In April 2024 I took part in the assembly of the Global Christian Forum (GCF) in Accra, in Ghana. For those who don’t know anything about the GCF, it is a body which was originally sponsored by the World Council of Churches (WCC) as a way of inviting churches and Christian movements which could not or would not join the WCC to meet with people from WCC member churches. It is an ecumenical body, but not in any meaningful sense a council or even a formally representative body. It takes no decisions, and makes no recommendations. It is a place for personal encounter, and for telling stories of faith – giving testimony, in the terminology some would use. Radically different traditions meet together for a week. My table included a Reformed pastor from Pakistan, a Presbyterian minister from the US, an Orthodox layman from Albania, a Polish Catholic bishop, a Ghanaian Reformed minister, a Pentecostal pastor from Korea, and me. Conversation was awkward at first, but got warmer and more personal, and hearing each other’s stories was incredibly moving.
But in the middle of the week, we were all taken by coach for a day to Cape Coast, to visit what is called a ‘slave castle’. It is actually one of some forty forts, built along the West African coast, to protect settlers and traders and to oversee the slave trade. Cape Coast Castle (I presume the name comes from the castellation of the fort’s walls) is now a protected, UNESCO world heritage site. It was one of the larger and busier forts. Through its dungeons, over a century and a half, it’s reckoned that over a million human beings (one estimate is as many as three million) passed, before being taken on board slaver ships and crossing the Atlantic. The fort was restored by the colonial administration in the 1920s, and is now a museum. It is a bleak, awful place. Many captives died on the way there, and in its dungeons, let alone on the Atlantic crossing. One particularly shocking thing stood out for me. When, after independence, the authorities began serious research on the fort’s history, they analysed the floor of the dungeon, which you might expect was compacted mud. But in fact it was the dried-out detritus of human misery – faeces, blood, flesh, food. The role of faith was acutely figured by the fact that the chapel was right over the entrance to the dungeons. A chaplain would have said services there regularly. The liturgy would have been the Book of Common Prayer. Probably the Collect for ‘All Sorts and Conditions of Men’ was said there, above the very place where people were suffering and dying: “we commend to thy fatherly goodness all those who are in any ways afflicted or distressed, in mind, body, or estate; that it may please thee to comfort and relieve them according to their several necessities, giving them patience under their sufferings, and a happy issue out of all their afflictions”.
I find it difficult to think of another more deplorable example of Christian hypocrisy. Understanding what went on in that place, and in others like it, and in the transatlantic trade, is vital to understanding the experience and perspectives of people in the Caribbean, in the southern states of America, in parts of Africa, and by extension people who live in our own country who have family origins in those parts of the world. It’s like knowing about the Shoah in order to understand at least something of the conviction which motivates many Israelis today, or about the Nakba to understand Palestinian rage, or the Holodomor to understand just why Ukrainians are so hostile to Russian imperialism. But – some might say – what has all this to do with me? Sure, terrible things were done by people of faith – members and clergy of the Church of England – in the past, but I have had no hand in that. Actually, since most of my ancestors were, so far as we know, rural labourers, they didn’t have much of an ‘investment’ in the slave trade. Surely I can’t be held to account for what others did a good many generations ago?
And isn’t there something to be said on the other side, anyway? It was people of religion – not just Anglicans, but Quakers, Baptists, and others – who led the campaign to abolish the trade. Even accepting that an extraordinary sum of money was paid to compensate plantation owners when slavery itself in the colonies was abolished in 1833, from after the ending of the Atlantic trade in 1807 considerable resources were devoted by the Royal Navy and others to intercepting slave traders and to suppressing slavery wherever possible. There is a complicated, ambiguous story to tell around the growth of British colonies in Africa in the nineteenth century and action by the colonial authorities to end slavery. If it makes sense in this kind of argument to think in terms of a moral balance or weighing up, some would say there’s much to be said on both sides of the question. That’s why, I guess, the argument about the legacy of the slave trade, and the way we reckon with it, continues to be so controversial.
In the Church of England, the argument – at least for the time being – has shifted away from the question of memorials, to one specific matter – Project Spire. This is a £100 million fund being established by the Church Commissioners to help address the historic injustice of slavery and the slave trade. It is called an ‘impact investment fund’. To be clear, it is not as such for the payment of reparations – not at least if what is meant by that term is the payment of specific sums of money to individuals as a form of compensation for past wrongs. The ‘impact’ the Commissioners are seeking to address is the long-term effects of slavery and the slave trade on communities over time. They want to help to confront the cumulative, historic injustices which flowed from slavery in the past, and which have continued to shape the destinies of communities on both sides of the Atlantic up to the present. What injustices might those be? It’s difficult to know where to start to answer that question, simply because they are manifold. The trade involved the capture and forced migration of millions of people from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas, effectively driving them into oppression and enforced poverty, quite apart from the ‘collateral damage’ of the deaths of many others – naturally no one has any precise sense of the numbers – en route to the slave ports, in the ‘slave castles’ such as that at Cape Coast, and in the appallingly crowded conditions of the passage itself. The trade fundamentally reshaped the demography and social history of the Americas and the Caribbean, and eventually of Britain itself. Its consequences live on today in the impact of poverty across these regions, though of course I recognise many other factors are also involved.
Why is Project Spire controversial? One reason is that the Commissioners’ justification for the sum of money devoted to it leans quite heavily on research it commissioned into the source of funds held by Queen Anne’s Bounty, which was established in 1704 to increase where possible the income of poor clergy, but using Crown revenues which had originally come from pre-Reformation payments to Rome but were transferred to the Crown in the 1530s. Queen Anne’s Bounty was merged with the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1948 to form what we now know as the Church Commissioners. The commissioned research, which included work by professional historians (one of whom, Arthur Burns, was a friend who died tragically in 2023), concluded that, after its foundation, the fund had “had links with transatlantic chattel slavery”, had “invested significant amounts of its funds in the South Sea Company, a company that traded in enslaved people”, and had also “received numerous benefactions, many of which are likely to have come from individuals linked to, or who profited from, transatlantic chattel slavery and the plantation economy”. But a number of historians, including an eminent economic historian, have questioned the logic of this, on two grounds – first, that much of the Bounty funds were invested in a separate entity from the South Sea Company, namely South Sea Annuities, which did not have direct connections with the trade, and second, although they did invest a rather smaller sum with the South Sea Company, they made no money from it as it wasn’t profitable. Therefore, the argument runs, there is little evidence that Queen Anne’s Bounty actually profited from the slave trade. And furthermore, it’s said, the logic of the Church Commissioners’ argument for Project Spire accordingly collapses.
Well, so it may. It’s certainly important to get the evidence right. Since I’m not an economic historian, and haven’t seen the material on which these competing claims are based, I’m not in a position to judge for myself. But it seems to me that there’s an unhelpful sleight of hand in the widening out of the argument by many of those who go on to condemn Project Spire as a waste of money, a sort of misplaced ‘woke’ assuaging of conscience. Some things are absolutely clear. The leadership of the Church of England in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was largely silent on the whole question of slavery and the slave trade. Many influential laity were directly involved in the trade, and benefitted substantially from it. Some senior clergy even held shares in plantations. No one has questioned the fact that the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) owned plantations in the Caribbean into the nineteenth century, and branded their own slaves with the word ‘Society’ (it has established its own reparatory justice fund). Although Anglicans were involved in the campaign to end the slave trade, these abolitionists were a minority amongst prominent Anglicans, and wider opinion in the Church in favour of abolition took time to develop. The monuments to ‘West Indian’ investors and owners adorn our parish churches and cathedrals. Through the database – still being expanded – run by the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of Slavery at UCL, you can find details of the many thousands of British people who were beneficiaries of slavery one way or another – and many of them were Anglican. There were of course always outliers – people who regarded the trade with abhorrence. John Wesley was one. But overall it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Church of England for a century and a half was largely complicit in the widespread enslavement and exploitation of human beings.
And that is why I defend Project Spire. You might say that the sins of the past, partly atoned for in any case by the energy and expense with which slavery was suppressed wherever possible after its final abolition, cannot legitimately constrain the present. But we are a church that professes to believe in the communion of saints. We are happy to emphasize our continuity with the past in our buildings, spiritual traditions, great theologians, and so on. On our liturgical calendar we commemorate many figures from the past. A cynic might say that some want the benefits of our past, but not the costs. I’m not generally in favour of removing the memorials from our church walls, except perhaps in the most egregious instances. But that’s because these memorials, even when they commemorate people who benefitted from the trade, were put up by relatives who wanted the dead to be commemorated, and remembered by their families. They couldn’t, in Anglican understanding, pray for the dead; but they could remember them, and take comfort from that. So it seems to me a rather cruel thing to take them down. They commemorate sinners, but we’re all sinners. Leaving them up doesn’t indicate approval of some of the things the commemorated did. But it is important to recognise and grasp what they did, and to say clearly and publicly that we condemn those actions. And the Church as a whole saying that it acknowledges what happened in the past and wishes – in practical terms – to help atone for them is a powerful way of doing that.
And what on earth do those who have been calling for the abandonment of Project Spire think such a step would be saying to those of mixed racial heritage in our congregations, and to our fellow Anglicans in West Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas? How could anyone ever take the Church of England seriously on matters of racial justice again? Granted, even now there are some who think we don’t take it seriously anyway, and plenty who think we still haven’t done enough, but think how much worse it would be if, having unveiled Project Spire, we then stepped back from it! The naïveté of such an idea is breath-taking. So even if you’re uncertain about the moral argument – and I hope I’ve made it clear I’m not – the practical unravelling of Project Spire is inconceivable.
Ad fontes 