Martyn Percy, "The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England" (Hurst, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Martin Percy about his book titled The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism, Empire, Slavery, and Revolt in the Church of England, published by Hearst in early 2025, which examines

two massive institutions, individually in comparison with each other, the entanglement of them, all things we're going to get into, the British Empire and the Anglican Church of England, each of which has had a whole bunch of things going on in the last few decades, centuries, independently, but as we're going to be discussing, really very much intertwined, perhaps more intertwined than our current discussions about the Church of England or

are willing, are eager, are interested in discussing and admitting. And so I think a lot of what we're going to be talking about here is about myths, about stories, about beliefs, obviously some of which are religious, but a lot of this is about institutions and the role of institutions in communities and the way politics does or is seen not to play into all of this.

So it's a fascinating tangled web here. Martin, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to help us unpick it. Miranda, it's a great pleasure. Very, very good to be with you.

Could you please start us off before we get too deep into the web with introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Sure. Thank you. Well, first of all, I'm an academic. I was born in Blackburn, England, and I now live in Scotland. But I really ply my trade internationally. I have a chair in the University of St. Joseph in Macau in China.

I also work in the Hong Kong province of the Anglican Church out there as their provost theologian. And I have a chair at the University of Bern in Switzerland. So I'm doing different kinds of things in theology and social science. So really my interest really as an academic is in cultural theory and theology and churches. So that broadly fits under the umbrella of what we call contemporary ecclesiology.

My doctoral work was on American fundamentalism, and I still remember my supervisor at the time. This was back in the late 1980s saying, you know, Martin, why on earth are you studying fundamentalism? Nobody will be interested in that subject in the 21st century. So I've often reflected on that piece of sage advice from my supervisor at the time.

My kids, my adult sons, if they were listening to this, would say that the thing you need to know about their dad is that he's the only living theologian named and quoted in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

And there I am in chapter 55, named and quoted on the lips of a character called Teabing, explaining to people that the Bible is not a fax sent by God from heaven. So a rather unusual academic career, all in all.

So I'm an Anglican priest, but basically have spent most of my working life as an academic. That is a very interesting collection of posts and combinations. How did it bring you then to this project?

Well, I guess because I write in the field of ecclesiology, I'm really interested in questions of power and authority and identity. And that's really how I began my writing and research career in this regard, by looking at American fundamentalists.

I was quite determined not to do a kind of what I call a rubbishing of fundamentalism. I really wanted to understand this and how it ticked. But it made me realize that you couldn't really understand it as a theological system. You had to understand it as a cultural and as a linguistic system in which power and authority functioned in particular ways. So when I finished that, I'd

I basically took that model, that kind of grid of power and authority and conflation, how people took their interpretations of the Bible and their leaders and elided them with God. I took that into mainstream ecclesiology, normal denominations like Methodism and Anglicanism and Catholicism.

So that's led me into writing affirmatively, but also quite critically about Episcopalians and Anglicans, a congregational level at macro denominational level, and also in lots of other different ways where there are failures of power and abuses of authority, often to do with gender, sexuality, most recently, child sexual abuse.

But more fundamentally, I'm just interested in what happens when churches begin to lose their way in an increasingly secular and post-Christian world. Hence this interest in Anglicanism or really the Church of England at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. The empire's over, the Commonwealth's unraveling. The Church of England still thinks it's kind of...

you know, ecclesiastical crafts, best in show, if you like, you know, top dog, you

Actually, the reality is it's really quite a small denomination and declining fast and depleting in terms of numbers and influence. And so I wanted to write a book that helped to explain that against the background of the legacy of empire and slavery and revolts, not just political and military revolts against the empire, but also the revolts inside the Church of England and Anglicanism.

So, you know, simple, small, easy to get your head around topics. Oh, not easy at all, because one of the things I really fixed on in the book was that one of the things that English Anglicanism exported quite unconsciously

to the colonies was its monarchical insouciance, its assumption that there is a hierarchy, a pecking order of things and a way to do business. After the American War of Independence, that unravels because you've suddenly got a democratic republican polity on the other side of the pond

which is really saying, actually, we're going to do our political and ecclesiastical business in a different kind of way. We're not going to pay obeisance to the king or to the queen. We're going to have elections. We're going to decide things democratically by votes. And that tension didn't really express itself until the 20th century.

when the British Empire, or what I refer to as the English Empire, began to unravel and eventually implode. And that was the point at which the English found themselves in a very difficult place, unable to assert themselves, unable to convince the rest of the world that their way of doing things was the best, and increasingly now prone to rivalrous

parts of the Anglican Church, which are effectively saying, we voted differently. We're going to do it our way. And so we're not paying attention to what you're saying anymore.

And what's so interesting, even just in the few minutes we've been talking so far, is how much where we're at now with these questions is linked so clearly to historical developments that might seem like they're much further away than perhaps they actually are. So in fact, I'd like to go back into that history, even before we talk about the American Revolution. I wonder if we can talk about

the initial expansion of the English Empire, of English colonialism, and the ways in which even from these really early stages of English attempted colonies in various places before it gets kind of super organized as the British Empire, how was the Church of England involved even in these early moments?

Well, of course, it's a fascinating story, isn't it? And one of the things one has to understand about the English Empire to begin with is if you go back to the early Tudors and particularly to Henry VIII...

England at that point is what you might call a good second division nation. It's in no shape or form able to rival the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Spanish. They are all Premier League. England is very much second tier.

Henry really doesn't like that Henry VIII. But if he wants continuity, power, equality, and preeminence, he needs a male heir. And as we know, he cannot get that from Catherine of Aragon. He petitions the Pope for an annulment. There's no divorce available, I mean, legally. So he needs an annulment to that.

But of course, the Holy Roman Empire is a relative of Catherine of Aragon. So unsurprisingly, the answer from the Pope, who basically answers to the Holy Roman Empire is no, you're not having an annulment. So the only legal divorce that takes place is Henry's divorce.

from the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. And that's the point at which Henry assumes the power, papal power in the Church of England. And the Church of England, you can date it, it basically begins in 1534. That's the point at which the Church of England, which is Catholic,

breaks away. It's still Catholic. They're still burning Protestants in 1534 as heretics. But it takes a couple of decades for that Church of England to shed off its Catholicism and embrace its Protestantism. And it becomes, in the end, a hybrid of Swiss and German Protestant thinking. It rejects Catholicism.

Henry's English expansionism begins to move in various ways. First of all, of course, he sequestrates the monasteries, a huge sort of land and power and asset and treasure grab. But you also get the early experiments in colonial expansion. You get...

Journeys Abroad, Francis Drake and others under Elizabeth I. The very first Church of England service outside the British Isles actually is in San Francisco. It's done by Francis Drake trying to circumnavigate the world.

So the English start to make waves. They start to actually assert their power. They have the means and the money to do that. The Spanish eventually are defeated. The Portuguese begin to wane. The Dutch take longer to crack, as do the French. But

The point the book is making is that to understand the Church of England, you have to understand that this is part of Henry's ambition to be the head of his own church.

and that the wealth and the power and the influence of the Church of England is tied up to Henry and eventually Elizabeth I's English expansionism. It only becomes British later. It's not Scots, Irish, or even Welsh to begin with. It's just the English abroad asserting themselves. And what you have in that is Church of England chaplains aboard naval boats,

in due course in the 17th and the 18th century, settling colonies with Church of England presences in foreign lands.

which leads to this expansion of the Church of England internationally. It's not a theological Catholicity, it's a geographic Catholicity. It's a Catholicity of extensity rather than theological intensity, let alone union. So it's a fascinating story to see that the Church of England is tied up with English ambition and English ambition to be...

a world player, if not top dog, or a dominant world player that actually sees itself as being at least the first amongst equals. Yeah, it's fascinating to hear just how early these things you were mentioning earlier around the kind of monarchical, arrogant idea of the position of the church in the world goes all the way back to the Tudors, right? Goes all the way back to the big personalities that we're used to hearing about in other contexts.

I think then it's worth talking a bit about how we get from that to what you were mentioning earlier around the American Revolution. You talk in the book that this is sort of old world and new world versions of Anglicanism. How do we get from this very English, very expansionist idea to these sort of competing versions of the institution? Is this a Scottish versus English thing? Is this a colonial versus metropole? I mean, what's...

What are these two versions and how are they developing an opposition to each other? Well, there's a number of forces that kind of come together, which start out as being quite separate. I suppose the important thing to say is that the very early colonial expansion into continental America, the sort of eastern seaboard states or colonies, are largely to begin with religious. You know, the royalists,

They go to Virginia. The Puritans, they're in Massachusetts. The expelled Jacobites, they're up in New York. So America is a kind of febrile competitive sort of hodgepodge.

of competing religious convictions, almost from the word go. So in actual fact, in the 18th century, you know, the 1700s, Anglicans are in no shape or form a top dog in all of the American states. In fact, in several, they're very, very marginal.

And, you know, in states like Connecticut, there really are small potatoes, but they're doing pretty well, thank you very much, in Virginia.

I think what takes place is that once you get into the 18th century, you enter into a period of a good 50 years when Europe starts to erupt into violent revolutions, which culminate in the toppling of monarchies and the arrival of revolutions and republics.

And that's mirrored in due course in America as well. Of course, it's money and taxation and power that's driving this. But fundamentally, when the American Revolution kicks off in 1776, it's a very mixed affair. You've got some Anglicans who are pro-Britain, pro-King, pro-George III, Anglicans.

some who are absolutely diehard revolutionaries, almost from the word go, that they want to be Episcopalian, but they want nothing to do with the old world. You've got some who are in the middle,

And you've got a number who take a very pragmatic view that the revolution will come and it will go and their normal service will be resumed. And Britain will once again have a new relationship with its American cousins and colony. It'll be different, but essentially some early version of the Commonwealth will emerge. I think that was what Bishop Samuel Seabury largely thought. He was a pro-monarchy. He was a chaplain to the King's Regiment.

He was against the revolution, largely against the revolutionaries, and his view was that even when the war ended, the republic would be a short-lived thing.

and eventually the British would be back and normal order would be somehow resumed. So he was a reluctant American in 1783 when he was consecrated as the Bishop of Connecticut, the first bishop Anglican outside the British Isles to serve overseas, crucially not under the control of the Church of England.

And that, of course, caused shockwaves eventually back in the Church of England because they realized they had an Episcopalian bishop who might be a Jacobite sympathizer, was definitely a Republican, could be pro-revolutionary. And what were the implications of that for the Church of England that still stood for king and country and a monarchy that stretched across the world and

and an empire on which the sun never set. So there had to be a major recalibration of what Anglicanism was beginning to become by the end of the 18th century. But it was carrying these tensions by then about power and authority, and it has never resolved them since then, never resolved them.

This is fascinating to understand because there is such a story, as you mentioned right at the beginning of our conversation, around kind of the unified world of the Anglican communion. And yet you're talking here about a fracturing, really, between old world and new world, about a single figure like Samuel Seabury being so kind of in the nexus of many different competing tensions. How then does this myth work?

Well, the myth, I think, only works if you're the person propagating the myth and you believe in the stats, you know, the statistics and the story it tells. For a lot of people, the myth doesn't work and they don't propagate it any longer. But I guess what's interesting about the book and perhaps unique is that it's not just a myth.

I'm saying that you have to go back to the 18th century, and particularly to the American Revolution, to realize that the Anglican Communion was broken before it was created. So even before it came into being, it was effectively split apart.

And we can kind of track that if you go on 100 years to the first Lambeth conference, which was actually triggered by a set of quite divisive theological arguments over, of all things, polygamy. There was a bishop of Kwasnotal, Zululand, Kalenzo,

who was a very gifted biblical scholar, as English and as upright and as upper class as they came, but extremely clever and sharp, translated the New Testament into Zulu, loved by the people. But he took a very ironic and gentle line with polygamy.

His view was that this was culturally and economically integral to the system that he had come to understand amongst the Zulu, but he wasn't going to take a line against it. On the contrary, he was going to baptize and confirm anybody who petitioned for that and welcome them into the church.

Back home in kind of mid-late Victorian England, even then there were conservative forces at work saying, well, this won't do, will it? We can't have a bishop of the Church of England turning a blind eye to polygamy. We need to get rid of him. So first of all, they petitioned to have him suspended and removed. That failed. They petitioned to the Privy Council to have him removed. The Privy Council declined to act.

And the consequence of this was actually some American bishops, of which there were nearly a couple of dozen by then, saying, well, maybe actually Anglican bishops from across the world need to get together and discover what it is that keeps us together. What is it that actually holds us in unity?

So they came together in the mid-late 19th century, and they hit upon a number of things. They said, well, we're bonded by our tradition. We're bonded by our commitment to scripture and to the creeds. We're sort of bonded by our theological method, but we don't have a pope.

We do have 39 articles of faith, but not all parts of the Anglican Church hold to those. So that should be good enough to kind of keep us together. It's worth remembering at the very first Lambeth conference, the Archbishop of York at the time thought this was a big waste of time and a rather vain exercise, so he stayed away.

the Dean of Westminster didn't open Westminster Abbey for this occasion. He also thought it was a waste of time. And on the subject of polygamy, Anglicans did, and you might recognise this, they did what they did best. They agreed not to make a decision about polygamy, but to keep talking to see if any common understanding would develop.

And one of the things the book points out is that polygamy stayed on the agenda of Lambeth conferences for another century. Didn't come off until the late 1980s. And the resolution on polygamy was, we can't reach an agreement on this. We're bored of talking about it. Let's talk about something else. LAUGHTER

So, when you think about the things that divide the global Anglican communion today, like homosexuality, well, Anglicans started talking about that in 1968 at Lambeth conferences. So, I'd say by 2068, by which time I'll probably be deceased, our

I reckon, you know, if there is an Anglican communion, that's the point at which they'll say, you know what, we're bored of talking about this. We're not going to reach agreement. I think we'll stop. They had 50 years talking about the sectomies, couldn't reach an agreement on those. It's just a history of fractious discussions at which agreements are not reached. And eventually they just part because they're

the discussion and move on to something else. So the book actually goes into these myths of a decisive, clean, united Anglican communion and says, you know what? Actually, what we're good at, Anglicans are good at, is talking but not making decisions. Undecidability is inbuilt into the ecclesiology.

That's definitely interesting to understand just how long some of these debates have gone on and to what kind of resolution as well. And especially when realizing that while these debates are happening, you know, decade after decade after decade, the church is doing a whole bunch of other things relating to big questions and big efforts of, for example, the imperial state. So,

So if we move on from the American Revolution, obviously, we're now talking in many ways about kind of the peak of British Empire. What was the Church of England's involvement with that?

Well, it was happy enough, I'd say, to ride a sort of pillion passenger on the back of the British Empire and get involved, as it were, in the colonial expansionism. So it's pretty common to talk about the four Cs of colonialism, you know, civilization, conquest, commercialization, and Christianity. Those are the four Cs.

And the Church of England neatly tucks into those things. You see a highly problematic version of this, in effect, unwritten policy when it comes to slave trading. Because it's quite clear that whereas other denominations are able, because they're smaller and they have less power, they're able to make decisions about this much earlier.

The Church of England is left in a highly ambivalent state over, for example, the vexatious question of, well, if I'm going to condemn slave trading, which the Bishop of Gloucester did, just on the very cusp of the 17th and 18th century, say 1800, he couldn't find it in himself to condemn slave ownership.

because he couldn't see a biblical argument against slave ownership. So he objected to the conditions of slave trading, but not to the economic necessity as he saw it, and biblical legitimacy of slave ownership. And as we know, a number of Anglican mission societies, notably the Society for the Propagation of the

sometimes just known as society. Well, I mean, they were left legacies, bequests in terms of wealth, which were cashed out in enslaved plantations. I mean, that's how they acquired their wealth, to fund missionaries. So the very first missionaries to the American colonies were funded out of slavery revenue.

The British, I think, because legally since Tudor times, you couldn't own a slave in England. But what you could do, of course, was own a slave abroad. And economically, financially, many people and corporations, companies, but also individuals ended up with substantial investments and endowments of slavery overseas, which

the people involved in which they never ever saw, but that was their widow's pension, that was something that they got a mortgage on, that was part of their financial services. So when it came to ending not just slave trading, but ending slave ownership, the British government, amongst the

tens of thousands of people that had to compensate for their loss of their asset, their property, their slaves. There were in that diocese, bishops, an ordinary Church of England clergy who were compensated by the government because they lost their slaves. And that was, of course, one of the ways in which their wealth was sustained.

enabling them to minister. So religion and missionary work and even just ordinary parish work on the ground in the Church of England was tied in with slavery, slave ownership and slave income well into the 19th century, well into that.

And to some extent, it's taken probably another century to ultimately leach that out of the financial system. There's probably some of it still left. What you now get, of course, is a number of these former colonists, still members of the Commonwealth, saying, well, yes, we've got Anglicans and we've got Anglican churches here.

But we need reparation that actually takes account of the damage that slavery and plantations did to the ground, the soil, the infrastructure, the biosphere, the ecosphere of these islands.

Yeah, I mean, these debates are very much ongoing now, which makes it sort of interesting to evaluate claims being made by figures in the Church of England today around the extent to which or the fact they claim that they cannot be held responsible for the actions of the institution in the past. Given how much you've engaged with the debates happening now, as well as the historical links to it, what do you make of that claim?

I think it's complex. But in short, I think I'd want to flip the question a bit. It's not a question of whether I'm responsible for what has been done in the name of this denomination in the past.

Thinking here about, you know, the kinds of initiatives and things that, you know, the Church of England has tried to say, we're not responsible for the past. The point is, is that it's inherited accrued wealth is unfortunately partly based on that exploitation.

And the absence of that wealth and the cost of the economy and the cost of the people in territories overseas, I'm thinking particularly here of Africa and the Caribbean, but also of parts of South America and Central America too.

These are areas that need a very, very serious look at what kind of inherited and accrued wealth needs to be set aside or handed over in order to level the playing field and do justice to the science and the art and the politics and the morality of reparation.

What I think I don't see at the moment the Anglican Church or the Church of England doing is really owning up to how devastating this history is. I see gesture politics, political

So, you know, the initial kind of much trumpeted, we're going to allocate 150 million pounds for reparation for slavery. Well, I mean, the Church of England wasn't giving away 150 million pounds. What it was doing was putting 150 million pounds aside and allowing the interest from that money eventually to be used

to be reinvested on particular projects that people overseas could apply for.

And that, again, keeps the power and the wealth all inside the Church of England. It doesn't give any agency or freedom to the countries and the peoples that have been historically abused and continue to suffer with the contingencies and the legacies of what that abuse has resulted in today. Now, I know that's costly.

And I fully appreciate that it would be extremely complex to devise a financial model that leveled this up. But it seems to me that reparation is not saying, well, we're going to keep hold of our money, but we'll give you a bit of the interest on a certain amount of that money, which actually is a tiny amount anyway. I think you're going to have to actually part with some money in a major way

if you want reparation to be morally serious. It's been done in other places. I think particularly of the Australian Anglican churches where actually really the government forced the Anglican Australian church there to hand over money in the end to victims of child sexual abuse. It wasn't content with this kind of halfway house that the Church of England is still hoping to get away with. Hmm.

We've talked about the past. We've talked about the present. That very much takes us into the future, which I think will be interesting to keep an eye on to see how these debates evolve. Especially because, of course, one other big institution is still kind of relevant here. I mean, maybe that's the question. We haven't talked about the monarchy except in kind of brief reference.

But how do things like, for example, the recent coronation of the current king link into these problems facing the Church of England? How much is the monarchy still part of these discussions? I think one of the things that's been a real game changer in the 21st century so far has been the coronation of Charles III. And in many respects,

It was a traditional coronation, bearing in mind that coronations have evolved over time. Some have been very pared back affairs, largely because the monarchy or the country was bankrupt, so they couldn't afford very much.

I think the key thing now is taking stock of where the nation is, particularly Gen Z and millennials, in relation to the conflation between monarchy, divinity, and ecclesiology. And what we saw, I think, in the coronation of Charles III was...

I'm afraid, still a very English event because it's the Church of England. There were concessions made to the inclusion of other denominations and other faiths. But Charles III is only the head of the Church of England. And he promises to uphold the Protestant faith of the nation. So he's still carrying that

post-Henry VIII legacy in those coronation oaths. Now, I just strongly suspect that that was rather jarring for anybody under the age of 40. Why does this ceremony have to be Protestant? Why does it have to be a monarch who is Protestant?

Why does it have to have these quasi-priestly forms vested in around the monarch, who becomes a kind of sacred symbol, almost like the coronation is an eighth sacrament in effect? I strongly suspect that his son, William, will not take these things quite so on board.

I think we may have seen the last coronation of its kind. One of the things I suggest in the book is that actually, when you start to look at the United Kingdom and Great Britain, you start to realize how uneven Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are in the context of

Church of England coronation in Westminster Abbey. And despite all attempts to make it as inclusive and as national as possible, by which I mean the United Kingdom, it's very hard to avoid the orientation that this is an English event.

to which the other home nations are invited and the Commonwealth nations also invited to participate. I think for the sake of national unity and the symbolism that goes with that, probably in the 21st century, we're due for something that's just actually more thoughtful, reflective, and more radical and more expressive than

of what it means to be English in the 21st century. But this is part of the serious fiction of the empire. I mean, I don't say it in the book, but it does just make me laugh sometimes that when Andy Murray plays tennis and loses, he's Scottish, but when he wins, he's British.

And that's a very English way of doing things. So the English often talk about British when it's going well, but they can easily not talk about the British when it's not going so well. And I just think that coronation services...

hold up a mirror to the nation and ask some pretty beckoning questions about who do you think you are in relation to one another, the other home nations, and in relation to the wider world. And of course, post-Brexit, in relation to Europe too, these are all rich existential questions for the life of the nation at the moment. And the Church of England, to be honest, in this

hasn't even begun to reflect on its role and how it might drive change rather than simply remain invested in the status theater of the house of Lords and, uh, it's ceremonial pretenses, uh,

in services like the coronation, I argue it needs to get its act together and think much more critically about how it actually emerges as a credible church for the 21st century, which I think would be leaner and more self-critical. Yeah. In the book, you go so far as to say it needs not just to get its act together, but to get its act together in a revolutionary sense, in a radical sense. What would this look like?

Well, it might look something like the kind of revolution that we had under Oliver Cromwell. I'm not suggesting for a minute, by the way, that we execute a monarch or anything else like that. But I do just think that that kind of brief 10-year period

was an incredibly fertile period of experimentation in governance, law, and order. It had its problems too. It was absolutely ghastly in terms of its overseas policies, particularly towards the Irish. But a more revolutionary attentiveness to the state of the nation might lead the Church of England to being humbler, smaller,

a little bit more self-aware and self-conscious. It might want to divest itself of its status and power at the top end precisely in order that it can re-establish its priorities at its most important level, which is at the parish level. And what we've seen over the last 25, 30 years is the most extraordinary development

backing away from the parishes and investment in the hierarchy. And I think if the Church of England is to last to the end of the 21st century, that entire trajectory has got to be reversed. We'll have to go back to being authentically local. I'm just meaning here in England. And

and authentically engaged in parishes and chaplaincies, much less to do with hierarchy and status, and much more at the service of the people. But at the moment, everything I can see in the Church of England, and I speak as somebody who lives in Scotland now, suggests to me that the Church of England has largely invested in the wrong model

of where it needs to be at this point of time in its history. And it's in danger as a result of that, of not just losing its local connections. It's also in danger of placing all of its bets on, as it were, Red 19 on hierarchy and losing that too and ending up with nothing. Very interesting to see then what happens going forward now that you've laid out for us so helpfully the context of

Is this something you're continuing to obviously be involved in in some ways, but is this something you're researching? Do you have other projects or concurrent projects, anything else you want to highlight before I let you go?

Thank you. Yes, I mean, at the moment, I've been just completing a book for another publisher, which is largely a treatment of secularization. So one of my side hustles is the sociology of religion and sometimes the anthropology of religion too. So I've been looking at some of the statistics and data around church attendance in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

and beginning to plot the trajectories of those going forward into the 21st century. The statistics, it won't surprise you to know, Miranda, are really quite troubling. And again, one can only say to the leadership of any church, any mainstream denomination, the writing is on the wall here. You've really got to look hard at where these statistics are going, because the danger is...

At the end of the day, unless there's a very, very thorough rethink on where churches are heading, we could lose some very valuable national assets, national treasures in terms of heritage, of building, of history, of culture, but also valuable forms of social and community service as well. So that's a really important thing as a kind of piece of sort of critical pastoral theology, if you like.

I'm also doing a new piece of work on Samuel Seabury, which goes into much more detail about his life and the culture that developed in early continental America around Episcopalians, which won't surprise you to know was also quite complex historically.

Samuel Seabury was, of course, a Republican and a Democrat, but he was also a high Tory and terribly sympathetic towards what we might call monarchical forms of power. So he didn't want the laity, for example, getting involved in the governments of the church. And that took many decades for the diocese of Connecticut to correct. So

These things live on in legacy. So these are the areas I'm working in. I'm kind of continuing to develop work on authority, power, the abuse of power, and at the moment also sadly circling back to how the churches, the mainstream denominations, particularly the Church of England, are responding to the great crisis of sexual abuse and survivors in its time and

And all the signs are at the moment, yes, again, is that the Church of England is just in deep denial, hoping that that story will go away and that they can somehow get their message across differently as though this was some kind of political party, you know, which had spin doctors at its behest. But I'm afraid until...

proper reparation is done for the victims of such abuse, there will be no peace in the land.

Very much a lot of open questions to continue looking at. And of course, any listeners who want to get more into the details of this, they can read the book published by Hearst in 2025, titled The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism, Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England. Martin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Miranda, really great pleasure. Lovely to talk to you and look forward to talking again. Thank you.