“If you are an ordinary member of the congregation delegated to be on the panel to select your new vicar you now have to attend mandatory unconscious bias training,” the Revd Marcus Walker declared in an article for The Critic on March 16.

In his blast against ‘the malignant mediocrity of managerialism’, the Rector of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London was referring to parish representatives, chosen by Parochial Church Councils (PCCs) in the Church of England when a local vicar leaves. Their job is to help appoint the next vicar along with the patrons of the parish church in vacancy and with the local diocese.

Walker is the founder of the Save the Parish movement in the C of E. If he is right, the established Church is now requiring parish representatives to attend neo-Marxist training courses intended to root out their racist tendencies at a sub-conscious level.

It has so far proved impossible to verify Walker’s claim or to gain information on how and when this alleged new requirement has come about. Was it subject to a General Synod vote?  The C of E media centre at Church House Westminster has not provided further details, neither has Walker. But unfortunately his claim has a strong ring of truth about it. If it has not already been enacted, it is certainly on the cards.

Back in 2020 the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, told the General Synod that the C of E was ‘still deeply institutionally racist’. The Synod duly voted to ‘resolve to continue, with great effort and urgency, to stamp out all forms of conscious or unconscious racism’ and to ‘request the Archbishops’ Council to appoint an independent person external to the Church to assess the current situation as regards race and ethnicity in the Church’. But the motion then did not specifically mention parish representatives.

The drive to root out racism in the pews led to the From Lament to Action report in 2021 by the Church’s Anti-Racism Taskforce. The Spectator’s associate editor, Douglas Murray, was passed a copy in advance of publication. This report ‘fantastically warns of racism “whispered in our pews”, as though the Church of England was the KKK at prayer’, he wrote.

My recollection from my time as a C of E vicar was that parish representatives had a right of veto over the appointment of a new incumbent. If the requirement to undergo unconscious bias training is mandatory, what would happen if the parish representatives of a church in vacancy refused to go on the course? Could the diocese legally appoint a vicar?

I contacted the Reform MP for East Wiltshire, Danny Kruger, who is a member of Parliament’s Ecclesiastical Committee, about Walker’s article. I asked him: ‘If this mandatory requirement has been introduced for church volunteers with the implication that their minds need reordering at some unconscious level, what would be your view of this apparently Marxist encroachment on appointments in the Church of England?’

So far I have not heard back from Kruger. But the Ecclesiastical Committee has teeth. It has just told the Church to halt its plans to replace its Archbishops’ Council with a bulky bureaucratic body called Church of England National Services (CENS). Kruger led the criticism saying CENS would result in ‘huge power held in the hands of a new charity which is unaccountable to Parliament or to Synod, to do what it likes’.

The Secretary General of the Archbishops’ Council, William Nye, duly wrote to General Synod members in March telling them that the measure to introduce CENS could not be ratified at their meeting in York in July.

Will Kruger lead the charge against unconscious bias training if Walker is right? Why should the Church allow its volunteers to be insulted and indeed bullied in this way? Unconscious bias training certainly is a form of bullying because it presupposes that the person undergoing the training is guilty of racism. That is why they have to be re-educated, Mao-style.

Were I a parish representative, I would quite consciously and openly prefer a biblically orthodox vicar from one of the thriving Anglican Churches in Africa to a white ‘progressive’. But that would have nothing to do with the fact that the ‘progressive’ was white. It would be down to their theological commitments. My preferred choice would of course need to speak good English to fulfil his commitments to the parish.

I rejoice that the Church of Jesus Christ is a wonderfully multi-racial body, for the risen Lord commanded his followers: ‘All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’ (Matthew 28v18-19 – King James Version). 

Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire, UK.