The Church of Scotland is set to make a formal apology for its ‘historical relationship’ with the transatlantic slave trade.

It will acknowledge how the Church benefited from ‘some of its members’ and their families’ direct and indirect participation in slavery’.

The ‘institutional apology’, due to be proposed at the General Assembly next month, also admits ‘members and officers of the Church offered theological justifications for chattel slavery’, which treated human beings as personal property.

The apology will also recognise that the ‘legacies of slavery continue to shape experiences of race and inequality today’.

But Professor Gordon Graham, a philosopher and Anglican priest ordained in the Scottish Episcopal Church, said the Kirk’s apology was ‘virtue-signalling’.

The report comes after the 2023 General Assembly agreed an apology should be ‘prepared for future consideration’, after receiving a report detailing how the Kirk financially benefited from the slave trade.

It will invite the General Assembly to ‘adopt the apology and investigate other actions that could demonstrate repentance, justice and reconciliation’.

It states that although British merchants were ‘involved in the enslavement and trafficking of people from Africa from the 1550s, the Church of Scotland did not take a public stand on slavery until the end of the 18th century’.

Ministers and moderators were ‘directly engaged in chattel slavery – yet as far as our research has shown us, no disciplinary action was taken by the Church’.

The report said: ‘Some clergy owned enslaved people themselves and continued to do so even after Scottish courts had ruled slavery morally and legally indefensible. 

'Others defended policies that delayed emancipation well beyond the abolition of the slave trade.’ 

Should the apology and report be accepted, recommendations for next steps will be brought to the 2027 General Assembly.

The Very Rev Sally Foster-Fulton, convener of the group that drafted the report, said: ‘This apology represents a moment of honesty for the Church of Scotland.’

Commenting further last night, Professor Graham asked: ‘Is there anyone out there meaningfully able to receive this apology?

‘This looks to me very much like virtue-signalling prompted by modern political sensibilities.’