‘The Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice’: a discussion
by John Root, Psephizo:
By a macabre coincidence the Church of England is simultaneously engaged in debates about safeguarding and the victims of abuse, and responses to its involvement in slavery in the Caribbean. Both issues raise two questions: how are we to make some assessment of the damage done under the aegis of the Church of England, and of what might constitute an adequate response to the evils we have been guilty of. Inevitably over both issues there are questions of how do we estimate the seriousness of the evils involved, within the wider context of the evils that humans constantly inflict on each other; and how can we possibly shape an adequate reparations for past evils that have enduring present consequences.
Here I limit myself to the discussion of the Church of England’s response to our involvement in slavery.
1. How much damage was done?
As regards the direct damage, it is reckoned that the money that the Church invested led to the transportation of 34,000 enslaved Africans. That is only a very small slice (roughly 0.25%, or 1 in 400) of the estimated 12.5 million Africans transported. But it indicates that the Church of England willingly subscribed to the heinous trade, that for well over a century it didn’t use its authority in the nation to oppose or condemn it, and that in the Caribbean the Church of England was an uncritical pillar of the slave owning establishments ot the various islands. It is arguable, then, that the Church was guilty not only actively but, perhaps more seriously, passively guilty for the occurrence of this evil.
This damage was directly physical—the number of people who died during the appalling conditions of the Middle Passage, the brutality and wanton rape and torture that slave-holders were capable of, the unrelenting and unrewarded centuries of harsh labour. But more seriously, and underlying Bishop Rosemarie Mallet’s reference to the ‘enduring evils’ of slavery, is its impact on the psychology and cultural, linguistic and religious heritage of the victims, compacted by the racial arrogance of their oppressors. The slavery that the Church of England was partially involved in and was broadly implicated by was of special character, not only was it exceptionally brutal but it was distinguished—unlike most historical examples of slavery—as being demarcated entirely by race.
Once this is established, a number of surrounding arguments become irrelevant. It is no defence to argue for the historical ubiquity of slavery, nor that (contrary to some ahistorical notions of the slaves being ‘kidnapped’) they were very largely sold as slaves by fellow Africans. This was a crime against humanity committed by the British, and only rarely was a Christian moral conscience raised against it. Conversely debate over the role of slavery in Britain’s economic take off in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (which this Report gets involved in) are irrelevant. Regardless of disputed economic outcomes, the slave trade and enslavement were appalling moral evils. (By contrast, the Holocaust was most probably economically and militarily damaging to Germany).
NB: see the Additional Note below for evidence of whether the Church of England did indeed profit from this investment in the slave trade.
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