I first heard of William Wilberforce in 1984 when the pastor of my church in Pittsburgh gave a sermon about him after reading “God’s Politician.” As I entered the master’s of arts and religion program at Trinity Seminary a few years later to focus on “public square theology,” Wilberforce and the Clapham community were a North Star and an aspiration.
Rubber met the road when I oversaw the longshot challenger Congressional race of Rick Santorum in 1990, and after a surprise victory, came to Capitol Hill as his chief of staff to practice what I had been planning to preach.
Clapham Group’s first client, the film “Amazing Grace” (2007), tells the story of William Wilberforce and his fight to end slavery, the release of which coincided with the 200th anniversary of the British Parliament voting to end the slave trade. Eric Metaxas wrote a biography of Wilberforce, published concurrently with the film and bearing the same title.
Hannah More also played a unique and crucial role in the fight to end slavery. Karen Swallow Prior, a friend of The Clapham Group, wrote an important new biography of More aptly titled “Fierce Convictions” (2014).
We modern-day American Christians have a lot to learn from the causes they championed. Just as importantly, we should emulate the way they campaigned for these causes.
More, a force to be reckoned with in and of herself — despite being a single woman in Georgian England — had as much influence as Wilberforce when it came to fighting for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself in Great Britain and her colonies. The story of their lives needs to be told again and again in each generation so we do not forget both the end result of their contribution to liberty and true virtue, and also the way they went about achieving those ends.
More and Wilberforce worked closely together on Wilberforce’s two “great objects” for many years. Surrounding themselves with other like-minded co-belligerents such as Thomas Clarkson, Henry Thornton, John Newton, Granville Sharpe, Josiah Wedgwood, William Cowper and Henry Venn, they labored for many years to abolish slavery and reform the manners ― what we would call morals in today’s parlance ― of both the upper and lower classes.
Both of these worthy goals had deeply spiritual and religious undertones for More, Wilberforce and their cohort. They each underwent a deepening of their nominal Christian faith before undertaking these causes and continued to grow in their faith as they labored together for many years. Neither of them would have achieved as much as they did apart from each other nor apart from their faith in Christ.
More grew up one of five daughters of a school teacher father (hardly very noble beginnings). Having a father for a teacher did have one major advantage, though, especially because at the time British society did not consider education for girls and women, outside of being trained in the “domestic arts” (i.e. how to run a household), neither suitable nor worth pursuing. More’s father educated all of his daughters alongside his other pupils. The five sisters went on to start their own school for girls, which they ran successfully for more than 30 years. Perhaps because of this early exposure to a well-rounded education, More maintained a love of learning and, in particular, the written word (both reading and writing it herself) for the rest of her life.
Wilberforce’s father died when he was 9 years old. When his mother struggled to cope with the loss and raise her son by herself, Wilberforce was taken in and raised by his religiously devout aunt and uncle. Over time, as he grew up and attended various levels of schooling, he strayed from this early foundation in the Christian faith.
Wilberforce experienced a reawakening to a deeper spiritual conviction when he took a trip with a friend and tutor from Cambridge University who also happened to be a devout Christian. On their journey, they read Philip Doddridge’s “The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul.” The trip and the book renewed in Wilberforce the spiritual conviction of his childhood.
In 1785, Wilberforce sought the counsel of Newton in a secret meeting, during which Newton persuaded Wilberforce that he could stay in politics and serve God if only he could focus on a worthwhile aim — this focus became his two “great objects.”
More and Wilberforce met in Bath in the autumn of 1787. They would remain friends and labor together for important causes the rest of their lives, dying within mere weeks of each other, although More was 14 years his senior. Their religious faith sustained More, Wilberforce and their fellow laborers in their long efforts and provided a strength of a moral imagination that carried them through many years of long, hard fighting to finally achieve the abolition of the slave trade as well as abolishing slavery itself years later in 1833.
More and Wilberforce knew, as Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in 1821, that, “the great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” Just as we at The Clapham Group know the importance of utilizing and harnessing the power of imagination — whether it be through films, music or graphic novels — the members of the Clapham Sect knew that creating and promoting good art, art that implicates the viewer and reader, can go a long way to achieving the noble ends to which you are striving.
Mark Rodgers is the founder of The Clapham Group in Springfield, Virginia.