The Church of England is right to look honestly at its past. 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 Church Commissioners’ proposed £100 million programme of “healing, repair and justice”, asks us to accept much more than an honest historical reckoning. It asks us to move from association to guilt, from guilt to inheritance, and from inheritance to a present financial obligation. At every stage, the categories become less clear.
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.
The first confusion is financial. Queen Anne’s Bounty, a predecessor of the Church Commissioners, did hold South Sea Company shares. 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 are therefore entitled to ask whether Project Spire has converted a complicated historical connection into a polemically useful accusation.
This does not prove that Queen Anne’s Bounty had no morally troubling connections. It does show that “linked to slavery” and “profited from slavery” are not identical claims. When £100 million is to be committed on the strength of the latter, the distinction matters.
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 which 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.
Otherwise, 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 has controversially 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. What do we make of the fact that the Church of England ignores 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 Atlantic slavery. It destroys the 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 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 sixty years.
The compensation settlement required to secure emancipation was enormous. The money went to slave owners rather than 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.
Progressive history records Britain’s sin in permanent ink and erases its repentance in disappearing pencil.
We must not be blackmailed by these ideological revisionists, whose motivation looks too close to being hatred of Western Christianity to allow us to let it pass. We should have 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.
This is why Project Spire feels less like Christian repentance than 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 it is the opposite. It muddles shares with annuities, consequences with guilt, charity with restitution, and historical complexity with a racial indictment.
The Church 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 and not the sacredness and uniqueness of the human person.
The really diabolical trick that Project Spire plays is that it carries within it a political judgement and perspective that is rooted in the progressive theory book of DEI/Wokery/Cultural Marxism 2.0. It actually intends the replacement of Christian personal responsibility with a redistribution of power relations from those it identifies as guilty of privilege to its oppressed identitarian minorities who are not.
It was exactly 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 only in order to benefit the disconnected descendants of one particular culture only. And, as it happens, it is an almost perfect example of anti-white reverse racism.
This ethical movement has 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’s time we defended our faith and a truer reading of our actual history.