Sunday, February 25, 2007
See Amazing Grace
We took the kids to see Amazing Grace (trailer) this afternoon. It was the first film to move me to tears -- admittedly, not such a difficult thing -- in quite some time.
It is the story of the campaign to abolish slavery in the British empire in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, led by William Wilberforce, a young MP from Yorkshire. Wilberforce has a conversion experience -- in today's terminology, he is born again -- and has to choose between a life of service to God or a career in politics. Various people, including the leaders of the then-radical abolitionist movement and his college friend, the future prime minister William Pitt the Younger, persuade him that he can do both.
The title of the movie comes from the greatest of all Christian hymns, "Amazing Grace." Its author, John Newton, was a British slaver who eventually repented, joined the ministry and himself preached against slavery. In the movie Newton becomes something of a monkish mentor to Wilberforce and eventually becomes one of the witnesses against slavery in the political battle for its abolition.
The film does depart from history on minor matters. The House of Commons seems to be full of peers, and Wilberforce's political mentor, Charles James Fox, lives to see the passage of the Slave Trade Act (in fact, he died about five months before its enactment). I'm sure there are other quibbles.
In the end, imperfect fidelity to history notwithstanding, Amazing Grace is a well-executed movie about an extremely inspiring political and social campaign to change the world. Most remarkably, the hero of the movie is a devoutly Christian English gentleman and his circle of aristocratic friends and allies, and the story centers on their triumph. The brutality of slavery lurks in the background, but the movie makes no common attempt to stoke the audience's emotions with long scenes that depict slavery graphically. This is smart, for that has been done many times, now to the point of tedium. Instead, the movie allows us to see slavery only as Wilberforce's upper class audience would have seen it -- abstractly, through his oration, with only a glimpse or a fleeting smell to remind them that it really is there. Amazing Grace is ultimately therefore a movie about a male, wealthy upperclass Englishman heroically changing the world through the power of argument and Christian faith without either gratuitous barbarity or post-modern cynicism. Go see it.
4 Comments:
By 
Doug, at
Tue Feb 27, 05:16:00 AM:
The Global Slave Trade Today and Faith-Based Action to End It
David Batstone, author of Not for Sale:
The Return of the Global Slave Trade – and How We Can Fight It
David Batstone exposes the fact that the global slave trade has returned in our time – with a vengeance. His conservative estimate: 27 million people are held as slaves in the contemporary world!
He discusses the commercial interests that profit from it, and describes the capture of slaves for forced labor, and for sex and prostitution. Most are women and children. Escape is almost impossible because they are usually trafficked to another country, their passports are taken away, and their families are sometimes threatened.
This contemporary slavery is found in the United States and Canada, as well as the rest of the world.
Batstone then lays out many faith-based efforts to end slavery in the world today, including efforts to get houses of worship to declare themselves “abolitionist,” and to offer sanctuary to those who have been trafficked.
A complete list of organizations can be found at: www.notforsalecampaign.org.
By Doug, at
Tue Feb 27, 05:17:00 AM:
Eric Metaxas, author of Amazing Grace on Interfaith Radio
mp3 at Feedburner
By ScurvyOaks, at
Tue Feb 27, 11:34:00 PM:
If Eric Metaxas's name rings a bell, it may be because he was Yale '84, btw.
By Sissy Willis, at
Thu Mar 01, 08:33:00 AM:
I first heard about it via email from the Humane Society of America a few weeks back -- Wilberforce was a founder of the world's first animal welfare society -- and Tuck and I were the first on our block to see it, way last Friday:
"Was blind, but now I see"
