Racial Justice Sunday 2026
[At 11am today], the Cathedral will be hosting our Diocese’s main service for Racial Justice Sunday; and on March 1st, the Bishop of Lewes will be presiding at the launch of our new Diocesan Racial Justice Toolkit. Some time ago, I was asked to contribute to this toolkit: which is a set of theological and liturgical resources—and I wrote a little piece that considers the Church’s work of racial justice by taking the event at Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles as a response to the trouble around the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis.
As you will recall, the Tower of Babel story is a story about human hubris. Earthlings decide to build their way to heaven—like Bellerophon riding the wingéd-horse Pegasus to Mount Olympus. And just as Zeus causes Bellerophon to fall, so God confounds the building project—and does so, specifically, by introducing linguistic diversity, thus disrupting their ability to communicate with one another, and so, cooperate with each other. Diversity, in this story, is a problem.
Come, the Holy Spirit on Pentecost after the Ascension of the Lord: people are gathered from various nations, and suddenly they find themselves able to speak in one another’s tongues, but not only that but also to understand everyone else. Notably, diversity is not obliterated: the people do not suddenly speak a common language, a lingua franca—they do not all become miraculously fluent in Latin or Greek, being the languages of imperial hegemony, or even in Hebrew, being the language of the Scriptures, or in some prelapsarian language, whatever it was that Adam and Eve spoke at the dawn of creation. No: Babel is not reversed—but it is redeemed, and diversity becomes a gift and not a curse.
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This way of thinking about the work of racial justice assumes a particular relationship between our history and our present moment. First, it assumes that our history requires some remedy, some rectification. Certainly, there is no nostalgic longing, not even for re-Babelian, Edenic, times. Nor is there an insistence on history’s irrelevance; that, over time, the problem has disappeared. And so, to those who yearn for a time before globalisation and demographic diversification, a time before denizens of our former Empire decided to repay the favour and follow colonialists home; [to this], we say no, not good enough. And to those who say that the work of racial justice is unnecessary and unwelcome work, a solution in search of a fictitious problem, we also say no—holy dissatisfaction with the world being a perpetual state of mind for Christians, our political theology being always and everywhere one of protest.
The second assumption is a principle of continuity between the past and the future. To say that the future should be different from the past is not to say that the past should be obliterated. Recall that redemption is not reversal. Rather, it builds on the past and present towards the future. This is why, for example, Christians are not all the same: the redemptive power of the God who saves us does so differently and to different effect for each of us, with our own individual histories and dispositions. So it is also with societies.
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It would be most convenient if our theology automatically delivered policy recommendations about how to redress historic atrocities and injustices, how to correct for prevailing prejudices. But it doesn’t. Political theology is not physics, from whose theories follow observable hypotheses logically and precisely. The Church can have no infallible position on such issues as reparations for slavery; affirmative action for minorities; the repatriation of artefacts; the removal of monuments. What we can and do have is a set of strong commitments, powerful principles—and we have a vision, albeit inchoate and incomplete, of how the world ought to be.
Our Pentecostal theology of racial justice imagines a world teeming with heterogenous voices in which all are participants in one another’s particularity. And so, it is not only antithetical to the cultural hegemony of the powerful or the many, but also to mutual indifference in one another’s affairs. Those gathered on Pentecost began to speak one another’s languages, and understood them as their own. This is mutual empathy and intimacy, inhabiting one another’s languages—and thus, cultures.
And as we have already explored, it is not just one another that a Christian theology of racial justice refuses to let us leave alone, but also our histories with one another. This is, not least, entailed by the Christian commitment to truth: to seeing the world and calling it as it is. And not only to see the world as it is, but also to work with and within it to birth a better, more just one.
Finally, one of the corollaries of Christian theology not directly offering policy proposals is that we have a high tolerance of error and failure. Ours is a religion of forgiveness, and more than that, of resurrection. The work of racial justice that we embark upon today may well be judged in the future as insufficient or wrong-headed or itself even inadvertently unjust. And when that happens, our task is to continue to try to figure out how it is that our Christian commitments would have us act, how it is that we are to try again to fulfil the promise of Pentecost.