by Bijan Omrani, spiked
The church’s endless self-flagellation over imagined historical sins is fuelling division, not healing it.
Who remembers Beilby Porteus? He doesn’t quite win the competition for Church of England cleric with the silliest name in history – the reverend Nutcombe Nutcombe, 19th-century chancellor of Exeter Cathedral, easily walks away with that prize. But Porteus was certainly one of the Church of England’s most outstanding campaigners for the abolition of slavery and, what we might call today, racial justice.
From the pulpit of St Mary-Le-Bow in 1783, he gave a seminal sermon. It condemned the inhumane treatment of slaves in the Caribbean, and in particular those on the Codrington Plantations – then owned by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, a Church of England body. Despite this fulminating critique of his own church, in 1787, Porteus was appointed as Bishop of London and thus also to the House of Lords, a position he used tirelessly to support William Wilberforce’s campaign to extirpate the slave trade. He was also committed to improving the lot of the poor, and making sure that as many people around the world had access to the Bible in their own languages.
Unfortunately, it seems that the Diocese of London has forgotten what it itself did to fight slavery. It is now engaged in a ‘Racial Justice Priority’ project. Clergy will be encouraged to promote ‘anti-racism in sermons’ in order to correct what the diocese claims is its own ‘systemic racism’. The project will also engage in ‘truth-telling’ to challenge the ‘historical heritage of slavery’, which, the Church of England seems to believe, haunts its every move. The cost of this project is £730,000 over three years, funded by the Church Commissioners – whose money, it is worth pointing out, was originally laid down for the support of poor clergy and cathedrals.