Welcome. Last week a mainly positive response to the C of E’s response to historic profits from the slave trade and slavery. This week a more critical assessment of its response to a multi-ethnic society. Is it fair?
How the Church of England can get ‘race’ wrong.
This is not a Jeremiad; not a hatchet job. In several ways the Church of England gets ‘race’ right. It is taking the issue seriously, and repenting of both past racism and (connected) past indifference. It recognises that racism can be expressed in policies rather than deliberate intent. Its ethnic minority congregational participation is increasingly leading to increased minority ethnic leadership.
Nonetheless, mis-perceiving the issues that ‘race’ raises for the church can lead to ineffective, wasteful policies. The church has history here. The Simon of Cyrene Theological Institute was set up in 1989 with much hope and expense, but little serious analysis of how it would meet a need and closed with no apparent exercise of ‘lessons learned’, or attempts to make it part of a continuing, connected narrative of how the Church might learn and develop its ministry.
It is because I think the Church is still mis-perceiving issues, and therefore considering embarking on costly ambitious programmes which may well prove ineffective, that I think the following correctives to the Church’s thinking and approach are offered.
1. Not recognising the complexity of ‘race’.
My very first blog raised the question of how far bulking up all ethnic minorities under the all-purpose acronym of ‘BAME’ hindered our understanding. Replacing it (seemingly only for cosmetic reasons) with UKME/GMH is no better. Whilst not white (and so presumably ‘global majority’) people share a near uniform experience of racism or ‘othering’ in various ways, nonetheless too easily and frequently agglomerating their experiences simply obscures manifold differences. This applies not only to the major differences of areas of recent origin (Caribbean, African, South Asian etc) but also the smaller but highly consequential geographical and cultural differences within those groups. Allied to other cross-cutting factors such as reasons for migration and length of time in Britain, social class and educational background, gender and age, and the complexity has increased so exponentially that consistently forming policies or expectations based on a crudely ‘bulked together’ UKME/GMH is hopelessly inaccurate. That is, we need to give full attention to ‘superdiversity’ (see Blog #6, 04/12.2020, and frequent subsequent references).
The basis of this misleading approach is paying attention exclusively to ‘external’ factors – the attitudes and impact of the wider society on minorities; and ignoring ‘internal’ factors – that is the culture, behavioural patters and assumptions of specific ethnic groups which powerfully affect their outcomes. Insofar as the Church of England is an overwhelmingly white church then it is right to pay serious attention to our ‘external’ impact on minorities, but failure to pay attention to the multiplicity of ‘internal’ cultures in our society tips us over into an institutional, political, impersonal mindset that is, weak on love and attentivess.
Yet the Church persists with using UKME/GMH as a frequent tool of analysis, notably with the ‘From Lament to Action’ report specifying ambitious quotas for minority ethnic participation, without any apparent awareness that quotas which are set to create fair proportionate involvement for minority ethnic leadership hide massively unequal outcomes between the different ethnic groups. The Church of England has three Indian men as bishops, but no Caribbean background men, despite our membership including considerably more African Caribbean people than Indians. The tools that the Church currently use give us no way of recognising or identifying this issue, let alone helping us to start looking at how we might understand and address what is a major pastoral and evangelistic challenge. Some years back I attended a conference on vocations with a spread of both ethnic groups and genders, yet there was one stark absence that no one seemed to notice: amongst the 60 or so people there was not one African Caribbean man.
Lying behind this failure of perception is an unwarranted expectation of what might be achieved by the sort of ‘positive discrimination’ policies which underly setting quotas for access training courses into senior leadership, or appointments to theological college staff. Such policies achieve ‘racial justice’ in only a very shallow way. As Thomas Sowell showed in his 1990 book ‘Preferential Policies: an International Perspective’ such policies benefit not the entirety of a disadvantaged group, but only a small cadre within that group who have the qualifications or experience to benefit from the opportunity. In that respect, inequality within the target group has been enhanced rather than overcome.
2. Not connecting race and class.
The situation referred to above of an encouraging number of Indian bishops but a concerning absence of African Caribbean male bishops has one possible explanation which stares us in the face: Britain’s Indian population has a high proportion of educated middle-class people, Britain’s African Caribbean population does not. (In 2019 34% of Indian state school students went to university; as opposed to 7% of Black Caribbean pupils). This ties in within another, also often undiscussed problem: the Church’s failure to gather working class people - to refer to the classic remark of the journalist, Clifford Longley at the time of ‘Faith in the City’ (1985), it is a problem that no-one talks about because no-one has an answer to it. Nor is this a problem just for the church. The controversial Sewell report of the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities sought to strengthen the recognition that racial disadvantage was closely entwined with more general working class disadvantage. Sewell’s quotation from Sunder Katwala of the British Future think tank ‘that we are doing better on race than on class’ (p 31) could be equally applied with perfect accuracy to the Church of England.
In the early days of migration from the Caribbean a West Indian social worker is quoted as saying ‘My own view is that no programme aimed at getting more West Indians in church will succeed unless such programmes can do something first about church participation by natives of this country.” (C Hill (ed) ‘Race: A Christian Symposium’ 1968, p164). Recently Harvey Kwiyani has described an encounter with a group of white British teenagers in Manchester who ‘explained to me that, as far as they could tell, it was not possible for white people to be Christians. Many of them were detached by two or three generations from Christianity and therefore had no close Christian friends. All the Christians they knew in their school were people of other races’ (in ‘Multicultural Kingdom: Ethnic Diversity, Mission and the Church’, SCM 2020, p14).
Thus the absence of people from ethnic minorities, especially young people of African Caribbean background, from the church can be reasonably explained as simply the consequence of acculturation into the ways of English people, especially of working class background. In a recent interview the dramatist/actress Michaela Cole has described how her teenage church routine of church all day Sunday and several midweek evenings, was eroded and finally disappeared under the demands of being at drama school; yet added that Jesus and the Bible were still important to her. Her experience is on the front-line of the 21st century’s great missiological issue: will western urban and especially working class secularism either prevail over or be undermined by majority world piety? In an informal survey of ‘What Do African Caribbean men have against the Church of England’, whereas the older men all cited racism and racist experiences as a major grievance, middle-aged and younger men approximated to white working-class norms: they were too busy with caring for their homes and cars, or that church was ‘boring’.
To cast the church’s relative weakness amongst black, notably African Caribbean, people as simply in terms of race and racism is a serious instance of two-dimensional thinking. One consequence, as argued above, of the damage done by seeing only a simple polarity of white/non-white, is that we ignore the very different levels of responsiveness to the church by different ethnic minorities. By having ‘race’ as our only working category we remain blind to other factors which have a major impact on outcomes: the specific ethnicity of our bishops, as noted; my impression that we are seeing numbers of African men emerge as leaders, as opposed to African Caribbean men; the upsurge in Iranian attenders..
If the statistics of church involvement were re-scrambled to make social class rather than race as the determinating factor then it would become obvious that at senior level we are skewed even more seriously by absence of working-class background leaders than by minority ethnic background leaders. As it is, our single issue focus on ‘race’ blinds us to major questions about how the Church impacts our society.
A further layer of complexity is added if we bring family structure into the picture (as the Sewell Report did to a limited degree). The evidence from the Marriage Foundation and others is that marriage rates now have a major class determinant. Professional or middle class people still tend to get married, amongst working class people it has become far more rare. Children from stable, two-parent families have better outcomes across the board than those brought up by a lone parent, usually the mother.
Leaders in both politics and the church are reluctant to emphasise the issue for fear of being dismissed as ‘judgemental’, but the timidity has rightly been dismissed as ‘reverse hypocrisy. Instead of not practicing what they preach, leaders (especially in the churches) are now failing to preach what they practice.
This has consequences for a multi-ethnic society, for example areas of high Indian settlement such as Harrow have unusually high marriage rates. African Caribbean communities, which are disproportionately working class, also have low marriage rates. We should consider seriously that advocating for marriage-friendly government policies, and preaching up the importance of marriage is in fact an important contribution to ‘racial justice’ that we need to make.
Yet the Church of England still pursues policies that suggest assumptions both that ethnic groups in Britain are a homogenous whole, and that they parallel quite exactly the white majority in all aspects of behaviour and family life, educational achievement, occupational success and so on. Only if these manifestly false assumptions are held to be true can it then make sense for ‘From Lament to Action’ to set targets for UKME/GMH involvement in leadership that mirrors (and in fact exceeds) their proportion in the total population.
If the Church of England is not to ‘beat the air’ in its engagement with a multi-ethnic society it needs to pay thoughtful, researched attention to the ways that race, social class and family structure inter-relate, and the relative importance of these factors in the flourishing of multi-ethnic congregations, the development of church leaders and the integrity of our witness to society. Focus on ‘race’ to the neglect of other major factors in our context is in danger of leading to further costly, high-profile but ineffective initiatives.
Next week Part 2: Neglecting what happens in parishes.
another bombshell... but spot on