Project Spire is the name that has been given to the Church of England’s decision to put aside £100 million of its investments to be directed to
working with and for communities affected by historic transatlantic slavery, with the intention that it creates a lasting legacy. The £100 million, which will be built up over the nine-year period of the three triennia through to 2031, sits alongside the £3.6 billion indicative distributions that the Commissioners have articulated for the corresponding periods.
I commented on this last year, noting the lack of evidence, the racist assumptions behind the goals of the project and the way that this has been driven by ideology instead of Christian theology. For my troubles, I was identified in the Fifth Report of the Racial Justice Group as an “Anglican blogger” who puts out a “false narrative” that must be “suppressed” (p 23). Actually engaging with the issues raised might have been more productive!
In February, the think tank Policy Exchange published a more detailed critique by four people: politician Lord Tony Sewell, Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at Oxford, Charles Wide KC, a retired Old Bailey Judge, and Dr Alka Seghal-Cuthbert, Director of the race advocacy group Don’t Divide Us.
The executive summary offers a disturbing assessment of what Project Spire is doing and the way it has gone about it:
Collectively, these [papers] argue that the Church of England’s programme of reparations is problematic for two reasons:
(a) Firstly, it represents a departure by the Church Commissioners from their core duties, of which international reparatory justice is not one, however worthy or not it might be in the abstract; and a diversion of funds intended for the good of parishes to a purpose for which they were not intended.
(b) Secondly, that this specific act of reparatory justice is poorly justified, historically uninformed and overall inadvisable.
The reason for these claims is set out in the detailed problems with the Project’s approach:
It is contended that Project Spire is based on:
• insufficiently examined preconceptions and contentious moral and political theory,
• flawed, narrowly selective, anachronistic historical understanding,
• a defective process which:
- embedded activism rather than balance,
- paid insufficient regard to legal or ethical propriety, at the outset or later,
- lacked transparency, true accountability and breadth of reference,
- failed to address authoritative critique,
- failed to consider competing views about the principles of, and criteria for, reparation and failed to justify the project by reference to those principles and criteria,
- was/is racially discriminatory in formulation and outcome,
- failed to consider the risks of division and to the reputation and authority of the leadership of the Church in the eyes of its members and the wider public,
- breached Charity Commission guidance on decision-making,
- lacked due consideration of the legitimate prior claims on the money entrusted to the Commissioners – especially those of parishes, where preaching the Christian gospel and performing pastoral acts of charity most effectively take place and which should be the Commissioners’ highest priority.
These are serious charges; if they have any basis in truth, then it means that those working with the Commissioners fund are responsible for serious misuse of funds.
The first of the three essays, by Charles Wide, looks in detail at the process by which the project was developed and the response to subsequent questions. In some ways, this feels like an odd place to start — until you recognise how important due process is, especially in relation to decision-making in connection with substantial funds. Due process, including openness to questions, challenges and alternative points of view, is the way we guard against the abuse of power, and it is something which has been perceived to be lacking in the Church of England, leading to a serious erosion of trust.
Wide meticulously traces the process by which the fund was initiated, including the wider questions about race both within the church and in wider society. In general terms, Wide notes:
It can therefore be seen how ingrained are the presuppositions and particular political stances amongst the Church elite and the way in which
those presuppositions and stances are perpetuated and advanced by embedding activism in the Church’s processes. It can also be seen that, in terms of governance, there is substantial overlap between the institutional Church and the Church Commissioners (p 14).
Wide then goes on to explore the claims made in relation to the Queen Anne’s Bounty, and its involvement in the South Sea Company, which is the primary way in which it is claimed that the Commissioners’ assets ‘benefitted’ from slavery. He notes the detailed refutation of the claims of the Commissioners’ report by historians Robert Tombs and Lawrence Goldman, who comment:
However, while the connection of the Bounty with the slave trade was reprehensible and a proper cause of regret, it was certainly not the source of “a historic pool of capital”. The South Sea Company never made any profit from slave trading, and the Bounty did not derive any income from slave trading during the brief period when it held shares in the Company. On the contrary, its 1720 investment in shares made a disastrous loss, equal to 14% of its total portfolio.
There was and is therefore no “historic pool of capital” derived from slave trading from which reparations today could reasonably be paid.
But, says Wide, these challenges have simply not been engaged with.
The Board did not cause the research and its conclusions to be reviewed or subjected to any external critical scrutiny. Had it done so, the flaws,
which have since been revealed, would have become apparent. Nor did it conduct any wider consultation. Furthermore, it seems that the Board leapt straight to proposing reparations, without pausing to consider the competing theological and secular arguments relating to a fraught, contentious issue, about which sincere Christians disagree (p 18).
He then traces the failure to respond to questions and engage with critique, including the failure to give clear answers to questions asked in Synod. The most disturbing of these is the failure to address the question of the Commissioners’ charitable status, and the fact that the proposals are not legally allowable in the light of the Commissioners’ stated charitable aims. This has been important enough to have been raised in Parliament, by Katie Lam MP:
The funds that have been committed to projects via the Church of England’s reparations project are in fact for the upkeep of parish churches and the provision of salaries for the clergy. I know that the Second Church Estates Commissioner is dedicated to our parish churches and would not support anything unlawful, so will the hon. Lady please provide the grounds on which the Church Commissioners are authorised to allocate this money to aims for which it was not intended? What details can she share of the conversations that she has had with the Charity Commission to determine whether they can do this, as it seems to be unlawful?
The second essay in the paper is by Nigel Biggar, and explores the wider arguments about the need for reparation, in which he engages with the recent arguments from Michael Banner. He offers a robust assessment of the complexities in all of these debates:
History is replete with wrongs from which we now benefit. Little or nothing that we inherit is without historic taint. The present Church of England occupies cathedrals and churches seized by the state from Rome during the Reformation. Some of its present wealth was almost certainly squeezed out of overworked and under-rewarded medieval serfs and 19th century industrial workers.
So, the question of which past wrongs to address and how best to address them is a complicated one that needs a careful answer. Yet, nowhere have the Church Commissioners felt it necessary to give one (p 35).
In turn, he then explores the questions of African complicity in the slave trade, the nature of British slavery, the extent to which the British economy benefitted from slavery, the significance of abolition, the role of colonialism, and subsequent post-colonial developments. At one level, addressing these question can feel like cool detachment — but in fact Biggar is offering a response to the specific claims that have been made in support of the case for reparations.
Some of his most striking material comes in the assessment of the ‘credit’ side of the debate — the role of Britain in suppressing the slave trade, and the relation of missionary work to the elimination of slavery.
It is not true that slavery-suppression was simply a pretext for colonial expansion. While there were often multiple motives for that expansion, sincere humanitarian ones were certainly among them. The strength of abolitionist feeling in Britain in the early 1800s was so great that it did not relax after Parliament had been persuaded to abolish the slave trade and slavery within the British Empire; it went on to persuade the imperial government to adopt a permanent policy of trying to suppress both the trade and the institution worldwide. …
In addition to the diplomatic velvet glove, the British also deployed the naval hard fist. The Royal Navy deployed up to 13% of its total
manpower in the West Africa Station, in order to stop slave-trading with the Americas. …Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape… “estimate the economic cost to British metropolitan society of the anti-slave trade effort at roughly 1.8% of national income over 60 years from 1808 to 1867”. Although the comparisons are not exact, they do illuminate: in 2021 the UK spent 0.5% of GDP on international aid and just over 2% on national defence. Kaufmann and Pape conclude that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade (alone) in 1807-67 was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history” (p 43).
In May 2024, Justin Welby visited Zanzibar, and in a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral criticised missionaries for treating Africans as inferior, and claimed that “we must repent and look at what we did in Zanzibar”. Alexander Chula, who taught in Malawi for three years, commented:
I am curious to know who exactly the former Archbishop had in mind. [Anglican bishop John] Mackenzie’s successors gave everything they had to the region, and their graves litter Malawi, still venerated today. They committed to sharing the lives of local peoples and… approached their cultures with a curiosity and respect seldom matched by Western visitors today. The imputation that they treated Africans as inferior dishonours men who died precisely because they considered Africans as worthy of that sacrifice as anyone.
The final essay in the report is by Dr Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert, and she simply sets out how divisive is the kind of approach the Commissioners are taking to race and history.
Many people find it hard to speak freely, to question or to raise criticisms about demands made in the name of social justice. Often it is because they fear the consequences of being labelled as racist (p 53).
When the main message is that virtue and vice track skin colour rather than individual agency and intentionality, the results can only strengthen anti-democratic practices which divide us along lines of race. Worryingly, what we see in the calls for reparations today is not a call for justice to be applied, but the opposite. To accept the claims of the reparations lobby is to entrench the principle of injustice, or at least of partial justice. It is to entrench a vision of ourselves as fundamentally unequal and as such, represents a backwards step politically and morally (p 55).
John Root, who has long experience in leading and planting multi-ethic churches, is not uncritical of the tone of the report, but believes its key arguments are vital:
‘The Case Against Reparations: Why the Church Commissioners for England must think again’, by Charles Wide KC, the Revd Professor Lord Biggar and Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, is the first coherent and thorough push-back against the archiepiscopally inspired and Synod agreed ‘Project Spire’ to make reparatory payments to Caribbean or Caribbean-descended people for the evils of Britain’s importation and enslavement of African peoples in our Caribbean colonies.
We do need to find a better way to address these issues; this was the speech I wrote for the debate on race in Synod, but was not called to speak:
I am Associate Minister at a city centre church in a city which is highly ethnically mixed. Around the time of the Black Lives Matter movement, we realised that the ethnic mix of those ‘up front’ did not match the ethnic mix of those ‘in the pews’. We knew change had to happen. So we listened, we observed, and we encouraged.
We now have a very diverse group of leaders (you can check online); we have welcomed refugees and asylum seekers from Hong Kong, from Iran, from central America in particular. Our clergy team is white, black, Chinese and Chinese American. In our services on Sundays we often have readings in four languages. We have a Spanish-speaking pastor funded through central funds. Last Sunday the sermon wasn’t even in English!
We celebrate our diversity and unity in Christ and we stand against racism wherever we find it. But we did it without ‘deconstructing whiteness’. We did it without using the language of ‘GMH’. We did it without specifying quotas. Rather, we did it by being captured again by the biblical vision of diversity we find in Acts 13, in Rom 16, and of course particularly Rev 7.9 (all the answers are found in the book of Revelation).
Our current course is damaging, divisive and will not deliver. Lord Boating talked about theology; the theology we currently have in place is deeply damaging. The Formularies of the Church are claimed to be ‘inherently racist’. Taking the gospel to Africa is described as Afrophobic. This will not do — and it will not deliver what is needed.
The bishop of Dover is right: we need to take action, but we need to do it in a better way.
Finding a better way is now imperative for the Commissioners themselves. And it is deeply worrying that Synod and other bodies in the Church have not been able to ask effective questions about this.
In his introduction, Tony Sewell makes an urgent plea:
The Church of England’s leadership wished to find a way to turbocharge itself to the top of the race agenda. What better way than to offer an arbitrary figure like £100 million in reparations and link this to slavery. No one, from the Archbishop of Canterbury down, had the moral courage to stand up to the vagaries of the ‘diversity and inclusion’ propaganda. In many ways I have seen the way that activists have distorted the facts around transatlantic slavery to build careers, hustle grants and seek false compensation. This has been bolstered by universities, school curricula and diversity agendas. Similarly, the Church of England avoids the deeper reflection required and has dived into the river, desperate to be seen as an institution that has been baptised and cleansed from the sins of institutional racism.
Revd Dr Ian Paul is a theologian, author, speaker and academic consultant. He blogs at Psephizo, where this article first appeared.
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“Why the Church of England is Wrong to Give Away £100 Million as ‘Slavery Reparations’”
All excellent reasons. Two more are that:
1) They have no right to give away this money without the consent of the church members who fund the church by donations and volunteer labour.
2) They have no right to give away this money without the consent of the British Taxpayers who fund the Established Church of England.
Even if the CofE benefitted from the slave trade, I don’t understand why ‘reparations’ should be made in this way. Most of the countries at the Western end of the transatlantic slave route have higher standards of living than those that were at the Eastern end. None of the money given would go to actual slaves, or people whose grandparents were slaves. It seems like an indulgence, but if they feel they must give away their money, why not fund a project to stop slavery that is actually happening now in various parts of the world – that would benefit actual slaves. Or would that be regarded as ‘neocolonialism’?
Not commenting in order to avoid profanity and abuse.
Slavey was only abolished in Brazil in the 1880s. Are the Brazilian churches paying reparations?
When the Church of England was simply ‘English Shinto’ it was a modest, self-effacing affair in which no one had to assert their ‘diversity’, and the members of whose congregations were content with eternity in the form of an entry in a book of remembrance. No jarring joy. No restless peace.
While Revelation expresses a grander faith of an earlier age, that faith had become little more than an adjunct to social improvement by the end of the 19th century. After another century it has taken on the mantle of activism. Contrast this with the early centuries in the Roman Empire. There was no campaign against slavery, and no record of any objection to the Roman and Greek practice of disposing of unwanted new-borns. Nor any desire to proselytise outside the civilised world.
Diversity is specifically a form of 21st century sectarian governance. There is no biblical version of it. Paul told his converts that they were no longer Greek or Jew, neither were they male or female. One may quote Revelation 7.9 but this is preceded by the tribes of ancient Israel in primary position.
The identification of nations in this passage is necessary to keep the Israelites in their position of the elder brother. What is evident throughout the entire New Testament is this unresolved relationship between the two.
But Paul would never have had anything to do with the idea that there could be black or white Christians or churches. In writing to the ‘Romans’, Paul was really saying to the Jews in Rome (made clear in chapter 3) that he was arguing to take the Law to its logical conclusion, not abandon or replace it. When Paul tells his Greek and Roman converts that they had been darkness, that is, they had been indistinguishable from it as is the Spirit of Christmas Future in A Christmas Carol, he was advancing the original theology that a later religion would adopt as ‘the House of War’.
The Church of England is on a fool’s errand if it is ‘desperate to be cleansed of the sins of institutional racism’. The point of being ‘institutional’ is that this condition is permanent. The system of diversity requires not only fixed identities but also fixed relationships between the identity groups. In the Church it is a return to that sort of unresolved tension between the elder ‘Church’ (the ancient Israelites) and the new (the Greek and Roman converts).
And in the end that ancient tension was never resolved. Paul’s preaching only produced riots in the synagogues. In sending him away to preach to the Romans and Greeks, the Twelve acknowledged this. In preaching to the Jews, Peter could never have preached Paul’s theology, that is, what Peter said himself that he didn’t understand.
But in the end, there is only faith. If anyone is reliant on the ‘flesh’, as Paul put it, it only produces factionalism that is so evidently present in this human system of diversity. If anyone is expecting biology to be present in themselves, and be black or white, gay or straight, when being given the morning star, being made a pillar in the temple, having a new name written on them, being given the crown of life, having had all their tears wiped away, their faith is even more prosaic than that of the ‘English Shintoists’; as if the ‘diverse’ were satisfied with something very much less than to be made like Christ in Revelation 1.14-15.
So what percentage of being black can a person claim? And what if they identify as black?
Seems the Apology Industry is one of Britain’s few remaining export markets – Fraudulent bishops busy siphoning off a hundred million quid in fake conscience money.
Meanwhile in our local village signs proclaim “Save Our Church.” Charity begins at home.
You can see the simplistic thinking here.
1 Historically, Britain are always the bad guys.
2 Even though I had nothing to do with this, I feel very guilty about it.
3 I want to assuage my guilt and feel good about myself by agreeing to hand away someone else’s money.
One of the noticeable points made in the quotes is very serious. It says we have pastors from 4 ethnic groups and have readings in multiple languages. Does he realise that this is racism of the first order? Should he or his congregation worry that the Christian minister is from their ethnic group? Does he realise that he is encouraging lack of integration into British society? Does he need a Gazan (Jesus) to preach the Gospel, or are the rest us able to do this? He has managed to bring race into Christianity, along with slavery. Essentially both are “sins of the fathers” which is certainly not Christian doctrine!
Well said.
Maybe the church should revert to the use of Latin as the universal language of the church and then we can stop all this ethnic nonsense
Yeah, great idea, back to the Good Old Days of Burning Christians At The Stake for disagreeing with the Vatican, eh? Back to the Good Old Days of Lords & Serfs.
The reason the Maryolaters still want to force Latin upon church services and Bible translations is because NO ORDINARY PEOPLE UNDERSTAND IT, leaving them totally dependent on the Elite Priestly Caste to interpret the Bible and spoon-feed it to the people in whatever CORRUPT FORM THEY CHOOSE.
Just like the Russian Orthodox Church uses OLD SLAVONIC that NOBODY UNDERSTANDS.
Except for THE ELITE PRIESTLY CASTE.
Along the lines of What did the Romans ever do for us? Should we not be seeking payment from the former colonies for everything we did for them? This reparations lark works both ways
I concur with many of the comments already made, and would like to add a few more.
My wife is a churchwarden and we have had to raise large amounts of money to keep our church in decent condition – that is to say, weathertight, at the same time as hearing that the C of E is sending vast sums of money to compensate persons-unspecified for historic and unconfirmed deeds by way of a process that is highly suspect, and with specific aims yet to be confirmed. Frankly, it is a scandal and should be resisted at all levels within the church, and also by the public, for we, as a country and culture, are once again being taken for a ride.
To add to the specific comments about reciprocity already made, I would ask when the African community is going to start acknowledging, and paying compensation for, the terrible things they have done to each other over the centuries in relation to slavery. Hard statistics are not readily available, but by some estimates at least a third of all Africans captured inland by coastal slaving nations died en-route to the coastal slaving camps (also run by Africans).
Africans were enslaving and killing each other for many millenia before the British came along. African tribes became kingdoms, and kingdoms grew into empires, on the back of slavery. In fact, many historians believe that until the industrial revolution happened, slaves (or serfs and the like) were the main reason that nations could amass the wealth necessary to develop.
Slaves have been taken, traded, abused and exploited since the earliest days of so-called civilisation. Do we call out the ancient Sumarians, or Egyptioans for their exploitation of slaves to build their civilisatons? Is there a sign on the great pyramids stating that slave-labour was almost certainly an important part of the workforce that built those wonders of the world? Do we expect the descendents of the ancient Mediterranean naval powers to atone for the use of galley slaves in their thousands? Should the Italians be asked to compensate the descendents of the Gallic or British tribes who were enslaved and taken to Rome?
And how about the hundreds of thousands (even millions according to some estimates) of Europeans who were killed, captured and enslaved by North Africans during approximately the same period that the British were involved in the slave trade. African slaving ships were a constant threat in the English Channel and worked up to the Nordic countries as well as Iceland. They would attack ships and take the crews and passengers, and if these were in short supply they would go ashore and ransack villages and towns, taking all fit people as slaves, killing the rest.
We perhaps forget that in some years many hundreds of British ships were captured by African slavers. In fact, at one point in the mid-17th Century, fishermen working in the Channel petitioned the King to do something about the threat of these slaving vessels as it was seriously affecting their abilitiy to earn a living.
So what sort of conversations are we having with the African community about their own involvement in this vile trade?
I was somewhat stunned when I read a recent BBC article about a Nigerian woman-reporter who was complaining about the fuss kicked up over a tribute by a local church to an ancerstor of hers who sent a lot of money to the church: the money came from the proceeds of slaving – her family had been long-standing slavers and had amassed a great fortune. She objected on the grounds that it was wrong to apply current European standards to her forebears as they would have known no other standards other than those prevailing at the time.
She went on to state that it was in fact ridiculous for people in the West to even begin to judge Africans by European criteria, as on that basis “there would be no great or worthy Africans”!! The article finished with the somewhat extraordinary admission that the ancestor in question was not someone who had died a century or two ago – it was her great-grandfather who was slaving well into the 20th century. And the Nigerian church was a methodist establishment that had erected a monument only a year or two previously.
What more can one say? It is so obviously a case of ignorant, virtue-signalling, spineless and rather anonymous church-leaders pandering to the current malaise of DEI. So let’s see some reciprocity in all of this, and let the descendebt of African Slavers come forward with there own suggestions as to how they are going to both acknowledge and atone for their equally horrible past. That said, I am not going to hold my breath……………
working with and for communities affected by historic transatlantic slavery,
Is it just me but those affected by slavery all died decades ago?