The Church of England’s General Synod is sipping not so much communion wine as guzzling identity politics’ moonshine. Rather than telling perpetually aggrieved activists that Christ advocates forgiveness, Synod has decided to cough up a billion pounds in reparations for the Church’s historic profits from the transatlantic slave trade. At a time when church buildings need urgent repairs, vicars are paid on average a meagre £27,000 to shoulder colossal workloads and cathedrals are having to charge entry fees to stay open, the Church’s governing body has decided to part with an astonishing ten-figure sum. It is beyond belief.
Not only are reparations for historical crimes dubitable theologically and financially, they are also an injustice if applied only to one slave trade as is happening in this case. Part of acting justly, one must, ceteris paribus, apply a principle consistently. To make fair compensation for slavery, all who continue to profit from their predecessors’ income from any slave trade must now be liable to pay reparations. As slavery has been ubiquitous throughout human history, that means an eye-watering number of nations, institutions and individuals owe money. To calculate who should pay what and who should receive what is therefore impossible. If that is the case, no one ought therefore to pay and no one ought to be compensated.
It is not as if the UK is not already helping financially nations populated by slaves’ descendants. For example, the UK has provided £300 million for infrastructure projects in eight Caribbean countries. This fund is a recognition of the need to help Commonwealth allies; it is not an admission of guilt. The aim is to encourage these countries’ economic growth and reduce poverty. Money is made available but Caribbean people are the ones who do the work. They are not patronised as helpless victims of past crimes in need of handouts, but as intelligent people who know how best to use the money given.
If the C of E wants to do something Christian to sustain the unity of Britain’s ethnically varied society, it ought to be delivering messages and funding initiatives that bring people together, rather than dividing them by singling out white people as irredeemably and singularly guilty of slavery. Here is an idea.
Instead of focusing only on the British slave trade, why not focus on the reverse narrative which is that of Britain’s successful effort at suppressing the slave trade. Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the Church’s first black female bishop and curiously a recipient of an MBE, could remind Synod that Britain spent £20 million (in today’s money, £20 billion) buying African slaves within the British Empire their freedom. Yes, that money went to the slave owners, but how else was Britain meant to prise those slaves from their masters’ blood-soaked hands short of war? Added to this is the cost of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron which between 1807 and 1860 captured 1600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. Hudson-Wilkin could also lead prayers in Synod to thank God for the courage of the Navy and of the prominent Church of England members who were instrumental in campaigning successfully against the British slave trade, such as William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson. And if Synod still wants to splash the cash, why not fund a national memorial in Westminster Abbey to the estimated 1587 sailors of the West Africa Squadron who gave their lives in the struggle against the slave traders? Such a monument would do what the Church is supposed to do: draw people of all backgrounds together around the common good, rather than create a dividing line between black and white.
Tragically, none of this will happen as Synod and the prelacy are befuddled by the bootleg of race politics. The time has come for parishes to withhold donations from their diocese in protest, and elect Synod members who will focus on reversing the decline in Church membership rather than on the politics of critical race theory. Telling people of all ethnicities, including white people, about God’s equal love for them would be a good place to start.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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The time has come for the CofE’s active members i.e. regularly attending congregations (and probably those of other denominations also now in hock to woke) to boycott by withholding all their financial and even more valuable volunteering time. This ironically might actually help refocus on core functions once the redundancy notices go out to the numerous paid non-clergy hangers-on that most Parishes and particularly Cathedrals have these days.
Unfortunately, I cannot see this happening or some Heritage Charities would have already folded for similar reasons.
The people who give most, whether they can afford it or not, and willingly volunteer are simply too nice to make a fuss or challenge anything for fear of being seen as nasty (under whichever ‘ism that can be applied).
Well said. The time has passed when the Bible was in Latin and very few could read. Why do people need to clergy to interpret the Bible? Congregations should meet outside the church and teach this woke lot a lesson.
Or meet inside their church without clergy present, expulsions by church heavies or the Police seem unlikely – but today who knows…
Evidently, over the course of the 18th century, about 7,000,000 slaves were transported across the Atlantic from the coast of West Africa but, of course, they first had to be captured inland and transported–1400 a week, every week for 100 years–to the West African ports; and that end of the trade had to be as well organised and profitable as any other. But it couldn’t have been conducted by Europeans: the geography, climate. tropical disease and the power of African rulers made that so self-evidently impossible that it can’t be imagined that Europeans even attempted it. (See. e.g. David Olusoga, Black and British, Picador 2021, p. 49) That end of the trade could only have ben run by Africans themselves–Africans who refused to cooperate in British efforts to suppress the trade (Frederick Forbes, a successful anti-slave-trade captain “was well aware of the futility of attempting to cajole African monarchs to abandon the slave trade …”, same book p. 329). So if the descendants of slaves were due ‘reparations’, wouldn’t the modern West African states have to pay their share–pay it, perhaps, to well off black Americans amongst others? And perhaps Justin Welby might see if he has more success cajoling West African rulers than Frederick Forbes had in 1849.
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