Given Lenny Henry wants the British state to pay £18tn in slavery reparations, perhaps we should be thankful that the Church of England wants to cough up “only” £100m as part of its Project Spire, the Church Commissioners’ proposal to invest in “communities affected by historic transatlantic chattel slavery”.

Not only does the Church want to spend this money, but a parliamentary response to a question asked by the Conservative MP Neil O’Brien this week highlighted how its leaders are jumping through a series of legal hoops to do so, including applying to register a new charity they propose to call The Fund of Healing, Repair and Justice.

It all adds to the sense that those who want this do not represent anyone but themselves and they are in danger of dragging the entire institution down with them. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, has said nothing so far to suggest this will change.

Mr O’Brien called Project Spire, launched in 2023, “divisive rubbish”, adding: “The Church’s hope has been to regain relevance by becoming an arm of progressive politics and it hasn’t worked. They are now facing unbelievable decline. It’s tragic.”

I don’t disagree. Driven less by external pressure than by the liberal guilt of its leadership, the Church often gives the impression that it’s barely a church at all. In the past, its strength was that it was literally “the establishment”. Now that is its greatest weakness, as it fumbles for relevance in a culture of polarisation. Let’s be honest, the Church of England hasn’t been cutting edge since 1549, so it would be wise to concern itself less with relevance and more with keeping and attracting the faithful.

The former head of the Church, Justin Welby, previously led the self-flagellation over “deep institutional racism” and committed it to net zero.

This identity crisis comes amid a material one. Nearly one in three churches across Britain could be closed by the end of the decade. The number of adults attending church on a Sunday is down 40 per cent since 2003. The number of children going to a Church of England venue on a Sunday is less than half of what it was in that same year.

But, as O’Brien says, the Church’s leaders want to spend £100m on what amounts to “a pure guilt trip”. It’s not a coincidence that the reparations scheme was devised at the height of the woke fever that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Welby personally intervened afterwards to enure that artefacts with any tenuous links to slavery or empire were removed from churches around the country, while the bureaucratic nature of the Church meant Project Spire rumbled on despite the objections of prominent academics and clerics.The former head of the Church, Justin Welby, previously led the self-flagellation over “deep institutional racism” and committed it to net zero.

This identity crisis comes amid a material one. Nearly one in three churches across Britain could be closed by the end of the decade. The number of adults attending church on a Sunday is down 40 per cent since 2003. The number of children going to a Church of England venue on a Sunday is less than half of what it was in that same year.

But, as O’Brien says, the Church’s leaders want to spend £100m on what amounts to “a pure guilt trip”. It’s not a coincidence that the reparations scheme was devised at the height of the woke fever that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Welby personally intervened afterwards to enure that artefacts with any tenuous links to slavery or empire were removed from churches around the country, while the bureaucratic nature of the Church meant Project Spire rumbled on despite the objections of prominent academics and clerics.

A true service to the nation – and to the survival of the Church itself – would be to use that £100m to save threadbare parishes and invest in infrastructure. Instead the Church seems preoccupied with grand virtue signalling that is intellectually incoherent.

It would be naive to describe the Church of England as a victim, but it is trapped by forces beyond its control. The qualities that once made it appealing – a lack of zeal, traditions rooted in local communities and a reassuring stuffiness – now make it an anachronism. Even more so since its perceived shift to woke obsessions have left the leadership here alienated from the rest of the world, in particular the 60 million or so Anglicans in Africa, many of whom have concluded those in England no longer share their values.

Last week, the Global Anglican Futures Conference (Gafcon) met in Sydney and declared it was forming the Global Anglican Communion in response to the growing rift between what it perceives to be an overly liberal English church and the more conservative global Anglican movement.

One of Gafcon’s socially conservative leaders, Dr Laurent Mbanda, Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Rwanda, is openly hostile to the election of Mullally, with the blessing of gay couples a particularly fractious subject.

Political Christianity is braced for a revival, in part a reaction to the increasing prominence of political Islam in British society. It’s ironic then that the Church least equipped to maximise any Christian resurgence is the one that most ties itself to politics.

Its wokeness – and its weakness – make the Church of England doubly irrelevant: too politicised to appeal to conservatives seeking muscular Christianity, and too institutional for progressives who are largely atheist and anti-establishment.

It seems reparations, like almost everything the Church of England does, are a gesture that will please nobody. And like the facile, cliched graffiti recently stuck on the walls of Canterbury Cathedral, they will attract no one new to the fold while alienating many others.

Before it embraced muddled notions of political relevance, the Church could roll onwards like a glacier. But like a lot of glaciers these days, it is at risk, almost imperceptibly, of disappearing altogether.