The Church of England’s reparations plan is un-Christian
by Niall Gooch, UnHerd:
Once again, reparations for slavery are in the news, with the Church of England stating its desire to create a £1 billion fund for the purpose.
The typical discourse around these kind of proposals is endlessly frustrating. For example, it is often stated explicitly or assumed implicitly that British national prosperity was “built on slavery”. This is flatly untrue: Britain was a wealthy country well before the transatlantic slave trade and continued to be one long after we had entirely banned slavery throughout the Empire, at no small cost to ourselves. Even at its height, slavery was a relatively small component of the British economy. The economic power that underpinned our time as global hegemon was largely the result not of dark deeds or plunder, but of our innovative, free and dynamic economy and political stability.
When the proposals come from the C of E, there is an added source of frustration, which is that there often seems to be very little specifically Christian reflection on how believers might think through matters of racial reconciliation. With slavery reparations, as with other matters, there is a distinct whiff of the Church leaping on board a passing secular bandwagon in the search for relevance and respectability.
Similarly, it was reported that something called the West Midlands Regional Racial Justice Initiative — a Church initiative — was seeking an Anti-Racism Practice Office (Deconstructing Whiteness). The idea that there exists some dark socio-political force called “whiteness”, which must be “deconstructed” to achieve racial justice, is for all intents and purposes a conspiracy theory. Defenders of the idea insist that hostility to whiteness does not mean hostility to Europeans, but instead against the forces of patriarchy, racial discrimination and unjust authority.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
