Archbishop Welby - £100m Compensation to Descendants of Black Slaves

The fund follows a Church Commissioners 2022 interim report looking into the origins of its investments. It found that the Queen Anne’s Bounty, a financial scheme established in the 18th century, was linked to transatlantic chattel slavery. 

The report’s writers found that the Queen Anne’s Bounty fund “invested significant amounts” of its funds in the South Sea Company, a firm founded in 1711 to refinance England’s national debt which was awarded the monopoly on Britain’s trade of enslaved people to the Spanish Americas." They estimate that the South Sea Company transported 34,000 slaves “in crowded, unsanitary, unsafe and inhumane conditions” during its 30 years of operation. A significant portion of the Bounty’s income during the 18th century was derived from sources that may be linked to transatlantic chattel slavery, principally interest and dividends on South Sea Company annuities and benefactions from wealthy individuals,”

Justin Welby, apologised for any historic ties to slavery: “I am deeply sorry for these links. It is now time to take action to address our shameful past. It’s hard to do this at a time when resources in many parishes are so stretched, but by acting rightly, we open ourselves to the blessing of God.”

The £100m will be spent ‘“investing for a better and fairer future for all, particularly for communities affected by historic slavery”, the Church said. An oversight group is also to be set up this year with “significant membership from communities impacted by historic slavery” to help shape and deliver a response to the report.

The Bishop of Manchester, the Right Reverend Dr David Walker, deputy chairman of the Church Commissioners, said he was also “deeply sorry” for the fund’s “shaming” historic links to the slave trade. He added: “We will seek to address past wrongs by investing in a better future, which we plan to do with the response plan announced today, including the £100 million funding commitment we are making. We hope this will create a lasting positive legacy, serving and enabling communities impacted by slavery.”

From an article by Gavin Ashenden in the Catholic Herald

Whatever the justification for this funding, it pays no attention to many other factors. Does no credit accrue for having freed the slaves?  It was the evangelicals in the Church of England who did so much to abolish slavery. Does this institutional self-deprivation have no financial implications to set alongside earlier profits? If not, why not?

Then there's the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. To pay for the ending of slavery, the government of the day borrowed £20 million to buy the freedom of those currently enslaved (multiply by 100 for today’s worth). This was a national loan that we funded by our taxes. In fact we only finished paying this off in 2015. 

It also ignores the historical fact that it was largely Africans selling other Africans into slavery that fed the unspeakably cruel slave trade in the first place. Why are they exempt from any moral or financial calculation if such calculations are being constructed?

The theological and philosophical questions are more interesting.

Slavery was ubiquitous. It has been practised throughout history. It persists today. In the arena of European history, something like 1.4 million white Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates from North Africa and sold into slavery there and in the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Why is there is no reciprocal call for compensation from the mosques of North Africa to the white European descendants of those victims of the African indigenous slave trade.

Why is the African-American context different?

There are two reasons. The first is that the wounds of slavery in American have not been healed and the UK has soaked up American culture, absorbing and digesting it in a way that our non-English speaking European neighbours have been free from. Partly through the power of social and public media, we are living a kind of proxy American cultural life here, with proxy American values.

The emotive power of American cultural preoccupations has reached these shores. The progressive political philosophy that drives American culture has two ingredients in particular that affect us. One is that the “victim” is always right; and secondly, the collective takes priority over the personal.

This collectivism is a derivation of Marxist preoccupations and ought to be resisted by Christian theologians rather than be adopted and affirmed. It must be of some note that in Jeremiah we find a trajectory of theological development that moves from replacing collective guilt to the responsibility of the individual. The people of the First Covenant were initially warned than the consequences of sin would flow down the generations. But subsequently Jeremiah (31.29) prophesied that “in those days they shall say no more: the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”. Collectivist identity and guilt down the generations was to be replaced by personal accountability before the living God. We don’t do generational guilt any more. It’s not part of our moral Christian code.

This is no small thing. It is one of the central defining differences between political utopian movements of the Left and Christianity. We abjure identity politics because they diminish and eradicate the value and the responsibility of the individual soul. We repudiate attributing guilt across the generations. To adopt a cultural movement that replaces the individual with the collective, capable of being applied inter-generationally, is a serious theological error, and will have dark political consequences.

Only by adopting this American ideology of victimhood steeped in collectivism do we find the rational to reconfigure not issues only personal guilt but re-formulate new economic liabilities that transcend the centuries without definition or limit.  

There is a Christian response to historic slavery. It is one rooted in the spiritual experience of moving from the slavery of sin to the intimacy of adoption in the Godhead. It is one nurtured by individual forgiveness. It has no direct economic cash evaluation. It cannot be expressed in monetary terms.

And what about the Catholic Church?

If the Archbishop of Canterbury has become so convinced that an American ideology of collectivism and victimhood should drive reparations the C of E has a moral imperative to put right, then Catholics are next in the queue.

The English state destroyed the Catholic monasteries and robbed them of their resources, while confiscating all their churches to turn them into centres of Protestantism.  It profited to the tune of £1.3 million pounds in the mid-16th Century. This would have an equivalent today of about £500 million.  

In the hope that Justin Welby’s conscience is not driven by racist criteria of victimhood only, but is willing to be even-handed in responding to the victimhood of whites as well as blacks, can Cardinal Nichols expect a cheque for £500 million? If we can’t have our monasteries back, we would like the ill-gotten proceeds of state robbery.

And while we are at it, the keys to our cathedrals too please.