Racism In The Church of England: ‘Microaggressions All The Time’
(ANALYSIS) All it took for simmering tensions within the Church of England to rush back to the surface was a simple diagram. Buried on page 51 of a report, the graphic divided Anglican churches into four types — three of which were described as being hostile to people of color in various ways.
High Church parishes saw ethnic minorities as “not good enough” or unworthy. Charismatic evangelical churches were hostile towards Black leaders. And traditional rural conservative churches viewed anyone not white with suspicion, classing them as “foreign.” Only the progressive urban church was a truly welcoming and diverse space.
Unsurprisingly, evangelical, conservative and traditionalist clergy, whose churches had been supposedly labelled as unsafe, exploded with rage online as the offending graphic was shared around with increasing incredulity.
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But the fight overshadowed more meaningful engagement with the meat of the report. And its findings were not pretty. Ethnic minority clergy were less likely to be appointed or even interviewed compared with their white peers. And for those ministers of color who did make it into posts, subtle and overt racism was commonplace, as was an insidious pressure to assimilate to the white English culture presumed as the norm across much of the church.
And yet, the existence of the report — despite its sweeping criticisms of racial inclusion in the church — is a marker of how things are changing for what remains England’s 1,500-year-old official state church. It was commissioned by the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice, a body itself established four years ago in the turmoil of 2020.
In that febrile pandemic-fuelled year, the murder of George Floyd and the Windrush scandal in Britain pushed the church to wrestle with its record on diversity. In fact, 2020 marked a turning point: The Archbishop of Canterbury declared in February that the church he led was “institutionally racist,” bishops were photographed taking a knee and a statue of the Anglican slave-trader Thomas Colston was famously hurled into the sea by anti-racism protesters. Into this potent mix, two explosive cases of racism emerged to spur the shaken church into action.
First, was the tale of Augustine Tanner-Ihm, whose application for his first vicar post after finishing training was turned down on the grounds that the parish was a “monochrome white working class” community which could make the Black priest “feel uncomfortable.” He sat on the hurtful letter for months, but finally posted about it on Twitter (now X) later that summer when prominent Church of England figures were throwing their weight behind Black Lives Matter.
“I was just like, come on,” he said years later. “This is crap. This is all for show.”
Just a few months later, a second case of clear racism emerged. Alwyn Pereira stumbled across emails from his own bishop which suggested he was intrinsically dishonest because of his ethnic background (Pereira was born in Kenya to Indian parents). Writing to another diocesan official, his bishop said: “Having worked very closely with people from the Indian sub-continent in my past, I think there are cultural differences in the way people like Alwyn communicate and actually handle issues of truth and clarity.”
All of a sudden, the Church of England was reeling. In the space of just a few months, two serious cases of overt racism against its own clergy had arisen just as it had begun to account for historic failings. The spectre of racial injustice seemed to haunt the institution wherever you looked. Was the Church of England just as hostile an environment to people of colour as every other part of England seemed to be?
Both Tanner-Ihm and Pereira say they see everyday low-level discrimination and prejudice throughout their ministries, before and after their infamous 2020 incidents.
“I still see it everyday. I am experiencing microaggressions all the time,” Tanner-Ihm remarked.
He is regularly stopped and aggressively questioned by security guards while going into church buildings, even when wearing his clerical collar and robes. Pereira, likewise, had plenty of stories to tell. His selection panel to enter the ministry had included probing on why he sought ordination, given it was the “Church of England, not the Church of Asia.” Casual racialized slurs from his own congregation were not uncommon.
The Bishop of Leicester, one of England’s most diverse towns, is Martyn Snow, who also sits on Church of England’s Committee for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns. He said he had been “frankly, shocked” to hear about some of the experiences ethnic minority clergy in his diocese had endured: “The stories people were telling were on occasions, yes, blatant racism, on occasions what’s often referred to as microaggressions, throwaway comments which can cause real pain.”
It might be the funeral director who will not ask the local Black vicar to conduct the ceremony for a white family “because that’s not what they’re expecting,” or worshippers complaining they cannot understand the Sunday sermon because of the accent of their Black or brown priest. “Everyday prejudice” — as one member of the church’s racial justice unit put it — wears down ethnic minority clergy week after week.
Tanner-Ihm and Pereira had been inundated with similar anecdotes since they went public, but most clergy were afraid of openly calling out racism in the church, they said. Snow reflected that for most of its history the Church of England had been “assimilationist,” forcing people to “become like us” before they were permitted to fully join the church. Those with diverse backgrounds were effectively made to leave their own culture at the door.
In the wake of Black Lives Matter and cases such as those of Tanner-Ihm and Pereira, the church established a task force to urgently examine its record on racism. This produced a report, From Lament to Action, published in 2021, which urged a sweeping program of reform to overturn racist culture in the church. Despite dozens of reports and hundreds of recommendations over 40 years of debate, non-white Christians were still enduring discrimination and prejudice and there were no more ethnic minority bishops than there were in the mid-90s (a total of two).
Guy Hewitt, a priest and former Barbadian diplomat who now serves as the church’s first ever racial justice director, has been tasked with implementing From Lament to Action. He said some things had been done, but the church was only at the beginning of its journey. Several of the key ideas in the report, including every diocese employing a racial justice officer, have already been abandoned. But Hewitt said other projects were underway, including building networks of ethnic minority clergy to support each other, raising awareness of racism, and developing a training program to combat racial injustice.
Some bishops and dioceses have pursued “intercultural churches,” tweaking how services work to free ethnic minority worshippers from assimilating into the default white norm. This could be as simple as encouraging congregants to say the Lord’s Prayer in their mother tongues, or as challenging as rewriting church rules to accommodate different cultural expectations around financial giving.
More high-profile moves have seen the church commit to creating a £100 million ($126.5 million) fund to invest in Black communities as an act of reparation and apology for its historic entanglement with the slave trade. And there has also been a wave of Black clergy appointed to senior posts. The church now boasts 11 bishops of color, with seven appointed in the last two years alone. Tanner-Ihm said the hierarchy starting to look more like the country they served was a “tremendous, massive change.”
But others question if the supertanker is turning around quickly enough, or even suggest the reforms since 2020 amount to little more than window-dressing. A former national adviser to the church on race, Elizabeth Henry, said the church “had the words, but it doesn’t have the will,” and suggested too much of the racial justice unit’s work focused on systems and procedures — and not on changing racist attitudes in people’s hearts.
Pereira was also downbeat, arguing too many senior figures were only paying “lip service” to rooting out racism and were unwilling to actually put in the time and money required to dismantle centuries of prejudice. The bishop who had written the infamous email about him had been given a rebuke and made to go on a training course, but beyond that little had changed.
“It's not one bad apple in the barrel, it's the entire rotten tree, which is producing bad fruit,” he said.
Pereira had even led an unsuccessful complaint by a group of ethnic minority clerics against the church to the official Equality and Human Rights Commission.
But it was unrealistic to believe the church’s journey towards racial reconciliation could happen overnight, Hewitt said.
“Racism is not a stain that can be simply washed away. It is a gaping wound in the body of Christ that can only be healed through truth-telling and overt acts of repair. It won’t be easy, but if we stay true to our faith and true to this cause, I believe we will get there,” he said.
Tim Wyatt is a freelance journalist who writes news, features, analysis and commentary on religion or social affairs stories. He has been published in The Guardian, The Times of London, The Economist and The Daily Telegraph.