Most Anglicans do not support the Church of England’s plan to allocate funds to slavery reparations. A new poll of Anglican churchgoers reveals that:

• 81% expect the Church to support local parishes rather than use financial resources on reparations,
• 64% believe it is “not the role of the Church Commissioners, using funds in their care, to atone for previous injustice such as slavery”, and
• 61% would switch their giving to alternative charities, if the Church proceeds with its policy.

The background story is this. In November 2022 the Church Commissioners for England, a charity which administers a fund to support the Church of England, made a commitment to make reparation for its involvement in transatlantic slavery, via ‘Project Spire’, to the tune of £100 million. This commitment was made in response to historical research that appeared to show that the Queen Anne’s Bounty, an 18th century forerunner of the Commissioners’ endowment devoted to supplementing the income of poorer clergy, had “links” with African chattel enslavement, mainly through investments in the South Sea Company.

Without any further or wider deliberation, the Commissioners set up an ‘Oversight Group’ to work out how reparation should be made. When the group presented its 41 recommendations, the Commissioners—who included both the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the present Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell— endorsed them fully.

Then the trouble began. After examining the historical evidence, the emeritus professor of international banking at Southampton University and author of a book on the South Sea Company, Richard Dale, concluded that the Commissioners had misinterpreted it. Their statement that “a significant portion of the Bounty’s income during the 18th century was derived from sources that may be linked to transatlantic slavery, principally interest and dividends on South Sea Company annuities”, he judged “misleading on several fronts”. As he explained,

• “First, no investor in the South Sea Company benefited financially from the slave trade, since it was consistently loss-making.
• Second, the Church Bounty did not even stand to benefit from the trade, because it declined to buy shares in the Company.
• Third, the investments that it did make, in South Sea annuities, represented, at one remove, claims on the Government which had no connection with the trade in slaves”.

Next, when I, a former holder of the Anglican world’s premier professorship in Christian ethics at Oxford University, went hunting for the Commissioners’ ethical justification of Project Spire, I discovered there was none. The thorny ethical questions about what present generations are obliged to do about the not-uncommon sins of some of their ancestors two centuries ago had not even been raised, no matter answered.

Read it all at The Biggar Picture