A new exhibition in the library at Lambeth Palace includes artefacts such as a “slave bible” with passages relating to freedom and escape removed and documents revealing the Church of England’s involvement in a fund linked to transatlantic chattel slavery It is the latest step in a wide-ranging programme of work launched in 2019 that aims to “address past wrongs” by researching the church’s historical links to the slave trade.
The Queen Anne’s Bounty fund, set up on 1704 to tackle poverty among clergymen, made significant investments in the South Sea Company, which the church knew was involved in purchasing and transporting enslaved people as its main commercial activity between 1714 and 1739. This fund has grown into the £9bn managed by the Church Commissioners out of which a new fund of £100m was set up last month to support projects “focused on improving opportunities for communities adversely impacted by historic slavery”.
The exhibition also features early abolitionist views, which was intended to showcase the “spectrum of opinion about the slave trade”. However, Prof Robert Beckford said: “The focus on abolition is an obfuscation of the horror of the slave trade and a willingness to collude with the sub-humanisation of black people. What it means ultimately is there is no recognition of how the church’s theological ideas made slavery possible.” He mentions as an example the omission from the exhibition of the Codrington plantation in Barbados, which in 1710 was bequeathed to and subsequently run by the Anglican church’s missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). It was known for its brutality, with enslaved people branded with hot irons bearing the SPG’s logo.
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The Codrington Estate is featured in MJR’s film ‘After the Flood: the church, slavery and reconciliation‘.
