The Church of England’s first black clergyman, a Rev Bryan Mackey, was ordained in 1794. A contemporary newspaper notice of his being presented to “the valuable Rectory of Coates, Glouceſterſhire”, did not note his race, but characteristically thought it relevant to relate that he was “late of Braſen Noſe College” in Oxford.

Today’s Church of England is somewhat more conscious of race. There are now, for instance, two “lead bishops for the Church of England on racial justice”, a “Racial Justice Board”, and aa “Racial Justice Panel”, the product of recommendations from an “Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice”, which found that the church was “institutionally racist”.

But even the CoE may be suffering from racial justice fatigue. On Monday, the Church Commissioners quietly revealed that its central funding for “social and racial justice” was to be more than halved, from £26.7 million for the three years up to 2025 to £12 million for the next three years.

The joint racial justice lead bishops are not happy. The Right Rev Arun Arora and Rosemarie Mallett, respectively bishops of Kirkstall and Croydon, said they were “deeply concerned and troubled”, with Bishop Arora describing the cuts as “brutal”. Church House replied that the largesse of the previous years was always meant to be temporary.

Whether this latest round of retrenchment means that we are passing “peak woke” remains to be seen. For example, the CoE is still theoretically committed to building a £100m fund to atone for its endowment’s “historic links to transatlantic chattel slavery” (the historians Lawrence Goldman and Robert Tombs have convincingly demonstrated that this is based on bad history involving mixing up two types of eighteenth-century financial instruments).

Intriguing possibilities, however, offered by the contest to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury and ex officio head of the Anglican Communion, a race which unlike the election of the Pope is characterised by many longueurs.

As the Church of England and its sister Anglican churches in the “Global North” slowly bleed out members, Anglican churches in the “Global South”, particularly in Africa, have seen a huge amount of growth. But this growth is largely within Anglican churches which uphold traditional views on sexuality and other social issues, something which has led to serious rifts, and indeed to some “Global South” churches rejecting the Archbishop of Canterbury’s status as “first among equals”.

This time, out of the 17 members on the board which will select the next Archbishop of Canterbury, five will come from the Anglican Communion, one per continent. Although this still severely under-represents Africa, which accounts for two-thirds of all Anglicans, this raises the possibility of the next ABC being either from the Global South or being a relatively conservative bishop within the CoE chosen partially with the support of conservatives from the Global South.

Will the CoE’s management, or indeed its more liberal members, accept quietly a socially conservative archbishop of Canterbury from Nigeria? The tension may be unmanageable, particularly since the CoE is still subject to the control of Parliament (in 2023, a bill was introduced to allow it to conduct same-sex marriages, a proposal which if enacted would lead to an actual schism within the Anglican Communion). If racial justice also means taking seriously the views of conservative African Anglicans, some within the mother church may well lose their ardour for the project.

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Yuan Yi Zhu is an academic and writer.

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