Coming full circle: Christianity, empire, whiteness, the global majority and the struggles of migrants and refugees in the UK

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 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 worked towards 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 we are 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)