Growing up, Dorothy Davis was not welcome in the “other” Episcopal Church in her rural Virginia community — the White one. When their bishop many decades ago tried to integrate Black and White Episcopalians, Davis recalls, her fellow Christians balked. So, Davis, now 86, wept this fall when the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia voted to repair its centuries-long break with Black members like her.
After decades of votes and commissions and studies and promises, hundreds of clergy and lay leaders voted in their annual convention to commit $10 million to reparations.
“We could feel the presence of God and the Holy Spirit enveloping us. It was amazing,” said Davis, a retired science teacher.
But now comes another phase with a new, hard question: What does it mean to make reparations?
“When you mention the word ‘reparations,’ White people think you’re going to hand out money to Black folks. There is very little conversation here about what’s next,” Davis said. “You can look at the expressions on their faces. If we say ‘racial reconciliation,’ that’s okay, but the word ‘reparations’? No.”
The vote, held in November, was one of the biggest financial commitments to reparations in the Episcopal Church, which supported slaveholding from the institution’s arrival on Virginia’s shores through the Civil War. The Episcopal dioceses of Maryland, New York and Texas now have reparations programs, and the Jesuits have pledged $100 million for the biggest national Catholic program. But Virginia was ground zero in the domestic slave trade, the heart of the Confederacy. It was where Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate, rented out enslaved people to work at the Virginia Theological Seminary, and where Episcopal bishops, priests and parishes enslaved people.
So Davis and Episcopalians across the diocese — the biggest and one of the oldest in the denomination — made history with the vote to create a system “by which repair may begin for those areas of our structures, patterns, and common life” in which non-White people “still carry the burden of theological, social, cultural, economic, and legal injustices, exclusions, and biases born out of white supremacy and the legacy of slavery.”
The size of its new commitment and the prominence of its historic sins make the Virginia diocese stand out among religious groups and universities and others that have taken up racial reparations. Its charter, however, is relatively unspecific, and a much smaller proposed program of $1 million had failed at a diocesan convention just months before, in April 2021. Those two facts worry some supporters of reparations.
“There is some real joy here, but I’m trying to be realistic. We did this with a resolution, and all it takes is one resolution to undo it. I’m wary,” said the Rev. Cayce Ramey, a former engineer and U.S. Marine who leads All Saints Sharon Chapel in Alexandria and is part of a small ad hoc group of lay and clerical leaders called “Good Trouble,” which is pressing for reparations.
Ramey’s concern is rooted in the backstory of the November vote — what he saw as insufficient support for reparations by Bishop Susan Goff, the fact that the $1 million program proposal failed and that the vote gives a task force five years to set aside an endowment before reparations would even begin.
Across the diocese, which covers about 80,000 Episcopalians across Northern and Central Virginia, “the support for reparations isn’t universal and maybe not even strong,” Ramey said. Anecdotal reports from priests across the diocese show they are facing “lots of questions and animosity,” he said.
He feels impatient, he said: “For 400 years, we’ve been meeting people where they are. Ultimately, $10 million is a drop in the bucket.”
According to the diocese’s most recent budget, it had $89 million of assets at the end of 2020, including $55 million of real estate holdings. Thirty-five percent of the real estate is leased out, 3 percent is vacant or undeveloped, and the remainder is used by actively worshiping congregations.
Reparations programs vary and can include activities as varied as investments in neighborhoods and in the businesses of disadvantaged peoples, scholarships, direct disbursements, and relational and spiritual work meant explicitly to acknowledge wrongdoing and unfairness and to repent.
The measure that the Virginia diocese passed says only that a reparations task force will “identify and propose means by which repair may begin.”
Some reparations advocates are more optimistic.
Dennis Carter-Chand, of Arlington, who is a member of the Good Trouble group as well as the task force on reparations, said he was nervous when he went in to work with the diocese on identifying properties to sell and when he considered that 30 percent of the convention voted against reparations. Now, though, he feels confident things will keep moving ahead, he said.
“I’m looking for the positives because this is a conversation people haven’t been willing to have. In the past, there have been resolutions and statements, but putting dollars to it affirms it’s a real thing and is deeply felt,” he said. “This is a big step, because this is Virginia.”
The diocese also last year created the position of “minister of racial justice and healing.” The Rev. J. Lee Hill Jr. told The Washington Post that the diocese is behind some other religious communities that have done a lot of groundwork, education and discussion about the true purpose of reparations and how such initiatives can work.
“Defining that will be a long, evolving task of the diocese. Reparations doesn’t mean just a cash payout; it will be the transformation of hearts and minds,” said Hill, who grew up in Chesterfield County. “Our work is the work of making years and years and years of wrong right. Will we finish this work in our lifetime? No.”
The Episcopal Church is the U.S.-based wing of the global Anglican Communion. Before it was formed after the American Revolution, Anglicanism was the established church of the Virginia colony.
The Virginia Theological Seminary, the denomination’s flagship school, which is based in Alexandria, made news in 2019 when it announced that it would spend $1.7 million to create a fund that would make direct disbursements — annually and in perpetuity — to descendants of enslaved people who worked at and built the school. The fund is now at $2.2 million. Its president, the Rev. Ian Markham, said he thinks the seminary is the only institution undertaking such direct reparations.
The school had a recent gala with 200 descendants, and “it was one of the most moving moments of my life,” Markham said. The program, he said, dealt with questions such as the fact that some descendants are White and that others are wealthy.
“All VTS is doing is recognizing these human lives were disadvantaged by the institution, and it’s regardless of whether they are rich or poor,” Markham said.
Regarding the diocesan-level program, some critics have noted that Virginia has many poor White residents and struggling parishes.
The Elon University historian Charles Irons, who studies religion and the church in Virginia, said he was struck by the contrast between the great power of the Anglican Church in early Virginia and the deep divisions among American Christians today, “where we’re divided into our liberal and conservative brands.”
Among U.S. Anglicans, many conservatives split off from the progressive Episcopal Church in recent decades over LGBT rights in particular, creating their own conservative Anglican branch.
The diocese taking the step toward reparations, he said, “is dwarfed” by all the divisions in U.S. Christianity — Protestantism and Anglicanism.
“It has a meaning for that community, and I love it, by the way. I’m so grateful, and I think it’s beautiful, but the primary meaning is for them, and let us all hope that it’s a witness for other communities. But I just don’t think they have that kind of cultural authority anymore,” he said of the Episcopal diocese.
Irons said the divisions among Christians are so grim and political that he is in the process of moving his family to England.
Goff, the bishop, who will retire at the end of this year, said that although there is “great support” for reparations, there is also “concern.” One question, she said, is how to define reparations.
People seem more open to having conversations, she said, describing the diocese as being “at the start of this particular chapter. How will we understand reparations? Where will the money come from?”
The guide is Isaiah 58:12, she said, which calls Christians to be “repairers of the breach.”
The Rev. Valerie Hayes, the rector at Calvary Episcopal in Front Royal, Va., said she is optimistic but feels that the process is too slow.
“I think we all agree this issue feels urgent. People are dying. Racial justice feels urgent,” she said. “And we are the Diocese of Virginia.”
correction
An earlier version of this article incorrectly said George Washington rented enslaved people to the Virginia Theological Seminary. It was Mount Vernon, his estate, that did so after his death. This version has been corrected.
