Nigel Biggar doesn’t hesitate to confront, but says his goal is to pursue truth

Nigel Biggar may be Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, but he remains a very active man.

He now devotes much of his energy to offering insights into how British culture (Western cultures generally) should consider their history in a more positive light and to standing up for freedom of expression – sometimes linking the two issues.

Over the past couple of days in Metro Vancouver, for example, he:

• Delivered a talk in Langley titled ‘The un-cancelled lecture: Did the British Empire promote human welfare’;
• Took part in an interview with local leader Rick Goossen, discussing the fact that his talk, originally sponsored by Regent College, had been cancelled;
• Posted ‘Elite Narcissists are Trashing History’ on ‘The Biggar Picture,’ his Substack site.

All while preparing for the inaugural meeting of Free Speech Union in Vancouver March 7.

The talk

After Biggar’s Regent College appearance was cancelled, leaders of Christ Covenant Church agreed to provide an alternative location for him to speak.

Roughly 100 people attended the gathering, which went off very smoothly. Quite a number in the audience were students from Trinity Western University, which is just north on Glover Road from the church.

The talk covered many of the topics found in his book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.

Biggar was clear about his Christian motivations from the beginning. He described the beliefs that underlie his work:

• every human being is equal under God;
• Christians should have special regard for the vulnerable;
• compassion is not the only Christian virtue; truth is also important;
• perceptions of reality can be more or less true, for all of us;
• all human beings are both creatures and sinners;
• we need to test each other: “together we might approximate the truth”;
• he is a firm supporter of free speech, within limits.

He said public discussion of issues, such as colonialism, usually lacks context – and that is what he is trying to provide. He acknowledged that he is a moral ethicist rather than a professional historian, though he added that his first degree was in history.

One significant issue, he said, is that while much public opprobrium has been heaped upon the British Empire, it is hardly a unique phenomenon: “Empire was a very common form of political organization. . . . Other peoples have been doing empire for millennia” – Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Muslim Arabs, Ottomans, Spanish, Incas, Portuguese, Comanche, Zulus. . .

Biggar said that when you survey 400 years of the British Empire, “you shouldn’t be surprised that it contains lots of bad things,” including slavery; the spread of disease (though “no one intended to do that”); economic, social and cultural disruption; racist contempt; unjust displacement of natives by settlers (he referred to a longer list on page 276 of Colonialism).

But he said the British Empire did good as well as evil – leading the way in renouncing slavery and providing leadership against the slave trade; moderating the disruptive impact of modernity upon local cultures, promoting a worldwide free market (and more, page 284).

He did discuss one of the issues that caused some Regent alumni, and others, to insist that he should not speak at the college – residential schools and the relationship with First Nations in general. He began by recognizing how contested the issue is: “I know there are deep feelings about it,” but adding, “feelings can lie.”

Stating that “I stand here to be corrected,” he pointed to several factors which undermine the widely shared contention that federal policy, particularly related to residential schools, amounted to cultural genocide.

For example, he said, despite many media claims of mass graves on reserves, no bodies have been disinterred. And that positive comments about residential school by First Nations people are not often reported: “public perception has been distorted.”

He is not impressed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Final Report, referring to an extensive note in Colonialism (page 349) which began, “I have not relied much on the [it] because its presentation of the evidence is not seriously even-handed.”

Colonialism

Much of Biggar’s presentation dealt with broad issues, such as those he described in Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (William Collins, 2023, revised & updated, 2025)

• Chapter 1:Was imperial endeavour driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate?
• Chapter 2: Should we speak of ‘colonialism and slavery’ in the same breath, as if they were the same thing?
• Chapter 3: Was the British Empire essentially racist?
• Chapter 4: How far was the British Empire based on the conquest of land?
• Chapter 5: Did the British Empire involve genocide?
• Chapter 6: Was the British Empire driven fundamentally by the motive of economic exploitation?
• Chapter 7: Since colonial government was not democratic, did that make it illegitimate?
• Chapter 8: Was the British Empire essentially violent, and was its violence pervasively racist and terroristic?

Some have lauded Biggar’s work. Publications such as The Times, The Telegraph and Literary Review published positive comments, while Stanford University professor (and prolific author) Niall Ferguson wrote: “Biggar fearlessly goes where few other scholars now venture to tread: to defend the British Empire against its increasingly vitriolic detractors.”

Others have reacted negatively, including Peniel Rajkumar in Church Times (“astutely weaponising prejudice”) and Kenan Malik in The Guardian (“a flawed defence of empire”).

For a couple of helpful insights into the book and the controversy surrounding it, go to:

•  A book analysis and account of interaction between Regent alumni by Joel Edmund Anderson, posted March 4;
• A detailed assessment by Hira JungKow of The Truth About Empire, a collection of essays rebutting points made Biggar’s book.

The latter appears on History Reclaimed, a site intended to “to challenge distortions of history, and to provide context, explanation and balance in a debate in which dogmatism is too often preferred to analysis, and condemnation to understanding.” Biggar is a part of that “independent group of scholars with a wide range of opinions on many subjects, but with the shared conviction that history requires careful interpretation of complex evidence, and should not be a vehicle for facile propaganda.”

Humility

Biggar said. “As a Christian, I find the moralism or the judgmentalism of woke criticism of empire to be ugly.” He urged humility, saying it is important to remind people how imperfect we all are.

Writing in Colonialism, he said (pages 8 – 9): 

First of all, it is often said about colonialism that we ought not to judge the past by the present. That is, I think, both true and untrue. It is untrue, if it means that we should not judge at all. We are moral beings; we cannot help but make moral judgments and react negatively, say, to historic instances of excessive violence. If we pretend not to judge, we will judge anyway, but obliquely.

On the other hand, it is true that we should not judge the past by the present, if it means one of two things. One is that human beings are always in the process of learning morally, and that some moral truths that are obvious to us were just not obvious to our ancestors. . . . The second sense in which it is true that we should not judge the past by the present is that the circumstances of the past were often very different from our own, and that good moral judgments will take that into account.

While answering questions following his talk, Biggar said, “I might be mistaken . . . I’m willing to be corrected. But he also added, “I don’t think that I’m so obnoxious or wicked that I should be shut down.”

He closed by thanking the church for the opportunity to speak, describing it as a time “where we can think together and contribute to the public good.”

Cancel culture

Rick Goossen, Chairman of the ELO Network, introduced Biggar at Christ Covenant Church, remarking that Biggar was an Adjunct Instructor in the ELO Oxford Leadership Program in 2024 and will be joining them again in 2025. 

The rather pointed title of the interview – ‘Regent College, Leadership, Woke-ism & Cancel Culture’ – was fleshed out during their conversation.

Biggar, who received a Master of Christian Studies from Regent College in 1981, said:

I owe Regent College gratitude for my career and my wife. I wish ill to neither it nor its president. However, I object strongly to the college’s dereliction of their Christian and civic duty.

I wrote two emails to the president, copying in the faculty and board of governors, in which I explained clearly why I think their decision fails in Christian and civic duty.

I received bureaucratic replies from the president that refused to engage substantively with what I had written and confined themselves to procedural platitudes. They also offered an explanation for the last-minute cancellation that was at odds with what other witnesses had told me. . . .

Asked “What does the approach of Regent College say about them and their approach?”, Biggar responded:

That the quality of their leadership is indistinguishable from that to be found in most other secular institutions. In the name of ‘pastoral concern,’ they cancelled a forum for the reasonable discussion of a matter of high public importance out of deference to the intemperate feelings of people who are determined that no one else should hear viewpoints with which they disagree, thus keeping those viewpoints unaccountable and insulated from critical scrutiny.

There are actually three parts to the interview – here, here and here.

Regent’s response

As I pointed out when I first wrote about this situation February 20:

Regent College President Jeffrey Greenman is not commenting publicly on the matter, but he did write a letter to Regent students February 14, stating:

In my judgment, the planned lecture on a very sensitive subject was not right for Regent since it needed different framing to foster constructive dialogue. Whenever we engage topics about which there is strong disagreement or controversy, it is critically important that all aspects of an event, from the choice of speaker to the event’s format, should demonstrate our concern for both critical reflection and appropriate pastoral awareness. . .

For the past 10 years I have sought to lead Regent to take very seriously our calling to love our neighbours on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. My concern was that this lecture would have been seen as out of sync with these efforts and could have seriously jeopardized our growing relationships with Indigenous elders and Indigenous Christian leaders locally and nationally.

A strong concern for me was to prevent this event from being interpreted as the College’s implicit endorsement of one particular interpretation of the troubling realities of residential schools.

Regent’s Board of Governors followed up with a February 24 statement,

[The Board] regrets the handling of the Nigel Biggar lecture and its eventual cancellation. Like many institutions, Regent is trying to find its way forward in a complex landscape of sometimes painful and contested issues.

We affirm with gratitude President Greenman’s pastoral concern related to this subject matter. . . .

During the interview, and his talk on the 5th, Biggar pointed out that his two Ontario talks went extremely well – at Redeemer College in Hamilton (100 people) and Yorkminster Park Church in Toronto (300 seats sold out).

‘Trashing history’

Biggar is willing to be corrected, but he is also more than ready to speak his mind. A post on his Substack site the same day as his talk in Langley (‘Elite Narcissists are Trashing History’) gives a sense of his sometimes combative tone:

Throughout the English-speaking world elites are falling over themselves to believe the very worst of their own countries.

In Britain, the Church of England has committed itself to spend an initial £100 million on slavery-reparations in response to the discovery that its endowment had “links” with African enslavement. “The immense wealth accrued by the Church . . . has always been interwoven with the history of African chattel enslavement,” a document explains. “African chattel enslavement was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation’s wealth thereafter.” And this has “continuing toxic consequences.”

Yet almost none of this is true. The evidence shows that the Church’s endowment fund was hardly involved in the evil of slave-trading at all. Most economic historians reckon the contribution of slave-trading and slavery to Britain’s economic development as somewhere between marginal and modest. And between abolition in 1834 and the present, multiple causes have intervened to diminish slavery’s effects.

He goes on to discuss the role of missionaries in Zanzibar, the nature of Aboriginal societies in Australia and the residential school situation in Canada.

The Biggar Picture

Biggar has recently developed The Biggar Picture, “a [Substack] platform to discuss politics, history and the great issues of our time.” Thus far he has posted a three-part series on ‘Culture War in Britain’ and – jumping off the fence – ‘Why I am a Conservative.’

His range of topics suggests that he might be considered part of a broader movement (tendency?) in British and Western culture which wishes to learn from, appreciate and even laud, at times, our cultural heritage.

His March 5 ‘Elite Narcissists’ tweet copies several well-known influencers who suggest that nature of such a network: Niall Ferguson; Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Douglas Murray; Andrew Roberts; and Andrew Neil.

Another sympathetic voice, possibly, would be Tom Holland, author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books, 2019).

The inside flap of the book cover states:

Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence is the single most transformative development in Western history.

In Dominion, award-winning historian Tom Holland explores what it was that made Christianity so revolutionary and disruptive and why, in a West that has become increasingly doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain irredeemably Christian.

Biggar introduced Holland for a 2021 Scruton Lecture at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, saying that annual lectures “are designed to . . . give voice to viewpoints that swim against the prevailing stream.”

Another outlet for Biggar is Free Speech Union, for which he is Chair and which he says has grown fast since it was formed in 2020. He spoke to the Toronto branch last week and will address the inaugural meeting of a Vancouver branch March 7.