AMAZING GRACE
William Wilberforce and the heroic campaign
to end slavery
By Eric Metaxas
Authentic Media. 305 pages. £4.99 (Kindle)
ISBN 978 1 780 783 048
Fresh in the wake of 12 Years a Slave win-ning Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, I read this William Wilberforce biography with renewed curiosity.
Eric Metaxas’ Amazing Grace charts the incredible 20-year struggle to abolish the slave trade in the late 18th century/early 19th century, helping the reader understand the reasons why the battle was fought so tirelessly. The 2006 film Amazing Grace is my only reference point on Wilberforce, so this book helped to fill large gaps in my knowledge. It also highlighted the need for Christians to be involved in politics.
Stay in politics
The book starts with Wilberforce's upbringing in Hull and his first exposure to evangelical Christianity during a two-year stay with his aunt and uncle in London. Wilberforce later attended Cambridge University, and I began to get bored with the many lengthy descriptions of his parties and excesses – but I woke up when the book reached Wilberforce's conversion. Then, as a very young Christian and MP, he asked former slave-ship captain John Newton whether he should leave politics and enter the ministry. Newton controversially told him God could use him in politics – and so he did, to great effect.
Graphic details of the brutal slave trade are included, and it seems implausible that Parliament rejected abolition so many times. Britain had a Christian façade, but was full of societal evils such as child prostitution and the public burnings of executed criminals. So Wilberforce wrote a bestseller which explained clearly the Christian faith, as he recognised that people needed the gospel if there would be any social change. Today, it is largely forgotten that the abolitionists were motivated by Christian principles, that human beings are made in the image of God and should be treated with dignity.
There are fascinating details about Wilberforce’s life, such as him having six children in ten years, two of whom died – a cause of great sadness and deepening trust in God.
Although the author’s picture language irritated me at times, the book is worth reading, particularly if you are interested in history and/or the slave trade. It sends the message that Christianity has a place in the whole of society, and that the gospel really is the foundation of social change. But the book perhaps falls foul of hero-worship and at times forgets that it was God who gave Wilberforce the strength to fight.
