One of the architects of the Church of England’s racial-justice programme has written a remarkable account of its difficulties. Dr Sanjee Perera acknowledges disputed definitions, institutional resistance, performative activism and the limitations of a reforming bureaucracy sustained by millions of pounds. Yet her analysis scarcely considers whether the programme itself has become part of the problem. A Church entrusted with proclaiming the inherent dignity of every human being, and our common humanity before God, ought to have something more profound to offer than the continual classification of people according to their differences.
There is a revealing moment in Dr Sanjee Perera’s account of the Church of England’s racial-justice programme when she recalls drafting the mandate for the Archbishops’ Commission on Racial Justice. She already recognised, she tells us, the “vainglorious absurdity” of expecting twelve commissioners to bring about substantial institutional change within three years. The task was Sisyphean, its difficulties immense and the machinery of Anglican government notoriously resistant to direction. Nevertheless, the Commission was established, its work proceeded and a considerable apparatus of racial-justice administration developed around it. In her article published by the Church Times on 23 October, Perera seeks to explain why the enterprise has encountered so many difficulties. She is less inclined to ask whether the enterprise was sensibly conceived in the first place.¹
This matters because Perera was no frustrated outsider. As the former Archbishops’ Adviser for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns, she was intimately involved in developing the programme whose shortcomings she now describes. She helped shape its mandate, encouraged changes to recruitment and ecclesiastical appointments, promoted alterations to theological education and participated in the national Church’s engagement with racial inequality. Her experience lends considerable weight to her observations. She has also researched the experiences of minority-ethnic Anglicans and reports distressing accounts of exclusion which no Christian institution ought to disregard. The Church of England’s treatment of some Caribbean Christians arriving in post-war Britain remains a shameful example of the distance between professed Christian fellowship and actual conduct. Yet the existence of genuine injustice cannot settle the question of whether a particular response to it is effective, proportionate or even properly directed. That is precisely the question Perera’s account brings into view.
Her central explanation is that racial justice constitutes a wicked problem, an expression borrowed from social-systems theory to describe difficulties whose causes are interconnected, boundaries disputed and solutions resistant to straightforward evaluation. Racism, in this understanding, becomes inseparable from poverty, employment, education, housing, immigration, colonialism, gender inequality, climate change, mental health and even artificial intelligence. Perera describes the resulting network of causes and consequences at considerable length. The difficulty is real enough: social circumstances are complicated, and discrimination may arise from practices which are not immediately obvious to those administering them. But the concept becomes less helpful when virtually every social disparity can be drawn into its orbit. A problem so expansive that nobody can satisfactorily identify where it begins or ends presents an obvious difficulty for anyone charged with resolving it. One may spend years identifying new intersections without ever establishing what practical improvement would constitute success.
Perera makes an admission which ought to trouble the trustees responsible for the programme’s funding. Recalling the optimism which accompanied the racial-justice campaigns following George Floyd’s death in 2020, she writes: “We did not even have a collective agreement on what oppression or racism looked like.” She is referring to the absence of a shared understanding across Church and society, rather than claiming that individual acts of racial discrimination were unrecognisable. The distinction is important. Nevertheless, it leaves an extraordinary problem of institutional governance. How does an organisation design a programme of comprehensive cultural transformation when the participants cannot agree upon the governing concepts by which its objectives and outcomes are to be judged? What precisely were the commissioners expected to deliver? By what common standard would progress be assessed? These are the questions which ought to precede expenditure, appointments and institutional reorganisation. They cannot be satisfactorily answered afterwards by appealing to the complexity of the difficulty.
The Archbishops’ Commission was established to monitor and support implementation of the forty-seven recommendations contained in the Anti-Racism Taskforce’s From Lament to Action. Its final report, published in February 2025, recorded progress alongside considerable frustration and continuing deficiencies.² The work was not simply fictitious, nor were all its proposals without practical value. But Perera’s recollection introduces an uncomfortable complication. She suggests that, with the principal recommendations already formulated, the Commission was left largely to generate a “rhetoric-driven political impetus” for their implementation. This is a remarkable way for one of the programme’s architects to describe a major ecclesiastical undertaking. If its authority was inadequate, its objectives contested and its timescale manifestly unrealistic, why was the structure considered appropriate? Perhaps the trouble was not simply that the Church resisted reform. Perhaps those demanding reform had mistaken an impressive institutional announcement for a workable strategy.
The financial commitments make the matter rather more than an academic dispute. The Church of England allocated £20 million to racial-justice work during the 2023–25 spending period. In December 2025, the Archbishops’ Council approved another £7 million for programmes over 2026–28, alongside £200,000 carried forward from the preceding period. It also confirmed that £11 million in payments relating to grants already awarded would be disbursed during those three years. These figures must be understood accurately: allocations and future payments are not identical to money already spent, and previously awarded grants cannot be counted again as entirely new commitments. The separate £100 million Church Commissioners’ initiative concerning historic links to slavery is another undertaking altogether.³ Even with those distinctions, the scale of expenditure is substantial. It represents money entrusted to ecclesiastical institutions for purposes which should be capable of clear explanation and rigorous scrutiny.
Perera offers an extensive description of work undertaken: increased representation, revised recruitment procedures, diocesan racial-justice strategies, specialist appointments, changes to theological curricula, public advocacy and engagement with a remarkable range of political and social concerns. What she does not supply is a correspondingly clear account of results. How many people suffering demonstrable discrimination have obtained effective redress? Which procedures have been shown to operate more fairly? What proportion of expenditure has directly corrected an injustice, and how much has supported the administrative machinery established to address it? The answers may well include genuine achievements, and any responsible assessment must examine them. But the distinction between doing something and accomplishing something remains essential. A diocesan officer may organise an admirable programme without altering the conduct which occasioned the complaint. A training course may increase familiarity with approved terminology without making its participants kinder, fairer or more courageous. What matters is what happens when somebody is actually wronged.
The predicament is familiar throughout institutional life. A legitimate concern becomes the occasion for a programme; the programme acquires staff, funding, a reporting structure and an increasingly specialised vocabulary. Each assessment discovers fresh deficiencies, while the complexity of the original problem makes conclusive evaluation difficult. Eventually, continuation can begin to look like achievement. There is no need to suppose dishonesty, improper enrichment or a conspiracy of professional activists to recognise the incentive. People employed to administer an enterprise naturally regard its continuation as important. Departments seek resources; commissions recommend further action; specialist organisations develop professional interests in the work for which they were established. Without rigorous external examination of outcomes, an apparatus created to remedy an injustice can become a permanent feature of institutional life regardless of what it has actually remedied. The Church, of all institutions, ought to be conscious of the moral hazards which accompany respectable intentions.
Perera seems uncomfortably aware of this danger. She describes the “virtue-signalling performative noise of activism” which creates anxiety and resentment within the Church. She acknowledges that accusation and counter-accusation can exhaust goodwill and leave people reluctant to engage. More striking still is her fear that “cheap allyship has become a disingenuous currency”, adopted as a socially acceptable means of career advancement without meaningful personal sacrifice. These are not observations from a critic hostile to every attempt at racial justice. They come from someone whose professional life has been closely associated with the cause. Her testimony suggests that the language of moral commitment can become a form of institutional currency, conferring approval and advancement upon those sufficiently fluent in it. Yet Perera never quite confronts the possibility that the professionalisation of racial justice may itself encourage the behaviour she deplores. An institution which rewards declarations of solidarity should hardly be surprised when declarations multiply.
The research she cites presents further difficulties for the assumption that disagreement necessarily reflects insufficient awareness. Andrew Village and Leslie Francis surveyed 3,167 clergy and lay Anglicans, finding that 58 per cent considered racial justice among the Church’s highest priorities, while only 22 per cent agreed that the Church was institutionally racist and 14 per cent reported racial inequality in their own place of worship. The researchers were careful to explain that their study measured racial awareness, not the actual prevalence of racism, and that their non-random sample imposed limits upon wider conclusions.⁴ The findings nevertheless suggest something significant. People can regard discrimination as morally serious without accepting every claim made about its institutional character. They can favour fairer opportunities without supporting particular forms of historical reparation or positive action. Those distinctions deserve respect. It would be a grave intellectual error to assume that somebody who questions the diagnosis is thereby displaying the very prejudice alleged.
This is where the intersectional framework becomes particularly troublesome. It may be useful to recognise that a person’s experiences can be affected by several circumstances simultaneously. Poverty, ethnicity, education and social standing may indeed combine to produce forms of disadvantage which a narrower investigation would overlook. But when such analysis becomes the habitual language of ecclesiastical relationships, the person risks disappearing beneath the categories assigned to him. He is approached as the embodiment of an identity, a presumed historical grievance or a position within a hierarchy of social advantage. The temptation is then to interpret his experiences, opinions and even moral standing through the circumstances of his group rather than the merits of his individual case. An approach intended to overcome racial prejudice may inadvertently reinforce the assumption that race is the most important thing to know about another human being.
There is a considerable difference between identifying an unjust practice and organising the moral imagination around competing identities. A church employer who excludes a qualified applicant because of his ethnicity commits a wrong which demands correction. The matter does not become clearer merely because the applicant is placed within a more elaborate intersectional analysis. Indeed, one danger of such theories is that they make the ordinary business of justice appear unnecessarily inaccessible. The grievance becomes a matter for specialists, requiring an approved conceptual framework before its meaning can be established. The complainant is drawn into an institutional process whose language may be considerably more sophisticated than its capacity to produce a remedy. Christian justice should be intelligible to the person seeking it. He ought not to require professional expertise in contemporary social theory to demonstrate that he has been treated unfairly.
Perera’s criticism of Anglican governance has more substance. She points out that the Church of England is not a single corporate organisation whose every constituent body can be directed by an archbishop. The authority of bishops is limited by legal and synodical arrangements, while dioceses and parishes retain their own responsibilities. An archiepiscopal declaration cannot simply transform the practices of every parish church. Yet this was hardly an obscure constitutional discovery made after the programme began. The same complexity existed when the Commission was established, when the grants were approved and when national strategies were devised. If the machinery was designed without adequate regard to the limits of those expected to operate it, the failure belongs partly to its architects. Nor does the absence of a single corporate personality mean that particular office-holders, trustees and institutions cannot be held accountable for their own decisions. Ecclesiastical complexity must not become a convenient refuge from financial and administrative responsibility.
Nuntiatoria has previously questioned the theological assumptions underlying the Diocese of London’s £730,000 Racial Justice Priority project, particularly the danger of importing critical-justice frameworks into preaching and theological formation.⁵ That concern extends beyond the effectiveness of an individual programme. It touches upon the source from which the Church receives her understanding of man. Social research can illuminate particular circumstances and assist the investigation of injustice. It cannot supply the ultimate moral foundation of Christian teaching. The danger arises when ideas developed principally to analyse power, identity and disadvantage become the organising principles of ecclesiastical life, with Scripture subsequently employed to provide religious approval. The order ought to be reversed. Christianity possesses a distinctive anthropology against which contemporary theories must be examined, accepting what is true and rejecting what is incompatible with the Faith.
That anthropology begins with a truth considerably more profound than anything contained in the language of diversity management. “And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). The dignity of the person is neither bestowed by society nor dependent upon the recognition of an institution. It belongs to him by virtue of his creation, his rational and immortal soul, and his vocation to know and love God. His ancestry cannot increase it; his colour cannot diminish it; neither privilege nor disadvantage can determine its measure. St Paul proclaimed to the Athenians that God “hath made of one, all mankind, to dwell upon the whole face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). The unity of the human family is not an aspiration awaiting fulfilment through administrative policy. It is a truth about what humanity already is.
Pope Pius XII articulated this doctrine with particular force in Summi Pontificatus, published in October 1939 as Europe descended into war. He condemned the neglect of human solidarity and charity founded upon our common origin, the equality of rational nature and the redeeming sacrifice of Jesus Christ. He recognised the legitimate variety of peoples and cultures while insisting upon the unity of the human family in creation and its supernatural destiny. Most pertinently, he declared that those entering the Church, whatever their origin or language, must possess equal rights as children in the house of the Lord.⁶ This was no tentative accommodation to contemporary fashion. It was the application of Catholic doctrine to the racial ideologies which had disfigured European civilisation. The moral principle was already established. The obligation was to obey it.
What a difference that understanding makes. The man who has suffered discrimination deserves justice because he has been wronged, not because his grievance advances the interests of a particular demographic constituency. The man accused of discrimination deserves a fair hearing because justice is owed to him also. Neither may be judged merely by ancestry, appearance or group identity. The same moral law governs both. Christianity can recognise that historical circumstances create inequalities, and that institutions may perpetuate unjust arrangements, without making collective identity the basis of personal culpability. Indeed, the distinction is indispensable. Once individuals are treated principally as representatives of ancestral advantage or disadvantage, the Church risks reproducing the very habit of racial judgement which it is supposed to condemn.
The question of historical slavery, to which Perera repeatedly returns, illustrates the difficulty. Nuntiatoria has already examined the difference between restitution, charity, institutional responsibility and the supposed inheritance of ancestral guilt.⁷ Historical wrongdoing may produce consequences which subsequent generations have an obligation to address. Property unjustly retained may require restitution; present discrimination demands correction; genuine need may call forth Christian charity. Yet the moral culpability of an offender is not automatically transferred to people who never participated in his actions. A just response requires careful attention to what is owed, by whom and to whom. The language of collective repentance can obscure those distinctions, replacing the practical duties of justice with an indefinite moral drama in which entire populations are classified by their relationship to the sins of the dead.
Perera eventually appeals to Christian theology, observing that sin affects institutions as well as individuals and that human effort alone cannot establish the Kingdom of God. One might have expected this recognition to transform the direction of her argument. Instead, the discussion returns to the urgency of institutional action, with comparatively little consideration of the Christian means by which persons are renewed. Sin requires repentance, conversion and grace. A discriminatory practice may be corrected by changing a policy, but the prejudice which sustained it is a disorder of the human will. Cowardice, envy, resentment, pride, favouritism and contempt are not recent discoveries. Christian moral theology has been describing them for centuries, and the Church has long understood the virtues required to oppose them. An ecclesiastical culture which becomes increasingly adept at diagnosing structural oppression while neglecting the formation of conscience may alter its procedures without improving the conduct of those responsible for them.
This is not to suggest that Scripture and theology have been entirely absent from Anglican racial-justice initiatives. The Diocese of London has, for example, recently published Becoming a Reconciled People, a series of biblical studies on identity, hospitality, exclusion and reconciliation.⁸ Its existence is welcome insofar as it returns attention to the Christian sources of moral obligation. The more important question concerns which understanding of humanity is governing the exercise. Is Scripture being permitted to determine the meaning of justice, reconciliation and human dignity, or is it being approached through categories already supplied by a contemporary theory of social relations? Biblical language can accompany either approach. The difference lies in whether the Church allows revelation to judge its preferred social theories or employs revelation chiefly to commend them.
A more fruitful investment of time and resources would begin with sustained instruction in the dignity of every human being and the moral obligations which follow. Children should learn that the classmate beside them is a person created in the image of God, worthy of respect irrespective of origin, appearance or circumstances. Clergy should preach the commandments and the virtues with sufficient clarity that contempt, favouritism, dishonesty and cruelty become recognisable as sins rather than merely breaches of an institutional code. Church officers should understand the obligations of justice in appointments, complaints and ordinary pastoral dealings. Such teaching must be accompanied by effective procedures for correcting actual wrongdoing. A congregation which professes Christian fellowship while excluding people because of their ancestry requires correction; a diocesan authority which conceals discriminatory conduct requires accountability. A Church which merely changes its vocabulary has scarcely begun the necessary work.
The responsibility is personal as well as institutional. A bishop cannot delegate his obligation to act justly to a diocesan racial-justice officer. A parish priest cannot discharge the commandment of charity by completing a training programme. A churchwarden who humiliates or excludes a parishioner cannot repair the wrong through a public declaration of inclusivity. The conduct which makes a community genuinely hospitable is often unremarkable: welcoming the stranger without condescension, judging appointments fairly, speaking truthfully, refusing malicious gossip, correcting those who abuse authority and listening when someone reports mistreatment. These acts require moral courage and a formed conscience. They are less conspicuous than another national commission, but they belong to the substance of Christian life.
The Church’s resources are finite, and that fact gives the present discussion a particular urgency. Across England, parishes face expensive maintenance, declining congregations and difficult decisions about the provision of ministry. Religious knowledge is diminishing, and many of those nominally attached to Christianity possess only a fragmentary understanding of its doctrines. The Church of England nevertheless devotes substantial funds and professional energy to an administrative programme whose conceptual difficulties are now being described by one of its former principal advocates. The expenditure of money is accompanied by the expenditure of attention, and the latter may be even more consequential. Hours devoted to institutional consultations, training and policy revision are hours unavailable for other work. They may be justified where the outcome warrants them. They ought not to become unquestionable merely because the stated purpose is admirable.
Perera concludes by invoking the maxim that justice delayed is justice denied. She is right. It is also an uncomfortable judgement upon a system which can devote years to analysing the complexity of injustice without always demonstrating that particular wrongs have been remedied. Someone denied fair treatment needs an investigation which establishes the facts and a remedy appropriate to them. He does not necessarily need another commission to explain the intersection of his circumstances with the structures of society. Nor should he be obliged to wait until an entire institution has agreed upon a comprehensive theory of oppression. The obligation to act justly exists already. Christianity does not require the solution of every social problem before one person can be treated with charity and fairness.
What makes Perera’s article especially revealing is her reluctance to follow her own observations to their logical conclusion. She recognises the contested definitions, questions the feasibility of the Commission’s mandate, describes the limitations of Anglican authority and deplores the performative careerism surrounding the cause. Yet the framework from which these difficulties have arisen remains largely intact. Her account allows for failures of implementation, insufficient agreement and institutional resistance, but devotes less attention to the possibility that an increasingly expansive conception of racial injustice has encouraged an equally expansive and professionally self-sustaining response. The programme may contain worthwhile interventions. That is all the more reason to distinguish them from activities which survive principally because the wider problem has been declared incapable of final resolution.
The proper Christian response to racial prejudice is neither indifference nor an endless rehearsal of collective grievances. It is the recognition of a common humanity before God, joined to the practical exercise of justice and charity. Christianity does not abolish the legitimate variety of peoples, cultures or historical experiences. It places those differences within a greater truth about human nature and destiny. Every person is owed justice. Every person is capable of sin. Every person is called to conversion. Those principles admit no privileged category whose members are exempt from moral responsibility, and no despised category whose members possess a lesser claim upon Christian love.
The Church of England would do well to reconsider where its energies are being directed. Greater investment in the formation of Christian consciences, the teaching of human dignity, the cultivation of virtue and the effective correction of identifiable wrongdoing would serve the cause of racial justice more faithfully than the indefinite multiplication of programmes and professional specialisms. It would also restore the essential distinction between the Church’s mission and the managerial ambitions of the institutions through which she attempts to discharge it. The cure for prejudice is not to make people permanently more conscious of race, but to teach them to recognise the person whose race should never have been a reason for denying him justice.
Perera has described a Church struggling to understand the machinery it has constructed and uncertain how to measure its achievements. Her account deserves attention, particularly because it comes from within the enterprise itself. But the Christian answer lies deeper than the institutional ecosystem she examines. The neighbour standing before us is not an intersection of identities, an embodiment of historical grievance or a problem awaiting administrative classification. He is a human being created in the image of God, possessing a dignity which no social theory can confer and no institution may legitimately deny.
The Church ought to know that already. Its task is to teach its people to live as though they believe it.
¹ Sanjee Perera, Church of the Empire: The Church of England and Race in Global Perspective, ch. “The Wicked Problem of Racism in the Church of England” (SCM Press, 2026); edited extract, “The ‘wicked problem’ in the C of E’s ecosystem,” Church Times, 23 October 2026.
² Church of England, “Final report of Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice published”, 11 February 2025.
³ Church of England, “Archbishops’ Commission on Racial Justice releases First Biannual Report”, 2022; “£12.4 million to be spent on social and racial justice programmes in the Church of England over three years”, 3 December 2025.
⁴ Andrew Village and Leslie J. Francis, “Too Woke or Not Woke Enough? Racial Awareness in the Church of England”, Journal of Anglican Studies, 24, no. 1 (2026): 106–128.
⁵ Nuntiatoria, “Ideology in the Pulpit: From Anglican Critical Justice to a Warning for the Catholic Church”, 2 February 2026.
⁶ Pope Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, 20 October 1939, §§35–49; Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge, 14 March 1937, §§8–11.
⁷ Nuntiatoria, “The Sins of the Fathers: The Church of England and the New Doctrine of Inherited Guilt”, 14 August 2026.
⁸ Diocese of London, “Diocese of London Launches New Bible Study Resource for Racial Justice”, 26 October 2026.
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