William Wilberforce and his fellow abolitionists, including the group known as “the Clapham Sect”, achieved something that seemed almost impossible: they ended Britain’s pernicious and lucrative transatlantic slave trade. With the energetic, valiant and self-sacrificial help of the Royal Navy, they enforced that abolition on the high seas. The economic cost alone was enormous. The courage required was substantial.
The present Archbishop of Canterbury, however, has gone on a tour of Africa during which she is undermining the reputation of the only people to do anything effective to end slavery. The Most Rev & Rt Hon Dame Sarah Mullally is weeping for guilt on behalf of people who bear none and promising money that she has no moral right to disburse – money that should be used to help shore up the collapsing ecclesial community for which she is responsible.
The real disaster, however, is that her political views obscure the inspiration of Jesus in the lives of reformers and throughout history, and immersing salvific heroism in a dark pool of undeserved guilt.
Slavery was a monstrous evil. Africans were captured, sold, transported and treated as property. Christians should neither minimise that horror nor excuse those who profited from it. But Project Spire – the Anglican Church’s reparative justice initiative in response to slavery – is a complete factual and ideological disaster.
The Church Commissioners’ £100 million programme of “healing, repair and justice” requires us to accept much more than an honest historical reckoning. It requires a movement from association to guilt, from guilt to inheritance and from inheritance to a present financial obligation. At every stage, the categories become more obscure and unreal.
The Commissioners say that the £100 million commitment will be made over nine years. The question is not simply whether the Church can afford it, but whether the moral case for describing it as reparative justice has actually been made. It has not.
The first confusion is financial. Queen Anne’s Bounty, a predecessor of the Church Commissioners, did hold shares in the South Sea Company which engaged in the slave trade. But it also held South Sea annuities. These were not simply further shares in the company’s trading business: they were government-backed debt instruments, paying interest on money lent to the state.
The Church’s research recognises this distinction, but its public moral argument repeatedly blurs it. The phrase “South Sea” is made to carry the whole emotional weight of slavery, although an annuity paying government interest is not the same thing as a dividend earned by transporting enslaved Africans.
Indeed, recent economic research describes Queen Anne’s Bounty as a conservative investor seeking liquid government debt. It suffered losses during the South Sea Bubble and subsequently avoided ordinary corporate equity and bonds.
Critics such as Nigel Biggar, Richard Dale and Katie Lam MP accuse Project Spire of converting a complicated historical connection into a polemically useful accusation that is not justified by the facts.
There is a deeper Christian problem. Project Spire depends upon a movement from the responsibility of identifiable people to the inherited responsibility of later generations. Christianity recognises that sin has consequences that spread through families, nations and institutions. But consequences are not the same as guilt.
The biblical phrase is found in Jeremiah and Ezekiel: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Both prophets challenge the proverb.
Jeremiah declares that each person who eats the sour grapes will have his own teeth set on edge; Ezekiel insists that the one who sins is the one who will die.
That is a decisive movement from hereditary culpability towards personal moral accountability. We may inherit a damaged world. We may have duties to repair injuries still continuing in the present. But we do not become personally guilty of an ancestor’s sin merely because we inherited his nationality, skin colour or institutional membership.
Complex questions to which there is no answer arise. How many generations does guilt travel? How is it divided among descendants of both victims and perpetrators? What happens when populations migrate, intermarry and inherit from many sides? At what point does historical causation become too dispersed to support a specific moral invoice?
The progressive account also reverses the moral balance of history. It does not merely say that Britain participated in slavery, which is true, as did almost every culture and country throughout history. It chooses insidiously to tell the story as though slavery were a peculiarly British or white invention and abolition an insignificant afterthought.
Slavery was close to universal. Africans enslaved other Africans and supplied captives to European traders. Islamic empires maintained extensive slave systems. Robert Davis of Ohio State University has estimated that between one million and 1.25 million European Christians were enslaved by the Barbary states between 1530 and 1780.
The precise figure is disputed, but the existence and scale of European enslavement are not. Why is there no demand for reparations from the descendants of the Barbary slavers? Why is there no recognition that Africans themselves captured their neighbours in battle or tribal raids and sold them to slave traders as the first step in the chain of historic abuse?
What do we make of the fact that the Church of England ignores all of this and, in its reflections on this complex moral issue, chooses only to place British and American culture in its crosshairs?
None of this excuses the execrable and inhuman Atlantic slave trade. The facts undermine and challenge the woke racial morality play in which one civilisation alone carries permanent guilt for a sin practised across the world.
Britain’s history is morally compromised, but it is also morally extraordinary. After participating heavily in the Atlantic slave trade, Britain turned against it. It abolished the trade, abolished slavery in most of its empire and then used the Royal Navy, diplomacy and economic pressure to suppress the trade internationally.
One major scholarly study estimated the overall economic cost of Britain’s anti-slave-trade campaign at about 1.8 per cent of national income annually over 60 years. The compensation settlement required to secure emancipation was enormous.
The money went to slave owners rather than to the enslaved – a painful fact from our perspective today – but the settlement was the political price of breaking the system and freeing some 800,000 people. Debts associated with the Slavery Abolition Act were subsequently consolidated with other government borrowing, some of which was not finally redeemed until 2015.
There is no recognition of the wider record of the Catholic Church on slavery. There was a wonderful and inspiring response from some medieval orders. The order most famously founded for the purpose of redeeming slaves was the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy – the Mercedarians.
Founded in Barcelona in 1218 by Peter Nolasco, its specific mission was to ransom Christians captured by Muslim raiders in North Africa and Spain. Members took a remarkable fourth vow, in addition to poverty, chastity and obedience: to offer themselves as hostages, if necessary, in exchange for Christian captives. Many Mercedarians literally gave themselves into slavery so that others could go free.
In 1839, Gregory XVI published the bull In Supremo Apostolatus, which condemned both the slave trade and slavery in language welcomed by abolitionists. It became one of the major papal texts cited against slavery. Leo XIII completed this papal trajectory. In In Plurimis of 1888 and Catholicae Ecclesiae of 1890, he praised abolition and described Christianity as the greatest historical force working for the eventual disappearance of slavery.
Project Spire has little to do with genuine Christian repentance and rather more to do with the adoption of an imported political theology. Its vocabulary of racial inheritance, collective guilt and reparative payment has been developed largely within American and Western European institutions. It has little popular traction across much of Africa, Asia or the Islamic world, where local histories of enslavement are rarely made the basis of comparable programmes.
The Church of England presents Project Spire as morally sophisticated and ethically responsible. But, disastrously and immorally, it is the opposite. It imposes the assumptions of a narrow progressive culture upon the Christian inheritance entrusted to it. It muddles shares with annuities, consequences with guilt, charity with restitution and historical complexity with a racial indictment.
Progressive history records Britain’s sin in permanent ink and erases its repentance in disappearing pencil. We should not be blackmailed by ideological revisionists whose motivation looks too close to hatred of Western Christianity for us to let it pass. We should cultivate the grasp of facts, the familiarity with history and the moral courage to refuse that inversion.
Repentance does not erase the past, but genuine repentance must count for something. Britain did not merely apologise for slavery: it spent blood and treasure suppressing it.
The Church of England today has a responsibility to offer a truthful history of its forebears and not to betray or traduce them against the evidence of history. It should tell the whole truth about slavery and give generously to those in need. But it should also attack the cause and not the symptoms. It should be courageous and indomitable in its conviction that only Christianity defends the liberty and integrity of human beings by recognising them as indelibly bearing God’s image.
Slavery is symptomatic of a society that understands legitimacy in terms of power relations rather than the sacredness and uniqueness of the human person. The trick that Project Spire plays is that it carries within it a political judgement and perspective rooted in the progressive theoretical framework of diversity, equity and inclusion, “wokery” and Cultural Marxism 2.0. It intends to replace Christian personal responsibility with a redistribution of power from those it identifies as guilty of privilege to supposedly oppressed identitarian minorities. It was precisely societies that recognised power as prior to compassion that practised slavery. It was the Christian insight into the sacredness of the human person that led to its abolition.
Reparations are not repentance. They are a way of imposing collective guilt and punishment on the disconnected descendants of one particular culture in order to benefit the disconnected descendants of another. And, as it happens, this is an almost perfect example of anti-white reverse racism.
This ethical movement is an emperor with no clothes. Worse than that, it wants to impose an anti-Christian ethic in the name of Christian responsibility. We have been blackmailed long enough by the devotees of collective wokery.
It is time we defended our Faith – and a truer reading of our actual history. It is up to members of the Church of England to protest against the waste of their own money. But we, as representatives of the rest of the Church, have a responsibility to call the present Anglican establishment to account for corrupting the historical record and defaming Christian witness and heroism.
(Photo: Nana Osei Adu-Boahene / Lambeth Palace)
