The Real Unconscious Bias in the Church

 

As unconscious bias training is rolled out across the Church of England for the clergy I felt it timely to do some cursory investigation into something I was new to. Is this the right tool for Anglicans to promote inclusion and diversity?

You do not have to do much digging online to discover that the science behind this is hugely contested.  What had its origins as pure research a decade ago is now highly politicised and wedded to the Critical Theory project. This is a hot potato.  I have yet to do the Zoom training session so in anticipation I am ploughing my way through various online free talks aimed at the business world to grab a sneak preview. What initially stands out is the absence of class as an unconscious bias. If racism,  misogyny , transphobia  and homophobia are taken as societal sins why not prejudice against class? 

The relevance of this point for me is that the Church of England remains middle class through and through. Surely if the Church is to buy a psychological tool it has to be one that deals with its Achilles Heel?  Is this too much of a can of worms? Perhaps this is indicative of a corporate shame that knows of the present collective indifference of the working class who over the centuries saw their altars stripped at the Reformation, watched the Wesleyian preachers booted out, the High Church slum priests imprisoned, and naively believed in the bishops and vicars who in 1914-1918 encouraged men and boys to go to the Front.  As the ranks of the clergy were confined to wealthy gentry (who heavily  taxed the rural poor) reform was slow to come. Some memories run deep.  

I was the first in my family to go to university and my imposter syndrome continues to flare up in church ministry from time to time. On the advice of my late Cockney grandad I learnt to become a bit of an actor, that is to be super posh when it suits. Yet the club-ability of the Church of England still confounds me on occasion with its unspoken rules, nods and winks, Trolloppian politics, clerical careerism, and some very eccentric forms of deference. One day I fear that my fake persona will be outed as that Devon vicar who still cannot handle a knife and fork properly and likes KFC too much to be in the club.

This glorious institution does so much good for the nation yet it needs to take a serious self examination of the many implicit obstacles it still puts before those who are not social class A or B? The dream would be to see the centre of gravity of the Church move to what the Pope called a poor Church for the poor. We are after all a religion founded by a carpenter and fishermen. Ironically, I suspect such a project would probably end up lost in the mire of a working party as parodied by Python’s Judaean  People’s Front.  The worst possible brainstorming outcome would be dumbing things down in say the hotspots of social deprivation - as if what ordinary people ache for is less spirituality rather than more.  

Following on from this the other aspect that cautions me to unconscious bias is its need for the “expert” to tell us truths that clearly we are not clever enough to figure out ourselves. Again, this is so bourgeois. Having largely abandoned religion the intelligentsia have a propensity to rush to experts and gurus to sell us the all encompassing fix to a problem we did not know we had. Is Sigmund Freud the father of psychotherapy in this category? Strikingly he has convinced us without real evidence that there is something in us called the unconscious mind which needs an expert to analyse or correct its biases. 

I would rather have a soul than an unconscious. Maybe denying the unconscious makes me a psychological Flat Earther but Freud’s animalistic phantasm of a chaotic mental subterranean landscape seems so at odds with the magnificent Christian cosmology. When I step into a cathedral I do not see any evidence that its Medieval architects envisaged humans were nothing less that creatures made in the Divine image, beings of light straddling heaven and earth. It is this near angelic view of humanity which has surely inspired the best in us and seeded civilisation building.  Freud’s materialistic and atheistic take advances a dog-eat-dog existence where every man, woman and child is neurotic, oppressed or repressed and given half the chance would slit the throats of their neighbour who we seethe in our jealousy as enjoying more privilege. 

From Augustine’s Confessions to C S Lewis’ Screwtape Letters the Church has more than plenty in its treasure trove of twenty centuries of spiritual insight to be confident about.  A renewed push grasping of these transcendent truths rather than the latest secular fad would lift us up rather than put us down in already gloomy times. But then, perhaps that’s my unconscious bias?