The Church of England has been captured by identitarian activists.
You can see this most clearly in the church’s determination to pay reparations for slavery. Last year, the General Synod – the church’s legislative body – announced that it would set aside £100million to investigate its historic links to slavery and provide reparations for the descendants of slaves. Yet apparently, this huge sum was not enough to appease the ever-growing identitarian faction within the church. This week, a report demanded that the offer be expanded to an eye-watering £1 billion.
Church leaders have agreed in principle to this new demand, though they will not release the money immediately from church coffers. Instead, they have agreed to raise the extra £900million from external sources, such as parish donations. Geetha Tharmaratnam, who is advising the church, has suggested that the shortfall could be made up by wealthy families who want to atone for their slave-trading ancestors.
Astonishingly, this £1 billion reparations plan isn’t the sum total of the church’s spending on racial initiatives. Just as the reparations debate has been brewing, the C of E’s Birmingham diocese has embarked on a hiring spree to fill all the posts in its West Midlands Racial Justice Initiative. Roles it is hiring for include an ‘anti-racism practice officer’, who will ‘deconstruct whiteness’, and a development worker, who would help to ‘eliminate racism within church youth groups’. All posts have a salary of £36,000.
Beneath the benign-sounding talk about fighting racism, the jargon about ‘deconstructing whiteness’ makes it clear what the purpose of these roles really is – namely, to force lay members and clergy alike to get on board with the Church of England’s wholesale adoption of critical race theory (CRT).
The church has been preaching CRT dogma for some time now. Eager to jump on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon, in 2020 the General Synod commissioned a task force to investigate how to increase racial diversity and promote ‘anti-racist’ activism within the church. The resulting report, published in 2021, was titled From Lament to Action. It suggested various measures, such as introducing racial quotas for hiring both clergy and lay roles. If non-white candidates cannot be found for certain jobs, then the church’s recruiters must provide ‘valid, publishable reasons’ as to why.
Since then, the church has been busy embedding critical race theory in virtually all of the bodies it runs. Its Diocesan Board of Education has produced CRT-infused teaching materials and guidance for schools. Complete with images of BLM-style raised fists, this guidance encourages schools to teach kids about ‘white privilege’, amplify ‘black voices’ and celebrate ‘black history’.
Read it all at Spiked Online
