This week the Church of England unveiled proposals for a shake-up of its national governance structure in what critics have called “a coup by Archbishops to take control of everything”.
I won’t bore you with the details (you can read the full report here, headed-up by the anti-Brexit Bishop Nick Baines) but what stood out to me was the barely concealed aim of replacing the organic accountability of democracy with a sterile rule by a woke technocracy. One purpose of this is, inevitably, to increase ‘diversity’, but it’s not hard to see that the real agenda is to impose a woke uniformity of political ideology on a church already infamous for being led by a clerisy out of touch with ordinary churchgoers and the country as a whole.
At the heart of the takeover is the all-powerful Nominations Committee, which is tasked with establishing “a community of diverse, appropriately skilled and appropriately knowledgeable people from which panels would be convened to oversee appointments and ensure eligibility for election”. Anglican blogger Archbishop Cranmer puts his finger on the problem here.
Note “appropriately skilled”, “relevant knowledge”, “suitable to stand”, “talent pipeline”, and “appropriate.. behaviours”. It will fall to the Nominations Committee to ‘sift’ all applicants to all Church of England boards, committees and governing bodies. It will be for them to discern and define what is ‘appropriate’ and ‘relevant’, who is ‘suitable’ and has ‘talent’, and whether or not they manifest appropriate ‘behaviours’.
Has it not occurred to the Review Group that this Nominations Committee will have the power to create a church in its own image, and that the Chair of the Nominations Committee will have more executive power than the Archbishop of Canterbury? Or perhaps that’s the idea. It isn’t clear, however, which committee will ‘sift’ nominations to the Nominations Committee, but you can be sure that the process will be the antithesis of transparency and accountability.
He sees parallels with the notorious Cameroonian ‘A-list’ for Tory candidates:
Clause 200 is designed to be the safety valve, the check or balance on the abuse of power, but it is a bit of verbal chicanery. In what sense is pre-election ‘rigorous sifting’ not a negation of of [sic] democracy? If candidates may not emerge organically and appeal to their electorates directly, but instead may be weeded out by the Anglican Conclave compliance committee to ensure theological conformity and gender/ethnicity diversity, then democracy is indeed removed. The proposal apes the process adopted by the Conservative Party under David Cameron and his ‘A-list‘ for candidates, which caused such outrage among Party members with its social engineering of removal of democracy that it was eventually abolished – but not really: it is still very much in place to ensure the ‘right’ candidates are nominated to the ‘right’ seats, and are seen to be. But the Conservative Party’s Candidates Committee doesn’t operate with transparency and accountability. If it did, it would be subject to democracy, and that would hinder the political objective.
The Church of England’s ‘sifting’ people for the ‘talent pipeline’ is also a mechanism for seeming: to ensure the ‘right’ women and ethnic minorities are appointed to the ‘right’ boards, committees and governing bodies of the Church of England, in order that they might in turn select the ‘right’ candidates from the list ‘sifted’ by the Nominations Committee, who, you can be sure, will sift some more than others.
The report is clear that it regards democracy as an inadequate mechanism for ensuring sufficiently diverse governance.
In the Church of England, a significant number of appointments to governance bodies are made through the electoral process. In our view, this does not deliver what the Church needs from its governing bodies. …
The Church bodies which either elect or nominate people onto the Church of England’s governance bodies are themselves not very diverse bodies, meaning that the people they elect or nominate onto governance bodies tend not to supply the diversity which is one of the requirements of the Charity Commission’s Seven Principles of Governance.
Ah, so it’s all about complying with the requirements of the Charity Commission’s Seven Principles of Governance? What exactly do these require of the Church of England?
Well, nothing at all as it happens, as the code does not ‘require’ anything but commends certain principles and practices. It also leaves entirely to the discretion of the charity itself how it defines and achieves ‘diversity‘:
The board assesses its own understanding of equality, diversity and inclusion. It considers how this happens in the charity and identifies any gaps in understanding which could be filled by discussion, learning, research or information.
The report’s implication that the elected General Synod is deficient in respect of the Charity Commission’s ‘requirements’ for diversity and therefore needs to be made less democratic, the better to comply, is thus a wholly misleading insinuation intended, we must suppose, to convince readers that they have no choice but to accept this reform.
Likewise, there is an appeal to the U.K. Corporate Governance Code, which the report quotes to show how the elected Synod is deficient in this regard:
Appointments to the board should be subject to a formal, rigorous and transparent procedure, and an effective succession plan should be maintained for board and senior management.
The Corporate Governance Code is published by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) and applies only to companies “with a Premium Listing of equity shares in the UK”. The Church of England is not a publicly listed company and does not have shareholders and thus the code does not apply to it. In addition, the code is not obligatory and makes clear that deviations, clearly explained to shareholders, aren’t necessarily indicative of poor governance: “There may be many good reasons why a company may choose not to comply and an explanation does not imply poor governance.” This too is therefore a misleading effort on the part of the report authors to make it appear that the proposed reform is a statutory requirement when it is no such thing.
Hopefully the General Synod will reject this report and its attempt to replace lively church democracy with a dull woke conformity. If it does not and instead gives it the green light, it’s hard to see how the Church of England will avoid accelerating faster down the right-on rabbit hole it has lately made its home – Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby rarely misses an opportunity to accuse his church of being “deeply institutionally racist” – which so jars with many of the people who would be its natural supporters. Wokery hasn’t revived the fortunes of any church to date and it seems unlikely to start with the C of E.
These problems of woke takeovers aren’t limited to the C of E of course. The church’s appeal to the FRC Code is telling, as this appears to be the font of much corporate wokery in the U.K. The code has been evolving quickly in recent years, with contentious ‘social justice’ elements being hardened even between the 2016 and 2018 editions.
The 2016 version, for instance, still made an effort to couch diversity in terms of improving the quality of deliberation: “One of the ways in which constructive debate can be encouraged is through having sufficient diversity on the board.”
Diversity here was just a ‘supporting principle’, and companies were only asked to have ‘due regard’ to its benefits: “The search for board candidates should be conducted, and appointments made, on merit, against objective criteria and with due regard for the benefits of diversity on the board, including gender.”
Come 2018, and it is now a central principle that diversity “should” be actively promoted in appointments: “Both appointments and succession plans should be based on merit and objective criteria and, within this context, should promote diversity of gender, social and ethnic backgrounds, cognitive and personal strengths.”
The annual report “should” also “describe the work of the nomination committee” (is this where the C of E got the idea from?) in “developing a diverse pipeline” and in its “progress on achieving the objectives” of its diversity and inclusion policy.
What’s more, it seems this is still not woke enough for the apparatchiks at the FRC. In July 2021 the FRC published research claiming to show that “diverse boards lead to better corporate culture and performance” and arguing that companies need to go even further in promoting ‘diversity’:
• Regulators and companies must focus on collecting more data on the types of diversity, board dynamics and social inclusion
• The Nomination Committee itself should be diverse and have a clear mandate to work with search firms that access talent from wide and diverse pools.
• The greater representation of women in the boardroom is reshaping culture and dynamics and benefiting businesses from a social justice as well as a performance perspective
The idea that ‘diversity’ improves performance and profit has been taken apart by Alex Edmans in the Telegraph, who argues that although he is himself ethnic minority and a supporter of diversity, the fact is the business case for diversity is wholly lacking in good quality evidence.
A much heralded McKinsey report, entitled Diversity Wins, argued that “the business case for gender and ethnic diversity in top teams is stronger than ever”.
Last month, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) released a study, which concluded that “gender-diverse boards are more effective than those without women”. The evidence is supposedly so compelling that one chairman claimed in the study that “there have been enough reports … statistics and … evidence-based research to stop talking about it and get on with it”.
Another declared that “I don’t want to see any men. I don’t care if they’re Jesus Christ. I don’t want to see them.” …
But the business case for diversity is far weaker than commonly claimed. The McKinsey study has been shown to be irreplicable even with their chosen performance measure (EBIT) and preferred methodology. Moreover, there is no link between diversity and other performance measures – gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, sales growth, or total shareholder return – or when using more established methodologies.
The study commissioned by the FRC runs 90 regressions investigating the link between diversity and profitability. Eighty-eight find no relationship, and two find a weak relationship that fails the standard threshold for statistical significance. Yet many articles have been written based on the study’s headline claim, without looking at its actual results.
Corporate wokery, spearheaded by the patronising, divisive and discriminatory drive for ill-defined ‘diversity’ is increasingly out of control, whether in the corporate world or the wannabe corporate world of the C of E. If we had elected a Labour government for the past decade that might be understandable. That this is happening on the Conservatives’ watch raises important questions about who governs Britain and how seriously the Conservative party takes its commitment to conservative values.
The FRC is slated to be replaced, when the Government gets round to it. This is a prime opportunity to steer corporate governance away from divisive woke ideology and towards something more sensible and benign.
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The Church of England finally parted company with Christ and his saints and his angels when it sold its soul (cheap) to the Covid devil in March 2020. But the final betrayal had been preparing for a long time, as any member of what is now a rapidly decaying corpse will attest.
Very true Annie not a word of support or a Challenge of the Murderous Narrative.I don’t think Christ was with them in the first place ever.
As for the Roman Candles that’s another story I don’t recall anywhere in the Bible that future prophets have to wear a million pound hat and matching ring and hang out in a Palace come state that has its own age of consent 14 I recall.
I said last August that the CofE was finished and that it would return but only after 70 years in the wilderness. I see no reason to change that assessment in any particular.
There are some churches (I belong to one) that have not succumbed to this nonsense and I think that such churches will survive and thrive and secede from the current CofE. How that will work out I do not know; ownership of the buildings is a difficulty.
I will examine this article in more detail later.
“Millions of people who no longer believe stay in their churches because of the community and support the churches provide. Our local affiliates stand ready to help and are vibrant communities full of people just like you who have left behind religion.”
Home – American Atheists
What it will boil down to is a huge number of historic churches being turned into houses.
As often seems to be the case, Peter Hitchens understands the mechanisms involved in these seemingly disparate developments, actually all driven by the dominance of radicals and the exclusion of conservatives from any positions of power or influence. Writing a few years ago about the obsessive hatred of customary metrics on the part of radicals, he described it as follows, in a piece he highlighted today as a result of a resurgence of attacks on him for defending the right to use customary metrics;
“I think a country is either top down or bottom up. Utopian, cold, arid, tediously regular metric systems, based on idealism, are top-down. Quirky, flexible, poetic customary measures, with their ancient friendly names, are bottom up. One has grown like a forest. The other has been plonked down like a car park. I began to consider the subject when I realised that I felt an actual pain of loss over the wiping out of customary measures in my homeland, especially the spiteful prosecution and conviction of the greengrocer Steve Thoburn for selling bananas by the pound to customers who preferred this. This conviction, despite lengthy legal struggles, and a public retreat from excessive zeal by the EU itself, has still not been quashed .
I sought to explain it and found the reason in the arguments above. People are always telling me how trivial it is, yet it is striking that any defence of customary measures (my sole aim) is met by a storm of petulant and snobbish rage from metric fanatics. My latest encounter with these zealots on Twitter has even led to a snide paragraph about me in The Times today. I explain in vain that I am quite happy to use the metric system and have it alongside the customary measures I prefer. I simply object to any attempt to stamp out customary measures. But they, like all zealots, think I am like them.”
My Reply to the Metric Zealots
This might seem on the face of it nothing to do with woke tyranny in the CoE hierarchy, but in fact the imposition of “diversity” from the top is just another example of the “top down” authoritarianism of radicals like the metric zealots (not, note, people who just prefer to use metric themselves, but those who seek to stamp out the use of customary measures by anyone, anywhere), and the anti-Christian leftists who have been running the Christian churches for some decades now.
We started with scepticism about lockdown, then dropped that and segued to being sceptical about vaccines. That must have run out of steam since now we are moving on to scepticism about wokeness. Is the goal to give every matter a dose of scepticism? It’s going to take a long while to reach everything.
It’s a healthy attitude.
It goes with the change of name to The Daily Sceptic. It’s what used to pass for normal journalism when I was younger, question everything.
“We”?
Used in the context of the “Royal We” perhaps?
I certainly hope so. We should apply critical analysis widely, particularly when people in authority are trying to manipulate us. If more people had done so in recent decades we might not have arrived at the situation that blights our lives now.
“The FRC is slated to be replaced, when the Government gets round to it. This is a prime opportunity to steer corporate governance away from divisive woke ideology and towards something more sensible and benign.”
This is a bit like those suggesting that the latest “Conservative” election victory was a prime opportunity to get rid of the elite leftist propaganda and social engineering machine that is the BBC. That didn’t happen, because the “Conservative” Party is not a conservative organisation. The members of the “Conservative” Party hierarchy are themselves woke/radical types, just sometimes pretending not to be in order to position themselves better to win votes against the openly woke parties of the admitted left.
Conservatives (small c) are not democratically represented in the current state of the UK electoral system. That’s why we keep getting “Conservative” Party election wins, but we never get any conservative governance.
Do stop just whining about ‘conservatives’ being hard-done by (which they aren’t), and focus on the real problems of establishment power and the way in which it manifests itself, utilising and subverting a variety of cover narratives.
You might be surprised at the consensus that might be gained by seeing the real problem rather than rattling on endlessly in a narrow sectarian fashion about ‘wokeness’ – which misses the point while the same old same old run away with it.
I don’t give much heed to affairs of the established Church, except to note things such as the current A of C being an ex oil-executive of little notable philosophical distinction – a simulacrum of an establishment shill.
The use of candidate filtering to bend electoral process has been a long-standing power technique – and it is not about ‘radical’ values; it’s about raw power For instance, Blair and cohorts used it move control of the Labour Party to the right and establishment interests, and Starmer has taken this to a new level – as you see in the end game of the neutering of democratic parliamentary opposition.
You need to get out of that mental box of an irrelevant and decayed spectrum of politics and grasp what all this sequestering of various divisive movements is really about. One day BLM; another the Countryside Alliance.
‘Wokeness’ misses the point!? I appreciate that power is power and more fundamental, but the fact is I know left wing anarchist vegans who have a problem with ‘wokeness’. No joke. It really is a problem.
Read my comment again. The strands of what is lazily termed ‘wokeness’ is a problem because of mis-identification of the political significance and utility. You are quite right about opposition to these (literally) knee-jerk initiatives coming from across the spectrum – my point exactly. Many people who feel strongly about racism, or gender bias, for instance, are highly critical of what they see as irrelevant diversions that don’t tackle the issues at all.
A good minor example example, for instance, is the contrast of the BBC’s self-conscious tokenism over diversity in music, whilst the composition of orchestras has altered massively through the simple practical expedient of blinding auditions.
Well done, RickH, that response skated with substance and largely avoided your usual playground abuse (although you couldn’t resist “whining”, I see).
You assert that conservatives “aren’t hard done by”, but I’ve pointed out often enough and in more than enough detail exactly how they have been and are, and how that has led us to the disastrous situation we are now in, that there’s little point in responding to your simple denial by repeating those points. You’d only revert to accusing me of more “repetition” and “whining”, of course, in any case.
“You might be surprised at the consensus that might be gained by seeing the real problem rather than rattling on endlessly in a narrow sectarian fashion about ‘wokeness’ – which misses the point while the same old same old run away with it.“
What would be the point of seeking “consensus” with those who, like you, deny the real problems we face? The onus is on you to advance beyond the obsessions of pre-1980s state socialism, not on me and mine to step backwards from addressing the problems of now.
Wokeness (modern leftism), and especially “minority” identity politics, is a huge part of the problems we face, and until you face up to that you will continue to be irrelevant at best, promoting the harmful aspects as often as not, because you fail to even see them for what they are.
“The use of candidate filtering to bend electoral process has been a long-standing power technique – and it is not about ‘radical’ values; it’s about raw power For instance, Blair and cohorts used it move control of the Labour Party to the right and establishment interests, and Starmer has taken this to a new level – as you see in the end game of the neutering of democratic parliamentary opposition.“
The idea that Blair moved the Labour party “to the right” is an illusion common to many Old Labour types, who simply fail to understand the changes in society that mean the establishment and leftists are pretty much one and the same. All Blair did was finally abandon the old leftist tropes of the early c20th (revolution, unions, state control of the means of production etc) for the modern leftist tropes of wokism (political correctness, as it was back in the 1990s).
“You need to get out of that mental box of an irrelevant and decayed spectrum of politics and grasp what all this sequestering of various divisive movements is really about. One day BLM; another the Countryside Alliance.”
You accuse anybody supporting any cause you dislike of being “divisive”, but in the real world, there are causes that are worthwhile, and there are causes, like BLM, climate alarmism, and covid panic, that are the opposite.
Wokeness is mostly associated with a particular strand of leftism (mainly the fairly well-off, white middle-class metropolitan types), but it is very much not favoured by all who would consider themselves to be left-of-centre in political terms.
Part of the issue is that many people feel pressured to claim to support it because they are concerned (justifiably) that they might be wrongly accused of racism or other discrimination if they don’t. It doesn’t help that academia and many companies have enthusiastically embraced it – unsurprisingly in the case of academia as that is controlled by the ‘woke’ demographic, but less predictably in the case of large companies where the controlling demographic is likely to be further to the right.
“Wokeness is mostly associated with a particular strand of leftism (mainly the fairly well-off, white middle-class metropolitan types), but it is very much not favoured by all who would consider themselves to be left-of-centre in political terms.”
Well, yes, but isn’t that pretty much the point I am making? That strand is nowadays the overwhelmingly dominant strand.
Leftism in the C19th/C20th at least was always an alliance between those seeking to improve wages and conditions for workers, but mostly very socially conservative otherwise, and the more ideologically leftist radicals wanting to make more profound and fundamental changes to society based on their dogmas. During the course of the C20th the latter took control of the political left in the UK, especially with the defeat of the big unions in the 1970s and 1980s.
This was a shift in control of the goals and tactics of the left, from mostly socially conservative union boss types to the ideologically obsessed, identitarian lobby-dominated dogmatic types that we called politically correct in the 1990s and we now call “woke”.
The latter, represented by Blair and Blairism, have dominated the political and social left since the 1990s at least, and was adopted by the hierarchy of the “Conservative” Party in the early 2000s, in response to Blairite political victories.
So yes, clearly there are people of the left who don’t share the obsessions of the woke, but they are marginalised minorities within the political left.
“Part of the issue is that many people feel pressured to claim to support it because they are concerned (justifiably) that they might be wrongly accused of racism or other discrimination if they don’t.”
The ideological left have successfully manufactured powerful social taboos around issues like “racism”, “homophobia” etc, and even managed to enshrine these in tyrannical laws, and thus it is right to fear being smeared with breaching these taboos. Like all social taboos, they are dangerous to cross, or even to be seen to have crossed, and people growing up within the culture find it uncomfortable even to think about questioning them.
The fault rests with those who (often, granted, for very good motives) supported the creation of these taboos and who continue to perpetuate them.
“It doesn’t help that academia and many companies have enthusiastically embraced it – unsurprisingly in the case of academia as that is controlled by the ‘woke’ demographic, but less predictably in the case of large companies where the controlling demographic is likely to be further to the right.”
The corporate elite is mostly dominated by those who either are themselves ideologically leftist (mostly of the Blairite faction) or who have no political motivation at all but who have trimmed to the left because they recognise where the power is.
Hence the almost universal adoption of or kowtowing to woke nonsense and hatred of conservatism in the business and corporate world.
Just you wait until the first gay, transgender woman Archbishop takes… office? Chair? Pulpit? I don’t even know, and I don’t much care at this point.
Where are the old dinosaurs who couldn’t accept women priests? They infuriated me for years and now I want them, they seem to have been swallowed up.
The developments described in this article come as no surprise, nor does the picture of Bishop Baines who appears to have his fingerprints all over it. If he’s a Christian, I’m Elvis.
Welby all but disappeared at the crucial moment – a pity as he began so well with the Wonga business, but he appears to be suffering an acute case of self-loathing from his career in the oil industry and perhaps daren’t speak anything other than tree-hugging contrite claptrap lest he be called out for hypocrisy.
Fortunately there are dissenting voices in the C of E with Save The Parish: prominently promoted by Giles Fraser, Marcus Walker and others (“rascally voices”, they were called, I believe)
I’ve been back to church in recent weeks after the local vicar appeared on Julia HB’s show to denounce plans to require tax passes in places of worship and stoutly refused to go along with it. In services about 50% won’t take the chalice and only briefly pull down their mask to slip in the wafer. As the Irreverends podcast remarked this week: the faithful wanted Holy water and we gave them Health and Safety and hand gel.
I’m sure we can fight this rubbish; Acts 5:38-39 “if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, you cannot overthrow it. You might be opposing God.”
It certainly doesn’t pass the sniff test.
Thou art Henricus, and upon these shifting sands I will not build anything, and the gates of hell….
I’m tempted by the idea of Quakerism.
The very church of Woke, surely?
Is it? I don’t really know.
I thought they believed you could reach God through yourself, as an individual, not by necessity through some organisation, like an established church. I find that concept attractive.
Zen Christians
The Anglican Church hid behind masks and abandoned those disadvantaged who lived with young families in high rise fats in support of “lockdown”. Their crass abandonment of God’s judgment and salvation through Christ for the serving of the new “Covid” God with mask to identify the believers and vaccine initiation for the 12+. They have not lost touch with their congregation they have lost connection to their faith.
Another way of putting it is to say that it is not that congregations have abandoned the Church, it is that the Church has abandoned their congregations.
We saw this very clearly when Welby closed the churches, for the first time in 800 years. As far as I can remember this closure was effected by the church hierarchy, NOT the government.
Were the churches closed in 1348/9 at the time of the Black Death? Of course not. And remember that was a REAL epidemic in which one-third of the people died.
Were the churches closed during the Blitz? Of course not, quite the reverse, and the then Archbishop of Canterbury called for a day of prayer. I am told that the queue to get into Westminster Abbey was half a mile long and there was no stupid anti-social distancing.
Indeed, I think it was the first closure in hundreds of years
The way things are going in this quest for diversity and inclusion, I can see the day when worshippers will be discouraged from attending unless they belong to a protected category. “You’re too white; go home and we’ll send you a Zoom link otherwise you’ll make us look bad.”
Yes, Wantock, but surely it’s the church hierarchy, diocesan offices, not us hoi polloi who were/are hiding behind their masks. This business has been useful in showing who are the actual Christians (and other faiths); thank God the street preacher had the CPS case against him dropped.
Archbishop Welby is an Old Etonian, appointed by Cameron, who is another one. Boris Johnson is another.
Please draw your own conclusion….