Emulating Wilberforce

Our society is at a crossroads. The borrowed capital of historical Christian influence is running out. We now have leaders who create rules only to break them, and then use up hours of energy and time denying, dodging, and evading scrutiny.

With a cost-of-living crisis only set to get worse before it gets any better, families will be forced to choose between eating and heating. Of course, this is not new, but the sheer scale of the problem is frightening. Inflation is on the rise. Recession looms large. The Lord is shaking the nation.

Perhaps it’s a tired old cliché, but this all presents a huge gospel opportunity. And an opportunity for confident, Biblically-shaped public square engagement. By public square, I mean the places in our society where stories are told, where debates happen and where ideas are swapped.

The darker the day, the more brightly the light of Christ should shine. After decades of a systematic unravelling of our Christian past, is our nation going to wake up? Will the darkness of current debates mean people begin to realise that the problems we face cannot be fixed by the Tories, by Labour or by any other political force alone?

In the prophecy of Jeremiah, early on, the LORD speaks to His people and says they’ve been trying to build from broken cisterns. The picture is stark and utterly tragic. To try and build a society without God, without reference to His word or to His law is, like the Tower of Babel, destined to fail.

Sadly, politicians seem slow or unwilling to join the dots. We live in an unmistakably interconnected world. Poor education attainment levels are connected to poverty, which itself is connected to family breakdown, which itself is connected to a long-standing refusal to promote family policies.

Or take calls to legalise assisted suicide. These are connected to a desire for control. Which is connected to a fear of death which flows from an individualistic culture where this life is all we’ve got. The loss of the eternal, or any public sense of the divine, has a practical cost for our society.

When it comes to abortion, we need to look at the issue holistically. Abortions happen because of enormous fear and pressure. Poverty comes into it. Absent dads come into it. Domestic violence or the fear thereof comes into it. We cannot be a credible ‘pro-life’ voice if we refuse to engage with these ‘upstream’ issues.

What our society needs is the application of God’s timeless, inspired, inerrant, all-sufficient word, sensitively and subversively applied to our context. In Proverbs, Lady Wisdom cries out and she persists even when ignored.

This is our calling. To stick closely to the Bible. To wrestle internally with its application to our confusing world. To learn from Christians in the broadest range of professions and to develop a clear, Biblically informed critique of current culture AND, crucially, proposals for the betterment of society.

In doing so, we are building on the legacy of Wilberforce and that remarkable Clapham Sect. They spotted problems and they laboured for solutions. They campaigned for positive change and their efforts were honoured by God.

None of this will be easy. But we have God’s word. We have a wealth of resources to call upon. And we have the Holy Spirit indwelling our hearts as we take up this challenge.