Last week Dr John Sentamu was enthroned as Archbishop of York in the great Minster. I welcome Dr Sentamu heartily but sympathise with him because he will never escape the media tag "the first black archbishop".

But some of his recent protests suggest he is enjoying the clich. He complains that the Church of England is "institutionally racist". The phrase is paranoid and meaningless and its absurdity is nowhere better demonstrated than in the fact that the new Archbishop of York is a black man. If the church is so colour-prejudiced, how come he gets to sit on one of its highest thrones today?

But then Bishop Sentamu has sat in the best school for learning political correctness. He was a member of the Macpherson Enquiry which followed the murder of Stephen Lawrence. This is the inquiry which invented the ridiculous concepts "institutional racism" and "unconscious racism" and, when sceptics asked for a justification for these tendentious neologisms declared loftily: "We do not pretend to produce a definition which will carry all argument before it". In other words, we won't answer your awkward questions. Just like the secret police.

Worse, the MacPherson Enquiry went on to define a racist incident as "...any incident so described by the victim, or any other person". This too is meaningless of course, but it is the catch-all, you're-guilty-even-when-you're-innocent terminology of the gulag. If anything can be legitimately described as a racist incident - the nonsense our new Archbishop has put his name to - then when I ask you if you'd like a cup of tea, you can report me to the race relations authorities.

It is a bad omen when the Archbishop of York is seen to be giving his backing to the lying definitions of totalitarianism. I had hoped that his elevation to a position of high authority would make Dr Sentamu hesitate before he allowed his name and status to be abused by the gang of political opinion which operates coercion under the euphemism of "inclusivity".

On the race issue Dr Sentamu is quite wrong: it is black bishops who are currently wielding power and influence in the Church. It is black African bishops who have got under the skin of the "progressive" English hierarchy by objecting to their wholesale surrender to secular nostrums and political correctness regarding homosexuality. It was these secularising and modernising bishops and powerful apparatchiks in the General Synod who were delighted by John Sentamu's appointment - if not influential in it. It enabled them to say: "See, we've got a black Archbishop as well - and he's not a bigoted reactionary like those Africans causing all the trouble!".

Dr Sentamu is wrong about the mood of the country too. People are not obsessed, as he is, with worries over the colour of bishops and priests. I know from my experience as an urban vicar, head of RE in a multiracial school, a country parson and now a city rector that there is a great hunger for spiritual teaching. Secularisation has failed. But the hungry sheep look up and are not fed. Instead they see their new Archbishop as deeply preoccupied with social engineering as any member of Blair's Cabinet.

Help with the spiritual revival is what we need, not more obsessive social delusions - not another example of the kettle calling the pan black.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.