The Church Pension Group (CPG), which runs the pension funds for the Episcopal Church, has published the results of its recent audit of the historical links to slavery of CPG funds. The report can be found at the CPG website. Reporting on the release appears in the Episcopal New Service. The Church Pension fund endowment is one of the largest fifteen endowments in the world, and third largest if university endowments are excluded. The audit is a response to a general convention resolution calling for a forensic audit of the fund. However, the initial ENS reporting on the methodology employed in in the audit suggests that it is perhaps overly generous to suggest that it was "forensic." The researchers themselves admit that they did not research the majority of donors, ostensibly because their donations were small and it would have been a time-intensive process. That means that the official findings of "no" direct connection to slavery, and comparatively greater but still modest indirect links slavery, should be taken with a grain of salt. The producers of the study also readily admit that the donors were, almost without exception, White, and that the economic structures of society that enabled the accumulation of wealth by White Americans prior to and following the Civil War were deeply racist. As Patric Favreau, the Executive VP of CPG, noted (according to ENS reporting), "wealth accumulation for much of the 19th century cannot be separated from the economics of enslavement." This means that even as the overt connections to slavery discovered in the audit appear modest, the White wealth that provided the foundation for the Church Pension Fund, and its predecessor funds associated with the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, should be understood to be inextricably linked to racist processes of White wealth accumulation which functioned to prevent wealth accumulation by Black Americans.
Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.
Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey
