by Sebastian Milbank, The Critic
In 2019, the Church Commissioners discovered a horrifying secret — the historic endowment of the Church of England had been polluted by profits from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Emerging amidst parallel controversies over the death of George Floyd and historic links to slavery in British institutions, the scale of the Church’s response exploded to grand heights in the intervening years. A £100 million reparations fund was authorised, to be distributed to the communities still affected by the horrors of historic enslavement.
On the surface this might seem a bold and just response to a great evil. As St Ambrose said, when he had melted down the eucharistic chalice to ransom enslaved Christians, “The glory of the sacraments is the redemption of captives.” And as he also wrote, “The Church has gold, not to store up, but to lay out, and to spend on those who need.” Many decent and well-meaning people will see such phrases as “atonement for enduring evils” or “the legacy of racialised inequality” and take them at face value. Who could oppose such lofty aims, and who could dispute the need for repair and healing in response to as grave an evil as chattel slavery?
There is a unique British genius, well-honed in the Church of England, in putting a superficially plausible and moralistic face on the most absurd and foolish of notions. Anyone who has read the “Healing, Repair and Justice” report has received a masterclass in this dark English art. It is based on a faulty premise, inconsistent and self-serving logic, and recommends solutions that are ethically dubious, ideologically slanted and extraordinarily wasteful.