by Gavin Ashenden, Christian Today
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.