Amazing Grace, the new film about British abolitionist
leader William Wilberforce, has inspired a rush to claim the
evangelical parliamentarian as a religious and social role model.
The modern evangelical left is especially anxious to do so.
Jim Wallis of Sojourners, perhaps the most prominent
evangelical left spokesman, likes to define his evangelical faith
by politics rather than his theology. “I’m a 19th century
evangelical,” he likes to say, referring to abolitionists and
crusaders against child labor, etc. Predictably, Wallis is claiming
Wilberforce as an evangelical left paragon. In fact, Wilberforce,
like Methodist founder John Wesley and other 18th century
evangelical revivalists, belonged to the ruling Tory Party and was
both conservative and reforming, not revolutionary, in his
causes.
Like his colleague Edmund Burke, Wilberforce was deeply
disturbed by the French Revolution, and suspicious of all utopian
schemes to re-create society. His 40-year campaign against slavery
was gradualist, and Wilberforce never relented in believing that
society can only be truly reformed by religion, not by government
fiat. This is the very inverse of Jim Wallis’s style of evangelical
left politics, which often conflate the Gospel with the welfare
state and government regulation.
The Wilberforce film is also an opportunity for the evangelical
left to knock religious conservatives, who presumably are
indifferent to the plight of the world’s suffering, and are
absorbed in the garish riches of their suburban mega-churches. In
the folklore of the evangelical left, their more numerous
co-religionists on the right are mindless supporters of war,
laissez-faire economics, and environmental despoliation. George W.
Bush is especially obnoxious to the evangelical left because of his
own evangelical faith, and because evangelicals have been his most
steadfastly supportive voting bloc.
NO EVANGELICAL HERSELF, Arianna Huffington on her blog nonetheless
linked to comments about Wilberforce and Bush by Chuck Gutenson, a professor at Asbury
Theological Seminary in Kentucky, and a loyal supporter of Jim
Wallis’s Sojourners. Gutenson was especially enraged by a
local Kentucky newspaper column’s comparison of George W. Bush’s
pugnaciousness on the Iraq War to Wilberforce’s unswerving crusade
against slavery. The red-state op-ed had reckoned that “George Bush
is the modern equivalent of William Wilberforce, a resolute man of
faith engaged in a long term, but unpopular struggle.” Apparently,
the columnist also compared Bush to Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Gandhi. Naturally Gutenson was aghast. “Can you imagine Martin
Luther King (much less Gandhi!) supporting Bush’s decision to go to
war in Iraq?” Gutenson incredulously asked. “One can imagine many
statements King or Gandhi might have more for Bush, but one can
rest assured that ‘stay the course in Iraq’ would not be one of
them.”
Point taken, but neither Gandhi nor King, for all their stature,
would be a dispenser of relevant advice about statecraft and war,
as both were adamant pacifists. Infamously, Gandhi refused to back
Great Britain against Nazi Germany or distinguish between the
British Empire and the Third Reich. King’s opposition to the
Vietnam War, in which he called the United States’ the “greatest
purveyor of violence in the world today,” lacked the moral
astuteness of his heroic crusade against racial segregation.
Gutenson, who also inclines towards pacifism, likewise cited
Wilberforce’s “own objection to war, having argued against the war
with France strenuously enough to suffer a period of estrangement
from his good friend [British prime minister] Pitt.” According to
Gutenson, “Wilberforce would have been more akin to contemporary
war objectors who are smeared with the charge of being
‘unpatriotic’ or of being an ‘appeaser’ because he thought war
inconsistent with Christian faith.”
Well, Wilberforce was not quite Jim Wallis. He was not a
pacifist. And whatever his early objections to Britain’s military
intervention against the French Revolution, which had the
lamentable result of delaying Wilberforce’s anti-slavery campaign,
Wilberforce supported Britain’s forceful opposition to Napoleon’s
vast conquests. “We have every reason to believe Wilberforce would
object to Bush’s war in Iraq,” Gutenson concluded. That is possibly
true, but Wilberforce’s objections would have been based more on
skepticism about nation-building than on the pseudo-pacifism of the
modern evangelical left, which has rejected historic Christianity’s
traditional teachings about “just war.”
The anti-slavery policy that Wilberforce persuaded Britain to
adopt also entailed the Royal Navy’s violently apprehending slave
ships on the Atlantic. Presumably, a strict pacifist would have
favored only more gentle persuasion with the slave traffickers.
FOR GUTENSON, THE BUSH-WILBERFORCE comparison is objectionable for
still another reason. After all, Wilberforce “used his resources to
benefit those oppressed or otherwise on the margins of society. He
argued for a better school system and for prison reform. The focus
of his life was on making society better and on improving the lot
of his fellows.”
This, of course, stands in stark contrast with Bush, who has
“has used his position of privilege to benefit himself and to
benefit the wealthy, generally at the cost of those most on the
margins of our society.” Gutenson provided no supporting examples,
his point being purportedly self-evident. Since federal social
spending, which is how the evangelical left typically measures
Christian compassion, has risen dramatically under Bush, it is a
mystery what specifically Gutenson had in mind. Probably it is the
Bush tax cuts. In the lore of the evangelical left, the biblical
prophets of old all demanded high taxes from the Hebrew kings.
With Christian charity, Gutenson concluded by contrasting the
sleeping habits of Bush with Wilberforce. The British reformer went
to bed at night knowing he had ended the slave trade. The monster,
Bush, sleeps with dreams of “hundreds of thousands killed in his
war of choice and of the poor damaged to benefit the wealthy.”
Indeed, Bush is the “antithesis of William Wilberforce,” Gutenson
concluded, and any permitted comparison between the two is a
“further testimony to the corruption of popular Christianity in the
U.S.” But then, in the eyes of the evangelical left, the U.S.,
including its Christianity, is perpetually and irredeemably
corrupt, even without Bush or the religious right.
Comparing Bush to Wilberforce is indeed historically inexact,
but not for the facile reasons that Gutenson offered. The
abolitionist was a legislator, not a ruler. Bush might be more
credibly likened to Wilberforce’s friend, Prime Minister William
Pitt, who launched a two-decade war with revolutionary France but
would not last to see its conclusion at Waterloo.
Wilberforce, like the Savior he followed, had such noble
qualities that all sects attempt to claim him as their own. However
spurious these claims of kinship sometimes are, the eagerness to
emulate the British abolitionist only further adds to his
glory.
