The Severity of Grace: Christianity and the Imperial Legacy
Monday Memo: 5/25 AD2026
Welcome to the Monday Memo, where I explore the world’s enduring dynamics; grounded in first principles, philosophy, character, and statecraft, rather than passing fads.
Editor’s Note: As this piece was being finalized, Pope Leo XIV issued a historic apology for the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.” No pope had previously acknowledged to this extent the role of the papal bulls that gave European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave non-Christians. The timing is striking. The Catholic Church’s first American pope, whose own family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, has now confirmed the central premise of this essay — that the transatlantic slave trade began as a Catholic enterprise and that Christian institutions bear a specific and non-transferable moral accountability for it. Pope Leo’s apology is precisely the kind of reckoning that the severity of grace demands. I have add the parts of his encyclical addressing slavery at the end of this post.
Yesterday, hundreds of millions of Christians celebrated the birth of the Church on Pentecost Sunday and the initiation of their mission to go into all the world and make disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. In much of the West however, the importance of that event seems to have less and less impact on the thinking of the religion’s more right-wing adherents, especially in how they engage with politics and history. They seem intent to offer their countries a cheap grace. As a scholar, I find myself rather perplexed by self-described traditional Christians in America—and in the UK and Canada—embracing the relativist postmodern and secular rhetorical attempts to defend the “West” by intellectuals and academics associated with the contemporary right.1 Systems tend to contain their own logic, and I am interested in how different groups take their claims about themselves seriously or not.
Take for example British peer, Professor Nigel Biggar’s project ‘Ethics and Empire’ to rehabilitate imperial history. For a Reverend Canon and ethicist, his rhetoric is surprisingly defensive of the European imperial legacy in a manner that undercuts the traditional Christian abhorrence of atrocity and promotion of peace. Unfortunately the imperial past cannot be separated from slavery. Elevated to the House of Peers in 2025, Lord Biggar is a noted scholar, but in terms of political engagement he occupies a vacant middle ground between old traditionalism and an anti-traditionalist, defensive, guiltless and consequenceless “anti-woke” disposition made for a British right desperately craving the shameless, aggressive energy of post-2016 American populism. That the post-Christian right embraces it is unsurprising, what is intriguing is his popularity among self-proclaimed traditionalist conservatives. What are they conserving?
Biggar recycles the attenuated argument that Africans enslaved Africans, selling them to varied buyers, such as Romans and Islamic sultans for millennia. Consequently, he posits that in assessing the unique and compact history of the transatlantic slave trade perpetrated by the post-medieval, Christian powers, one should instead expand their scope and time scale by a factor of ten to consider the purported 5,000 year history of slavery in a continent 43 times the size of Texas rather than focus on the sui generis 400 years of the triangular trade in coastal West Africa. On this issue Biggar’s insight is rather limited. Africans did not enslave Africans for there was no such thing as an “African.” There were distinct kingdoms and empires and tribes, like in Europe, but even more divergent given that Europe was formerly “Christendom.” The category is all wrong, rather like saying that the First World War was the Europeans killing their own people until the Ottomans got involved and confused things. The common attempt to portray the Great War as a “European” civil war is as wide of the mark as is Biggar’s temporal expansion of the slavery question. The European and African sovereigns and republics possessed conscious separate identities so that a French attack on German trenches was no more treason against the Third Republic or “Europe” than the Dahomean conquest of the Kingdom of Whydah was against “Africa.” No one would dare tell an Irish person that their historic oppression by the English came at the hands of “their own people.” Biggar’s argument gains traditionalists nothing against their detractors.
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