As if the Church of England didn’t have enough to worry about with leaky roofs, empty churches and lack of money to pay priests, it now has the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice, or ACRJ. Appointed a year ago, this group of twelve of the great and good, under ex-Labour Cabinet minister Paul Boateng, has just published its first report. This document is certainly full of good intentions. Whether it has much to offer the ordinary churchgoer, or for that matter the Church of England as a whole, is rather more doubtful.
Go into any church this Sunday, and it’s a racing certainty that you won’t find much old-fashioned racism. The caricature of the blue-rinsed pearl-clutcher or retired colonel who can’t stand black people is as outdated as a character from an Evelyn Waugh novel: so too the priest who regards Africans or Indians as inferiors to be civilised by white preachers.
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