THE creation of diocesan posts with a remit to advertise racial justice doesn’t mean that the Church of England is fighting “a culture war”, the C of E’s Racial Justice Director, the Revd Guy Hewitt, has said.
Fr Hewitt was responding to reports in national newspapers in regards to the promoting of posts in dioceses reminiscent of York, which is looking for a “Racial Justice Education Adviser” — a recent post funded by the Racial Justice Unit.
The diocese “is a predominantly white community with around 3% of the population of 1.4m who’re Global Majority Heritage”, the job description says. “This is reflected in our churches and in our ordained ministers, of whom we’ve got 6 who would describe themselves as GMH.”
The post-holder’s responsibilities would come with using “the ‘Being White’ programme to work with senior leaders to deal with problems with white fragility” and giving “unconscious bias and variety training”.
Fr Hewitt told The Times on Tuesday: “This just isn’t a few culture war. This is in regards to the very epicentre of what the gospel calls us towards.” It was vital, he said, that the Church “stand against the evil and pernicious sin of racism”.
He said that, for instance, Yorkshire Cricket Club had had “serious problems around racism. . . It’s simplistic to attempt to suggest that because a spot is predominantly white, or of 1 race, that there aren’t any issues.”
The undeniable fact that the post was funded by the Racial Justice Unit meant that cash was not being diverted away from front-line parish ministry, he argued: it was not “a zero-sum game”.
The Times quoted the Revd Dr Ian Paul, a member of the General Synod and the Archbishops’ Council, and associate minister of St Nicholas’s, Nottingham, as saying that terms utilized in the job description appeared to have been “imported from the culture wars within the US, by which all society is known in a binary of conflict between ‘black’ and ‘white’. This whole approach is alienating atypical members of the Church of England; it creates more division moderately than unanimity.”
The Bishop of Kirkstall, within the diocese of York, the Rt Revd Arun Arora, was quoted by the paper as saying: “The excellent news of the gospel challenges the sin of racism each as practised and in its lasting impact. In Yorkshire we see that challenge within the activities of groups reminiscent of Patriotic Alternative, whose regional organiser was recently jailed for stirring up racial hatred and inspiring racially aggravated criminal damage.”
A spokesman for the diocese said that its “racial justice charter” had received the support of 97 per cent of the diocesan synod, and that the post was “funded nationally by the Church of England’s racial justice unit”.
