The soaring, light-filled quire in Rochester Cathedral has witnessed centuries of worship. But beneath where the cathedral's singers sit, under its timeworn paving stones lies a dark financial legacy.

Hidden in an archive until just a few years ago, were share dividends from the early 18th Century showing the cathedral's dean and chapter invested directly in a company that trafficked slaves, making profits of around 400%.

"We think it paid for a huge renovation project here at that time," says the Very Reverend Philip Hesketh, Dean of Rochester, pointing out the quire paving that was relaid.

"There were some major things like seven Georgian houses in Minor Canon Row just outside the cathedral, accommodation for staff, clergy, and an organist's house," he says.

In the south aisle of the nave is also an elaborate wall monument commemorating John, 1st Lord Henniker who was buried at the cathedral in 1803. He was one of the most prominent anti-abolitionist members of parliament and had close personal links to the slave trade.

"I think it's important to identify it, acknowledge it and to tell that story," says Hesketh.

What is happening at Rochester mirrors a broader reckoning happening across churches, cathedrals and the Church of England.

In 2023, the Church announced that the predecessor to its modern endowment fund had invested heavily in the South Sea Company, a business involved in transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic during the 18th Century

It said it had made profits from those investments that would be the equivalent of around £1.4bn in today's money. Those profits were all integrated into the Church's modern day investment fund, which is now worth many billions of pounds.

The disclosure prompted an apology from the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who said he was "deeply sorry for the links" and promised to make amends through a £100m "social impact" fund.

But today the money remains unspent.

What began as one of the Church's biggest attempts to confront its links to slavery has become the focus of a fierce row.

Supporters of the Church's promise to make amends say it has a responsibility to address the legacy of slavery. Critics argue the historical case has been overstated and question whether the money should be spent at all.

More broadly, the dispute raises questions about the promises many institutions made after the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who was killed in Minneapolis in 2020 after a police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.

Floyd's killing sparked protests across the United States and around the world. In Britain, institutions came under growing pressure to look at their own records on race, discrimination and historical injustice.

Six years on, will the Church's commitments still be delivered, or do shifting political winds mean there is no longer the will to do so?

The George Floyd moment

Following the reaction to George Floyd's murder by a police officer in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020, universities launched investigations into their links with the slave trade and the British Empire. Museums reassessed collections. Businesses announced diversity initiatives. Charities and churches also began looking again at their histories.

The Church of England was part of that wider moment.

The Church had already spent years engaged in a process of reflection about its own role in the slave trade. But it would take George Floyd's murder by a white police officer to spur the Church on to speed up its examination of ties to historic slavery and explore some form of repentance.

What did the Church find?

The most significant investigation was already underway, spearheaded by the Church Commissioners, the body responsible for managing the Church's multi-billion-pound investment fund.

They commissioned a forensic audit into the origins of a historic financial fund known as the Queen Anne's Bounty, originally set up to support clergy and parishes and the precursor of the modern-day fund.

Dr Helen Paul, an economic historian at the University of Southampton, was one of the experts brought in to decipher 18th Century ledgers. The audit found that many donors to the fund had connections to the transatlantic slave trade. But the most significant revelation concerned the Church's own investments.

Researchers reported that between 1723 and 1777, the Church of England put its investment monies almost entirely into the South Sea Company.

"The company was based in London and worked with the Royal African Company to go to West Africa to deal with enslavers there and force enslaved people onto their ships and sail across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and then further to Spanish held ports," Paul says.

She estimates that this single company trafficked around 34,000 enslaved Africans to the Spanish Americas in such inhumane conditions that 10-15% of people died in transit.

"When you're talking about the number of people who are trafficked, one person is one person too many," she says. "It has to be remembered that sometimes this can spiral off into discussions about numbers or profits, but actually these are human beings on ships."

When the Church Commissioners published their report in 2023, Archbishop Justin Welby expressed deep sorrow for the institution's "shameful past".

The Church Commissioners' audit said investments in the South Sea Company accounted for almost a third of the income of the Queen Anne's Bounty during the years for which records are available, huge numbers in today's money, and the precursor to the current fund.

The Church announced Project Spire, a £100m fund aimed at making amends, primarily by supporting black-led enterprises in the UK.

For supporters, the findings provided a clear case for action.

Bishop Rosemarie Mallett, a descendant of enslaved Africans, who would later chair Project Spire's oversight committee, found the findings deeply significant.

"It absolutely felt like a watershed moment," she says.

"The forensic accountants had done their work and came out with this deep connection to African chattel enslavement. Once something is brought to the light, you can't push it back into the darkness."

As a historian who had come across the Church of England's links to slavery as a student, for many years Mallett had long been conflicted about associating with the institution.

Now as a bishop, with a Church commitment to tangibly repent for its past sins, she felt the institution was starting to better represent the Church her mother and many others had stayed loyal to.

The push back

But not everyone accepted the Church's conclusions or the need to repent.

One of the most prominent critics is Richard Dale, emeritus professor of international banking at the University of Southampton.

Dale argues that, aside from a brief period, the Church invested in "South Sea Annuities" – which he describes as government bonds – rather than directly in the trading business of the South Sea Company.

"The enormity of this mistake cannot be overstated," he argues.

"To come up with the idea that the major, almost the entire portfolio consists of slavery-related investments, when in fact they were not, is quite a big mistake."

The likes of Helen Paul vehemently stand by their findings - arguing that the South Sea Annuities cannot be decoupled from the South Sea Company's slave-trafficking activities.

The disagreement has become central to the wider debate surrounding Project Spire. But some argue the Church research should have gone much further to lay out an entanglement with slavery that goes far beyond what the audit showed.

Many vicars, bishops, and archbishops are known to have personally managed investments in plantations, and in the South Sea Company, sometimes paying for renovations to churches and cathedrals.

When slavery was finally abolished in 1833, the British government paid out such massive amounts of compensation to slave owners that the national debt was only cleared in 2015; at least 96 clergy of the Church of England were among the recipients.

The missionary wing of the Church, the United Society of the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG) even ran the Codrington estate, sugar plantations in Barbados with around 300 slaves.

They branded slaves with the word "society" on their chests and used the plantation profits to pay for their work spreading Anglicanism through North America.

Nevertheless Dale's critique of the Church report has provided powerful ammunition for opponents of the idea of making financial amends for any gains made by the Church for its links to slavery.

Political and cultural change

When Project Spire was announced in 2023, in the shadow of George Floyd's murder, the opposition to it was mainly murmurings behind the scenes. But that opposition has become full-throated.

Among the most influential voices leading the intellectual pushback to Project Spire now is Lord Nigel Biggar, an ordained Church of England priest and a former Christian ethics academic at Oxford University.

Last year, he published a book titled Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt. Lord Biggar views the Church's response not as righteous repentance, but as a reactionary capitulation to modern politics.

"The Church's response to the killing of George Floyd and the upsurge of Black Lives Matter was exactly the same as that of many cultural institutions in the country. I'd regard it as a kind of moral panic," Lord Biggar argues.

While he acknowledges the Church's complicity, he insists it must be viewed through the moral lens of the 18th Century, rather than the 21st.

"Slave trading and slavery were institutions and practices, practised on every continent by people of every skin colour since the dawn of time," Lord Biggar says.

"It doesn't really surprise me at all that the Church was involved. There's very little that we inherit that isn't tainted by historic injustice somewhere along the line," he says.

Furthermore, Lord Biggar challenges the core premise of Project Spire and reparatory justice as a whole – that historic suffering directly dictates modern disadvantage.

"Barbadians, mostly the descendants of slaves, are considerably better off than the average Nigerian," he says, in the kind of claim that some within the Church of Caribbean ancestry say they have found deeply offensive.

Lord Biggar is deeply critical of what he sees as an obsession with historical guilt that ignores Britain's role in ending the trade. He points to evangelical Anglicans like William Wilberforce who championed abolition.

"I don't think it helps race relations to exploit white guilt in terms of a narrative of white oppression, black victimhood. I mean some whites were guilty, but some whites were liberating and emancipatory."

What happens to these promises?

Some of the backlash to the Church's £100m commitment is about its legality. On that basis, earlier this year 27 MPs and peers called in a letter for the £100m initiative to be abandoned.

Conservative MP Katie Lam was one of the lead signatories and argues that Church funds are restricted to supporting parish churches and clergy wages.

"If you give your money to a donkey sanctuary, that money cannot instead be used for a domestic violence shelter," Lam says.

"That's not a value judgement. But if that's what the person gave their money to, a donkey sanctuary, then that's where it has to be spent," she explains, saying Project Spire will put people off donating to the Church.

Critics also point to the financial pressures facing parishes across the country, with some struggling to pay staff or afford to repair churches, saying the £100m should be spent there instead.

But in 2025, the Church Commissioners announced a commitment of £1.6bn over the next three years for exactly those things, saying reparatory justice spending would sit alongside, not replace, existing work.

They have also been very clear that no donations coming into the Church would fund the work of Project Spire.

Nevertheless to address concerns the Commissioners say they will create a separate charity to fund Spire, which is where the project is stuck at the moment.

Beyond the legalities, questions from members at the meeting of the Church's national assembly, General Synod, earlier this year revealed broader opposition – even hostility towards Spire.

Lam finds the philosophical underpinning of Project Spire troubling. Because the individuals who were themselves enslaved have been dead for 200 years, she argues that allocating funds based on race is "inherently divisive".

But elsewhere, reparative justice projects are already underway.

Unlike Project Spire, which remains gridlocked, members of the current iteration of the USPG – the Church missionary society that ran plantations - are funding a separate £7m reparative justice project directly on the Codrington estate.

The ongoing work includes financial literacy courses, small business grants, infrastructure projects, and the agonising process of locating ancestral graves.

For Kevin Farmer, executive secretary of the Codrington Trust in Barbados, the argument that the Church absolved itself by eventually supporting abolition is deeply flawed.

"There would have been no need to pat yourself on the back in 1807 if you had not engaged in enslaving people from the early 16th Century. So congrats that you ended the slave trade in 1807. Let's deal with the fact that you started it," he says.

Father Andrew Mumby, Rector of St Peter's Church Walworth in south London, sees the issue through the experiences of his own congregation.

His congregation is largely made up of black Christians whose ancestors were from West Africa and the Caribbean.

"If you don't address injustices, historic or otherwise, that in itself creates and perpetuates division," he says. "In this parish, 31% of children are living in poverty. There is intergenerational poverty from families like mine who haven't had loads of money passed down," he says.

For Father Andrew, the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade is not an abstract historical debate, but a clearly visible, structural force shaping the lives of his parishioners today.

He says that as a Jamaican directly descended from enslaved people, and a Christian, he finds some of the opposition to the Church's attempts to make amends for its financial entanglement with slavery deeply disturbing.

"There is something for some people which is very threatening about this work, which provokes a certain reaction," Father Andrew says.

"And I will say, although I know that some people don't like terms like this, there is a sense of white fragility."

A Closing Window?

Today, the Church of England finds itself paralysed. The initial moment of global reckoning following 2020 has given way to legal gridlock and a polarised culture war.

The Church is caught between what some regard as Christian justice for its complicity in one of humanity's darkest chapters and the realities of modern politics.

"I don't think the terrain is as easy as it was five years ago," says Bishop Rosemarie Mallett, acknowledging the shifting political winds.

She feels that the increased divisiveness in the country has made people nervous about pushing forward. But she remains hopeful Project Spire's reparative justice will happen.

"I pray, I hope. I think the window is still there, but I think it has narrowed." (Aleem Maqbool/BBC)

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