A Fund Built on a Footnote

The Church of England will spend £100 million to atone for a sin its own ledgers may not record

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org  | August 12, 2026

Give the Church of England its due. When it resolved to repent, it did so with the full apparatus of the modern conscience — forensic accountants, an oversight group, an archbishop's tears, and a hundred million pounds laid on the altar of history. The instinct behind Project Spire is not, in itself, contemptible. A church that discovers blood in the foundations of its wealth ought to be troubled by it. Penitence is a Christian reflex, and the Commissioners reached for it.

The trouble is that penitence without truth is not repentance. It is theatre. And the longer one examines the fund the Church now calls Healing, Repair and Justice, the more one suspects that the sin being atoned for was, in the crucial particular, misread.

The American precedent

VirtueOnline has watched a version of this play out in The Episcopal Church for more than twenty years, and the American experience is worth setting beside the English one — if only because it exposes how loosely the word “reparations” is thrown about.

It is often said that The Episcopal Church seeded reparations with $1.7 million. It did not. The national church's contribution was a resolution, not a cheque. At the 2006 General Convention, Resolution A123 apologized for the Church's complicity in slavery and directed every diocese to document that complicity — but it moved no money. The dollars, when they came, came piecemeal and from below: from seminaries and dioceses, not from any churchwide fund.

The $1.7 million was Virginia Theological Seminary's, established in 2019. Unlike England's still-unspent commitment, it has actually paid out. The seminary began issuing cash payments in February 2021 — roughly $2,100 a year to each identified descendant of the Black laborers, enslaved and free, whose work built the institution. More than two hundred descendants have now received payments, the endowment has grown to $2.8 million, and the money is structured to continue in perpetuity.

The Diocese of Maryland took a different road. Its $1 million seed, voted in 2020, made its first disbursement in 2022 — but $175,000 to six community organizations, not a penny to individual descendants. That contrast, cash-to-descendants versus grants-to-institutions, is precisely the design quarrel now surfacing in England, where £100 million has been promised and no one can yet say who is to receive it, or how. The Americans, whatever one makes of their theology, at least settled that question before they wrote the checks.

The ledger that wasn’t

The whole English edifice rests on Queen Anne's Bounty, the fund founded in 1704 to relieve impoverished clergy, and on its eighteenth-century holdings in the South Sea Company. The Commissioners' researchers concluded that the Bounty had grown fat on the slave trade. Archbishop Welby apologized for it. The Bishop of Manchester likened the Church to a burglar who cannot in conscience keep his loot. A hundred million pounds followed the apology out the door.

Then the historians arrived. Professor Richard Dale — a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the author of a study of the South Sea Company — pointed out what the accountants had missed. The enterprise had two distinct parts. One traded in human beings. The other was a vehicle for government debt. Queen Anne's Bounty put its money in the second: South Sea annuities, which were in plain terms gilts — loans to the Crown. To confuse the two, Dale wrote, was an elementary error. And the trade the Church now weeps over was, in cold fact, a chronic loss-maker; no investor grew rich on it, least of all one who never bought the trading shares. As Dale summed it up, the Bounty's investments, in stock or in annuities, earned nothing from the slave trade.

This is not the grumbling of a partisan. Even the Commissioners' own historical advisers have conceded, in print, that the annuities and the trading securities were two separate instruments. When your own witness concedes the point, the case is in trouble.

The parish left in the cold

Set the history aside and a second scandal remains. The endowment the Commissioners are dipping into exists, by law and by intent, to keep parish clergy in post and parish roofs from falling in.

Twenty-seven members of the Commons and the Lords reminded the incoming Archbishop of exactly this. At a moment when churches across the country are struggling to keep their doors open, they wrote, it is wrong to divert £100 million to a project entirely separate from the Church's core obligations. They called it what much of the pew already suspects it to be: a legally dubious vanity project.

The pew agrees. In a poll of Anglican churchgoers, eighty-one per cent said the money should go to the parishes; sixty-one per cent said they might close their own wallets if Spire proceeds. Meanwhile the meter runs: the Church has confirmed that more than £1.15 million has already been spent on the project — on research, consultancy and legal advice — before a single grant has been made. A church that cannot fund a curate in a dying market town has found a hundred million pounds for a fund whose historical premise its own scholars cannot defend. One struggles to imagine a parable that flatters the arrangement.

Repentance as performance

What is most revealing is the Church's conduct under scrutiny. Faced with detailed, sourced, scholarly objection, the Commissioners have not answered it. They have closed ranks. At a Synod fringe meeting in July, Project Spire's own research co-ordinator, Charmaine Simpson, accused the critics — named historians of standing — of “deliberate misinformation.” That is not the language of a body confident in its evidence. It is the language of an institution that has committed itself publicly and cannot now afford to be wrong.

And still it presses on, though it cannot yet press far. The Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice cannot even be registered with the Charity Commission; a legal challenge has seen to that. Yet from the slave fort at Cape Coast, Archbishop Sarah Mullally renewed the pledge, insisting that “part of the Christian belief in repentance is about action.” Action, yes — but repentance for what, precisely, and on whose reading of the books?

A harder word

There is a true repentance available to the Church of England, and it is not this. It would begin with the humility to let the historians finish their work before the cheque is written. It would remember that the endowment in question was given to feed shepherds, not to burnish the reputation of their managers. It would treat the eighty-one per cent not as an obstacle to be managed but as the faithful to be served.

Scripture is not silent on offerings made to cover a fault the offerer will not honestly name. The prophets had a word for sacrifice brought in place of obedience, and it was not a word of comfort.

If the Church of England wishes to repent of slavery, let it do so on the ground of what actually happened — no more, and no less. A fund built on a footnote, defended by anathemas against its critics and paid for out of the parish collection plate, is not justice. It is a mirror the institution holds up to admire its own contrition. And the God who sees in secret is not deceived by mirrors.

David W. Virtue, DD is the founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline, an orthodox Anglican news and commentary website read by Anglicans in more than 100 countries. Some 21,000 stories are archived at www.virtueonline.org.