The Church of England can always be relied upon to walk into a room just as everybody else is leaving. The question of whether we have reached ‘peak woke’ – the high watermark of Americanised racial politics dictating every aspect of public life – remains open. However, those post-Black Lives Matter efforts, which saw mass demonstrations and acts of self-abasement by companies and institutions, are undeniably more muted and more disputed than they were in 2020. It seems unlikely that, for example, Andy Burnham would ‘take the knee’, as Keir Starmer did so unthinkingly.
This is partly because institutions have learnt from the mistakes of the past six years, while plenty of those pushing this agenda proved to be grifters, advocates of racial violence, or good old-fashioned charlatans. Not so, however, in the Church of England.
There is something almost endearing about this; the C of E has long been an institution where the eccentricities of the comfortable middle-classes survive long past their sell-by date. Bishops wore wigs deep into the 19th century, and gaiters into the dog days of the 20th century, after they had become obsolete elsewhere. Inevitably, they will sport rainbow lanyards well into the dog days of the 21st century, after everybody else has thrown them in a bin.
