The Bishop of Manchester, working class communities, and progressive prejudice
He said ... "On the ground, in working class communities, there is some wonderful and outstanding work going on, that is fighting injustice, that is saving lives through foodbanks and community projects, that is educating children and standing up for the most vulnerable people in our society."
Backing the debate brought by Fr Frost, the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, said there were many 'inbuilt prejudices and barriers' to welcoming people from outside the Church ...
"There are so many – in our system – inbuilt prejudices and barriers and cultural difficulties," he said ...
Bishop Mark Tanner, Chair of the Church of England’s Ministry Development Board, welcoming the debate, emphasised that vocations were not just about ministerial roles.
"We in the Church need to be those who champion others, whatever they are called to in order that they can be salt and light across our communities, we believe that this is part of our prophetic role," he said.
He also urged the Church of England to listen rather than impose 'middle-class solutions' on issues faced by those who are working class.
This is the report on the Church of England website of the debate in General Synod in February, supporting a motion "to encourage the ministry of people from working class backgrounds". In a previous post, laudable Practice doubted that the CofE was meaningfully interested in appealing to working class communities, which tend to be significantly more politically and culturally conservative than many CofE public voices, and that the CofE would instead prefer its "own comfortable, monolithic political and cultural progressive consensus".
An example of such a preferential option for progressive assumptions, rather than solidarity with working class communities, was seen when the Bishop of Manchester, David Walker, gave 'Thought for the Day' on BBC Radio 4 on 16th June.
Bishop Walker has a long record of identifying with the political Left. To be clear, there is nothing at all wrong with this. There is a noble history of Christian socialism in the Church of England - balanced, of course, by bishops, clergy, and laity who stood within the equally noble Tory and Liberal traditions.
In a 2015 Guardian article, Bishop Walker urged policy makers to not to "make life any harder" for those struggling working class communities:
In Britain in 2015, for far too many households, work has ceased to be the escape route from poverty. It’s just one more dimension to living on or beneath the breadline. When the kids come home to empty cupboards and to mum slumped on the living room sofa, it’s not that she’s lain there all day. More likely she’s just grabbing a nap between part-time shifts. Let’s not make life any harder for her, or for them.
Writing for the liberal Anglican pressure group 'Modern Church', he called for a housing policy which recognised and protected the dignity of those in working class communities:
The most basic requirements lie around personal safety and security. A home must provide protection for those who dwell in it and their most treasured possessions. This includes the ability to determine who, barring emergency, may enter. A dormitory bed, however preferable to exposure on the streets, will never be a home. Nor will a property to which the landlord has unrestricted access. For those at particular risk of domestic abuse, a safe room may be an essential.
Home should indeed be a place of safety and dignity, not least for those at risk of abuse.
A concern that public policy should not "make life any harder" for working class communities; homes in working class communities to be places of safety and dignity. This noble voice of what we might call the Old Left was not heard on 16th June, when Bishop Walker used 'Thought for the Day' to address the grooming gangs scandal. The timing was, to say the least, significant. The previous day it was made known that the Prime Minister - ahead of the publication of Baroness Casey's National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, and after months of sustained opposition - would be ordering a public inquiry into the scandal. The 16th June was the publication date for the Casey Report.
Something of the shame and horrors revealed by the report are indicated by the BBC's account:
Baroness Louise Casey's report into group-based sexual exploitation pulls no punches in its description of the failures at all levels to tackle what it calls one of the most horrendous crimes in our society ...
Overall, she described the lack of action by the authorities over the years as "denial" or a collective "blindness", particularly when it comes to the ethnicity of perpetrators.
The report said "despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young white girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively."
Such was the BBC report on the day that Bishop Walker took to the airwaves to tell listeners that it was all very distasteful - indeed, contrary to the teaching of Our Lord - to even consider the ethnic background of the gangs guilty of the mass rape of thousands of children:
This is not a pattern of offending confined to any particular ethnic, cultural, or religious group ... It is a natural human tendency to want to think that such horrendous crimes are only carried out by people who are not like us ... Matthew and Luke both tell how Jesus call us to cast out the log from our own eye before seeking to remove a speck from some else's ... it calls me to pay full attention not just to my personal sins and wrong-doings but of those committed by people like me, not to retreat into the relative comfort of denouncing the misdeeds of more distant others. For whilst gangs may dominate the news headlines child protection experts affirm that the vast majority of child sexual exploitation is committed by the victim's close family members or family friends.
Bishop Walker was repeating precisely what polite progressive opinion had been saying for years, since news of the scandal began to be reported. What had occurred, we were told, was no different at all to other horrific cases of abuse. To suggest otherwise was, as Labour's Lucy Powell MP, Leader of the House of Commons, said at the beginning of May, a "dog whistle", appealing to the Far Right.
Now contrast Bishop Walker's words with those of the Casey Report, with its recognition that authorities, including the police, were "incompetent at best - sometimes turning a blind eye but often actively enabling abuse - and corrupt at worst":
Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young White girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.
Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue. This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division ...
Blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions, all play a part in a collective failure to properly deter and prosecute offenders or to protect children from harm.
Bishop Walker's words on 16th June, therefore, were perpetuating a mindset which contributed to a catastrophic, scandalous failure by the agencies of the state "to properly deter and prosecute offenders or to protect children from harm".
Matthew and Luke both tell how Jesus call us to cast out the log from our own eye before seeking to remove a speck from some else's ... it calls me to pay full attention not just to my personal sins and wrong-doings but of those committed by people like me.
Indeed, Bishop Walker, indeed.
Words from a 'personal note' by Baroness Casey, including in her report, are unfortunately and shamefully very relevant to the Bishop's 'Thought for the Day' address:
I met many victims of child sexual exploitation when I conducted the inspection of Rotherham Council in 2016. I was outraged, shocked and appalled at their treatment – not only at the hands of their vile abusers, but at the treatment afforded them by those who were supposedly there to help.
Mindful that when a bishop speaks publicly on a matter of significant public interest, he or she will inevitably be regarded by public opinion as speaking for the Church of England, we can now add the established Church to the list of those institutions which regard the assumptions of progressive opinion as more important than the thousands of working class girls who were the victims of these grooming gangs. So much for the Bishop's political solidarity with the working class in the face of a scandal described by The Economist as "a stain on the British state"
Now return to where we started - the CofE General Synod debate on encouraging the ministry of people from working class backgrounds. The proposer of the motion talked of working class communities fighting injustice. The Archbishop of York referred to "inbuilt prejudices" which were an obstacle to working class people in the CofE. And Bishop Tanner "urged the Church of England to listen rather than impose 'middle-class solutions' on issues faced by those who are working class".
Bishop Walker's words on 16th June, by contrast, were an appalling reminder that when it comes to a choice between progressive assumptions and the interests and dignity of working class communities, too many voices within the contemporary CofE have no hesitation in choosing progressive assumptions. Even, that is, when we are talking about some of the most vulnerable children in working class communities, abused, exploited, and raped, and then abandoned by agencies of the state.
In his 'Modern Church' article on housing policy, Bishop Walker said that Leviticus 25 is "a good starting point" to consider our obligations as a society to working class communities: "thou shalt cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound". On 16th June, he had an opportunity to proclaim something of a year of jubilee for those working class communities scarred by the grooming gangs scandal, not least the profoundly shameful, unjust actions of the police, local government, and social services; he could have urged a year of jubilee, to restore rights, dignity, and justice to these communities But, no. Polite progressive opinion was more important for Bishop Walker. It had to be preserved and maintained, even though the same polite, progressive opinion was on that very day publicly exposed as a cause of the "blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness" which colluded with profound evil and horrors inflicted upon girls in working class communities.
If the Church of England is in anyway serious about authentically respecting, serving, ministering in, and seeking the flourishing of working class communities, it cannot let Bishop's Walker's shameful words stand as a response to the grooming gangs scandal.
To do otherwise would be to admit that the solemn words of Leviticus 25, "Ye shall not therefore oppress one another; but thou shalt fear thy God", only have relevance as long as progressive opinions are not challenged.
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