Institutionalised

When the Archbishop of York was just beginning his episcopal career, he came to St Stephen's House for our Founder's Day and virtually had to be shown how to wear a mitre by the sacristans. It was his very first appointment after his unexpected elevation to the position of Bishop of Reading subsequent to the atrocious mess over the non-appointment of Jeffrey John, and his complete lack of preparation for the role into which he had been propelled was refreshing in a bishop. He had not, like Cosmo Lang waiting to become Archbishop of Canterbury, been practising his episcopal signature long before. He spent several years writing little books on prayer and that sort of thing. Now, as we know, he feels he needs a 'Chief of Staff' on a salary of £90K p/a. The pay is, the Archbishop's office stresses, on a par with that of equivalent positions in the charity sector, and I'm sure this is true; the bigger question is whether one is needed when previous Archbishops have survived without. The much-ridiculed job description, which sounds a bit like the slave who was deputed to stand in the chariot of a Roman general at his Triumph to whisper in his ear 'remember, thou art but mortal', doesn't give a clue what this functionary will actually do to earn that salary. Presumably the Archbishop already has a PA and the Diocese of York has HR support and a diocesan secretary; it's hard to see what else a Christian organisation needs. 

The Church of England draws its standards and expectations from the secular world in just the way we know it shouldn't, but always has. Stephen Cottrell the vicar of St Wilfrid's Chichester in 1988 might have boggled at what Stephen Cottrell the Archbishop of York in 2021 thinks is unexceptionable: but over the intervening years he has become part of an institution with its own momentum, its own norms and models, which use the highly-wrought language of religion but which are structurally no different from those of an indifferent and, truth be told, slightly old-fashioned commercial enterprise. 

I might well have followed the same progress were it me. The sad truth is that we all tell ourselves we're individuals, and that we, if no one else, will resist the norms of the organisations we find ourselves part of; but we don't. For the most part we're all sucked in, assimilated, absorb the attitudes and outlooks of those around us. 

There are a lot of illustrations of this lately. The recent Government-sponsored report on Racial and Ethnic Disparities provided one: its definition of 'institutional racism' was very strange, and as far as I remember reversed completely the one I was used to. I thought that 'institutional racism' - going back to the MacPherson report in 1999 - was a way of describing the unequal outcomes which remain even when explicit discrimination is removed from laws and rules, and when nobody explicitly intends discriminatory results. Of course if you define institutional racism as explicit discrimination, you're unlikely to find it, because that's against the law. The conclusion was naive if nothing else. 

The dreadful speechifying at the anti-Policing Bill demo I attended on Easter Day was the usual sort of stuff you expect at student demonstrations and not very different from the fare served up at Oxford in the 1980s. I looked across at the few police officers monitoring what we doing and thought their main concern was almost certainly getting home on time rather than oppressing minorities. But the point is that the best of us, the kindest and most public-spirited and most generous-minded, are subtly beaten by the institutions we belong to into the shape they are accustomed to, however much we flatter ourselves we won't be. I represent an institution that's been around for two thousand years, and it has done great good and great evil, so I know. Institutions require rules and law to bind us to the better angels of our nature, and without them the world, the flesh and the Devil take over: and don't forget it.