Abstract
Willie James Jennings contends that the goal of whiteness is the creation and preservation of segregated space. For Jennings, whiteness, as well as upholding perceived notions of white normativity, is a way of being in the world, an imagined reality made real by our movement in physical space which destroys the identity-forming connections between communities and land. In this article I bring together Pope Francis’s reflections on the globalised economy in Laudato Si’ with the critiques of James H. Cone and Jennings to demonstrate the horrific harm of whiteness on marginalised people groups and the land itself. To resist the building project of whiteness, therefore, requires attention to our relationship with land. At this point I turn more readily to the land of England, offering the beginnings of a theology of place given the substantial land holdings of the Church of England. I close by asking whether the Church of England can be trusted to use its land to dismantle whiteness given its troubling colonial history in relation to land use.
Keywords
Introduction
If, as Willie James Jennings contends, the goal of whiteness is the creation and preservation of segregated space which prevents the embrace of those imagined apart, how then should we reimagine our living spaces to resist this destructive end? The Church of England owns a substantial portfolio of land, giving them considerable power over our geography and living spaces in England. How can a theology of place for England resist the building project of whiteness, which harms both people and the earth, and offer a new vision for land use in the Church?
In this article, I will first demonstrate the horrific double harm of whiteness to the earth and poor and marginalised communities, especially black and indigenous peoples, by reinterpreting Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Si’ in view of the critiques of white domination by James H. Cone and Jennings. This engagement will demonstrate a means of resistance through attentiveness to local places. Given the Church of England's considerable land ownership and its historic parochial model for church and community life, I will then offer the beginnings of a theology of place for England drawing upon Michael Northcott and Andrew Rumsey. I close with a warning to those seeking a Christian theology of place, asking whether the Church of England can be trusted to use its land to dismantle whiteness given its troubling colonial history in relation to land use. 1
A Universalising Paradigm: The Double Harm of Whiteness to People and Planet
In the essay ‘Whose Earth is it Anyway?’ James H. Cone makes the crucial link between the plight of the oppressed and the plight of the earth, recognising that the logic of the subjugation of peoples is the same logic seen in the subjugation of the more than human creation. 2 He recognises that the ecological crisis has not been a prominent concern for African American communities in their struggle for liberation; instead, understandably, they have focused their energies on defending their inherent human dignity in a context of centuries of slavery, lynching, and segregation. Cone draws attention to the work of Womanist theologians, specifically, Delores Williams, Emilie Townes, and Karen Baker-Fletcher, who make the connection between the degradation of the earth and the abuse of black bodies, especially black women's bodies. For example, Emilie Townes writes of the placing of toxic landfill sites in African American communities as ‘contemporary versions of lynching a whole people’. 3 Cone goes on to present in more detail the disproportionate ways black and poor communities have their local environment contaminated by hazardous waste as an example of the implicit connection between racism and environmental degradation. Cone writes: ‘With fewer resources to cope with the dire consequences of pollution, the poor bear an unequal burden for technological development while the rich reap most of the benefits. This makes racism and poverty ecological issues.’ 4
Pope Francis, in his famous encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, likewise stresses repeatedly the connection between ecological and social injustice: ‘Everything is connected’. 5 Indeed, this is the central premise to his teaching, captured in his statement that ‘[w]e are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental’. 6 Moreover, Pope Francis demonstrates how environmental deterioration has the largest impact on the poor. The poor suffer the most as a result of environmental exploitation, their needs overlooked as collateral damage, an after-thought to the political and economic decisions made in the halls of power. 7 This neglect of the needs of billions of people is perpetuated by the ‘lack of physical contact and encounter’ between rich and poor, dulling the senses of the affluent who can remain apart from such communities that are experiencing environmental degradation which destroys their homes and limits their access to safe food and water. 8 Pope Francis highlights how this neglect of the realities of the poor can exist alongside a ‘“green” rhetoric’. 9 He continues: ‘we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor’. 10 Thus, the climate and biodiversity crisis we face is also a social crisis which requires a robust challenge to models of consumption and production and to the efficiency drive that standardises processes and reduces costs to achieve economic growth without considering a broader vision of reality. If everything is connected, what is needed is not discrete solutions but a collaborative approach that pays attention to the whole while valuing the inherent worth of every organism as a precious creature that God declares to be very good. 11 Moreover, Pope Francis teaches that ‘[s]trategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature’. 12
As well as integrated solutions, awareness of the causes of this complex crisis are required. Returning to Cone, he argues that the struggles of vulnerable communities are not a newly created problem but a legacy of white domination and colonialism. He writes: No threat has been more deadly and persistent for black and Indigenous peoples than the rule of white supremacy in the modern world. For over five hundred years … white people have been exploiting nature and killing people of color in every nook and cranny of the planet in the name of God and democracy.
13
For five hundred years whites have acted as if they owned the world's resources and have forced people of color to accept their scientific and ethical values. … Now that humanity has reached the possibility of extinction, one would think that a critical assessment of how we got to where we are would be the next step for sensitive and caring theologians of the earth.
15
We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.
17
Pope Francis asks us to be wary of ecological initiatives that are absorbed into the global system of dominance of the technological paradigm. 19 Environmental ethicist and theologian Michael Northcott is also suspicious of global, technological driven approaches to the environmental crisis. Northcott explores how the image of the earth captured from space, the blue planet, has generated a discourse that views environmental concerns from a global perspective. Although this may help to perceive the gravity of the degradation of the planet, Northcott contends this view has a series of pitfalls that prevent meaningful change. In global environmental negotiations, each nation's particular resistance on a certain issue can constrain international agreements. More significant is the influence of multinational corporations who often fund international summits on the climate and promote ‘growth-led technological change as the only realistic solution to the environmental crisis’. 20 Northcott catalogues a whole host of reasons why this is problematic, not least the abuse of the global South by scientists and corporations from the global North, compounding the suffering of vulnerable communities.
Furthermore, Northcott demonstrates how international summits and their reports use the language of the ‘global commons’. By this terminology they mean ‘not just the supranational regions such as the oceans, the atmosphere and polar regions but potentially all the natural resources of the planet’.
21
This contradicts the traditional view of commons as land areas cared for communally by local people for the benefit of themselves and future generations. Northcott argues that the problem with perceiving nature as a global commodity is that it frames the natural world as a bank of resources available to global accounting and policing, that is best managed by distant institutions and international treaties which promote profit-driven technological solutions while also criticising poor commoners for not acquiescing to their model of so-called sustainable development.
22
Northcott explains further why this globalising logic is problematic: This discourse is damaging to traditional land and water resource use patterns in the South and the North, because it justifies the continuing expropriation of forests, fisheries and farm lands from tribal, nomadic and village communities by state agencies and commercial landowners. This process continues apace despite the growing body of evidence that traditional common property regimes have a better record of efficient and sustainable resource use—that is, of providing low cost and low environmental impact water, food, clothing and building materials to local people—than their modern supplanters.
23
The disruption to cultural identity through environmental exploitation is likewise spoken of by Pope Francis. He is worth quoting at length here: Many intensive forms of environmental exploitation and degradation not only exhaust the resources which provide local communities with their livelihood, but also undo the social structures which, for a long time, shaped cultural identity and their sense of the meaning of life and community. The disappearance of a culture can be just as serious, or even more serious, than the disappearance of a species of plant or animal. The imposition of a dominant lifestyle linked to a single form of production can be just as harmful as the altering of ecosystems.
25
In his post-synodal apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia, following the landmark Amazon Synod held in Rome in October 2019, Pope Francis extends his teaching concerning the care of indigenous communities and the validity of their contributions in tackling the ecological and social crises facing the Amazon region. He confirms the primary authority of the various original peoples of the Amazon ‘from whom we have the most to learn’, describing the ‘rest of us … as “guests”’ when engaged in social dialogue concerning the future of the Amazon. 29 The preparatory stage for the Amazon Synod, as well as the gathering in Rome, involved many representatives of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. The careful and attentive listening to indigenous communities prior to, and during, the Synod is evident throughout the Final Document, The Amazon: New Paths for the Church and for an Integral Ecology, issued in the final days of the Synod. The document encourages the Church to be attentive to indigenous wisdoms that ‘possess teachings for life’, and which can offer an ‘integrated vision of reality, capable of understanding the multiple connections existing throughout creation’. 30 This echoes Cone's argument that black and indigenous voices are essential to overturn the values that have led to the destruction of land and cultural identity. Moreover, it shows how the type of connected strategies Pope Francis called for in Laudato Si’ can be found beyond the current dominant technological paradigm within the worldview and approach of indigenous communities.
Cone's essay also highlights the disproportionate impact of environmental exploitation on black and indigenous communities, a legacy of white domination and colonialism. This is confirmed by the Amazon Synod when it details the current vulnerabilities of such communities in the Amazon region: ‘The life of indigenous, mestizo, riverside, peasant, quilombola and/or afro-descendant peoples and traditional communities is threatened by destruction, environmental exploitation and the systematic violation of their territorial rights’. 31 Moreover, the Synod also name colonialism as the cause of such vulnerability: ‘The episodes of colonisation throughout history, motivated by extractivism and bringing about different migratory currents, forced [indigenous peoples] into situations of great vulnerability’. 32 Subsequently, in Querida Amazonia Pope Francis reiterates his apology to native peoples for the offences the Roman Catholic Church committed during the colonial conquest of the Americas. 33 He also unmasks the colonialising logic of ongoing environmental and social exploitation today, concealed as technological-driven forms of national and international business that plunder and pollute the Amazon region while ignoring the pain this causes indigenous communities who understand the land as an extension of their own body. 34
Willie James Jennings, in his seminal text The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, gives significant weight to the reconfiguration of land in the colonial moment where the type of integrated approach to land and place held by indigenous communities, as described above, was disregarded. Jennings demonstrates how the ancient connections to place and land, that were central to the identity of many indigenous communities, were reimagined in the colonial era as a grotesque claim to a secured and bounded piece of land. In late eighteenth-century North America this was done through the establishment of private property. Following the seizure of indigenous land by the colonising power of England, a new spatial vision was fashioned for America as the land was divided into sellable squares for white settlers. As a result, former ways of imagining life in relation to land were disrupted beyond recognition. Enabled by the invention of the measuring chain by Englishman Edmund Gunter, Jennings describes how Thomas Jefferson was able to enact his plan to divide up the supposedly vacant land of America into plots large enough for any settler. Despite the protests from native peoples to the claiming of land as property, the land became sellable to potential buyers. The intricacies of the landscape and the animals that lived upon it, all essential to indigenous ways of life and their identity, were mapped onto Jefferson's grid system.
35
This, Jennings writes, ‘destroyed the possibility of thinking of identity within land, within place’.
36
Land in North America would now primarily be viewed through its possible price. Jennings writes of the power of the white body in this framework, as the world was transformed: Like the formation of racial vision organized around white bodies, the grid system operated without regard to any specific geographic features. And like the conceptual turnings of whiteness in which tribes and peoples, their stories, their ways of life were charted through the visual logic of their phenotypes and racial classifications, the grid system drew lines through mountains, valleys, rivers, burial sites, and so on.
37
For Jennings, the creation of racial identity and subsequent rise of racism and white supremacy is wedded to our distorted relationship to space. ‘Whiteness’, as defined by Robert Beckford, is the way in which ‘ideas, myths and language are used to ensure that white skin colour is represented in a particular, superior way’.
38
He describes whiteness as an ‘invisible norm’, an ‘ethnically neutral category that can go unexplored and unchallenged as the standard of expectation and evaluation’.
39
While Jennings would certainly agree with this definition, his articulation of whiteness, as can be seen in the above quotation, is contingent on a relationship to geography, specifically the transformation of the world into private property. For Jennings, whiteness is a way of being in the world that is marked by constant evaluation and tends toward segregation and the destruction of place-centred identity, made real by our movement within physical spaces that are marked by commodity rather than intimate connection. His whole programme seeks to make visible this invisible way of being. One's resistance to the ‘deformed building project’ of whiteness is easier to see; it is a resistance toward the relentless drive toward a ‘common purpose that destroys life’.
40
What does this resistance resemble? Jennings writes: People have resisted [the performance of whiteness] from the very beginning—resisted the loss of life in a place; resisted being designated racially; resisted their lives being commodified; resisted being forced to live inside global systems of exchange, debt, and money; and resisted as long as they could the relentless systems of education and evaluation that supported these things.
41
Jennings’s account of the ‘deformed building project’ of whiteness resembles the world critiqued by Pope Francis, a world in which a one-dimensional technological paradigm deployed by the powerful is perceived as a positive vision of progress but masks a harmful reality of environmental exploitation, increasing social injustice, and the destruction of local cultures wedded to particular places. Northcott demonstrates how the global model Pope Francis describes impacts local land use rights to the detriment of both the land itself and local communities. Moreover, Jennings and Pope Francis both identify that global systems eradicate difference as they impose a universal, dominant lifestyle for the sake of technological efficiency, disregarding identity-forming connections to a particular land and its creatures through a failure to attend to other voices outside this dominant paradigm. Jennings brings specificity by naming this domineering work as the goal of whiteness, that came to birth in the colonial moment when bodies and land were enclosed by lines drawn by the hands of the powerful.
Jennings has articulated what resistance to the performance of whiteness resembles. Pope Francis likewise asks that we resist the universalising logic of the technological paradigm, drawing attention to the ways it can be undermined by small co-operatives of producers who opt for an alternative way of life, who seek beauty, slow down, stop buying products we do not need, and strive for a community that causes far less harm to creation. 45 In this resistance we can discern a retrieval of place-centred identity through attention to the local. Turning my attention to England then, how can we resist the building project of whiteness in the land of England? Or if that is too ambitious, what can my own denomination, the Church of England, do to undermine the relentless construction of a world that limits the embrace of those imagined apart?
The Land of England: Resisting Whiteness through the Local
The Christian charity Operation Noah, which supports churches to address the climate crisis, published in 2022 the report ‘Church Land and the Climate Crisis: A Call to Action’. This report challenges the Church of England to reimagine its current landholdings as places of meeting for ‘all people of peace who pursue creaturely flourishing’. 46 The report highlights how in the Church of England's ‘Routemap to Net Zero Carbon by 2030’, church land is only mentioned in passing, with much of the route map focused on church buildings and energy use. Operation Noah sees this as a missed opportunity. The report states that ‘land owned by the Church's National Investing Bodies (primarily the Church of England's Church Commissioners) is considered outside the scope of the report, which is unfortunate given that the agricultural land owned by the Church of England is likely to create more greenhouse gas emissions than all Church of England church buildings combined’. 47
Operation Noah estimates the Church of England own around 250,000 acres of land: ‘98,000 acres of rural and strategic land owned by Church Commissioners …, 70,000 acres owned by dioceses (known as glebe land), 31,000 acres in Church Commissioners’ UK forestry investments, [and] smaller areas of land owned by individual churches’. 48 Glebe land, which historically was used by parish clergy to generate a living, is now managed by Diocesan Boards of Finance to raise income for clergy stipends. Full details of this land are not known. Of the land owned by the Church Commissioners, considered part of their investment portfolio to finance the work and mission of the Church, it includes ‘35,000 acres of high-quality farmland, approximately 50,000 acres of mid-quality farmland, 4,000 acres of woodland, 6,000 acres identified as strategic for housing, [and] 10,000 acres of land designated for nature’. 49
Operation Noah draws attention to the vision statement of the Church Commissioners for strategic land but criticises it for a lack of urgency when radical action is needed to face the climate and biodiversity crisis. If we do not meet the pledges made at UN climate conferences and continue in our current trajectory, it is expected that it will lead to a 2.5°C rise in global heating by 2050. Operation Noah identifies three key priorities for Church of England land to help avert this tragedy: tree growing, peat protection and restoration, and supporting farmers to reduce emissions. Moreover, it also reminds its readers, contrary to Western and modern understandings, that all land belongs not to humans, but to God. Land should be carefully managed to provide rest for the land and food for the poor and outsider (Lev. 19:9; 25:4-5). 50
As this research highlights, the Church of England owns a substantial portfolio of land, which gives them considerable power over our geography and living spaces in England. The Operation Noah report rightly focuses on strategies for agricultural land and woodland, while also attending to human needs and livelihoods that are impacted by land use. 51 More could be said, however, about housing and communal spaces or land which informs the cultural identity of local communities. Within the breakdown of Church Commissioner owned land it was noted that 6,000 acres have been identified for housing and it is well-known that glebe land is often sold to developers for housing. If, as Jennings has argued, ‘the maturity whiteness aims at always forms segregated spaces’, how can the Church of England use its power over land to resist this segregation and bring new life to the earth? 52 We established with Pope Francis and Jennings that an integrated vision of creation fostered through attentiveness to a particular place and its creatures is one way to resist the power of whiteness and its universalising paradigm. How we imagine and use physical space is, therefore, essential. A failure to grasp the relationship between land use and whiteness may result in an approach to the climate crisis from the Church of England that inadvertently perpetuates the logic of colonialism that continues to harm the most vulnerable, prevents the sharing of different ways of life, and dismisses those voices that urgently need to be heard.
I will now return to the work of Michael Northcott who demonstrates something of an alternative vision of place-centred communities, while also providing another form of critical assessment regarding what went wrong in our relationship to land in Great Britain. Although we cannot return to the world Northcott describes here, it demonstrates other possibilities than the ones we now conceive as the norm, and challenges parish communities to consider alternative forms of life together that push against commodified life. 53 While Northcott does not attend to the power of whiteness in his writing, 54 in his work we find possibilities for an integrated vision of life for England that resists the building project of whiteness that harms both people and planet.
Due to the influence of the Celtic saints, monastic dwellings were established across much of the British Isles from the fourth to the eighth centuries. Their work sustained local governance of communities maintaining place-making practices concerning food, fuel and water provision. This work combined spiritual and practical care for places, that developed into place-governed institutions. Northcott summarises the positive ecological and social impact of monasticism on the British Isles: In particular there emerged in England and Scotland under monastic rule social arrangements for the careful use and sharing of environmental commons, including crop lands, grazing areas, rivers, uplands, and woodlands, while craft guilds evolved to govern non-agricultural forms of creative work and exchange. These institutions and practices were formed around parochial polities in which monastic communities and parish churches played central roles, while royal courts were remote and relatively weak in their influence over land and people as compared with the modern era. These institutions underwrote the gradual evolution of European farming from a slave or serf economy to a peasant economy in which individual smallholders held and could pass on their land use rights to succeeding generations. Analogously in the towns, medieval guilds were institutions that trained craftsmen, enabling them to become free citizens, and ensured fair prices for their products.
55
The undermining of local governance in Tudor and Stuart Britain was compounded by the dissolution of the monasteries. The background to such events cannot be fully explored here, but Northcott stresses how monasteries had lost something of their original intention, particularly in respect to land. Monks no longer actively cared and tended creation alongside peasant farmers, becoming wealthy landowners rather than co-workers. 56 Dickens and Youings confirm that the life of an ordinary monk in England had become relatively comfortable, no longer tilling and tending the land but known to their neighbours as local land proprietors and the receivers of rents and tithes. 57 Nevertheless, we should be wary of reports of great immorality in the religious houses, given the political atmosphere at the time. Although the influence of the monasteries on the spiritual life of the nation was waning, most historians agree that the dissolution, beginning with the Act of Suppression in 1536 that saw the closure of the smaller religious houses, was financially, rather than religiously, motivated. The acquisition of monastic land provided a means to raise needed revenue for the Crown to finance military expenditure for a kingdom vulnerable to invasion and internal rebellion. After the dissolution Henry VIII recommended the scheme to others, including to James V in Scotland, as a means of acquiring wealth from the kingdom. 58 Henry did not hold onto monastic land for long, readily turning his new assets into cash. Knowles notes that ‘little more than sixty years after the Dissolution, only a small part of the lands once monastic remained the property of the Crown’. 59 Northcott argues that the dissolution of the monasteries begun in England, and moving later onto Scotland and Wales, would have lasting repercussions on Britain's relationship with the soil. 60
The dissolution marked the beginning of the pivotal break between people and land in Britain. It ushered in a new system for land management, replacing communal open fields with bordered fields individually owned or rented. This new system authorised by Acts of Parliament beginning in the seventeenth century transformed common land—large proportions held in trust by monasteries and the church and farmed by local people—into private property. During the Acts of Enclosure between a quarter to a third of the land of England, Scotland and Wales was taken by the Crown and subsequently given to the nobility in reward for their support. This centralising move, and the successive Acts that followed, led to a concentration of power in the hands of a new class of landowning farmers who extracted wealth from the land at a distance from the land itself. As a result, peasant farmers were dispossessed from common land, losing their ability to work for themselves and therefore were forced to move into industrial areas in the hope of acquiring factory work. Their descendants today find themselves once again without secure employment as the majority of factory work has been exported outside Britain. Northcott contends that this break from the land, briefly surveyed here, led to an erosion of the importance of place as the centralising forces of the state did away with local governance of common woodlands, grazing land and shared waterways. 61
One might assume that this withdrawal of humans from the countryside might benefit wild species and increase biodiversity. It has, in fact, had the opposite effect due to the industrialisation and mechanisation of farming practices, the increase in the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, as well as the use of heavy machinery. This has allowed for the destruction of diverse forests and grasslands to create fields of monocrops that produce food for billions of domesticated animals such as pigs, cattle and chickens which are increasingly kept indoors in livestock sheds. Despite the efforts of conservation groups many wild species in England are close to extinction or are already extinct.
62
Northcott writes that industrial agriculture practices displace human labour on the land, but at the same time they erode living soils and uncultivated areas, and hence the base of the food webs on which insects, birds and small mammals rely. Traditional mixed farms and smallholdings by contrast sustain a much larger range of species, and they produce more human food per hectare than modern industrial farming methods.
63
The resulting disconnect between people and land is driven, Northcott argues, by the industrialisation of food production promoted by town planners and development companies who use available land on the edge of urban areas to create spaces of consumption such as shopping malls and residential housing estates that are only reachable by car along busy roads. 64 Pre-industrial cities have much more space given over to parks, flood meadows, waterways, trees and spaces for small-scale food production. For example, the Sea Mills garden suburb in northwest Bristol was built following World War II with the aim of being self-sufficient. There is a prevalence of green spaces including space for local food production as well as areas for business and local services. The design of the suburb lends itself towards social interaction with those in the community. 65 Northcott describes how new housing developments built since the 1960s have used common space for car parking rather than for green spaces. He goes on to highlight how this need for tarmac is impacting the well-being of children and adults, as they spend less time outdoors interacting with creation, human and more than human. Northcott argues that children and young people need this engagement outside with more than human species to allow positive development, leading to increased creativity and imagination. Tarmacked roads, resulting in faster traffic, mean it is no longer safe for children to cycle and play unsupervised, preventing some of these important interactions from taking place. Decreased access to green spaces and small-scale food production also means many children increasingly do not know from where their food originates. 66
In response to the issues highlighted above, Northcott asks: ‘How then might religious communities and parish churches, which affirm face-to-face and neighbourly contact as a vital feature of church and community life, influence and change the technological society in a more ecological direction?’ 67 He proposes his own Christian theology of place, a parochial ecology to restore place-centred reality. He suggests different ways such an ecology could be developed, such as encouraging parish churches to become the locus of community mobilisation for its local environment, as well as places of hopeful resistance. 68
Andrew Rumsey, in his book Parish: An Anglican Theology of Place, similarly offers a parochial ecology, albeit from a different starting point, to draw parallels to the traditional cure of souls extending further than human souls. The resonance of parochial ecology for Rumsey articulates the true vocation of parochial ministry, one that is ‘formed by an ecology of care for a particular place, its people and the relation of both to God’. 69 Correspondingly, Rumsey explores the intimate connection between human community and natural landscape found in geographical study of the parish. He argues that it is the local characteristics of one's parish that inform collective identity. 70 Moreover, he describes the parish as a ‘threefold cord of soul, soil and society’. 71 Rumsey's basis for his investigation into the importance of the geography of the parish is his belief in both the secular and spiritual dynamic of place, seen in the history of the parish over many centuries, ‘uniquely combining religious meaning with local identity’. 72 Rumsey notes that Christianity is one faith tradition exerting an influence on the nation among many practised in England. However, he asserts that the Church of England's formative influence on the places of England cannot be ignored, even if her influence is diminishing. Rumsey contends that the staggering age of parish boundaries and the legacy of the parish system, while not without its challenges, is the basis of neighbourhood belonging that provides welcome to the outsider and could bring renewal to the church as a radical form of local identity. 73
Considering these theologies of place offered by Northcott and Rumsey, my question is how can the Church of England, through its own land ownership and management, provide greater opportunities for neighbourly contact that can foster cultural identity while also restoring barren places? For example, what would it resemble for the Church of England to use its strategic land in a radically different way that does not conform to current expectations of housing development? 74 Could glebe land be preserved as a green space that is biodiversity rich, used as a community allotment encouraging social interaction between those suffering isolation, safeguarded as a place for traveller communities, turned into a sports field for a school with only an asphalt playground? These are merely suggestions of my own imagination or generated through conversation with others. A local community would be best placed to dictate how glebe land is used, but only if they are aware of its existence.
A Warning to Christian Theologies of Place
While this retrieval of a theology of place for England to help cultivate place-centred identity is helpful, Jennings provides a warning to those seeking a Christian theology of place. A theology of place must, Jennings contends, reckon with the power that was wielded over place in the colonial moment. 75 Although I have proposed the theologies of place of Northcott and Rumsey as one way to resist the globalising paradigm and the building project of whiteness through attentiveness to local places, their work fails to engage substantively with England's colonial history, her power over place, and the harm such power has caused to black and indigenous communities. Such colonial entanglements are not examined in their research to consider the impact of this history on the theologies of place they propose.
The power wielded by English colonisers over the land of North America using the measuring chain to carve up plots of indigenous land was highlighted above by Jennings. Meanwhile, Meredith Lake provides a fascinating account of the colonisation of Australian land and the role of the Church of England. She demonstrates how Anglican spirituality—the universal claims of the Gospel given local expression—and the parish ideal was sought to be realised in Australia by Revd William Grant Broughton who arrived in Sydney in 1829. Revd Broughton, who was later made a bishop, spent a large part of his time in Australia as an itinerant minister consecrating new church buildings and churchyards, redefining the spiritual meaning of plots of land throughout the colony in southeastern Australia. Lake writes of the bishop's ministry of consecration: Each time the bishop consecrated a church or burial ground, he formally invested a scene of settlement with religious meaning and called down God's blessing on the colonists who gathered there. … In doing this, he proposed a positive religious relationship between colonists and particular places—relationships that were all the more important, perhaps, in the absence of thoroughly settled parishes and among people in the process of creating a new home. He at once resurrected a powerful English symbol of the connections between a community and a particular place and expressed his enduring commitment to an Anglican religion that was thoroughly embedded in the land.
76
This account of Broughton's ministry is another example of the destructive work Cone highlighted that subjugates people and planet, that removed those from the land who were best placed to care for it, and did not listen to indigenous voices which could have informed European settlers on a relationship to land based on creaturely connection and intimacy rather than possession and control. 79 Given Pope Francis’s teaching that colonisation has not ended, but continues ‘disguised’ and ‘concealed’, 80 I wish to extend Jennings’s warning to current land practices in the Church of England. If her previous colonial power over land, as seen in the accounts above, is not reckoned with, the Church of England may perpetuate a similar colonial logic to its current landholdings that disregards existing attachments (beyond ownership) to English land. For example, I recently discovered a planning application made on behalf of a Diocesan Board of Finance to build houses on a small plot of glebe land next to a parish church in a suburban village. This 3.65-acre site is a haven of green space in a busy residential area that has been well used by the community for an extended period of time (decades presumably, maybe centuries?) as playing fields, for community picnics, and comprises the local Scout and Guide hut, among other uses. The planning application has caused significant uproar in the village with over 200 objections placed against the proposals. 81 In my mind, this demonstrates how the Church of England has failed to listen to its parishioners and perceive the importance of this open space for neighbourly contact and local identity in a context of significant other housing development in the village. This is not to say that houses should not be built on glebe land, but that attentiveness to local voices is essential to ensure the church does not build fences on sacred space.
Moreover, the Church of England's current approach to glebe land, and church land more broadly, is further complexified given how such land came to be owned by the church. In 1704 the Queen Anne's Bounty was formed by the Church of England to tackle the extreme poverty of beneficed clergy. At this time the church had the right to levy a 10 per cent tithe on all agricultural produce grown on the land in the parish to secure an income for the incumbent. However, depending on the size of one’s parish or the quality of the land, one's wealth could vary significantly from parish to parish. Some incumbents were so wealthy they could afford to pay a curate to do the pastoral work on their behalf. The Queen Anne's Bounty tried to provide a remedy to clergy poverty, by either buying plots of glebe land for poor clergy to help sustain a living or provide an annual cash stipend if buying property was not feasible. In 1948 the Church Commissioners body was formed, merging the assets of the Queen's Anne Bounty with the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who had also sought to make parishes more equitable by redistributing church funds.
What has been revealed in the past year or so, through research commissioned by the Church Commissioners in 2019, is that the Queen Anne's Bounty has significant links with transatlantic chattel slavery. This connection is twofold; through its significant investment in the South Sea Company, a company that traded in enslaved people, and through numerous benefactions from individuals who profited from transatlantic chattel slavery and the plantation economy. For example, Edward Colston was a benefactor to the Bounty. The South Sea Company was founded in 1711 and given the monopoly on Britain's trade of enslaved people to the Spanish Americas. Between 1715 and 1739 it transported 34,000 enslaved people, as well as transporting enslaved people from Caribbean islands to mainland America. The report states: ‘Investors in the South Sea Company would have known that it was trading in enslaved people’. 82 The report goes on to say that: ‘From 1723 to 1777, Queen Anne's Bounty's funds that were not used to purchase land to augment clergy income or pay for its running costs were invested almost exclusively in South Sea Company Annuities’. 83
In terms of the land and property purchased for poor clergy, although a sample tracing exercise seems to indicate that none of this land remains in the Church Commissioners property portfolio today, they can make no guarantees it is not still owned by other parts of the Church of England, such as by Diocesan Boards of Finance. 84 In my mind, this adds further weight to the need for greater transparency around the Church of England's landholdings, as Operation Noah has called for in their report on church land. Moreover, this leads me to ask, using the words of Cone: ‘Do we have any reason to believe that the culture most responsible for the ecological crisis will also provide the moral and intellectual resources for the earth's liberation?’ 85 Can those with power, who have historically abused that power, now employ it, or perhaps relinquish it, for good? 86 Can the Church of England bring God's liberation to the poor and marginalised, and share in the flourishing of all God's creatures? As a Church of England priest, who was fortunate enough to grow up in England's ‘green and pleasant land’, with identity-forming connections to both local land and an Anglican parish church, I have a hopeful vision of what is possible. Yet I also ponder my own culpability in systems that abuse marginalised peoples and have removed people from their land, while aware of my own privileged childhood that fostered connections to a specific, albeit very small, piece of land. Is a humbler vision for the Church of England possible, no longer entering space to seize and control, but working alongside others to resist the building project of whiteness and help preserve the preciousness of the whole created order? 87
