Too Woke or Not Woke Enough? Racial Awareness in the Church of England

Abstract The Church of England has recently engaged again with issues of racism by setting up the Anti-Racism Taskforce in 2020, followed by the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice in 2021. Both groups stressed the lack of progress in tackling racism in the Church and the need to raise awareness of racial injustice at all levels. This paper reports on the measurement of racial awareness among 3,167 clergy and lay people who took part in the Church 2024 survey. Eight items in the survey were used to create the racial awareness scale. Results suggested a mixed picture with a majority awareness that racial inequality is an important issue that needs to be addressed, a majority rejection of the idea that there may be local or institutionally embedded racism and enthusiasm for diversifying leadership but not for taking specific actions relating to historic slavery. Multiple regression analysis showed racial awareness was shaped by a complex mixture of individual, contextual and religious factors.