The police are rightly under intense scrutiny at present for their rejection of the Peelian principle of enforcing the law impartially between ethnic groups ‘without fear or favour’, thanks to their wholesale acceptance of DEI and critical race theory.
There is another body of fundamental importance whose original principles demand equal treatment of people regardless of race: the Church of England. However, it is little known just how much the DEI doctrine of treating people differently on account of their skin colour has also appeared in the most recent directives of church authorities.
A comparison of two figures in the newly-released 2025 report of the Church Commissioners for England (the charity responsible for administering the historic £11 billion endowment of the Church which is meant to be used to support the cure of souls in poor parishes) strikingly highlights the depth of the problem.
In 2025, the Church Commissioners invested £400,000 in a programme to start 200 church choirs. Although this is a limited initiative – there are still thousands of churches without any support to start choirs – it is undeniably a good work which will teach children to sing, and bring many families of all backgrounds to faith and worship.
At the same time, they also spent £500,000 to fund one single racial justice post in just one diocese for three years.
One can see precisely what ideas this funding will be promoting by inspecting the Racial Equity Policy of the said diocese, Leicester. Racism is not, according to this policy, discrimination or prejudice exercised by any individual towards another based on ethnicity or skin colour. It is ‘the collective prejudices of the dominant social group in society [i.e. white people] which are often enshrined in law, institutions and societal practices.’
Such prejudices are usually unconscious. ‘Racism is an ideology that was needed to justify systems like chattel slavery and colonialism and the genocides that came with it’, and therefore it entered into the fabric of society, and the church. It is something that is an unconscious part of the behaviour of the ‘dominant group’ – no point in protesting that they aren’t racist – and this alleged ‘institutional racism’ (the term is taken straight from the Macpherson report) can only be removed by a wholesale reform of the structures of the church.
The policy is particularly concerned with the ‘wrongdoing which has disadvantaged, wounded and exploited UKME/GMH [UK Minority Ethnic/Global Majority heritage] people in our midst’, but is uninterested in the possibility of wrongdoing happening in the opposite direction. The ‘[i]deology of racism demands that power belongs to white people’ and therefore the policy ‘holds predominantly white members of the Diocese to account’.
These ideas are brought across into the Diocese’s Board of Education ‘Responding to Racism Guidance’. Schools should consider ‘teaching pupils about what white privilege is, whilst also recognising that many individual white British children and families do not experience explicit privilege and can have similar socio-economic challenges as Global Majority Communities‘. Indeed, it claims that ‘white supremacy is ever present in our institutional and cultural assumptions’.
Little empirical evidence is produced
It would be invidious to pick on just the Diocese of Leicester. These ideas will be found in published policies, strategies and ‘tool-kits’ across many of the 42 dioceses, not to mention the Archbishops’ Anti-Racism Taskforce. Institutional racism is taken as a given, as is the need for radical action to change the structures of the church to eradicate this purported racism. Diocesan reading lists include articles entitled ‘Whiteness is an invented concept that has been used as a tool of oppression’, podcasts such as ‘Unpacking White Privilege’ and ‘What White People Can Do Next’, and books like Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Guildford Diocese’s tool-kit states that an aspect of white privilege is white people generally having ‘a positive relationship with the police’. Perhaps this needs updating.
It is striking how hungry for money some of these diocesan strategies can be. They demand ever more funding for a burgeoning industry of regular unconscious bias sessions for clergy, staff and volunteers, school racial justice workers, researchers to decolonise curricula and hunt for ‘problematic’ church monuments. Let us also not forget the £100 million that the Church Commissioners want to give to black-led NGOs as reparatory payments to atone for historic slavery as part of their ‘Project Spire’.
Little empirical evidence is produced to justify the need for or likely effectiveness of such funding. There is also disregard for the deep sacrifices made to atone for historic slavery. The accusation of institutional racism is like an original sin for white people, for which there is no real possibility for full redemption. But this is a novel doctrine estranged from Christianity. How can this constant disparagement of white people sit with maxim that ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek… for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’?
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