SLAVERY, RACE AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH
The
recent killing of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter
movement in the United States, and across the world, has rightly, and
powerfully, shone a fresh light on racism in the United Kingdom today and the way
in which this country was not simply complicit in the Atlantic slave trade, but
was at the heart of it.
In
the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s death there was a legitimate fury
that led to certain statues and symbols being toppled or questioned: the statue
of Edward Colston in Bristol being one, and the ongoing campaign to remove the
statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College in Oxford another. We see the power
of symbols and iconography and how they inform and shape our understanding of
history.
In
the light of this the Archdeacons of the Diocese of Southwark have written to
the incumbents, churchwardens and Parochial Church Councils of the Diocese
asking us to research any connections between our churches and the Atlantic slave
trade.
This
article sets out the connections that Croydon Minster, as Croydon Parish
Church, has had with slavery and seeks to set this history in the context of
how we might act today.
History and Remembering
History
is about collective memory; and how we remember matters. Remembering is not
just a recollection of a past event it is a piecing together of what has gone
before; it is a re-membering: putting the pieces, the members, back together. The
opposite of ‘re-member’ is not ‘forget’, but is ‘dis-member’. Black Lives
Matter is asking us to re-member, not dis-member the past. That means we must
tell, to the full, the stories of the past in a way that affect real lives in
the present and shape the future.
This
should be obvious to Christians because at the heart of the Christian faith is
an act of remembering. The Eucharist draws us into the past – the sacrificial
death of Jesus Christ on the cross - to make sense of the present – as
disciples who walk in the way of the cross - and anticipate the future – as a
foretaste of the heavenly banquet of the Lamb of God. The word anamnesis is the Greek word used in the
Gospels when Jesus says ‘do this in remembrance (anamnesis) of me’. Anamnesis translates
as ‘remembrance’ or ‘make present’. In that sense the past recollection is made
present and active and therefore transformative. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the
context of complicity in slavery, it is amnesia and not anamnesis that is
prevalent in the United Kingdom today.
The
statues of the likes of Edward Colston and Cecil Rhodes tells us that British
history is not benign and cannot be told nostalgically. Rather, British history
has long festering and seeping wounds that infect how we live life today; the
poison of those wounds comes out in ‘passive’ and ‘active’ racism. People of
black, Asian and minority ethnic heritage are on the receiving end
of the dis-memberment of British history and the story of who we are today when
the full story is not told.
Discovering ‘Our’ Story
It
would seem that slavery has been a feature of human societies for millennia.
The Israelites were slaves in Egypt and in the market place in Rome Pope
Gregory the Great saw Angles, English heritage slaves, for sale.
It
is also true that the New Testament refers to slavery apparently uncritically. We
cannot gloss over that. It is part of our story. Both Jesus and St Paul use the
imagery of slavery and slave owners, sometimes enjoining mercy on the part of
slave owners, but also saying slave should be obedient. St Paul uses the word doulos which can translate ‘slave’ or
‘servant’ to speak of the Christian being ‘a doulos of Christ.
This
imagery became toxic as slave owners and traders, who ‘professed and called
themselves Christians’ felt able to appeal to what they saw as a Biblical
mandate for their practices.
Ironically
it was from the same Judaeo-Christian source that the abolitionists, amongst
them evangelical Christians such as William Wilberforce, made the case against
slavery. Scripture also speaks of the freeing of slaves, both Israelite slaves
from Egypt and release of captives in a Year of Jubilee.
What
is clear is that by the 18th century British society was utterly
entwinned in the Atlantic slave trade and the commerce which was reliant on
enslaved people from Africa.
What
does that have to do with Croydon Minster today? Global and national stories must be told and
so must the local. That
is why the Archdeacons of the Diocese of Southwark wrote to us to research any
connections between our churches and the Atlantic slave trade. These
connections may be expressed by monuments in the building, the naming of an
institution associated with the church or benefactions over the centuries. The
Archdeacons did not ask us to tear down any such connection, but to begin to
account for them and how we interpret them today.
Some
research undertaken by David Morgan has shown that there are such connections. This
is not surprising given the prominence in the locality of Croydon Parish
Church. The fire of 1867 destroyed memorials which were to families associated
with slavery, but we know that memorials existed.
The
Bourdieu family, who lived locally at Coombe House, erected a memorial to
Phillippa Bourdieu. It was a Grecian style monument near the rood screen of the
church. They owned the Hoghole Estate in Jamaica in the parish of St Thomas in
the Vale.
The
last pre-revolutionary Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, has a
plaque in the Lady Chapel. He would certainly have known of slavery and been
complicit in it, although we do not know, without further research, if he
profited from the trade.
We
also find that the associations with slavery extended right into English
society, including the Church of England. The Reverend East Apthorp, who was Vicar
of Croydon in 1770s arrived from America having been ejected from Boston by the
independence movement. In England Apthorp initially stayed at Addington Palace.
The Palace was substantially rebuilt by Barlow Trescothick, a slave owner, who
was married to Apthorp’s sister.
Apthorp’s
father Charles was the Paymaster General of the North American Colonies, and we
can be certain that he made money out of slavery. Charles Apthorp married Grizzelda Eastwicke
whose family owned a plantation in Jamaica. We also know that East had brothers
who made money from slavery. Indeed in the Baptism Register for Croydon Parish
Church in the 1780s there is an entry for the baptism of an ‘adult negro
servant’ of the Apthorp family. This man was not a member
of the Vicar’s household but someone who has come over with one of Apthorp's
brothers. We can only speculate if he was a freed slave.
Those
are the facts: so where does that take us, as a church community today?
Sin and the Image of God
It must
be stated, absolutely and categorically, that slavery was, and is, always wicked
and wrong; racism was, and is, always wicked and wrong. In Christian terms we
would add that slavery was, and is, sinful;
racism is sinful.
Slavery
and racism, which are intimately related, are sinful because the enslavement of
another human being diminishes their dignity which we believe is God given to
all people. Slavery is the ultimate and enduring deprivation of liberty which
makes human beings a commodity to be sold and bought. Racism is wrong because
it reduces people to a category, a subject, a ‘thing’ and not a person to be
known, cherished and valued.
A
Christian account of being human, drawing on the Hebrew Scriptures (most
vividly the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to freedom in
the Promised Land), sees human identity as free and subject only to God and not
another person.
We draw
our understanding of human dignity from the Book of Genesis which speaks of
human beings made in the image and likeness of God and into whom God breathes
his living giving spirit (Genesis 2.7).
Furthermore
as Christians we see that divine image marred through human sinfulness, of
which more below, and because ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of
God’ (Romans 3.23): all people – irrespective of race - are in need of
restoration into the image of God. In Jesus Christ we see the fullness of human
potential as one who lives a sinless life because he remains a bearer of the
image of God.
As the
first letter of John teaches, ‘Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their
brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister
whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen’ (1 John 4.20). He
also states this very clearly and dramatically saying, ‘All who hate a brother
or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life
abiding in them.’ (1 John 3.15). The enslavement of a human being is a
catastrophic failure of love, and precludes a true love of God.
Some have
called slavery the ‘original sin’ of modern western society. Original Sin does
indeed tell us that we are bound up and implicated in patterns of behaviour
that precede our individual existence but into which we are bound by our very
membership of the human race. In Christian thought the sin of Adam speaks of
the predicament we find ourselves in. Original Sin could be called ‘inherited
sin’ because it is something received even if not merited, but something we all
too readily make our own.
The
doctrine of Original Sin has had a bad press in modern times. It is assumed to
be a deeply pessimistic account of the human condition, implying individual
wickedness from birth. Rather, it is better seen as a generous account of
humanity because it acknowledges that we are all caught up in inherited
patterns of human behaviour and consequences that are not of our own doing, but
that we are formed by, precisely because we are social creatures and part of
humanity. Attitudes to race, stemming from slavery are an illustration of how
original sin works.
Being in Christ: A New Creation
For
Christians life ‘in Christ’ (Greek en
Christou) is the way to restore life lived in the image of God and to break
the crippling inheritance of sin. St Paul teaches that the capacity for renewal
is in Christ, the Second Adam: the First Adam, the first anthropos - human being - led humanity to reject the ways of God,
so the Second Adam makes possible the reversal of that sinfulness through a
radical obedience to God, even to death. It is this way of life that leads us
‘from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land’ (from the Church of
England Baptism Service Common Worship: Christian
Initiation p. 87).
Baptism
which initiates us into the Body of Christ acknowledges both our uniqueness, who
we are – ‘God has called you by name’ – and that we find our identity within a
wider mystical society, the Communion of Saints. So in Baptism our deep
identity is not eradicated but cast in a new light, for we also become members
of a ‘new race’ as Christians. As St Paul writes:
As many
of you as were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There
is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer
male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3.28)
St Paul
connects this new identity in Christ to the coming New Creation which is cosmic
and personal: ‘So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything
old has passed away; see, everything has become new!’ (2 Corinthians 5.17). The
‘new race’ of being a Christian must never be into a notion of ‘whiteness’ or
middle-classness or any other secular cultural construct, but rather into the
‘glorious liberty of the children of God’ (Romans 8.21)
The
Christian narrative is one in which we are led to a vision of the New Creation
in Christ. The vision of the New Testament is one of a new race of those
redeemed in Christ. Identity is not defined racially or tribally. The
Revelation to John describes a vision of heaven in which the twelve tribes of
Israel are present, as is to be expected, but the seer continues looking and
then writes:
After
this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from
every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the
throne and before the Lamb, robed in white with a palm branch in their hands.
(Revelation 7.9)
Slavery, Racism and the Church Today
As I
stand at the altar of Croydon Minster and see the faithful gathered for the
Eucharist I get a glimpse of John’s vision: I see people of many nations and
heritage gathered around the Altar of the Lamb, and it warms my heart.
I, and I
am sure the vast majority at the Minster, find it hard to believe that this has
not always been recognised by ‘those who profess and call themselves
Christians’. Yet we know that as recently of the arrival of Caribbean migrants
on SS Windrush in the 1950s that the
Church of England was frosty at best and hostile at worst in its reception of
Black Anglicans from the Caribbean.
Some will
say that we cannot judge people of another age by our standards. In some ways
that is true; but judgement for all of us will be against the enduring message
of the Gospels.
I behold
the congregation of the Minster - and look at myself - there are people who
harbour ill-will, bad thoughts, a ‘past’, envies, quarrelling and strife. There
may even be people who have a racist side to them.
And so
comes the call of our patron saint, St John the Baptist, that we should repent
and amend our lives.
The
Church is made up of people who get things wrong. All of us gather as broken
and in need of perfecting, conversion and repentance. The conversion of society
begins with the conversion of the human heart.
This
raises big questions about how we handle apology, sorrow, regret, remorse and
historic complicity. At this time penitence is appropriate. Acts of penance –
personal and corporate - are not virtue signalling. They are times when one
acknowledges one’s own sinful actions in the past and resolves to amend one’s
life, by God’s grace. The Christian Gospel however declares that through Jesus
Christ we can break the ‘habits of sin that lead to spiritual death’.
It also
lays down the challenges for how the church: what does our church look like in
how different faces are seen, voices heard and contributions valued. If we
really are the Body of Christ, what is our body
language as ‘people of from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and
languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb’?
© Andrew
Bishop, 2020
