Is the Church of England going to apologise for Christianity? A report by something called the Oversight Group has declared that the Church should say sorry publicly, not just for profiting from the evils of slavery (through investment in the South Sea Company) but for ‘seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems’. And having apologised, it recommends the Church ‘reach beyond theological institutions’ and ‘enable all Africans to discover the varied belief systems and spiritual practices of their forbears and their efficacy’.

What would such an apology say about the Ugandan Martyrs executed in the 1880s by King Mwanga II?

The Oversight Group is an independent committee, but the Church Commissioners have ‘warmly welcomed’ all the report’s recommendations, including the ‘suggestions around truth-telling’, and for those of us who still love the Church of England, this is both depressing and disturbing.

If all beliefs and practices are as good and truthful as each other; if attempts to replace one set of religious ideas with another are wrong, then all Anglican missionary activity is wrong, and some of its bravest modern martyrs, the African Christians who suffered and died for their faith, were misguided.

The broadness of the report’s spiritual demands has some deeply alarming implications. Surely there are ‘diverse African traditional religious belief systems’ which the missionaries were right to try to replace? Idolatry, witchcraft, twin infanticide (a practice in south-east Nigeria until it was all but abolished by the Presbyterian missionary Mary Slessor), cannibalism, human sacrifice – to name some of the most extreme.

Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, is critical of the report. ‘The way to do it would’ve been to say we applaud all the good that was done and is being done today, while acknowledging there were mistakes which need to be put right,’ he says. ‘But by comparison to the good done, the mistakes are minor.’ He cites the use of drums in worship as an example of an African practice which it was wrong for missionaries to eradicate. ‘We can now see it’s possible to use drums without those pagan associations.’ But many other ‘very concerning elements of African traditional religions kept people in bondage. No one should apologise for eradicating any of that.’

Nazir-Ali converted to Catholicism three years ago precisely because of the C of E’s obsession with ‘jumping on every faddish bandwagon about identity politics, and mea culpas about Britain’s imperial past’. If every-thing is seen from an anti-imperial, anti-colonialist mindset, even the spreading of the Gospel can’t escape that mindset. Logically, then, you end up apologising for Christianity itself.

It has passed by the Oversight Group (an oversight, perhaps?) that most missionaries opposed slavery. By the 20th century, most missionaries were also African. In 1906, the Church Mission Society had nearly 9,000 missionaries, fewer than 1,000 of them European – the rest were ‘native agents’. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African Anglican bishop, and a former slave who converted at 16, brought his own Yoruba translation of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer to tribes along the Niger river because he saw it as his calling to ‘make all men wise unto salvation’ and to ‘fight manfully under Christ’s banner against spiritual enemies’. No one did more to bring West Africa to Anglicanism, or to make Anglicanism African.

The Revd R.H. Stone, an American Baptist who nearly died several times on his mission in the 1860s, recounted in his book In Africa’s Forest and Jungle: Or, Six Years Among the Yorubans how in awe he was of the bravery of the African converts turned missionaries. In particular, he wrote of two women converts called Osoontala and Ofeekee who ‘endured the most bitter persecution without a murmur, supporting themselves by their implicit faith in the promises of God’. Osoontala was hounded by her village for her faith. Ofeekee’s husband would often flog her for not participating in pagan practices: ‘One Lord’s Day we noticed an expression of pain on her countenance and enquired what was the matter. She said nothing, but merely lifted her shoulder cloth and exhibited the lacerated flesh.’ ‘If I had not already become a Christian,’ Stone said, ‘they would have led me to become a disciple.’

Should the Church of England apologise using the wording of the report, it would be an insult to the memory of missionaries and converts. What would such an apology say about the Ugandan Martyrs, 22 Catholic and 23 Anglican converts, who in the 1880s were executed by King Mwanga II? That they need not have bothered abandoning their old beliefs? That they should’ve thought harder about ‘efficacy’? Today’s African Christians may also be surprised to discover that their faith is optional – especially given that of the Christians in the world who are killed for their beliefs, 90 per cent are from Africa.

There is a collapse of confidence in Anglicanism within the C of E. The Church seems embarrassed by its own existence and by the imperative of spiritual leadership. One retired bishop tells me he once asked the chair of one of the many reports on the future of the Church why there was nothing about encouraging priestly vocation, and was told that would be ‘too elitist’.

The only sliver of hope for Anglicans is that the C of E simply hasn’t yet clocked the implications of the recommendations and could back away from them. A C of E spokesman says that the Church does not interpret the recommendations as a call to apologise for spreading the Gospel, ‘however, we need to be transparent that appalling abuses took place in the past’. If the Church wants to apologise for abuses, it should. But it has to reject the Oversight Group’s wording, or it will end up undermining its reason for existing. How typical it would be of the Church of England to apologise for Christianity by mistake.  <//>