Gauntlet at the Lychgate: How and Why is the Church of England Racist?

Abstract

Recently, much has been said and written about racial justice in the Church, often at cross purposes, mired in ambiguous terms and incompatible frameworks. Racism remains just beyond a universally accepted model of the problem, tangled in a host of other historical, ideological, cultural, political and economic compulsions. In the Western Church this is exacerbated by the theologically rooted othering that is the legacy of our Church history, complicit in empire and slavery and mired in a culture shaped by a hermeneutic of ethnoracial hierarchy. This summary article considers this particular structural drive and introduces the broad theological and ecclesiological legacy of systemic racism in the Western Church, narrating the theologised virtue aesthetics which form a backdrop to institutional racism in the Church of England.