The Church of England and African chattel enslavement: Defining and distributing a responsibility for repair

In this paper I argue that the Church of England should acknowledge its role in African chattel slavery, and take reparative action as a response to such a moral reckoning. Unlike the British state’s refusal to offer reparations, recent years have seen the Church of England apologise and begin to confront its history, and this paper draws on a ground level study of how and why the Church has been making efforts to do this. Because of the Church’s complicity in the crimes of chattel slavery, I firstly argue that the Church as national institution bears a moral responsibility to intervene in the politics and practice of reparatory justice work. However, the relationship between the church membership and this historical injustice is less easy to define. Rather than centering the issue of blame and guilt, a different understanding of the nature of the responsibility individual church members carry is needed to shape a collective, social process of reckoning with slavery. My second argument is that, whilst not blameworthy in the same way as the national Church is, the membership is implicated— a positioning that lies beyond either innocence or guilt. Thirdly and lastly, I argue that in an organization that is “still institutionally racist” like the Church of England, it is those in positions of leadership, and those racialized white that have the greatest responsibility to engage in, support and resource the work of addressing the history and legacies of chattel slavery.