Understanding the Church’s Present Situation. # 155. 16/04/2024.

Out of Many, One People

Welcome, to my attempt to unpack some of the various currents and proposals before the Church of England at present. Please share your wisdom, and commend to others you think might be interested.

Understanding the Church’s Present Situation.

1. ‘Something’s happening . . .’

* In September I was coming out of the Business Design Centre in Islington where a students’ Freshers Fair was taking place. Outside was a table where some Christian students were singing (rather forlornly) gospel songs and handing out gospels. The majority of the Christian students were non-white (like the students inside the Freshers Fair).

* Apparently half the congregation at Holy Trinity, Brompton are now minority ethnic. Whilst that it startling it is not completely surprising. Several of the young people where I was vicar 15 years ago are now early thirty-somethings attending HTB (particularly from Sri Lankan Tamil families). This almost certainly means HTB has the largest minority ethnic attendance of any Anglican church in the country,  in what is often seen as the preserve of the confident, affluent, ex-public school English man – indeed, the very cathedral of ‘whiteness’.

* 35% of the deacons ordained in London diocese in 2023 were from minority ethnic groups. This is a remarkable change in a very short time. Ten years ago or less the percentage would have been 5-10%. The backgrounds cover African Caribbean, African (including Somali), Indian, and three Chinese ordinands.

These are London examples, and whilst London is exceptional, I have the impression the picture is similar elsewhere, so what lies behind these very encouraging developments? Whilst the policies adopted by the Church have had some impact (there is an impressive story of one ordinand’s induction through a youth apprenticeship scheme), I believe changes in the nation have probably had more traction, notably the marked improvement in minority ethnic education achievements with increasing numbers going to university, especially given that the ethnic groups where we are seeing progress are mostly from the ‘thriving’ minorities (Indian, Chinese, African) rather than the typically ‘struggling’ minorities (African Caribbean, Pakistani, Bangladeshi).

In 2008 I wrote: ‘An indication of whether the Church of England is not just ethnically, but also socially and educationally skewed will be if we attract a growing number of ordinands from those minority communities that are doing well academically - notably Indian, Shri Lankan and Chinese’ (Church of England Newspaper 28/03/2008). That is exactly what is now happening, and suggests that to be at home in the Church of England having three A Levels may be more important than having white skin. It is still the case that ethnic minorities suffer from micro-aggressions, unconscious bias, and a range of wounds coming from prejudices or assumptions of white superiority, and churches are not immune from this, but such negatives are not sufficient to quench an overall direction of growth.

These positive shoots of racial integration are not just limited to the church. They are seen obviously in the higher reaches of government, in tv adverts and in fashions, increasingly in academia, notably in medical departments. Given these shifts then at first sight it seems inexplicable that we are, to quote Professor Doug Stokes faced with a ‘perma-crisis of catastrophisation’ which ‘normalises the invocation of vulnerability, (so that) the prevention of the materialisation of these risks gives moral clout and political justification for P(rofessional) M(anagerial) C(lass) rule’ (p 134).

Anxieties about the realities of racism - dramatically upgraded with the death of George Floyd – have continued nationally at a high level, particularly in the Church of England. Thus in the last few weeks alone we have seen the ten-fold inflation of the Church’s aspirations for money to be spent on reparations, and more recently the setting aside of the cost of eleven office (PMC?) appointments in the West Midlands dioceses for staff to address ‘deconstructing whiteness’ (a phrase subsequently withdrawn, perhaps because of over-reach).

Why the ‘perma-crisis’? The obvious answer is that racial disparities continue to exist, particularly as regards the descendants of trans-Atlantic enslavement, both in Britain and the USA (in which context the pejorative understanding of ‘whiteness’ as a social construct first appeared). It is the interpretation of these disparities as a solid deep-foundationed ‘construct’ that accounts for the persistently hectic nature of our response to race and racism.

Behind this response lie two conceptual errors.

2. ‘ . . . and you don’t understand it, do you Mr Jones’.

(Bob Dylan ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, on ‘Bringing it all back home’ 1965 - a previous time of cultural disruption).

Conceptual Error 1: Embracing the Disparity Fallacy.

The first error is the belief that racial disparities have only one cause (that is, a ‘univariate social analysis’) – white racism. Such an assumption is entrenched in the Runnymede report (blog # 40) and in ‘Racism and Ethnic Inequality in a Time of Crisis – Findings from the Evidence for Equality National Survey’ (see blog # 121). Thus the evidence for inequality of income, notably among the African Caribbean population can have one cause, and one cause only, the racism of white society. Further since this disparity has been irreducibly persistent over the years, then the only possible response is to address white racism with ever-deeper and more far-reaching initiatives. The very toughness of the problem – from within this mind-set – indicates its intractability; thus elusive terms like ‘systemic’ and ‘construction’ are deployed in an attempt to grasp conceptually an issue which has thus far been intransigent. If the citadel of racial disparities has not yet been over-run and demolished then more and more troops with evermore sophisticated theoretical weapons must be brought into the battle against the as yet undefeated and un-deconstructed bastion of ‘whiteness’.

This analysis in not without merit. Racism still exists, still blights the lives of many people (see blog 148 on ‘Microaggressions). The over-reach of ‘orthodox’ anti-racism as outlined above makes it too easy for white people to dismiss the whole matter as pretentious opportunistic nonsense and so carry on with business as usual. And we often do, rather than persistently looking at ourselves for evidences of presumed racial and ethnic superiority. But the folly of ‘orthodoxy’s’ univariate social analysis is that it ignores (as per the Sewell Report, blog # 25) a whole range of other factors which contribute to disparities – disparities which affect different ethnic groups quite differently (even visually similar groups, as with Jamaicans and Nigerians). The assumption that the differences between different cultures don’t make any difference is both near universal and obviously nonsense. To take but one example of many, the journalist Philip Collins noted that 10% of MPs are from minority ethnic backgrounds, and went on to lament that it is short of their 15% share of the national population – but by what logic is it assumed that ethnicities with widely differing characteristics should all produce MPs in exact replication of their population share. Ethnic groups are not identical! But orthodox anti-racism’s subscription to it means that since the only allowable explanation for disparities is white racism then the many other possible explanations (on which, more below) are ruled out of court. In so far as the Church of England is in thrall to the orthodox explanation, so far will it continue to be producing high profile and very expensive but inadequate solutions. We are like someone trying to open a can of sardines with a sledgehammer, and neglecting a tin-opener.

The Disparity Fallacy blinds us to other causes of racial disparity.

Conceptual Error 2: Not embracing ‘Super-Diversity’.

There has been increasing recognition that race is not a stand-alone category of identity; that is to say that alongside our racial or ethnic identity we have many other characteristics that affect our lives and our outcomes – most obviously gender, but a host of other issues such as social class or sexuality. It is this recognition that led to the formulation, notably by the black American legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, of the concept of ‘Intersectionality’: if being black as opposed to white gave you one form of disadvantage, then being also a woman as well meant that you were doubly disadvantaged. You suffered the double whammy of being the victim of both racism and sexism.

Whilst both those forms of injustice occur in our society, yet the real-life outcomes don’t fall as neatly as Crenshaw and others would suggest. In Britain African Caribbean women’s hourly income is actually higher than that of African Caribbean men by age 40 (‘Race and Ethnicity’ report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, p 70; see also charts on pp 58 & 62. Blog # 108). There are 7 women MPs of African Caribbean background as opposed to 3 men. As far as Anglican bishops go it is 2 to 0, whilst with clergy in Willesden Episcopal Area it is 4 to 1. These are not anomalous statistical accidents, they reflect a deep-seated cultural pattern in our society (as also in the United States) which Intersectionality is unable to account for. As regards as to how this gender imbalance might be best understood the historical background of slavery, and consequent culture, provides the best explanation. The Guyanese-born psychotherapist Barbara Fletchman-Smith writes ‘Cultures which have experienced slavery possess a memory of men being useless. . . Because of this strong internalisation, which is a direct result of slavery, it is harder to bring up boys to reach their full potential without an active and helpful father-presence’ (in ‘Mental Slavery: Psychoanalytic Studies of Caribbean People’, Karnac, 2000; p 64). Societies dominated by white men are more oppressive for black men than for black women, possibly for reasons of masculine competition and for reasons of sexual attraction.

By contrast with Intersectionality’s clumsiness in accounting for differential outcomes in British society, the concept of ‘Super-diversity’ provides far greater explanatory precision and power. In contrast to Intersectionality’s single-minded emphasis on power differentials Super-diversity both recognises the way that cultures also shape outcomes, and also recognises a far greater range of factors generating variables. Thus as well as broad-brush categories such as race, gender or class, it also recognises more specific ethnic distinctions (say, between Africans and African-Caribbeans; or even between Barbadians and Jamaicans), a growing variety of countries and cultures of origin, as well as other distinctions such as pre-migration history. The resulting outcome of this ‘diversity of diversities’ is that British society can no longer be seen as a few large ethnic blocs, sub-divided into class or gender blocs, but a much more complex and confusing mosaic. Parveen Akhtar, a sociologist at the University of Bradford points out that ‘Post-1945 you had large waves of immigration from fewer places in the world, largely from the former colonies. Now, since the 1980s, you’ve got smaller waves of immigration from a wider range of places’. This is perfectly illustrated by the handful of minority ethnic bishops in the Church of England, most of whom have ‘minority of minorities’ backgrounds, including a Congolese Belgian, an Iranian, and no less than three Malayalee South Indians, as opposed to very few bishops coming from the large pre-1980 migration sources in the Caribbean and the northern half of the Indian sub-continent.

Super-diversity powerfully affects both national and church policies. The first is that the complexity eludes grand, large-scale top-down policies of the sort that the West Midlands dioceses are proposing. It is the confusing fragmentation and the cross-currents on the ground that shape what is happening. The result has been described as ‘radical unpredictability’ (or as Jesus put it: ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.’ John 3:8). That the United Kingdom, Scotland and Wales should all have leaders with minority ethnic backgrounds would have been unpredictable even ten years ago. So would be the prevalence of black people in tv adverts or the flood of Iranians being baptised into the Christian faith. By contrast national policies, not least church policies which seek to shape what is happening through top-down policies easily become ineffective and expensive.

Superdiversity make us aware of how complex and unpredictable is our present situation.

3. Working with What’s Happening.

Changing our theoretical understanding of what’s happening as outlined above should have the following consequences:

a) Stop catastrophising.

Certainly there are problems. Racism is still too common in the Church of England. But it is declining, significantly, and cannot usefully be described by such abstract and rigid terms as ‘construction’ or ‘system’. Using ‘catastrophisation’ as a sanction for creating new bureaucracies and budgets is a distracting and costly error. The church sells itself short by focussing on our failures not our areas of effectiveness, and giving ourselves an exaggeratedly blemished reputation. So Professor David Olusoga can make the wild and unsupported allegation: ‘The Church of England derived a part of its vast wealth from the murder and exploitation of Africans’ (The Times 06/04/2024) even though the most recent scholarly analysis says that none of the income from the Queen Anne’s Bounty in fact came from the slave trade (thus Professor Richard Dale in the Church Times 22/03/2024, headlined ‘Slavery did not benefit Bounty’).

The progress towards a more just and harmonious society may be slower in some parts of the country than others but the ‘slowly, then suddenly’ paradigm is a characteristic of a super-diverse society and should fuel patiently and hopefully working for change for the better across the country.

b) Generate contact.

Back in 1954 Gordon Allport’s book ‘The Nature of Prejudice’ summarised the argument that racial prejudice was best overcome by ‘intergroup contact’ when certain conditions prevailed: ‘equal status’ so that differences of background were fairly minimal; ‘common goals’ towards a shared end; ‘intergroup cooperation’ without competitiveness; ‘support of authority’, with one acknowledged as standing over all. In other words, an account of what the local congregation should be like.

Further, white people are most likely to recognise and be angered by racism when it is the experience of people they know and value rather than when it is an abstract and remote accusation. So it is important for church authorities and congregations to be concerned to multiply occasions for intergroup contact as part of their everyday work. The initiative of Leicester diocese to develop and roll out the learning and experience of intercultural congregations (see blog 153) is a good example.

c) ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations . .

baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you’ (Matt 28:19). One of the big wins for both the Christian faith and racial justice recently has been the widespread acclaim for Ryan Calais Cameron’s play ‘For Black Boys . . .’.  How did it come about? ‘I was living on my mum's floor; I was on Job Seekers Allowance, and I visited a church because I knew a couple of people who went. . . I received so much love from the church members, and it was very different to the idea that I had of church. . . I discovered people who are actually real. They were like me, and they still liked stuff like football. They just loved Christ’ (Church Times interview 05/04/2024). That is, a church simply doing what it should do.

It is in generating joyful, Spirit-filled, welcoming, faith-sharing ministry at the congregational level that effective intercultural ministry is developed, and which enables churches to have a positive and constructive impact on the whole society, fulfilling Jesus’s commission (and simultaneously living out the four conditions that Allport sets out for overcoming prejudice) rather than seeming to make focus on ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’ as our central purpose. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are single-mindedly concerned about sharing their faith to the exclusion of all other life issues are nonetheless – certainly at grass-roots level – possibly the most integrated of all religious groups in the country. It is not without significance that the diocese of Sydney, a bastion of conservative evangelicalism and not given to taking up ‘progressive’ agendas, yet has a minority ethnic archbishop, of Sri Lankan (and Buddhist) background. Diverse ethnic inclusion happens most effectively when it is secondary to an over-arching, unifying purpose, whether of a political party, a sports team, a school or a church

To address racial diversity the Church’s first focus should be on sharing the good news of Jesus. Tony Sewell told The Times (16/03/2024) that for church leaders ‘It would be so much better to focus on bringing people back to a time when the church was packed. They need to repair their base, but they're doing something political, for show, giving away this cash. . . The church needs to think its purpose and stop using the race element as a mechanism to solve their uncertainty in the world’.

The Church Times (01/03/2024) reported on Bishop Philip North speaking at the General Synod debate on housing estates: ‘85% of the UK global-majority-heritage population and two-thirds of young people lived in estates and lower income parishes. These areas should be priorities, he said’. If the West Midlands dioceses instead appointed eleven people to develop churches on run-down housing estates then the impact on, inter alia, minority ethnic people would be substantial. A rising tide lifts all boats.

The pace of change in the Church of England’s ability to witness credibly and convincingly to a multi-ethnic society is rapidly increasing. By holding on to inaccurate and out-dated concepts of race and racism we are focussing energy and expenditure on inappropriate areas that will be fruitless. Instead we should run with those positive developments happening in our midst and multiply our opportunities for effective church life at the local level. My prophecy is that by 2050 we will have a substantial and impressive pool of minority ethnic leaders, whose biggest challenge will be how we can effectively evangelise the secularised and unconcerned white English majority.

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Add On

Ian Paul’s ‘Psephizo’ blog for April 5th 2024 on ‘Racial, Ethnic and Social Diversity in the Early Church’ is well worth looking up. He gives a very thorough analysis of the surprising amount we can know of the background of the five leaders of the church in Antioch (Acts 13) and of the long list of contacts that Paul lists in Romans 16. He also writes, along a similar line to the conclusion of this blog: ‘What we find in the New Testament is a deliberate description of the apparently effortless diversity of the community of those following Jesus. Yet it was not, in fact ‘effortless’; the heated debate about Gentile inclusion shows that, at one level at least, this diversity was hard won. But the basis of it was the ultimate biblical vision found in the Jewish scriptures: that ‘all nations’ would be drawn to the God of Israel; salvation is from the Jews (John 4:22), but it is for the whole world. And this diversity was not a result of a commitment to diversity as the end goal, but (ironically) a natural by-product of exclusivism, the belief that ‘there is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved’ (Acts 4:12)’.