Church of England leaders are planning to use their considerable financial clout to try and bring an end to what they view as an “excessive” bonus culture still prevalent in many large companies. The Church has instructed its fund managers – professionals in dozens of finance firms who double as caretakers for an estimated £8bn of Anglican investments – to vote against any corporate bonus policies that award bosses more than 100% of their base salaries.

Under the stewardship of new Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the Church has taken the view that excessive pay acts against the greater good of society in two, complementary ways: by making it harder for people to see themselves as equal before God when their “real world” experience tells them differently, and by suggesting to the poorly paid that they are “worthless in God’s eyes because they feel worthless in the eyes of the world”.

The Church spoke out against bonus culture in 2009 – one year after the watershed of the financial crisis – when it also described the mis-selling of financial products as a “profoundly moral issue”. In 2011, it made a general commitment not to support pay schemes with bonuses in excess of four times the salary.

That stance has now hardened. As well as reducing its tolerance of bonuses from 400% to 100%, the Church wants bonuses to be awarded not as a matter of course – or even an expected, additional payment – but by using some “reasonable calculus linking higher rewards to greater contribution, skills and responsibility and that those who are lower paid are also rewarded fairly”. Those calculations would also take into account “ethical business conduct … respect for human rights and cooperation with those seeking to create the right conditions for a just society … and environmental sustainability”. Finally, the Church advocates transparency in bonus policies, and the opportunity for “true” bonuses to be available to all workers.

For a body that has come under sustained attack in recent years for being behind the times and irrelevant to today’s society, the Church has now become one of the few voices to accurately articulate the thoughts of a great deal of people on the general direction of pay, business, society and inequality, and appears to be putting its money where its mouth is. The Church’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG) is playing an increasing role at the centre of its activities, and it would be no surprise if many other investors now followed its lead.