The art of being Christian and antiChrist

When I was growing up, I learnt very little about Africa in school that was positive and even less about how my forebears and I came to be in the Caribbean, with family names such as John and Louison and Hinds and Honore.

What I did learn, however, was that those who brought my enslaved ancestors there from Africa toted two weapons, one in each hand, the musket and the Bible. That explained the proliferation of churches across the island and the symbiotic relationship between Christianity, chattel slavery and colonialism.

On March 4, 2024, the Church of England published the report of the Independent Oversight Group, which it commissioned to review its response to the investigation it had done on its links to transatlantic chattel slavery. Appointed by the Church Commissioners, the group was chaired by the Right Rev Dr Rosemarie Mallett, Bishop of Croydon, herself a descendant of enslaved Africans.

The report provoked predictable media interest, not least because the Oversight Group recommended that the Church increase the £100m investment fund it announced in January 2023 to a £1bn fund “for healing, repair and justice”. It further recommended that the Church:

• Speed up the timeline for delivery of the fund;

• Acknowledge and apologise for its historic denial that black Africans are created in the image of God, and for its “deliberate actions to destroy diverse African religious belief systems”.

When in 2023 the Church published the report of the research it had commissioned into its links with transatlantic chattel slavery, it acknowledged that it had benefited from its historical involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and that the £10bn endowment fund it now had at its disposal had its origins partly in a financial scheme established in 1704, based on transatlantic chattel slavery. The Church Commissioners made a £100m financial commitment to address the legacy of slavery.

As for the recommended £1bn investment fund, Gareth Mostyn, the chief executive of the Church Commissioners, is quoted as saying that £100m was the “appropriate financial commitment … at this stage”, while ensuring that they could honour existing commitments to parishes and other church activities. The commissioners would “at some point in the future consider whether to invest more”.

In order to get to the £1bn target, the group said the fund should aim to attract capital from the Church Commissioners; “other institutions once complicit in African chattel enslavement”; and contributors who, “outraged by injustice, wish to make common cause against racial inequality”. The fund will be black-led, and will invest in members of disadvantaged black communities.The fund “will aim to back the most brilliant social entrepreneurs, educators, healthcare givers, asset managers and historians. It will not pay cash compensation to individuals or provide grants to government bodies”.

DISBELIEF

The Church’s belated acknowledgement of the weight of its sin and the need “to understand the truth of our past, apologise for past wrongs, and seek to invest in a better future for us all”, and to see “the money we are committing (as) part of a journey of repentance and healing”, clearly angered some within the Church itself.

Dr Ian Paul, a member of the Archbishops’ Council, which coordinates the work of the Church, is reported as saying: “This report is quite extraordinary. It appears to be based on an essentially racist reading of history – that white people are all bad and the oppressors, and black people are nothing more than victims. This is insulting to both black and white. It is anti-Christian. Unbelievably, it calls on the Church to repent for having preached the gospel.

“African Christians, including the vast numbers of Anglicans in Africa, will be very angry to read that. The authors of the report appear to be completely ignorant of the Church’s own beliefs.

“It will imperil local ministry and mission. Why would ordinary churchgoers continue to give to their local church when it appears we have these vast sums to throw around? Whoever commissioned this report appears to have a death wish for the Church of England.”

A member of the General Synod, Prudence Daley, expressed disbelief that “the Church of England is effectively apologising for converting people to Christianity”.

If only ‘converting people to Christianity’ were the Church’s sole mission and purpose in African enslavement. This General Synod member is evidently ‘ignorant of the Church’s own beliefs’, beliefs and practices to which they gave rise, which made the Church the Antichrist in the experience of African communities on account of its barbarity and its dehumanisation of God’s people, created in the image of Mother/Father/Spirit God. It was always on hand, ready and willing to dispense divine absolution to enslavers and marauding murderers as they exterminated indigenous peoples and worked the enslaved to death.

VANTAGE POINT

What is noteworthy about the work of this Oversight Group is that it is essentially the work of descendants of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, seeing reparations from their British vantage point. The Church is focused mainly on past wrongs and on the need for repentance and healing. But as the veteran reparatory and climate justice campaigner Esther Stanford-Xosei has argued:

“Reparations basically have to be determined by victims, meaning affected communities, the descendants of enslaved people. And we don’t yet have a forum or a mechanism that can canvas the will or views of our people collectively to then make a determination as to what we want around reparatory justice.”

The idea, for example, that the £1bn investment fund should be put to generating more money and should not ‘provide grants to government bodies’ is peculiar, to say the least.

Even in this age of neoliberalism, elected government in the island states of the Caribbean are called upon to play a crucial role in guaranteeing the defence of the individual against invidious forces that do not necessarily respect the rights and entitlements of those who cannot fend for themselves, or who constitute the excluded in society. This crucial role is discharged particularly in the context of the provision of potable water, school places, healthcare, elderly social care, housing and shelter.Those islands have little capacity to sustain themselves in normal times, let alone as they are forever in imminent threat of devastation by hurricanes, tornadoes, sea surges and the like. So much so that many have taken to selling passports to rich Europeans, Chinese, Russians, Arabs and North Americans (often described as ‘ultra-high net worth individuals’) for as little as £50,000, in a hardly sustainable and highly problematic programme that they call ‘Citizenship by Investment’.

In return, those ‘investors’ are allowed to purchase huge expanses of land, often prohibiting locals from accessing beaches and forests; they are given diplomatic passports and other concessions that locals cannot dream of, and yet are required to show evidence of residing in the country for only five days in any five-year period.

NON-REPETITION

Esther Stanford Xosei notes: “Under international law, reparations is defined as five key principles, including restitution, rehabilitation, compensation, satisfaction and finally a guarantee of non-repetition.” She adds that the returning of land which the Church has owned and profited from for generations would be an obvious form of restitution and compensation.

And as for ‘non-repetition’, the Church has come lately to its commitment to racial justice. After decades of agitation by its black clergy and laity, it established an Antiracism Task Force which segued into the Racial Justice Unit and the Racial Justice Priority Group. In the spirit of non-repetition, one would hope that pursuing racial justice means disrupting the encrusted and exclusionary culture and practices of the Church, and actively engaging in the long overdue task of decolonising the Church and avoiding the repetition of racial wrongs.

Professor Augustine John is a human-rights campaigner and honorary Fellow and associate professor at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.