The night before last, I awoke with a start and couldn’t go back to sleep. Had I drunk too much? Possibly, but that wasn’t the cause of my insomnia.
I was raging inwardly over the latest idiocy of the Church of England — the Church my father and several relatives have served as priests, and in which, despite all that has happened, I still worship.
An internal body described as an independent oversight group has recommended that the C of E should pay £1 billion in reparations to atone for its historic links to slavery. Previously the Church had pledged to stump up £100 million, which some thought pretty steep.
What are these historic links, you may ask? In the early 18th century, the Church of England profitably invested in the South Sea Company, which transported 34,000 slaves across the Atlantic over a 30-year period.
Cash-strapped
Slavery was an abominable evil, and one could certainly lose sleep contemplating man’s inhumanity to man, while marvelling that the Anglican Church of 300 years ago should have briefly been the beneficiary of such a wicked business. But this reflection was not what kept me awake.
I thought of the failing, cash-strapped Church of England, which has closed more than 400 churches in the past decade because it couldn’t afford to keep them open.
As I tossed and turned, I also thought of impoverished vicars, expected to survive on an average salary of around £30,000 a year, admittedly plus free accommodation — although these days that’s far more likely to be a utilitarian box than a gracious rectory.
I remembered the many poor people who, despite counting their pennies, give generously to the Church in the collection every week because that is what is asked of them.
And now it transpires that our weakened national Church, which can’t or won’t pay its priests a decent wage, and which has closed hundreds of churches, hopes miraculously to lay its hands on £1 billion to atone for the sins of people who lived three centuries ago.
Sins, moreover, that were visited on victims who are long dead and can no longer be helped in this world.
The idea of the oversight group is that the £1 billion could be partly raised from wealthy families and companies ashamed of their historic links to slavery. The Church Commissioners, who control assets worth some £10.3 billion in the form of land, buildings and investments, aren’t anxious to help.
I have two immediate questions. What kind of Church thinks that it is either sensible or moral to raise £1 billion by way of ‘reparations’ for ancient crimes when it is closing so many churches, and won’t pay a decent wage to its priests in the here and now?
My second question is: What will the £1 billion be spent on? The chair of the oversight group, Dr Rosemarie Mallett, Bishop of Croydon, didn’t enlighten us when interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s World At One on Monday. She spoke vaguely of ‘programmes based on justice, healing and repair’, which ‘can provide a legacy for a hopeful future’.
As for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, he resorted, as he often does, to bureaucratic language that serves to cloak meaning. He spoke about ‘transatlantic chattel enslavement’ and said that his ‘prayer is that this work will stimulate further visionary and practical co-created action’. What on earth was he going on about?
I doubt Dr Welby and Dr Mallett know what they will do with the money. This being the case, there must be a good chance that it will be wasted. What appears to matter is that the C of E will be seen to atone — although whether you can atone for someone else’s distant sins must be seriously questioned.
What a nonsense this is, and how sad. The Church of England is fixated on the past, which it can’t change, while it fails to grasp the real problems of plummeting congregations in an increasingly godless society.
The Church’s hierarchy has been largely secularised. Most of its bishops sound and act like Left-wing politicians. It is not so much their Left-wing views that worry me, though in the interests of balance it would be cheering to have the occasional Right-wing prelate, if any living specimen could be found.
No, what really appals me is the lack of holiness in so many of these people. God is hitched as a wagon to their dominant secular preoccupations. He is strictly secondary.
Dr Mallett is a representative of this breed. Born in Barbados, she came to England and in due course studied sociology. Her doctorate is in that discipline, not in theology. I don’t pretend to have studied many of her utterances, but those that I have suggest to me that she’d be at home in a Corbynista Labour Party.
Punishment
She believes racism is embedded in society, and rife in its institutions. Evidently the sins of our white ancestors — those of Arabs and Africans who took part in the slave trade are conveniently set aside — will always be held against us. Reparations are a form of punishment.
Almost unbelievably, Dr Mallett’s oversight group called for the C of E ‘to fully acknowledge and apologise. . . for its deliberate attempt to destroy diverse African religious belief systems’. In short, the Church of England should say sorry for preaching the Gospel.
I have no doubt Dr Mallett would welcome a current C of E advertisement in the West Midlands for an Anti-racism Practice Officer (salary £36,000, appreciably more than a vicar’s) whose duties will include ‘deconstructing whiteness’.
Someone who would certainly agree with Dr Mallett is David Olusoga, professor of public history at Manchester University, who followed her in the episode of World At One I’ve mentioned. He welcomed Dr Welby’s comment that ‘restorative justice’ would be ‘multi-generational’. That sounds like perpetual war.
Divisive
In a characteristically one-sided item, the BBC’s compliant Sarah Montague didn’t ask Professor Olusoga about abandoned churches or underpaid vicars. He was sure the Church could and would pay, though he didn’t think £1 billion should be the end of it. Recalling this hope of his in the small hours deprived me of more sleep.
The Church of England hierarchy has foolishly — I should say disastrously — bought into the eternal guilt and endless reparations demanded by the likes of Dr Mallett and Professor Olusoga, and endorsed by Dr Welby. No one at the top of the Church has the intellectual courage, or the will, to challenge them.
If there were any consistency, the Roman Catholic Church would have to pay vast reparations for killing hundreds of thousands of people during the Inquisition. The Pope might have to flog off the Sistine Chapel. Except that he won’t. The Catholic Church won’t allow itself to be torn apart over its past failings.
Not so our national Church. If only it would grasp that the case for slavery reparations is being made by people on the Left who want whites to live in a state of perpetual guilt, and to go on paying for what their distant forefathers did — literally for untold generations.
It is a piece of divisive secular ideology that doesn’t make sense. How tragic that the poor, weak, inward-looking Church of England should have whole-heartedly accepted it.