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.
Additionally, the Christian critique of imperialism and racism—almost prophetic—is not new. In fact, fear of its consequences is why the nineteenth-century English Anglican social reformer, Josephine Butler, wrote that it was her “deep conviction that Great Britain will in future be judged, condemned or justified, according to her treatment of those innumerable coloured races...over whom her rule extends.” She is an example of the tension between the desire to do good as a Christian citizen and the difficulty of forming prudential policy while seeking to live providentially. But she did not shrink from the reality of judgement and historic accountability inherent in a traditional conception of the Christian state and society. Christians proclaim that human standards fail to reach the divine standard and therefore they have need of grace. But if they have knowledge of grace then they recognize just how fallen and broken they are and this informs their judgement of wrongdoing and atrocities. If the old Christian empires are judged severely they are judged that way because of the severity of the Christian standard that makes them realize they require grace and cannot redeem themselves. They are not judged by the standards of pagan Rome.
If you take its claims seriously—which no one but Christians themselves are obligated to do—Christianity does not ask you what humanity did 5,000 years ago. It asks what you did after being exposed to what happened 2,000 years ago. Britain (initially England and Scotland) was a post-Reformation Christian state when it entered the transatlantic slave trade, which had been a Catholic enterprise. It knew the Incarnation, was increasingly Biblically literate, and retained the core of the Christian tradition. It is almost profane to argue that its standards should be indexed against that of Senator Marcus Licinius Crassus,2 Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab,3 or King Trudo Agaja,4 rather than Mother Julian,5 Reverend Morgan Godwyn,6 Hannah More7 or Josephine Butler.8
It is an odd “Christian” ethic that treats Pentecost as a consequenceless moment in the appraisal of states, empires and societies that should have been impacted by the claims of the Christian gospel. It is strange conservatism that places the Christian patrimony on the same level as its historic opponents. The dilemma is that Christians are not permitted the comfort of comparison. They are called to a higher and self-imposed standard regardless of what any other civilization did before or alongside them. They are stuck with the severity of grace.
It is my deep conviction that Great Britain will in future be judged, condemned or justified, according to her treatment of those innumerable coloured races, heathen or partly Christianized, over whom her rule extends, or who, beyond the sphere of her rule, claim her sympathy and help as a Christian and civilizing power to whom a great trust has been committed.It grieves me to observe that (so far as I am able to judge) our politicians, public men, and editors, (with the exception of the editors of the “religious press,”) appear to a great extent unaware of the immense importance of this subject, even for the future peace and stability of our Empire, apart from higher interests.
It will be “imposed upon them,” I do not doubt, sooner or later, as it has been imposed upon certain missionaries and others who regard the Divine command as practical and sensible men should do: “Go ye and teach all nations.” All cannot go to the ends of the earth; but all might cease to hinder by the dead weight of their indifference, and their contempt of all men of colour. Dr. Livingstone rebuked the Boers for contemptuously calling all coloured men Kaffirs, to whatever race they belonged. Englishmen deserve still more such a rebuke for their habit of including all the inhabitants of India, East and West, and of Africa, who have not European complexions, under the contemptuous title of “n——s.” Race prejudice is a poison which will have to be cast out if the world is ever to be Christianized, and if Great Britain is to maintain the high and responsible place among the nations which has been given to her.
—Josephine Butler in Native Races and the War, published 1900 [language as in original but redacted]
(May 2026)
ENCYCLICAL LETTER
MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS
OF HIS HOLINESS
POPE LEO XIV
ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON
IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE…
176. In the development of her doctrine, the Church has gradually come to a deeper awareness of the gravity of these issues. It is true that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, as though the moral criteria that matured over time had always been available. Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery. In antiquity and the Middle Ages many individuals and even ecclesiastical institutions had slaves. Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to requests from Sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, the enslavement of “infidels.” It was only in the nineteenth century that a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated, notably under Pope Leo XIII. This development offers a clear example of the Church’s growth in understanding the perennial truths of Revelation that she safeguards. Although there was not always consistency in practice — given that slavery was long tolerated before being unequivocally condemned — there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized. This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached. It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.
177. This is why the memory of past complicity and blindness in the face of the injustice of slavery becomes a call to vigilance. What we have learned must be translated into discernment and responsibility in the present. If we want to avoid the need to ask for pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith, it falls to us today to denounce, clearly and firmly, trafficking in its many forms and, together with all who are committed to this cause, to support concrete efforts of prevention, protection, liberation and rehabilitation.
178. Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information. Entire regions, especially those marked by structural fragility and limited geopolitical relevance, are currently subjected to a new mindset of extraction: that of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps and demographic information. These have become the new “rare earths” of power: vital data which, once aggregated and analyzed, can be used to train predictive models, guide investment strategies, anticipate crises and, above all, determine who and what is deemed to matter. Those who control the health data of entire peoples — often collected under the pretext of aid, research or innovation — possess a structural leverage over the future, for they can shape needs and markets. They can also decide, before others, to whom medicines, investments and protections will be allocated. Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: to ensure that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance. This requires restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and for whose benefit. Otherwise, the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form.
