We need to talk about race—and historical facts

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Giles Udy writes: George Floyd's expiry was deeply traumatic for many people. In the months that followed as those who had experienced racism found a vocalism to express the history of their pain, I felt it was of import for me not only to listen to them but to brainwash myself as much as I could, to better understand their feel. I've spent many months reading and advisedly examining my own reactions to see in what ways I had contributed to their sense of not existence heard or understood.

As office of this procedure I picked up Ben Lindsay's book We Need To Talk Most Race: Understanding the Blackness Experience in White Majority Churches. I made a conscious effort to arroyo information technology with as open a mind every bit possible only every bit I read it I found myself feeling increasingly uneasy about some of his statements. Where he gave footnotes, I checked them out and found a number of them didn't even say the things he said they did. That alarmed me and I began to dig deeper. What I've establish has really concerned me.

I believe the book is securely flawed. Far from being distributed to, and studied by, groups throughout the church, my view is that it should really be withdrawn from church bookstalls. I'm enlightened this is a drastic suggestion which must be supported with solid argument. I believe it tin be. My reasons follow.

I really find myself ill at ease with the thought of criticising a beau author, especially 1 like Ben who comes across equally a genuinely nice person. But since the summer I've been reading extensively in slavery history, black theology, and disquisitional race theory and I am becoming increasingly convinced that the wider church is making a number of mistakes in its well-meaning but sick-informed attempts to address racism, including its partnership with the Blackness Lives Matter organization (as opposed to the 'black lives matter' idea). I expressed my broader concerns recently in UnHerd.

As I have written in that commodity, the fact of the existence of racism in the church building does non validate every diagnosis of its cause, nor every solution for its eradication. Information technology is absolutely right that the British church pursues racial justice but it is essential that that process is seen to be academically, historically and theologically credible. If information technology isn't and that becomes known, there will be resentment and division, rather than healing, in the church building. Ben's book fails drastically on all these 3 criteria.

It is in that context that I write now nearly the book. I have constitute that it to be so poor, in and then many instances, that I am yet struggling after nine months to put my voluminous notes in some form of society. For this reason, these points may seem somewhat disjointed and I apologise if they come across as such. I will simply state each in turn.

The Problems with Ben Lindsay's We Need to Talk About Race – A Summary

Ben states that fundamental Black liberation theologians such as Robert Beckford and Anthony Reddie "should be required reading". Yet they deny both the atonement every bit traditionally understood and the say-so of scripture, and offer a parallel interpretation of the life of Jesus which is unrecognisable to orthodox Christians. Endorsing BLT to church members is a pathway to division. My commodity gives more than detail and my paper volition explore this field of study at length.

Ben states that "the church was the moral cement for our structure of racism in our nation" and "we take not yet fully reckoned with our Christian responsibleness for the legacy of racism in our gild" (my italics) and cites 'Rev Duke Kwon' as the source. This is a massive allegation. Ben never mentions that Kwon is American and was referring to America. This is a very serious mistake. British church building members reading these words, endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other senior leaders, will believe them to be the truth about the British Church – on the basis of an American pastor's contentious comment about the American church.

Many of the footnotes Lindsay uses to support his arguments simply don't say what he says they do. In one example he cites a Harvard report to support the allegation of police brutality against black people (in America, not the UK which makes it irrelevant anyway) but checking the source I find that the Blackness writer of the commodity really says the contrary and debunks the merits – which came not from a prestigious Harvard report but from the British Guardian newspaper. If I was marking a higher paper with such mistakes in information technology, I'd give it a 'D'.  I requite other instances of misleading footnotes in some of the points which follow.

Ben has taken many of his cadre understandings virtually racism from Reni Eddo-Lodge whose bestselling book is a popularisation of Critical Race Theory:

In July 2017, I read Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People well-nigh Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge. It is one of the best books I've read on race from a United kingdom perspective, covering problems such every bit the histories of racism, systematic and structural racism, what white privilege is and race and class.

He says he gave the book to his whole church leadership in the days when he pastored a church.

This is not the place to expound on the errors of and impairment existence done by Critical Race Theory (my article touches on that, albeit briefly). Only the significance here is that Ben openly states that he bases his perspectives on the pervasiveness of white supremacy, white privilege and his definition of racism from Critical Race Theory, which is increasingly coming under fire from Black intellectuals such as Trevor Phillips, the Black founding chair of the Equality and Human Rights Committee who comments:

Critical Race theory is a Scam. It has nothing to practise with improving life for Blackness people. It makes the issues entirely about white people, what they practice or experience. It is nifty for academics who sell books and get around guilt tripping white people but information technology makes no divergence to the ordinary black person'southward life.

CRT is also criticised by Black orthodox theologians, mostly in the U.S. also every bit leaders here in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland. Does Christianity really need to be "disentangled from white supremacy" as Lindsay asserts? He writes

At that place is no doubt, still, that, historically, the concept of white supremacy has been woven into the fabric and construction of our guild, which is to the detriment of black people and the benefit of white people.

Many would challenge that view.

Ben'southward footnote supporting this last accusation, that "white supremacy has been woven into the fabric and construction of our social club" (i.e., the United kingdom), surely then radical a charge that it must be supported by fact, is puzzling—not least because a number of the evidences he gives are nothing to exercise with Britain. The comment "See the transatlantic slave trade" ignores the boggling anti-slavery mood which swept 19th Century U.k.. Queen Victoria even adopted ane African child equally her goddaughter. Sarah Forbes Bonetta, as she became known, had only reached the age which according to the custom of her captors, the Dahomey, who practised human cede, she had become liable to exist i it its victims. She was rescued in 1850 by a naval officer of the Due west Africa Squadron, which had been stationed off the African declension to put down slave trading.

He and so mentions "apartheid" which was South Africa not the UK, "Jim Crow laws",  America not the UK, "The McPherson report" from 20 years ago, specific to the police not the UK as a whole, "hostile immigration laws", a contentious exclamation, which at least needs to exist supported by an argument rather than used as argument, "disproportionate incarceration rates in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland…" a complex issue, simply to use these as proof of 'white supremacy' is contentious, "and in the U.S." once again, an American instance, "and the Britain 'Race disparity audit'"—there'south no bear witness of 'white supremacy' in the report – disparity, yeah, but not 'white supremacy'.

In short, even so some other Lindsay footnote only doesn't support the claim that he uses it to practise.

Ben also writes: "Knowing that culture derived from the continent of Africa … it could be argued that everyone in the Bible is of African descent." This is non really tenable, though information technology'southward a popular thought in Black liberation circles, where at its most farthermost it ends upwards as version of 'black supremacy' in contrast to 'white supremacy'. Scholars maintain that Mesopotamia, non Africa, is commonly accepted as the kickoff identify in which 'civilisation' began, and it developed independently in China and Mexico.

He continues,

I believe that one of the chief reasons Christianity is unappealing to some blackness people in the United kingdom is that, throughout history – and today – black people take been consistently unmerited by the church building. This is the same church that, ironically, came from Africa, was cultivated in African educational institutions and produced African theologians.

"Came from Africa"? Abraham was not African; neither were Jesus, Peter or Paul.

The often-repeated accusation that British theology is 'Eurocentric' and 'whitewashed' also appears in the book, similarly derived from Black liberation theology and critical theory (as my commodity makes clear). It is an easy charge to make and anybody nods in agreement but what does this really mean? Where are concrete examples which show that 'traditional' theology is racist? Such assertions must be supported if they are to be taken seriously. They aren't and so they merely cannot exist taken as valid. Anthony B. Bradley's Liberating Blackness Theology (2010) is essential reading on Black liberation theology and its critique of so-called 'white theology'.

Ben Lindsay and slavery history – the major trouble with the book

Lindsay places history (or, rather, his estimation of it) right at the center of the arguments and purpose of the volume – so much so that these are the opening lines of his dorsum embrace blurb:

From the UK Church'southward complicity in the transatlantic slave trade to the whitewashing of Christianity throughout history, the Church has a lot to answer for when information technology comes to race relations.

The problem is that Lindsay's knowledge of history is wafer sparse and, given the bold assertions he makes from information technology, this is securely troubling. In that location are numerous smaller examples which I could cite to begin with. Each merits a detailed refutation. Hither are simply three.

First, he writes "in Bonhoeffer's time it was clear – the Nazi'southward (sic) were the perpetrators and the Catholic Church building was the bystander [to, it is implied, Nazi racism]" – this in context of the British church today, and Trumpian racism (the latter having no relevance to the UK). This is but untrue. While some stayed silent for pragmatic reasons and others did back up the Nazi party, Cosmic clergy as a whole were brutally persecuted from the moment the Nazis gained power. Clergy, nuns and lay leaders were targeted post-obit the Nazi takeover, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or "immorality". Priests were watched closely and frequently denounced, arrested and sent to concentration camps. From 1940, a dedicated Clergy Billet had been established at Dachau concentration camp.

Intimidation of clergy was widespread. Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber was shot at. Cardinal Theodor Innitzer had his Vienna residence ransacked in October 1938 and Bishop Johannes Baptista Sproll of Rottenburg was jostled and his habitation vandalised. In 1937, the New York Times reported that Christmas would see "several thousand Cosmic clergymen in prison house." Propaganda satirized the clergy, including Anders Kern's play The Last Peasant. Jesuit historian Vincent A. Lapomarda writes that Hitler campaigned against the Jesuits, closing their schools and confiscating or destroying their holding, imprisoning or exiling thousands, and killing 259 of them, including 152 who died in Nazi concentration camps. The superior of the Gild in Germany, Fr Anton Rosch, was imprisoned, brutalised and scheduled for execution when rescued by Soviet troops at the end of the state of war.

In 1937 anti-Nazi Catholic bishops travelled to Rome where, with the Vatican's chief diplomat, Eugenio Pacelli (later on Pope Pius XII), they convinced Pope Pius XI to issue a German-language encyclical—a deviation from the usual Latin—to condemn the abuses of a regime that had promised in 1933 to exit Catholic institutions solitary in return for the church staying out of political diplomacy.

Secondly, Ben comments:

The 32 images of William Wilberforce in comparison to just 4 images of blackness abolitionists and anti- slavery activists displayed in the National Portrait Gallery tell their own story.

No, they don't! It'southward remarkable, given the very few black abolitionists that there were in Britain, that there are whatever. This is a simply unsupportable allegation that shows no understanding of British 18th/early on 19th century history. Portraiture was a luxury for the wealthy. Ben simply does not understand history, in this instance social history, and makes a potentially divisive statement based upon that lack of understanding. Portraiture was not the 1790s equivalent of press photography, which costs nix today and is indeed a reflection of popular culture interest.

A much amend reflection of popular interest in black abolitionists would be in the popularity of their written memoirs. Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) went through nine editions. Ottobah Cugoano'due south Thoughts and sentiments on the evil and wicked traffic of the slavery went through at to the lowest degree three printings in 1787, was translated into French and was revised in a fourth edition iv years afterward. Yet again, a proper examination of history totally discredits Lindsay'due south throwaway but inflammatory remark.

Thirdly, Ben writes:

The United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland has and continues to do good from slavery, whether information technology's the innovation of the Industrial Revolution, which was a direct result of the wealth generated from the slave trade…

The thesis that the Industrial Revolution resulted from slavery originates with ii Trinidadian Marxist scholars writing in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, the Trotskyite C. L. R. James (The Black Jacobins, 1938) and Eric Williams (Capitalism and Slavery, 1944). Marxism holds that that commercialism is based upon the economical slavery of the oppressed masses. These writers simply practical Marxist paradigms to history and drew conclusions driven by political philosophy, not economics or history. As long ago as the 1970s historians Roger Anstey (Professor of Modernistic History at the University of Kent at Canterbury, writer of The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810) in England and Seymour Drescher (Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, author of Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition) assuredly refuted James and Williams only their assertions remain in popular thinking.

The trouble with all such erroneous assertions is that they are convincing and together build a moving picture of a wholly racist past which lingers long subsequently the details take been forgotten. The effect is worrying, dissentious and divisive. No one has the fourth dimension in the church to do what I accept washed, almost full time for weeks on end, to research each in item. Simply merely after research like this can we encounter how misguided so many of Lindsay's assertions are.

Lindsay's most serious accusations

Lindsay's near serious accusations, particularly because he insists that racial harmony cannot come until they are acknowledged and repented of, business organisation the British Church.

Beginning, he states that 'without both black and white Christians sharing an agreed collective retentiveness of past racial wrongs by the church building, it volition exist difficult to move forrad in unity'. To fix this "at that place have to be moments of publicly acknowledging the hurting and the complicit racist history in the Britain church".

And he details the wrongs which the British church now needs to acknowledge:

From the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland Church'southward complicity in the transatlantic slave trade to the whitewashing of Christianity throughout history, the Church has a lot to answer for when it comes to race relations… the U.k. church must as well acknowledge the crucial and significant role it played in starting the barbaric transatlantic slave trade in the first place … the propagation of slavery past the church … receives minimal scrutiny [here and elsewhere the italics are mine]

These are very grave accusations. Given that Lindsay demands their credence as essential if the church is to move forward towards racial harmony, they must be supported by the facts. As I will bear witness, they aren't.

Earlier I even respond to these charges, which really form one of the central themes of his volume, we need to know Lindsay means by the "Britain Church" which he believes bears so much guilt—the CofE, Catholic, Baptist, or Methodist church? New independent churches similar the Vineyard? He never defines it, and instead accuses the whole Great britain church. This is illogical. The Methodist church was founded long after the beginning of the slave merchandise by ane of slavery'south almost bitter critics, John Wesley (see John Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (1778)). Baptist and Methodist missionaries worked tirelessly among slaves in the West Indies, treating slaves as equals, planting congregations and raising upward Black leaders to head them. White Baptist and Methodist missionaries were persecuted past planters, had their churches burned downward and in some cases were killed.

Turning in detail to specifics, we are required by Lindsay to 'acknowledge' that the 'UK church' (whatever that means) played a 'crucial and pregnant office' in 'starting' and 'propagating the barbarian transatlantic slave merchandise'.

No supporting documentation or references are given to support these charges.

The Church of England and Slavery: The Codrington Plantation

The sole involvement of the Anglican church in slavery was when its missionary social club, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), was left a plantation in Barbados in 1711 in the volition of a man who wanted to establish an order of medical missionaries to alleviate the plight of slaves, funded by plantation profits. Information technology was bound by the will to maintain the plantation and slaves. If it had closed the plantation downward the slaves would take been seized past other planters. The SPG got excited past the prospect of existence able to create a new more humane model of a slave-run plantation. Just if ever there was a poisoned beaker, this was it. It was mistaken, morally questionable, and ultimately a failure.

This cannot be defended, but information technology needs to be seen in its historical context. Until Christians in the third quarter of the 18th Century investigated and publicised the conditions in which slaves were transported and so held, virtually no one in England knew much of their plight. This was why the famous print of slaves stacked on the 'Brookes' slave ship (1787) created such a stir, was printed in thousands of copies, and was hung in inns and private houses throughout the country. People did not know what slave weather condition were until and so. They were appalled when they found out. This was fifty-fifty less the case in 1711.

The interest of the SPG has now become infamous (actually it was quite controversial even in the late 18th Century) but no one has thought to wait behind the widely repeated accusations and inferences to found the actual historical facts. They are complex, nuanced, but don't support the wilder accusations and give context for the lesser ones.

Suffice to say, there were 400 slaves on the Barbados plantation at emancipation, 83,000 on Barbados itself and 750,000 in the West Indies. Simply on those figures, the Church of England was never fundamental to slavery. Fewer than 100 out of the 6500 Anglican clergy serving in 1833 received bounty for slaves at emancipation. (The verbal numbers of serving clergy are hard to come by; it could have been as many as 10–15,000.)

47,000 bounty payments were made on emancipation. 97 payments were made to clergy (not all of whom were straight owners of slaves, in that some had inherited shares in plantations). Those 97 stand for just 0.2% of the total.

Even though the accuse was first fabricated in Synod in 2006 that the Bishop of Exeter was paid for slaves he owned (ever since held up as the 'smoking gun' of wider CofE guilt) this is totally without foundation. He was one of a number of executors of an aristocrat'southward will, and had aught to do with slavery (he even presented petitions to parliament for its abolition). It is deeply regrettable that the clergyman who raised was not improve informed and that there has never been a retraction. There should be. The story went round the world at the time and continues to exist widely repeated, as has the story that 'the church building' (i.e. the CofE with its full knowledge and on its instructions) branded its slaves – another story which has got twisted out of context. The SPG were absentee landlords and put local managers in identify to run the plantation who did brand some slaves. This was discovered by the resident SPG chaplain who was utterly horrified and put an firsthand stop to it.

The SPG did receive bounty for slaves on their plantation (not the Archbishop of Canterbury equally has been declared). The SPG was paid £8,558 every bit compensation for the manor slaves. It then returned over seven times that amount to the Codrington manor (£61,626) and over xx times that, (£172,047) elsewhere in the Caribbean over the following decade. The money was used to build churches and schools, funding staff for them, to help build the foundations of a stable new guild for freed slaves.

Demands for financial reparations continue to be made against the CofE, argued on the basis that the CofE took money for the slaves merely left them destitute with no compensation. These figures, which I have found in an erstwhile tape of SPG mission work, tell a different story.

The Britain Church building 'started' and 'propagated' slavery

The accusation that the church started and propagated slavery is unsupportable nonsense. Information technology is based on a complete misunderstanding of the history of the way early white Europeans (not the church) viewed Africans, at a fourth dimension when the globe was little understood, using bible stories to help them observe an answer. That fact has been shoehorned to fit the presuppositions of critics, rather than the opposite. In one case again, subsequently an test of the existent contextual history, the charge simply doesn't stack upwards. Many Blackness liberation theologians and historians influenced past critical race theory conflate 'white European' with 'Christian', in the same way people talk about the Muslim world, regardless of their bodily faith or unbelief. Christians today would not recognise someone as 'Christian' merely because they were born white British or European. Moreover, church attendance was compulsory in the 17th Century and laws restricting appointment to public office to communicant Anglicans were only repealed in 1828, and then even the fact of wide church building attendance is no proof of faith.

In further support of this allegation, Lindsay repeats Black liberation theology's widely used accusation that the church (he implies the British church building) during slavery subscribed to the 'curse of Ham' argument that denigrates Blackness Africans to secondary status as slaves and inferior beings. At that place are two major problems with this.

First, the footnote reference Lindsay cites to back up this accusation against the British 18th Century Church actually refers to anti-abolitionist preachers in the American S in the mid-19th Century, though he conspicuously uses the argument to imply a British mid-18th Century context. Once once again, Lindsay marshals support for an assertion using a footnote that doesn't do that. He obviously hasn't researched it himself and but repeated what he has read elsewhere.

In fact, past 1850, the appointment to which the quote actually refers in America, Great britain was so gripped by moral outrage over slavery that information technology was, in issue, co-ordinate to i historian, an 'anti-slavery country'. See, for example, Richard Huzzey, Liberty Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (2012) and January Morris, Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (1973). Huzzey's volume is scholarly, fascinating, and essential reading. Black liberation theologians and radical Blackness historians dismiss British 19th Century history solely as i of imperialist expansion, exploitation and greed. The reality much more than nuanced.

Ironically, Britain actually used its imperial power ('ironic' because Lindsay clearly adopts the standard anti-purple/left perspective on British Empire history throughout the volume) to send gunboats into foreign ports to suppress slave trading in both Africa and Brazil. (The Brazilian trade was remained substantial fifty-fifty later on emancipation in the 1830s although its government had nominally banned slave trading. After one just brazen British naval bombardment of a Brazilian slave trading port the government backed downward and completely reversed its former inaction.)

I have now spent ix months reading on this field of study intensively, reviewing 18th/early on 19th Century SPG annual sermons, Christian tracts, and Bishops' speeches in the House of Lords and nowhere (across a few exceptional and totally unrepresentative opponents of abolition in the late 18th Century) have I constitute any mention of the 'curse of Ham' thesis or sympathy with its core idea—quite the reverse.

Lindsay also repeats, without any supporting references, the accusation made originally by the first Black liberation theologians in the The states (e.thousand., James Cone) that Christianity was used to suppress slaves and make them more than compliant:

Religion was as well a driving force during slavery in the Americas. Once they arrived at their new locales the enslaved Africans were subjected to various processes to make them more than compliant, and Christianity formed part of this … minimal evangelism actually took identify in the early days of slavery.

I have researched this subject in peachy detail as well. The facts, at least in the Caribbean, the only region which is relevant to the British church building, are very different from the myth. Ben'southward mention of slavery 'in the Americas' is not only irrelevant but ignores the complexity and lack of uniformity of Christian do in 17th/18th Century America – where at its nigh extreme the Puritan leaders of Boston condemned 3 Quakers to decease for heresy in the 1650s. Subsequently on, Quakers refused to admit anyone who endemic slaves to their congregations.

From the early on 18th century, sources (such as Arthur Dayfoot, The Shaping of the Due west Indian Church, 1492-1962 (1999)) brand it abundantly articulate that the planters in the Caribbean were, as a whole, deeply obstructive to Christian missionaries and mission among the slaves, fearing that Christian teaching would cause the slaves to insubordinate—exactly the opposite of Lindsay's accusation. When they did, the planters' hostility oft was directed confronting clergy, particularly Methodists and Baptist pastors (at to the lowest degree ane was killed) and their churches were burned downwardly. Anglican clergy were non paid by the CofE but received their stipend and housing from the planter establishment. Whatsoever Anglican chaplain who stepped out of line was impoverished, at worse thrown out of his living.

'Minimal evangelism' was certainly due, on occasions, to the worldliness of some of the local clergy (a fact bemoaned by a number of devout Christian pastors, missionaries and fifty-fifty bishops back in England) but more than often information technology was because planters strongly resisted it wherever they could.

What is truthful is that, in seeking to overcome planter hostility, clergy said that converted slaves were less likely to exist involved in violent uprisings. They said this in society to gain more admission to slaves. But this fact has got twisted into the opposite – the accusation that Christianity was used to suppress African resistance. It wasn't. Given the contributions made to slavery history by Marxist historians and Marx and Lenin's insistence that the ruling class use religion every bit 'opium' to neutralise the resistance of the oppressed, I personally wonder if Marxist theory, rather than historical evidence, is at the root of this allegation.

In passing I would besides annotation that Lindsay even gets his basic figures incorrect:

Merely before the start of the 20th century, the transatlantic slave trade was responsible for the enslavement of approximately 24 million African men, women and children.

Modernistic inquiry puts the effigy at 12.5 one thousand thousand. The footnote Lindsay provides with this is to a volume which states that "24 one thousand thousand" represents the whole trade over history including the Arabic/Islamic slave trade non just the transatlantic merchandise. This actually is sloppy writing and, sadly, yet again characteristic of the book equally a whole.

There are many more points I could raise merely I will conclude with only one final example, the one that showtime alerted me to question the volume. Early on on, as an emotive re-told instance of the historic racism Black people have experienced in United kingdom, Lindsay recounts a story about a white churchgoer'due south conversation with his mother nigh Nelson Mandela.

I call back an occasion in the 1980s when my mum had come up habitation from her midweek prayer meeting. In that location had been a discussion virtually Nelson Mandela … a white church building member had described Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and said he should be locked upward.

The historical context shows that at the time this was a not unreasonable affair for a British person with limited access to detailed news to say and was quite possible to say that without existence racist. Mandela refused to renounce violence in the 1980s; his wife Winnie Mandela called for 'necklacing', a hideously savage grade of murder where a tyre full of petrol was placed circular the wretched victim'southward neck and set alight, of other Blackness South Africans that opposed her (and was implicated in i such infamous murder in 1989); the UK was under terrorist siege by the IRA – including the bombing of the Yard Hotel in 1984 in an endeavor to assassinate PM Thatcher. This was the climate at the time and might well lead a South Londoner in the 1980s to quite reasonably conclude that Nelson Mandela was a 'terrorist'. Given what was known at the fourth dimension, in that location was no reason to believe it was not true.

And then comes the following: "That was a view shared by the then UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher." That's where I raised my eyebrows. Lindsay's footnote on the Thatcher quote cites an article in the Independent newspaper. The Contained piece doesn't mention Mandela—it mentions the ANC (Africa National Congress), stating that Mrs Thatcher called the ANC a 'terrorist' organisation. Not Mandela. Yet again, Lindsay uses a footnote to back up something the footnote doesn't say. In fact, fifty-fifty that story was untrue. A elementary fact-bank check uncovers multiple articles, even in the Left press, which testify that the Thatcher quote is a myth. Mrs Thatcher never said it. The Observer had to consequence a retraction (which it did on Sept 10, 2006). As we now know Mrs Thatcher was actually privately urging the white South African regime to cease apartheid. It simply needed a uncomplicated Google search to uncover the truth of the story. Sadly, this is typical of the volume.

Does this matter?

If these were exceptions rather than typical examples of poor scholarship which are found throughout the volume, they would not; however, there are many more that I could cite.

If the book had not been so highly acclaimed (even as a 'must read' by Justin Welby; "This is 1 of the near of import books to have been written in contempo years and is essential reading for every Christian and particularly every church leader in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland." Selina Stone, lecturer in political theology, St Mellitus Higher), these examples would not affair. If Lindsay'south book and the ideas it contains were not beingness used as the go-to for Anglican churches seeking to address racial justice, they would be of trivial effect; and if Lindsay was non addressing staff and congregations in some of the leading churches in the country and fifty-fifty theological colleges (Lindsay is to give the prestigious annual Moule Twenty-four hours Lecture at Ridley on 9th June 2021), they would not thing.

A number of churches are now either using the book in their domicile groups or proposing to do and then, together with study notes written by Ben Lindsay. And we do not have to look far to guess what those notes volition say. In his book, each chapter already ends with written report questions. On page 50, we find this 1:

White church member: were you enlightened of the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland churches part in the transatlantic slave trade and its implications for today? Are yous enlightened of the privileges you have inherited every bit a result of the ideas that initiated and maintained slavery?

As I have shown, the answers Lindsay provides to respond to this question here are based upon fiction rather than historical fact. Nigh church members will not take studied slavery history, specially with regard to the church's involvement in it. If the volume is promoted to church groups as 'fantabulous' (as the group leaders of one large church building have been told) and then recommended to congregation members as a set up volume for home groups they volition believe Lindsay's version of both slavery and modern history is correct. In fact, information technology is securely flawed.

Many churches have now, commendably, made it clear that they are committed to racial justice. In the process they are adopting a book which states that in lodge to achieve racial justice and unity in the church building, white Christians must first accept "an agreed collective memory of past racial wrongs by the church", which include its "whitewashing of Christianity throughout history", its "complicity in the transatlantic slave trade" and acknowledging "the crucial and significant role it played in starting the barbaric transatlantic slave trade in the outset place" and the "propagation of slavery by the church".

If they exercise and so, the church will exist responsible both for deceiving them and for persuading them to assent to what is, in reality, untrue—a prevarication.

None of this negates Ben Lindsay's laudable work over the years with gangs and in developing strategies to combat serious youth violence strategy. And he is clear that his aim in the book is to facilitate unity among Christians of all ethnicities, something every Christian would share, as I practise. The flaws are with the ideas he promotes and the history he retells, not that aim. Equally I wrote at the start of this, it is essential that every church building's approach to racial justice is seen to exist academically, historically and theologically credible. If it isn't information technology will merely pb to resentment and discord. Ben's book fails drastically on all these three criteria. Once church members get enlightened of these flaws, the book is in danger of increasing division rather than healing it.

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Giles Udy is a political historian and author of Labour and the Gulag – Russia and the Seduction of the British Left. He has written for The Times, Telegraph, Mail, UnHerd, Critic and Standpoint equally is on Twitter every bit @gilesudy

(The epitome at the height is from the print of the Brookes slave ship which acquired such a stir on its publication.)

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