in their unity, and in their capacity to engage with the cultures of the community where they are set.
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Drawing on Scripture: ‘The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. . .People will bring into it the glory and the honour of the nations’. Revelation 21:24, 26.
Of the nations that you know, what glories and honours do you think they will bring? What would be your top ten?
I think I agree with a lot of what you say here, and clearly there is a lot thta is helpful to new arrivals, especially with English classes that also feature efforts at understanding and integration into British culture. I had a lovely and helpful morning a few months ago accompanying a group of asylum seekers on a visit to the town Hall and the Mayor's parlour, trying to explain the way our city is governed and our strange local customs.
But I think local context is very varied and very important. In metropolitan cities with 50+ years of UKME settlement there is a type of multicultural / intercultural Britishness.. And the local parish of the CofE is not usually very English! While down the road there may be a range of churches serving diaspora communities.
It's a bit different in the Northern ex "mill towns" where there are still residential and culturally segregated communities of Muslims and whites (who may identify as Chrisitian but mostly don't go to church). It can be pretty grim at the moment because of the war in Gaza and assumptions that all Palestianans are Muslim, that all Jews are on the side of the Israeli state, and that Christians also support them.
The biggest dificulty though is in the peripheral, strongly pro Brexit areas, especially where there has been "white flight" to the coast and countryside, as well as some "left behind" post industrial communities. These can be the most ethnically segregated and least multicultural areas, and the growing sense of "Englishness" has some racist and xenophobic elements.. If you are in an all white church in such an area there needs to be a different strategy of introducing "English" people to the joys and richness of diversity, and a critical history of Empire etc.
I'm very sceptical though about government attempts to instil "British Values" in schools and through the citizenship test, and would not like the Church to follow down that route.
Maybe being English and being British needs more differentiation. Scottish and Welsh readers would think so.