Is this the Church of England’s Arday affair?

I lament Jason Arday’s apparent suicide. I shake my head at the dreadful pity of it. Yes, he had been serially dishonest. And yes, the immediate responsibility lay with him: the hand that killed him was his own. Yet his death was still a tragedy. He’d become so trapped in a fantasy about himself, it seems, that when reality finally broke in, Nemesis came with it. A terrible reckoning caused the self he’d invented to disintegrate. It must have seemed to him that black nothing remained.

But Jason’s responsibility is widely shared. It also belongs to all the adults who indulged him. Who failed to make him reckon with the truth. Who lowered the threshold so he could clamber over it. Who encouraged him to dismiss criticism as expressions of racist bad faith. Who, year after year, aided and abetted the elaboration of his fantastic claims. Who patronised him.

Why did they do it? For many, no doubt, because uncaring kindness was so much easier than telling the truth. For some, evidently, because their own academic standards were hardly higher than his. For others, because he was a useful poster boy for their ‘decolonising’ crusade.

But is it credible that not one of the seasoned teachers or academics who vetted him in the course of his career failed to see what is now so glaringly obvious – that the emperor was stark naked? I think not. I’d wager a modest fortune that some did see it, but knowing what it would cost them to say so, suppressed the thought and bit their tongues. Why? Lest they be accused of racism, their friends step away, and their careers suffer.

There’s a warning in this sorry tale for the leadership of the Church of England. The Church commissioners, including both archbishops, persist in their support for ‘Project Spire’, the policy of devoting £100million to paying reparations for the church’s alleged profiting from transatlantic slavery. Reliable sources tell me that the project has been vigorously championed among the commissioners who are responsible for managing the church’s assets, including the First Church Estates commissioner, Alan Smith. They also observe that the decision to proceed with the project was made in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 and the consequent anti-racist, knee-bending panic. Apparently, only one of the commissioners’ 27 board members voiced an objection to it. Was that because all the others were convinced supporters? I know for a fact they weren’t. So why didn’t more doubters speak up? Could it have been – as an eye-witness reports – that dissent was suppressed, because senior church figures are concerned about being branded racist?

My own ‘lived experience’ tells me that’s entirely plausible. Sometime during the Covid epidemic – late 2021 or early 2022, I think – I was invited to join in a Zoom call to discuss the Church of England’s responsibility for making slavery reparations. Of the four people present, three (including me) were white. The fourth was a black clergyman. Most of the meeting was taken up with him and me arguing. I remember pulling my punches, partly because my view of the historical and ethical nonsense of reparations was not as clear and firm as it is now. But mainly because I was aware of how bad I would look if I said what I honestly thought. In the current, emotionally manipulative climate, when claims of racial harassment are so easily made and readily believed, it’s very risky for a white person to speak up candidly to a black person about race and slavery. So, I tied my tongue.

Since its public launch in January 2023, the wheels have come off the rationale for Project Spire. Richard Dale, an historian of international banking, has shown that the commissioners misunderstood the data: the 18th-century church fund, the Queen Anne’s Bounty, neither directly invested in nor profited from slave-trading. I, until recently holder of the Anglican world’s premier university chair in Christian ethics, have pointed out the astonishing failure of the commissioners to publish any considered ethical justification. And Charles Wide KC has exposed their failure of due diligence in launching the project before discovering that it’s beyond their lawful powers to divert money from resourcing the Church of England’s ministry to supporting black-led businesses in the Caribbean and Africa.

How have the commissioners and the project’s officers responded? Mainly by retreating into a bunker and saying as little as possible, hoping no one will notice the fuss and the critics will tire and go away. But also by complaining that forensic questioning is a form of harassment and refusing to answer it. By indirectly threatening critics with litigation. By refusing to name them. And on one (aurally recorded) occasion, by publicly defaming them as deliberately spreading disinformation – that is, lying. Recently, Bishop Arun Arora, deputy chair of the church’s Racial Justice Board and public champion of Project Spire, has gone to the desperate length of invoking in its defence the authority of none other than Alan Lester. ‘Desperate’, because Professor Lester is no expert on transatlantic slavery and, in my long experience of him, his rational mouth is more gum than teeth.

I am a Christian convert. I’m an active member of the Church of England. I’m even an Anglican priest. I wish the leadership of my church no ill. But they’re stubbornly leading us into our very own Arday affair, where the nakedness of Project Spire will be exposed for all to see and those responsible for stewarding the church’s assets will be called to public account. I know that the reputational costs of rowing back will be high, but the costs of rowing onward will be much, much higher. Commissioners – and bishops, clergy and laity – who’ve been harbouring doubts and biting their tongues need to muster the courage, take the risk and speak up now. Before it’s too late.

Nigel Biggar is a Conservative peer, Regius Professor emeritus of moral theology at the University of Oxford and author of Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (Swift, 2025).