In the sometimes-fraught reflection on empire that we encounter in our contemporary culture wars, these lectures seek to explore the complex and often conflicted relationship between the untidy growth of imperial Britain and the Church of England - arguing for a more nuanced account of how we reflect on the experience of empire and contemporary English religion and identity.
Abolitionists or Accomplices? The Church of England and the Sins of Empire
Monday 25th September, 6.30pm, Vicars’ Hall
In this first lecture, Canon Inman invites us to step back into the world of the Caribbean and the British Atlantic in the early eighteenth century to explore how clergy and leading lay Anglicans sought to engage with what has naturally been considered the chief sin of empire - the horrors of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans from the mid-seventeenth century until its abolition by Parliament in 1807. What role did the Church of England play in allowing slavery to persist and how might conclusions in this regard shape our contemporary response to, for example, contested memorials in places like Bristol Cathedral or even Chichester?
Enlightened Anglicans: Missionaries, Education and Britain’s Empire
Monday 2nd October, 6.30pm, Vicars’ Hall
The popular portrayal of missionaries in the British Empire is often one of maniacal and insensitive propagandists of the faith who were perennially culturally insensitive to their contexts, the Church of England as instrumental to the British Empire’s ‘moral trinity’ of ‘civilization, commerce and Christianity’ as it expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century. In this lecture, Canon Inman invites us to consider the nature of global Anglicanism in the so-called ‘Second Empire’ and the influential role – for good and ill – that the Church of England played in establishing networks of learning, interpreting other cultures and religions, and indeed being reshaped itself by the experience of empire.
An Imperial Church? The Church and the Idea of Empire
Monday 20th November 6.30pm, Vicars’ Hall
In this final lecture, Dr Inman explores the role of theologians and senior Churchmen in relation to the idea of ‘Greater Britain’ at the turn of the twentieth century. While there is considerable evidence of the Church’s central role in conveying a moral vision for the British Empire, a new generation of Anglicans – many informed by Christian Socialism – had far less interest in advancing the cause of an imperial Church and were even agitating against imperial authorities in the colonies. In this lecture, Canon Inman argues that this was expressive of the Church’s contentious relationship to the colonialism per se that had manifested itself at various points since the sixteenth century, indicative of unresolved theological tensions within the Church of England itself since the Reformation. Canon Inman asks how a more nuanced account of the Church of England’s relationship to British imperialism might inform the Church’s response to contemporary culture wars and the challenge of racism in our own day.
