Holy Week is the most important part of the year for many Christians, but it will come as little surprise that some members of the Church of England appear to be focusing on racial justice rather than Jesus.

‘I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn,’ the Venerable Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, archdeacon of Liverpool, wrote on Twitter. ‘It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender. So yes, let’s have anti-whiteness, & let’s smash the patriarchy. That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression.’

Miranda Thelfall-Holmes is a name for a trendy vicar that a comedy show would strike out for being too obvious

This wisdom was revealed to her from a secular Sinai – a ‘Racial Justice Conference’ in the slightly less epic setting of Birmingham – whose promo bumf included the exciting attraction that it would ‘encourage white participants to take next steps in facing their own whiteness’.

Let’s get the obvious cracks over first. Miranda Thelfall-Holmes (who is, of course, white by the way) is a name for a trendy vicar that any decent editor on a comedy show would immediately strike out for being too obvious. But reality has a habit of being crude and stereotyped in this way. Why stop there? The Rev Candida Piddlington-Smythe. The Most Reverend Fruitella Hockeystick-Jones.

Thelfall-Holmes’s pronouncement is so desperately small and banal. Anybody who has worked in, or with, an institutional body or big corporate organisation in the last ten years will recognise the signs of ‘I’ve been on a DEI (Diversity, equity, and inclusion) course’-ism – the shining eyes and the slightly over perspiring glow of the new convert. When challenged on her tweeted proclamation – it went down like a cup of cold sick in a communion chalice, unsurprisingly – the Ven. MT-H was quick to reassure her detractors that they just didn’t understand:

‘I was contributing to a debate about world views, in which ‘whiteness’ does not refer to skin colour per se, but to a way of viewing the world where being white is seen as ‘normal’ and everything else is considered different or lesser.’

Another vicar asked, with marvellous understatement, ‘Slightly confused by this, so being born white is wrong?’ MT-H had to unpack it a bit: ‘No, that was my exact point! Seek out the training.’ ‘Seek out the training’ must be, I think, a new translation from the Book of Proverbs 19:20: ‘Listen to advice and accept instruction, that you may gain wisdom in the future.’ For lo, ye shall eat abundantly of the Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Anti-Whiteness.

Far be it from me to advise the holy, but I would have thought the Bible – the ancient wisdom of the creator of all things, with its conclusive message of redemption for all – might be a better steer for the clergy than a lot of tenuous claptrap knocked up by some loopy Californian-types.

Threlfall-Holmes is just another terrible mediocrity. And, yes, there will always be such cut and paste, click and drag people about in big institutions, following whatever is high status and fashionable and feels important. That is the kind of person attracted to administration. The trick is to ensure that the ideas these tractable ninnies are out there parroting aren’t mad or dangerous ones.

Because yes, it is funny, but there’s a serious point here. We must confront two big questions: is racism a serious universal human flaw to which anyone, given the right conditions, can partake in? Or is it, rather, whatever is not socially acceptable to the elite class at any given moment?

The reality is that there is nothing clever about the archdeacon’s semantic hair-splitting; and there is nothing good to be gained from talk of ‘anti-whiteness’. Thelfall-Holmes says she wasn’t talking about skin colour. Fair enough. But couldn’t she use another word in its place? Or, better still, Thelfall-Holmes should think twice before attending another ‘conference on whiteness’.

Remember that campaign for kicking racism out of football? Time for something similar: Let’s kick racial thinking out of the Church of England, swiftly and firmly.