Repentance Without Conversion: Project Spire, Moral Substitution, and the Collapse of Theological Formation in the Church of England
The Church of England’s £100 million “Project Spire” slavery reparations fund has become emblematic of a deeper and more troubling institutional crisis. Defended by the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, and continuous with the moral trajectory established under Justin Welby, the initiative is framed as an act of “repentance” flowing from the gospel command to “love thy neighbour.”
Yet, as Nuntiatoria has already argued in Donor Revolt and Moral Overreach: Activist Virtue and Institutional Failure in the Church of England, Project Spire is not an isolated misjudgement. It is the predictable outcome of an ecclesial culture in which theology has been systematically de-prioritised, moral reasoning has been secularised, and formation has been reduced to managerial competence rather than doctrinal depth.¹
Repentance Without Moral Agency
In Christian theology, repentance (metanoia) presupposes moral agency. It is an interior turning of the person—or of a living community—from sin toward God, expressed through confession, contrition, amendment of life, and reconciliation. Repentance is ordered toward conversion, not toward retrospective financial settlement.
Project Spire collapses this distinction. By describing the reallocation of present-day ecclesial assets as “repentance” for actions committed centuries ago by different moral agents, the Church of England redefines sin as historical association rather than personal or corporate culpability. The transatlantic slave trade was an objective moral evil; its perpetrators and direct victims are long dead. What remains is historical memory, not living guilt. To confuse the two is a fundamental theological category error.²
From Conversion to Compensation
This error is not accidental. It reflects the substitution of secular moral frameworks for Christian moral theology. Within these frameworks, guilt is inherited, virtue is performative, and moral legitimacy is achieved through visible acts of redistribution rather than interior conversion. Justice is detached from truth and redefined as permanent imbalance.³⁻⁴
As noted in the earlier Nuntiatoria editorial, this substitution has already provoked resistance among practising Anglicans. Polling cited there indicates that a majority of regular churchgoers would withhold or redirect their giving if Church funds continue to be diverted toward reparations rather than parish life, worship, and clergy support.¹ The so-called repentance of Project Spire is thus accomplished not through conversion, but through alienation.
Assets, Trust, and Fiduciary Drift
Defenders of Project Spire insist that the £100 million allocation will not starve parish life. This reassurance evades the more serious question of purpose. The assets administered by the Church Commissioners exist to sustain worship, clergy, parishes, and mission. They are not discretionary instruments for ideological signalling.
Much of the wealth now moralised under Project Spire derives from Queen Anne’s Bounty (1704), established explicitly for the support of poor clergy.⁷ To re-purpose such endowments for symbolic reparative projects risks violating donor intent and fiduciary responsibility under established principles of charity law.⁸ As Nuntiatoria previously observed, critics have rightly questioned whether such use of Church funds is even legally coherent.¹
Here the institutional inconsistency becomes clear: moral absolutism outwardly, administrative caution inwardly. The Church moves swiftly to align itself with fashionable moral causes, yet hesitates when confronting failures of governance, safeguarding, or doctrinal clarity. Such selectivity corrodes moral authority.
The Formation Failure Behind the Moralism
At the root of this crisis lies a collapse in theological formation.
Increasingly, ordinands enter training with a Sunday School level of theology and an undeveloped faith. Where earlier generations would have undergone rigorous, immersive formation to correct this deficit, contemporary pathways often normalise it. Many candidates—especially second-career ordinands and those training for self-supporting or part-time ministry—complete only two years of fragmented, non-residential study, frequently alongside secular employment.⁹⁻¹⁰
This mode of formation prioritises pastoral skills, safeguarding frameworks, and institutional management over dogmatic, moral, and ascetical theology. Compounding the problem, instruction is often delivered through post-modern academic frameworks that emphasise deconstruction, contingency, and sociological critique. Doctrines are analysed for how they function or whom they empower, rather than why they are true.¹¹⁻¹²
The predictable result is not theological maturity but destabilisation. Ordinands do not leave formed; they leave confused—uncertain in doctrine, hesitant in belief, and habituated to doubt. That doubt is then rebranded as humility, uncertainty as virtue, and conviction as danger. Theology recedes, and secular moral categories rush in to fill the void.¹³⁻¹⁴
Why Secular Moralism Becomes Inevitable
Clergy and bishops formed in this way do not become morally neutral. They become morally colonised. In the absence of a coherent theological grammar, they default to the ethical languages already dominant in public-sector and NGO culture: harm, inclusion, narrative repair, and symbolic apology.¹⁶⁻¹⁷
Thus repentance becomes institutional apology; sin becomes harm; grace becomes redistribution; justice becomes permanent imbalance. Project Spire is not a theological decision gone awry; it is the expression of a hierarchy trained to manage moral narratives rather than to guard doctrinal truth.
Anachronism and Permanent Guilt
Project Spire also embeds a narrative of permanent moral imbalance. Britain’s historical involvement in slavery was real and grievous, yet Britain also expended immense political, military, and financial resources to suppress the global slave trade in the nineteenth century, at great cost in lives and treasure.⁵⁻⁶ These facts do not erase past evil, but they render simplistic moral accounting intellectually and theologically untenable.
Christian justice seeks restoration and peace; it has a terminus. The reparations logic adopted here admits none. There is no point at which the debt is paid, reconciliation achieved, or the ledger closed. The Church is cast instead as a perpetual penitent, endlessly compensating for history while neglecting its present vocation.
Conclusion: Theatre Cannot Save a Church
Repentance without conversion is not repentance. It is theatre. Project Spire, presented as gospel fidelity, instead reveals a Church that has lost confidence in theology and now seeks moral legitimacy through secular activism. In doing so, the Church of England risks alienating its faithful, hollowing out its mission, and substituting ideological conformity for doctrinal truth.
A Church that no longer forms its clergy theologically will inevitably moralise instead. But moral theatre cannot save a Church. Only the recovery of serious theology, coherent formation, and repentance rightly understood can do that.
- Donor Revolt and Moral Overreach: Activist Virtue and Institutional Failure in the Church of England, Nuntiatoria, 16 January 2026.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1450–1453; St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q.84, aa.1–10.
- Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966).
- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), chs. 1–3.
- David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 341–389.
- N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 560–602.
- Church Commissioners for England, Queen Anne’s Bounty: Historical Overview.
- Charity Commission for England and Wales, The Essential Trustee: What You Need to Know.
- Church of England, Formation Criteria for Ordained Ministry (House of Bishops).
- Church of England Ministry Division, Pathways for Ordination and Training.
- Andrew Davison, Participation in God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
- Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
- Edward Feser, The Last Superstition (South Bend: St Augustine’s Press, 2008), ch. 5.
- Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991).
- Congregation for Catholic Education, Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis (2016), §§56–69.
- James Tunstead Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), chs. 7–8.
- Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020).
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