A Magazine Edition +the Church Commissioners £100 million. # 104. 24/01/2023.
Out of Many, One People.
A Magazine, including the Church Commissioners £100 million.
Welcome. A different approach this week. A ‘Magazine edition’ nstead of one topic, with occasional add-ons, there are a variety of items, plus a longer piece about the Church Commissioners setting aside of £100 million in response to past investments in slavery.
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Trends in Global Christianity 1900-2050 is a video presentation to the World Council of Churches by Gina Zurlo of the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity, available on You Tube, and is a feast for fellow statistic nerds.
* over the entire period the proportion of professing Christians in the world stayed on a steady 30-35% line.
* in 1900 82% of Christians were found in the global north; in 2020 this was 33%.
* in 2020 global Christianity was represented by: Roman Catholics 49%, Pentecostals 13.5%, Eastern Orthodox 8.9%, Anglicans 3.8%, Baptists 3.4%, Other Orthodox, Lutherans & Reformed 2.6%, JWs 0.8%, Mormons 0.7%, ‘Hidden’ believers 0.2%.
* Christianity needs a 2% growth rate to keep level with world population – non-traditional churches growing by 13%; Pentecostals by 4%; Adventists, JWs, Mormons by 3-4%; ‘mainline’ churches by less than 2%, with Lutherans & Methodists very low; ‘hidden’ believers by 3.5%.
A reflection: How in the face of growing diversification and fragmentation do we sustain being a people united in faith and love?
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‘Celebrating Diversity in Christian Ritual: Honouring the Heritage of Minority Believers’ by Grace Milton (Grove booklets P169) raises some important case studies of the issues faced by converts from other faiths about both participating in rituals of their faith background, and how they might express elements of that background in their own rituals. Whilst sensitive to the vulnerability of converts entering institutions forged in a different culture, I think it undervalues the givenness entailed in a faith, leading to an over-suspicious picture of WMCs (white majority churches); too loose a use of the ‘God story’ with very little content spelled out, notably the centrality of the death and resurrection of Jesus; and therefore too great an inclination to personally customised rituals, which lose a sense of the church’s catholicity. To quote the literary critic Eric Auerbach: ‘we are to fit our own reality into its [the Bible’s] world, feel ourselves to be elements in its universal structure’ (quoted in Christopher Watkin’s newly published ‘Biblical Critical Theory’, which I am devouring with relish).
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The One People Commission have compiled a very full booklist of 60 resources relating to the inter-ethnic unity and mission of the church. Available through the Evangelical Alliance web-site.
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Richard Weston has contacted me about the vacancy for a Senior Pastor at Magdalen Road FIEC church in Oxford. They especially want someone to develop them as an intercultural church, reaching out to the ethnic minorities in their community. More details can be found on the church website, under Just Looking > Job Vacancies.
One ambition for this blog is for it to be a ‘Situations Vacant’ and ‘Situations Sought’ service for churches and people committed to developing multi-ethnic churches. So do contact me if you are a church or a minister to make known your need.
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You read it here first! Two weeks ago I suggested that the Pele/Bobby Moore 1970 World Cup encounter led to a harmful ‘physically strong black/cool level-headed white’ stereotype. Now an analysis of the Fifa 20 video game by two academics agrees, suggesting that the video games’ portrayal shows black players having greater physical attributes such as speed and strength with white players having superior technical and cognitive abilities. They conclude that ‘Fifa 20 is a site for potent experiential socialisation in racialised myths’.
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Three Cheers for the Church Commissioners.
By coincidence the news that the Church Commissioners of the Church of England were setting aside £100 million over nine years, acknowledging our historic role in the slave trade, popped up on my phone as I was watching the excellent Netflix film ‘Worth’, about the US Government’s programme to compensate those bereaved or injured through the 9/11 bombings. ‘How much is a human life worth?’ the film asked. By how much can you adequately and appropriately compensate someone who has lost a spouse or child in a disaster?
The question of how we should compensate those who are descended from people sold, shackled and held down by slavery is different. We are the perpetrators of the evil, rather than bystanders. The tides of several generations have swept over the event – who do you compensate? But the dilemma of how you attach a monetary figure to human grief and suffering is similar. More elusively how do you restore some sense of justice done? In situations of gross injustice, how can solidarity be meaningfully expressed?
On both the grand sweep of human history and in the small details of our personal histories there are wrongs that can never be righted. But how do you apportion blame? When are they so remote or insufficiently serious to be worth dwelling on? Are words or symbolic actions cheap evasions or the salutary cleaning of wounds? How much? To whom? And when is the slate clean?
The decision of the Church Commissioners to apply a precise financial sum to a situation that eludes clear parameters is inevitably controversial, and raises all these sorts of questions.
But overall, I want to congratulate them for a bold and principled policy for the following reasons:
Repairing a Wrong.
Britain’s involvement in both trading in slaves, and using them for around two centuries on plantations in the Caribbean was a crime against our fellow humans. It is true that enslavement, often extremely brutal, has been a long-standing and universal practice. Why become fixated on this instance? Partly because it was racialised, and so has an unusually enduring after-life. Partly because it had a very profitable outcome, and has left the perpetrators in a position to compensate. Particularly because it was carried out by a Christian nation who had (and belatedly discovered) a faith that should have made it abhorrent. That certain behaviour has become normalised never justifies it (a truth that the church today needs to apply to sexual ethics). To treat people made in the image of God with such inhumanity ought to have offended the consciences of the administrators of Queen Anne’s Bounty and prevented their investment in the South Sea Company.
That the Church of England today, and those of us who have been employed by it, have benefitted from such investments needs a proper act of recognition and repentance. The argument that setting aside £100 million pounds over nine years is something that a Covid-smitten and cash-strapped church cannot afford is not a moral argument. Archbishop Welby’s response that ‘by acting rightly we open ourselves to the blessing of God’ is a bracing affirmation of the priority of faithfulness.
Educating Ourselves.
Some of those involved in proposing the policy, such as the Bishop of Birmingham, have expressed themselves as shocked. That may indicate the way that, until recently, education about Britain’s involvement and profiteering from slavery, has not received adequate attention. Whilst it may not be a fashionable educational theory, we really do learn from pain. The cost of the policy ought to cause church people and the wider public to recognise the enormity of the evil that this country, with the church’s complicity, has been involved in. There are times when for our own good a costly response causes a change of heart and attitude.
What the Church Commissioners Fund can not address as directly is the downstream damage that slavery did through white people’s superior assessment of themselves, which as writers such as James Walvin have suggested, was augmented to provide some sort of justification for the master/slave relationship. The damaging consequences of that are very much alive in memories today, rather than being a few centuries ago. The discrimination, humiliation and racist abuse that met migrants from the Caribbean post 1948 have had lasting consequences in both economic and social disadvantage, and in the consequent sense of embitterment and alienation, right down to today’s newspaper report of Lewis Hamilton recounting his bitter childhood and schooling experiences.
The consequences of such evil cannot be wholly erased (though some people bear testimony to the healing power of God’s grace) but the necessary inner humbling of white attitudes, which outwardly the Church Commissioners proposals embody, is taken forward by such policies.
In this respect, proposals for a national monument expressing shame and apology for the slave trade and for chattel slavery need to be taken forward, either by the Church Commissioners’ policy, or separately. Failing a national response in the near future, the Church of England ought to be taking definite steps to create such a monument, ideally in Westminster Abbey.
Doing Good.
The Bible is in favour of it (Titus 2:7,14; 3:1 NIV). Even if the world uses the phrase with a sneer. Indemnifying the descendants of slaves today (as in some American proposals) is impracticable, arbitrary and, I would argue, demeaning. Some wrongs can’t be adequately righted. But the intention of indemnifying the Caribbean islands is clearly a containable project, morally justified, and offers copious opportunities for contributing to improved popular education, social projects and infrastructure. In my Blog on ‘Reparations, a Sighting Shot’ (# 75, 17/05/2022) I quote the social historian Orlando Patterson in 'The Sociology of Slavery': "Jamaica and the other West Indian islands are unique in world history in that they present one of the rare cases of a human society being artificially created for the satisfaction of one clearly defined goal: that of making money through the production of sugar". Just as we believe that a father is morally bound to take financial responsibility for his children, so the island societies of the Caribbean were sired by Britain and we have a responsibility to provide for them. It is right for the Church of England, which properly should be seen as some sort of moral exemplar, takes the lead in this.
It is harder to see why West Africa should also be included as a destination for funding. The West African peoples sold slaves to the slavers, albeit fellow Africans. To say that they were eventually disadvantaged by depopulation, political destabilisation and the damaging incursion of western arms or alcohol is their problem, for which they need no recompense. Even, at one extreme, there are black Americans who are arguing against the repatriation of the Benin bronzes on the grounds that they were produced from the wealth that Benin’s royalty unjustly acquired by selling their ancestors as slaves.
That the Commissioners money will be used well is partly but not entirely in their hands. But we should be thanking God for their faithfulness in making the proposal, and wisdom that positive outcomes might be maximised.
On this topic, you may be interested in a Gresham College lecture on ‘Slavery and the British Economy’ on Tuesday, 7 Feb 2023 - 18:00, by Professor Martin Daunton - Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, between 2004 and 2014. He is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge.
‘During debates over the abolition of slavery, supporters of the system claimed that it was vital to the British economy and that abolition would be disastrous. The abolitionists argued that slavery was immoral and that the economy would prosper in its absence. Just how important was slavery to British economic success? This question continues to resonate in modern debates over the historic role of slavery’s profits in the building of country estates or the endowments of charities’.
Available on-line via the Gresham College web-site, or later posted on You Tube.
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Also Lambeth Palace Library is hosting a free exhibition of items from its archives that have links to historic transatlantic chattel slavery, until 31st March.