Coming Full Circle: Christianity, Empire, Whiteness, The Global Majority, and the Struggles of Migrants and Refugees in Britain

The book in which this chapter appears is concerned, overall, with deconstructing Whiteness, Empire and Mission; highlighting the destructive consequences of these intersections, both for Global Majority people and for white people. The book is also concerned with identifying the liberative opportunities that can emerge when the destructiveness of these intersections is rigorously analysed, clearly exposed and seriously repented of as part of a clear commitment to seeking out positive and collaborative ways forward rooted in justice and equality.

The coming full circle to which this chapter refers is that of the period between the late 1960s and early 1970s through to the post-Brexit present of the United Kingdom (UK), the government of which is proclaiming it to be “Global Britain”. As an increasingly older white British Baptist scholar of religion and society who, over this period has, with varying emphases and foci, nationally and internationally tried to be active in the struggle against racism and for ethnic, national and religious pluralism, I have structured my contribution to this book around four originally independently generated (between 1974 and 2001), but all personally-related, pieces of writing that I consider to be of wider relevance to the overall theme of the book, and which collectively I am calling “A Quartet Over Time”. Three of these (a poem from 1974, and what others have suggested might better be called the ‘prose poems’ of 2016 and 2021) were written by myself, while the poem of 1986 was written by my deceased (2010) white German Catholic wife, Margret Preisler-Weller.

In between these poems and prose poems, I have attempted to undertake an analytical discussion within which – including also by reference to some of my other writing over the past four decades - I am trying to expose some of the connections that, at multiple levels, exist between the personal and familial, religious and political, national and international realities of the imperial inheritance within which, in differing ways all of us who are in one way or another Christian and connected with the UK and Europe - live, whether conscious of it (as are most, but not all of those of a Global Majority heritage) or not (as are likely, still, the majority of those of us who are white and Christian).