Heart and Soul: The Church's slave plantation, part two

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Professor Robert Beckford explores the Christian understanding of reparations. He speaks to Christians in Barbados who say reparations from the Church are now both justified and necessary. But their perspective is only one side of the story. In England, representatives from the Church of England and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel articulate their understanding of reparations and why they believe it is unnecessary. Robert looks into Christian scripture to explore if there could be a theological case for the payment of reparations.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In 2008, 23-year-old Norwegian students Martina Vic Magnussen was killed in an apartment near Mayfair.
0:08.0	Hours after her death, the only suspect in the case fled the UK to Yemen.
0:13.0	He has never been questioned by the police.
0:16.0	I'm Noel El-Makafi and I made a promise to Martina's family 15 years ago to find out what happened.
0:22.0	Murder in Mayfair is the new mini-series right here in the documentary.
0:27.0	All episodes are available now.
0:29.0	Guided by the Almighty, we honor our history, our ancestors, democracy and independence.
0:38.0	This is the moment in late 2021 that Barbados officially became a republic,
0:44.0	removing Queen Elizabeth the second as the head of state.
0:48.0	From this day and forever declare Barbados a parliamentary republic.
0:59.0	The Queen is of course the symbolic leader of the Church of England.
1:04.0	The church that most Barbados have been following since the first enslaved Africans were converted to the faith centuries ago.
1:12.0	I'm Robert Beckford and for heart and soul I'm in Barbados and I've been exploring how the entanglement of the church and slavery has been impacting people's faith on the island today.
1:26.0	In the first program we heard how many Belgians have been turning away from Anglicanism.
1:31.0	In the second program I'll be examining growing calls for reparations to be paid by the Church of England.
1:37.0	We have to realize that the money that we're gained from the enslavement of Africans here and from the free labour that they got is still enriching the Church of England today.
1:49.0	I don't think that the Anglican diocese here should be struggling to find ways and fundraise to maintain its buildings.
1:57.0	You cannot talk about the Church because the Church had no policy. What we had in the West in the was the responses of individuals.
2:07.0	It's thought that millions of African men, women and children died as a result of enslavement.
2:13.0	I want to know, could there really be a theological argument for reparations to be used as a method of atonement?
2:22.0	I've just left St. Leonard's Anglican Church and it's in the middle of Old Bridgetown, the kind of Barbados that tourists have to go off the beaten track to arrive at.
2:35.0	It's less prosperous, it's more impoverished and it's where most of the Barbagians who service the hotels and the other institutions that the tourists visit live and return to after work.
	...

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