Faith, Freedom, and Ancestry: Tracing the Anglican Church’s Legacy in Jamaica

As someone researching my Jamaican ancestry, I eagerly anticipated this FeAST webinar. The Anglican Church in Jamaica has been intertwined with my ancestors’ lives since the mid-1800s and most likely earlier, with St Stephen’s Parish Church in the small rural town of Nain, documenting their baptisms, marriages and deaths.

The Revd Garfield Campbell’s presentation has given context and history to my personal research. He divided it into three parts: firstly, the history of the diocese of Jamaica, secondly, the role of its first bishop Christopher Lipscomb, and finally its evolution to the present day.

The Church of England (the Established Church) in Jamaica was born in 1664. It wasn’t until 1824 that the dioceses of Jamaica and Barbados were established by the British government to appease both the anti-slavery advocates and those who supported slavery. Bishop Christopher Lipscomb, who was answerable to the British government, was given the mandate to instill religious and moral instruction to the enslaved people who were restless and enlivened by the anti-slavery debates, while at the same time safeguarding the interests of the slavers.

Garfield explained that because of the many challenges he faced, Bishop Lipscomb built an ecclesiology (that is, a study of the Church) based on compromise operating from a position of domination which prioritised the enslavers over the enslaved. There were some clergymen, schoolteachers, and catechists who worked to improve lives. Enslaved people saw baptism and confirmation as a means of obtaining minimum protection. Marriage, for example, provided legal protection from being sold to separate enslavers. Post-slavery, baptism facilitated access to better-funded schools run by the Established Church.

Today, the Anglican Church in Jamaica is often seen as a church for the wealthy, a perception rooted in its history and, according to Garfield, not entirely accurate. However, he noted some people’s unease surrounding Archbishop Justin Welby’s presence at the Diocese’s 200th anniversary celebration, reflecting lingering historical tensions.

Garfield hails from Nain, the same rural community as my parents and ancestors, and is a second-year PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, studying 19th-century Anglican missiology in Jamaica through conversion, power, and agency. In his summary, he questioned whether the Anglican Church in Jamaica can overcome the perception some people have of it. He believes it can but “it will require open honest and genuinely democratic self-examination rooted in an acknowledgement of a compromised past which has leaned more towards the side of the oppressor rather than the oppressed.”

Watch the full webinar here: https://uspg.org.uk/feast/webinars/