Posted on 03/09/2007 4:48:22 PM PST by Rummyfan
bttt
This and "300" are the movies to see.
Great man. Never heard of him before Rush Limbaugh mentioned the movie on his show today. Thanks to Mark Steyn. Educational bump!
Amazing Grace sounds well worth seeing
Interesting perspective. Thanks.
Please do not let the early part of the film, where this argument is taking place, make you discount the rest of the film. It is historically accurate; Wilberforce was against the British fighting the American colonists.
This was well-acted, and I give it higher marks than does Mr. Steyn. The recreation of the London docks was realistic and a bit awe-inspiring. The costumes were meticulously done, and even captured the change in women's clothing and men's hairstyles between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I have seen very few films manage this with accuracy.
I found the film inspiring. We are going to England next year, and we will say a prayer for Wilberforce and Pitt, who are buried next to each other in Westminster Abbey.
Thanks, I love well done period pieces.
I think it has more to do with having to thank the man for starting the end of slavery in western civilized countries.
Remember that to the MSM, the reparations folks and slavery victimization folks, it is not allowable to thank a white, Christian man for anything.
It's strange that Steyn would write a favorable article about Wilberforce without once mentioning that he was an evangelical Christian.
They cannot abide the thought that it was Christians, and even worse, evangelical Christians, who pretty much on their own brought down one of the oldest and most evil of human institutions. In England and in America.
The fact is that slavery was ended in England by Evangelical Christians, and in America by Republicans. Needless to say, this is simply unacceptable to the leftists, who cannot stomache the idea that progress is made by anyone by leftists, so they have simply written it out of history.
Instead, the British Empire and the Republicans are the designated villains, and Christianity is a menace to all right (i.e., left) thinking people.
One ironic result was that in the 60s blacks were persuaded that Christians were the oppressors, and so they turned to Islam--even though Islam did more than any other force to spread slavery through the post-classical world.
Check out his "7 Up" BBC series.. now on DVD.
An interesting look at class in the UK over the last 40+ years...
"Moreover, the story of abolition is also the story of the power of the gospel. The unseen background of Wilberforce’s work was the spiritual movement known as the Great Awakening. All throughout England and America the gospel was ablaze under the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield, and many thousands of people came to Christ in a generation. What we did not learn from the movie, is that when Wilberforce presented Commons with petitions from “the people,” a vast majority of these were Quakers, Methodists, Baptists, Dissenters and Anglican – many of whom had been touched by the Great Awakening. Had it not been for the Great Awakening there would have been no abolition—at least not in Wilberforce’s day."
from:
http://www.reformation21.org/Shelf_Life/Shelf_Life/309/vobId__5459/
I think the Great Awakening in the Anglo-American community, and the lack of anything comparable in the rest of Europe, is largely responsible for the fact that Britain, Canada, and Australia are our closest allies. Europe remained wallowing either in reactionary corruption or brutal radical movements, while the English-speaking world proceeded with liberal (in the true sense) reform.
'The fact is that slavery was ended in England by Evangelical Christians, and in America by Republicans.'
I fully agree with your sentiments, but I must point out a small fact that has not been mentioned yet in this thread - slavery has never been legal in England itself. It has always been illegal under English common law and was actually first written specifically into statute in 1102. Slaves brought into England could not be bought or sold and effectively had the status of indentured servants or employees until the case of James Somerset in 1772 who ran away from his 'master' who intended to send him to work on his Jamaican plantations. James didn't want to go and the Lord Chief Justice ruled that as slavery was illegal, he could not be made to. This technically freed between 10 and 14 thousand 'slaves' in England, though most carried on as they were, not considering themselves slaves, certainly their working conditions and rights were no worse than the indigenous population at that time.
So, good as Wilberforces work was, he only outlawed slavery in the semi-autonomous colonies, not in England.
Must admit I am looking forward to seeing the film!
Yes, I'm familiar with the Great Awakening and the work of John Wesley. Indeed, a friend of mine wrote a book, "The Triumph of Augustanism," on the unimaginable extent of disbelief and atheism in the society of the English 18th Century.
If you visit the English countryside, among other signs of this history you will find that almost every ancient church in England had to be repaired after major neglect in the 18th century. Wesley not only founded Methodism, he reinspirited the Church of England as well.
It was not entirely Evangelical. One descendant of this re-inspiriting was the Oxford Movement, which led to High Church Anglicanism and produced Cardinal Newman, who to some degree transformed the Catholic Church in England and Ireland.
Yes. Very true.
In fact, I would take this further. Slavery disappeared all across Christian Europe during the "dark" and middle ages. There were serfs and peasants tied to the land, but not slaves.
What ended slavery was, in short, Christianity. When the Conquistadors went to South America and enslaved the Indians they found there, the Pope held a meeting and decreed that these slaves would have to be freed. So, the Catholic Church was opposed to slavery.
In other words, what Steyn says is true, but what he leaves out is that slavery vanished all over Europe and then was REINTRODUCED during the Renaissance, when explorers went out and encountered the slave trade in Africa. Slavery was universal in all places and times except where real Christianity was dominant, whether Catholic or Evangelical.
There was slavery during the middle ages, but it was imposed on captured Christians by Muslims. Christian nations did not have slavery, as such, until the early modern period.
Wilberforce represented a pure strain of enthusiastic Christianity, and you might say that awoke the souls of Christians who had gone to sleep during the Renaissance and the so-called Age of Reason.
I should qualify that and say that Christian nations did not USUALLY have slavery. But it disappeared gradually. In fact, the Bible does not explicitly outlaw slavery. There were Christian slaves and slaveowners in the early years of the Church. But the implications of all men being created equal, and the implications of a Savior who died for all, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, inevitably led in that direction.
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