'Too Woke or Not Woke Enough: Racial Awareness in the Church of England'. # 215. 06/11/2025.
Out of Many, One People
Welcome, to a blog coming out earlier than I expected because of particular circumstances. So my next blog will be on 25th November. Thanks to the authors for providing clear statistical evidence in an area too easily marked by unsubstantiated rhetoric.
‘Too Woke or Not Woke Enough: Racial Awareness in the Church of England’ – by Andrew Village and Leslie J Francis.
This Report, published in the Journal of Anglican Studies in October 2025, draws on material from the Church 2024 survey, which was responded to by 3167 both ordained and lay people. Included in its wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of church members attitudes and beliefs there were eight particular questions which focused on race, the answers to which provide the basis for this Report. From responses to these questions the authors created a Racial Awareness Scale (RAS).
As an intended snapshot of Anglican members, only a quarter of the respondents were under 50, women were 52%, 82% had university level education, 32.6% were rural and 10.5% inner city. That is, typical Anglicans are nowhere near typical of our national population. It can also be asked how accurately the sample actually reflected church membership. Surely Anglican women were under-represented in the sample; and were rural areas over-represented? Most seriously, for the purposes of this report, non-white ethnic minorities were under-represented. At 5% (in fact4.8%) the Report sees this as fairly close to the 6% of the 2014 Church Diversity audit (p 14). But in the subsequent decade it is almost certain that minority ethnic participation has increased substantially (as indicated by increased number of minority ethnic ordinands). More seriously only 0.4% each were from ‘Black’ and from ‘Asian’ backgrounds – that is both groups constituted only 1 in 250 of the sample, or about 13 actual people.
The overall picture ‘is of a majority awareness that racial inequality is an important issue that needs to be addressed, a majority rejection of the idea that there may be local or institutionally embedded racism, and enthusiasm for diversifying leadership, but not for taking specific actions related to historic slavery. Opinion was evenly divided on whether the Church is acting too slowly on racial justice, with 33% agreeing, 33% uncertain and 35% disagreeing’ (p 19).
Divergences within the sample were fairly predictable, with women, younger people, graduates and urban dwellers all scoring higher on the Racial Awareness Scale. (This is broadly in-line with the picture in Eric Kaufmann’s ‘Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution’, though Professor Kaufmann’s assessment of the feature which he sees as an aspect of ‘cultural socialism’ is far more negative – see blogs # 169 &170).
More interesting are some of the ecclesial divergences. Whereas 35% of the parochial clergy (who formed one third of the sample) thought the church was acting too slowly to address racial injustice, this shot up to 67% amongst extra-parochial clergy (2% of the sample, or around 63 people). This ‘may point to the anxiety of those working at the diocesan level or in theological education that this is a pressing issue that needs faster action. This may not be the perception of those in the pews’ (p 20). Consequently, to bridge the gap this requires of the hierarchy a ‘mature understanding of the forces that act on individuals to shape their likelihood of responding to initiatives to raise racial awareness and act for racial justice’ (p 26). However, it could also be considered that extra-parochial clergy are at risk of giving performative subscription to the progressive mindset held widely amongst opinion formers and which is less well attuned to the realities of life in a multi-ethnic society than the experience of at least some parochial clergy. (See blog # 47 on ‘How Anti-Racists can be Racist’).
Another area of ecclesial interest is the attitude of Evangelicals. Whereas the Broad Church and Anglo-Catholic samples responded similarly to the issue of whether the church is acting too solely to address issues of racial injustice (35% & 37% agreeing), Evangelicals, at 27%, scored much lower. Overall they were also younger and more inclined to value thinking over feeling. Following regression analysis of the correlation of several variables (a process way outside my statistical pay-grade) and particularly allowing for moral and theological conservatism, the Report qualifies: ‘Evangelicals did, on average, have lower racial awareness scores than the rest of the sample, but this was because they were also more conservative when it came to doctrine and morality generally. If we allow for this, it seemed that evangelicals tended to be more racially aware than others, especially Angle Catholics. . . (T)he data we present here expose their greater awareness than others of racial issues in the church and of the need to deal with them’ (p 28). In this respect it may be significant that, on my estimates, of the nine minority ethnic deacons ordained last June in London diocese, at least seven were going to evangelical parishes.
These anomalies raise important questions about the mindset of the Report itself, and more generally of the Church of England’s official policies on race. The implication in the Report’s title of some sort of simple and single sliding scale between Not Woke and Too Woke may inhibit understanding of the complexity of race in Britain, which is publicly exemplified by the presumably not woke Conservative Party producing a very much higher proportion of senior minority ethnic leaders than the more woke Labour Party, and especially contrasted against the uber-woke Green Party.
The Report is aware that the correlation of awareness with racism is not simple: ‘being aware of racial issues and looking for change does not guarantee a person is not racially prejudiced, nor does having low awareness of the issues necessarily stem from being racist’ (p 24). Clearly being racially aware is important but it bucks the issue of what sort of awareness is being looked for. In the Introduction on ‘Race and the Church of England’ we come across the frequently used but very rarely defined phrases ‘racial justice’ and ‘institutional racism’. But what might be the benchmarks that suggest progress in these areas? One fears that it is largely top-down criteria, such as increasing the racial diversity of the church’s leadership (only 21% disagree), removing memorials to slavers and slaveowners (only 24% agree), and paying reparations for financial benefits from slavery (only 23% agree). But there is little here that directly impacts whether or not a minority ethnic person might start attending a church, or, if they do, what is likely to help them grow in faith in Christ, or start to take on leadership roles. The Report states rather wearily: ‘the fact that the Church of England is still having to address racial issues and is still setting up bodies that then set up more bodies to make progress suggests that it has not yet changed the culture of the institution nor, perhaps, the Church at large’ (p 6). One possible explanation is that it is focusing on phrases that are now widely used but which yield little in the way of concrete suggestions about how parish clergy and congregations use their time and direct their energies, and so too often leave the church directionless.
This is not to say that Racial Awareness is not important. The Report quotes a helpful definition: ‘those with racial awareness can begin to address issues of racism because they have a cognitive understanding of the continued existence of race-based privilege and oppression’ (p 9), but there needs to be the proviso that cognitive understanding is helpful only if it leads into the warmth of encounters, feelings and relationships. The Report does give helpful pointers: ‘listening to the individual experiences of people from ethnic minorities in the Church, which must be the primary focus’ (p 6), and points to the damage of ‘subtle forms of racism’ (p 7).
In this respect the Report introduces the useful concept of ‘silent racism’: ‘the way in which the shared ideology of the dominant racial group creates images and assumptions that subtly reinforce racism among those who had not considered themselves to be at all racist’ (p 8). However that ideology and its assumptions are primarily contested through actual engagement, and dissonance, with people of other ethnicities. But, as the Report recognises, with its large cohort of rural participants many (though decreasingly so) will be in parishes with barely any minority ethnic population So when respondents do not ‘see racial inequality in my place of worship’ (Table 2) is that shallow complacency because the congregation is still all white, or does it reflect that some churches have made important progress in becoming a home for people of varied ethnicities? It would have been helpful if the Report could have separated out the two very different contexts.
Further ‘the shared ideology of the dominant racial group’ requires much creative and open engagement by the Church of England. Put simply, how ‘English’ should the Church of England be? How far should worship be focussed on liturgical texts and restrained emotion, as opposed to expressive, spontaneous improvisation? How far a theology marinated in the wisdom of centuries but tested by close critical scrutiny, and how far by convictions that readily warm the heart and readily burst into mission? How far, in short, is Anglicanism, a specific and enduring expression of Christianity nurtured in one very unique historical context, and how far an open-ended expression of and response to the cultures and needs of those who live around one particular parish church?