“Have you stopped beating your wife?”

Some inquiries pretend to be yes or no questions, but are really traps. The one in the title is one such: replying either yes or no may lead to criminal prosecution.

“Are you a racist?” is slightly different because answering ‘no’ gets you in the clear. Yet, while this reply may be irreproachable legally or morally, it’s suspect intellectually.

The only proper response would be to answer that question with another: “How do you define racism?” If the answer is “believing that some races are innately superior to others”, then the negative reply to the original question is both moral and sound.

However, if your inquisitor says, “believing that there exist some racial differences beyond just skin pigmentation”, then any unbiased person has to admit to being a racist. I know I would.

Yet the Church of England bypasses such nit-picking in one bold move. The pupils at its primary schools are taught that all white people are racists because they live in perennially racist societies.

Since the tots wouldn’t relate to such scholarly terms as ‘critical race theory’, they are exposed to a visual teaching aid called a ‘pyramid of white supremacy’. In her excellent article, Catherine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet, describes it as poisonous, and one has to admire her restraint in not calling it something even worse. Words like ‘satanic’ and ‘evil’ pop into my mind more readily.

Going from the base to the tip, the pyramid starts with Indifference (“Politics doesn’t affect me”), then proceeds to Minimisation (“Not all white people are racists”), Veiled Racism (racist jokes, cultural appropriation), Discrimination (anti-immigration policies, racial profiling), Calls for Violence (KKK, burning crosses), Violence (lynching, hate crimes) and finally, sitting proudly at the top, Mass Murder.

Do you deny that your white skin gives you privileges? Have you ever uttered the entirety of the counting rhyme ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, moe’? Mimicked jive talk?

Well, then you are inexorably moving towards joining the Ku Klux Klan, burning a cross in front of your black neighbour’s house, then lynching him and eventually graduating to mass murder. And if you have no interest in politics or, God forbid, deny that all white people are racists, you are a lyncher and mass murderer in the making.

I presume that anyone reading this is an adult, a sensible one. Such people can dismiss that subversive pyramid out of hand and perhaps suggest its wielder shove it somewhere dark.

But primary school pupils (aged 7 to 11) don’t yet possess the critical faculties to dismiss the critical race theory for the evil bilge it is. They assume, writes Miss Pepinster, that everything they are taught is true, which may give their whole life what Americans call a bum steer.

Speaking of Americans, it’s hard not to notice a distinct Transatlantic slant to that geometrical construct. Let’s just say I haven’t met, nor even read about, many Britons joining the KKK, burning crosses and lynching.

It’s good to know that the C of E is acting in the ecumenical spirit encapsulated in Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek… for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” There is neither American nor British. True values are universal. That means, inter alia, that whatever perversions Americans come up with can be imported as they are, without changing a word.

“It staggers me,” writes Miss Pepinster, “that in British schools, this theory – completely unproven and highly controversial even in the United States – is being taught as fact.”

She then shows how contrary to Christian teaching that theory is, which strikes me as both true and redundant. Christians will regard this observation as self-evident, others as irrelevant. Indeed, one doesn’t have to go deeper into matters religious there than quoting St Paul’s commandment above and perhaps also those recorded by St Matthew.

The problem with teaching the critical race theory as fact, or at all, isn’t just that it contradicts Christianity, but that it contradicts history, logic and common sense – and does so for nefarious purposes. That ought to upset believer and atheist alike, anyone who doesn’t think children should be indoctrinated with pernicious lies.

The critical race theory is an intellectual heresy sharing its defining characteristics with heresies that are strictly religious. A heresy doesn’t necessarily preach something that is wrong. It simply assigns undue importance to one aspect at the expense of others, building a false theory on the basis of a single fact.

Thus, Arianism wasn’t wrong in insisting that Jesus was a man, nor was Docetism wrong in preaching he was God. Yet the former heresy denied Jesus’s divinity and the latter his physicality, which destroyed the balance later affirmed at Nicaea.

Keeping our feet firmly on the secular ground, all the things taught by the critical race theory have indeed happened in history. KKK marches, lynchings, cross-burnings, racial mass murder, the lot. Not so much in Britain, it has to be said, but let’s not wax parochial here.

However, building on the basis of that fact a comprehensive theory of history and human behaviour is an attempt to jump from the particular to the general, soaring over the necessary inductive steps in between. That is heresy at its most appalling.

Any school, and especially a church one, ought to tell children that both evil and good have permanent residence in man’s soul. Each person individually and any group collectively is free to choose one or the other. Sometimes they choose right, more often they choose wrong, and children must be taught how to tell the difference.

If they are properly taught, they’ll know that racial supremacism is wrong even if the term never comes up in discussion. But if that’s all they are taught about our civilisation, the only thing they’ll learn won’t be colour blindness. It will be hatred – perhaps not of other races, but of their parents, their neighbours and friends, of our whole civilisation.

That’s the point of the critical race theory. It’s not a scholarly hypothesis; it’s a recruitment drive. Its promulgators are seeking to conscript enough soldiers to create an army of fanatics ready to smash every tradition, every institution, every ideal going back to the pre-woke times.

That theory is a poisoned arrow in the quiver of modernity, but that receptacle holds other arrows as well. Whatever the declared aim of any modern secular heresy, be it Just Stop Oil, MeToo, BLM, LGBT or any such, they all have the same source, hatred, and the same target, Western civilisation.

“Drawing lines through our society and telling some children that they’ve been born on the wrong side, because of the colour of their skin, is wrong and must be resisted,” concludes Miss Pepinster.

She is right, of course. But I’m afraid a major cataclysm will have to occur before any such resistance can have a noticeable effect.