Church of Scotland to contemplate apology for alleged slavery links

The Church of Scotland’s General Assembly will next month consider a report detailing historic links to the transatlantic slave trade and proposals for an official institutional apology.

The report details ways during which the Church of Scotland believes it profited from the involvement of a few of its members within the slave trade. Furthermore, evidence that the Church of Scotland justified slavery on theological grounds will even be presented.

The report urges the Church to make a proper apology and to explore a spread of options that might promote repentance, justice and reconciliation.

The apology accommodates quite a lot of confessions, including that “theological justification was offered for race-based slavery” and that it was “defended on moral grounds”.

It states that even after slavery was outlawed in Scotland, some members and office-holders of the Church of Scotland “continued to own slaves overseas” or lobbied against emancipation, and that “for years lots of our office-holders and other members derived their income directly or not directly from slave labour”.

The General Assembly will consider the report at a gathering on 16 May.

The report says at one point that slavery was based on “the invention of race” and that while some may query why the Church is apologising now after centuries have passed, “the passage of time doesn’t diminish moral responsibility, nor does it render suffering irrelevant where its consequences endure.”

Another paragraph reads, “It is neither just nor appropriate for those most harmed – particularly members of African descent inside the Church and wider community – to bear the first burden of explaining its significance to a largely White membership. Responsibility for understanding, naming, and responding to this legacy rests with the institution and, in practice, with its White majority.”

The proposed apology states that the Church is sorry for a way it “collectively and individually, contributed to and benefitted from the enslavement of individuals of African descent”.

It continues, “We are grieved beyond telling by the extraordinary suffering we now have inflicted – through our actions and our inaction – on our brothers and sisters. As bearers of God’s image loved by God, they need to have been loved by us. Not only did we fail to like them, we did not treat them with basic human respect. 

“We repent, committing ourselves to changing course and bearing fruit worthy of repentance.”

Similar moves have been taken by the Church of England, which has committed to providing £100 million in funding towards reparations, after its own investigations concluded that the Church had benefited from slavery. “Project Spire”, because the scheme known as, has proved controversial nonetheless, with some historians questioning  whether the evidence suggesting complicity with slavery is as strong as claimed.