Slaves and open borders: ‘Who is my neighbour?’

Gavin Ashenden• February 4, 2025

Both Catholics and Anglicans have been caught up in theological and political arguments about the relationship between politics and the theological question of “Who is my neighbour?”

In America, an unlikely public debate sprang up, bridging the Atlantic divide, between Vice President J.D. Vance and English politician and pundit Rory Stewart, a former contender for the Conservative Party leadership. Yet, in spite of his Tory credentials, he is very much on the left of the political spectrum.

The argument erupted when Mr Vance suggested that Christians have a hierarchy of obligations, with their family and communities coming first. Mr Stewart, who was keen to claim Christ for open borders and unlimited immigration, accused Mr Vance of not understanding the implications of Jesus’s words in John 15:12, where Our Lord says that the greatest love entails laying down one’s life for one’s friends. When Mr Vance perceptively quoted the Church Fathers on the ordo amoris, Mr Stewart retorted that Jesus was ambivalent about family connections and that the Christian tradition had been over-influenced by Cicero. He alleged that, unknowingly, Mr Vance was urging a form of paganism.

The internet has been awash with the argument for several days. Mr Vance was correct in suggesting that St Thomas Aquinas discusses the hierarchy or ordo caritatis (order of charity). Summa Theologiae II, q. 26, orders the priorities of loving: first, God; then the self (“a man ought to love himself more than his neighbour”); followed by one’s neighbour; and lastly, one’s own body (“we ought to love our neighbour more than our own body”).

Mr Vance has argued that what is most odd about the Left’s hierarchy of love is that it reverses what has been the normative Christian duty or responsibility, prioritising the abstract and the universal over the local and particular. The consequence of this is reducing love to either a feeling or a political programme.

Mr Stewart suggested that the parable of the Good Samaritan offered a mandate for prioritising the stranger. But others have pointed out that the riposte itself contains the Greek word for “neighbour,” πλησίον (plēsion), which is derived directly from πλησίος (plēsios), meaning “near” or “close by.” It is therefore proximity that makes neighbours the object of our care and attention.

This contrast—between the conservatives’ claim that the local and proximate take precedence over the distant and universal—has erupted in the Church of England as well, but over slave reparations.

A dispute has arisen over whether the Church of England has any moral duty to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves. This has raised a number of complex questions. But perhaps the most pressing is whether the denomination has a greater duty towards the sixth generation of the descendants of slaves than it does towards the financial needs of its current congregations and parish churches.

Commentators have pointed out that the links between historic investments and profits from the slave trade were not as causally connected as progressive activists have assumed. Nor is it obvious that the descendants of slaves are morally entitled to reparations from the present members of the Church of England, even if the historical connection were stronger.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury announced with great fanfare—delighting the political activists among the Anglicans—that the historic resources of the Church of England, an investment fund often described as Queen Anne’s Bounty, were going to be used to pay reparations of over £100 million as part of an initiative called Project Spire.

However, a new report released by Policy Exchange on 1 February strongly criticises the Church Commissioners’ proposals to pay such a large sum for the Church of England’s alleged involvement in the slave trade. The report describes the process as one that “embedded activism rather than balance.”

The authors—Oxford ethicist Lord (Nigel) Biggar, the lawyer Charles Wide KC, and race scholar Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert—warn that the proposal exceeds the Commissioners’ legal powers and charitable purpose, diverting money intended for struggling parish churches to racial activism.

Lord Biggar criticises the historical misreading upon which the supporters of Project Spire base their claims, stating:

“The British were among the first peoples in the history of the world to abolish both the slave trade and slavery. They went on to do penance for slavery by spending resources of money, ships, and lives in suppressing slavery worldwide for a century and a half.”

He continued:

“The question of which past wrongs to address, and how best to address them, is a complicated one that needs a careful answer. Yet, nowhere have the Church Commissioners felt it necessary to give one. This represents a serious failure of due diligence on the part of the Church Commissioners.”

Lord Sewell of Sanderstead provided the foreword, in which he said:

“It appears to have slipped into a progressive relativism where feelings triumph over facts, and where everything is laid down on the altar of ‘lived experience.’ Rather than addressing the genuine challenges in our society today, the Church allows itself to be dragged into the quagmire of a narrative about the legacy of slavery and systemic racism.”

The authors claim that the project is fatally flawed for two key reasons: first, because it represents a departure by the Church Commissioners from their core duties—of which international reparatory justice is not one, however worthy or not it might be in the abstract—and a diversion of funds intended for the good of parishes to a purpose for which they were not intended. And second, because this specific act of reparatory justice is poorly justified, historically uninformed, and overall inadvisable.

The report concludes:

“The establishment of Project Spire was the result of a defective process which embedded activism rather than balance, paid insufficient regard to legal or ethical propriety, and lacked transparency, true accountability, and breadth of reference.”

It further states:

“The broader case for reparations is also dubious, because the funds in question—Queen Anne’s Bounty—were hardly involved in the evil of slave-trading at all, and because the contribution of slave-trading and slavery to Britain’s economic development is a highly contested matter.”

The conflict between political progressives and conservative critics of a theologically driven progressive agenda centres on the same argument in both cases. When establishing who one’s neighbour is, does the Christian faith prioritise the near, the proximate, and the local? Or does it favour the distant, the theoretical, and the universal?

Progressive activists are attempting to invert and reverse the long-held ethics of the historic Church. Their case has been severely undermined by a theologically literate vice president on one side of the Atlantic and a group of well-informed intellectual critics on the other.

Photo: A woman walks toward Mexico at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, on the U.S.-Mexico border on February 1, 2025 in San Diego, California. (Photo credit: Apu Gomes /Freelance photographer via Getty Images)