Church statues with slavery links are ‘bar to faith and worship’
CHURCH of England statues linked to slavery can “present a bar to faith and worship”, its race commission chairman, a former Labour minister, has said.
Lord Boateng, 70, was appointed head of the Archbishops’ Racial Justice Commission in July last year to lead a board of independent advisers to scrutinise the Church’s policies, practices and culture, aiming to “root out systematic racism”.
The chairman, who is of Ghanaian and Scottish origin and was the first black Cabinet minister when he was appointed as chief secretary to the Treasury in May 2002, is currently leading the three-year review.
During a briefing to reporters following the publication of General Synod papers yesterday, Lord Boateng gave his first update on the progress his commission has made so far, and also hinted at the direction the Church will take regarding controversial statues.
He said that there was a “moral imperative” to review monuments and to what extent those who profited from “trading in the souls of others”.
Lord Boateng also said that the commission was looking at “questions around monuments and memorials, [and] the extent to which they present a bar to faith and worship today”.
“It also throws up questions around the wealth of the Church and how that wealth came into being and what we need to do today [to] heal some of the legacy of that monumental injustice that slavery represents and the importance of finding the resource to do that.”
He said that there was a “moral imperative” to review churches and monuments and cited the example of Bristol Cathedral: “When you go into the cathedral and you look at the contributions made by people who made their money by exploiting and trading in the souls and lives of others, you get a sense of just how complex the picture is”.
The Diocese of Bristol decided to remove dedications to Edward Colston – the English philanthropist and MP who was involved in the Atlantic slave trade and who died in 1721 – after the toppling of the late 19th-century statue of him in the city centre in June 2020.
Lord Boateng’s comments regarding memorials within the Church of England come as the institution undergoes a period of reflection and revisionism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.