Slavery

How Christian nations ever allowed slavery is odd, but then again I guess there are slaves mentioned in The Bible - did Jesus ever campaign against slavery? I don't recall so, but then again He knew Wilberforce would do so some 1800 years later.

Mark Steyn, a columnist here in the United States (but whose work appears in Canadian and UK publications), wrote a review of the movie "Amazing Grace." He didn't really care much for the movie, preferring instead the book of the same title by Eric Metaxas. Nevertheless, Steyn offers the following in his review which I found interesting:

What did Wilberforce 'cure'? Two centuries ago, on March 25, 1807, one very persistent British backbencher secured the passage by Parliament of an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout His Majesty's realms and territories. It's not that no one remembers the disease ever existed, but that we recall it as a kind of freak pandemic -- a SARS or bird flu that flares up and whirs round the world and is then eradicated. The American education system teaches it as such -- as a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had conjured out of their own ambition. In reality, it was more like the common cold -- a fact of life. The institution predates the word's etymology, from the Slavs brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome. It predates by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. The first legally recognized slave in the American colonies was owned by a black man who had himself arrived as an indentured servant. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers. As Metaxas puts it, 'Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.'

And then this:

'What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery,' says Metaxas, 'something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mindset that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world.'

That, to my eye, seems to explain why Christian societies would have permitted slavery. Summed up -- it's always been that way.

It was Wilberforce's Christianity that was the flame behind his passion. The movie does a fair job presenting it as such. It could easily have scrubbed from the script the religious context, making his motivation being more "doing the right thing" rather than doing God's will. But they did not, though some evangelical types have taken exception to the downplaying of the strictly Christian elements. I think that criticism is misguided. I think there's enough Christian theme to be effective without being off-putting.

It's like my opinion of street corner Bible-thumping preachers, all red of face and spewing spittle in their righteous indignation -- for every one person they attract to Jesus, they send 99 away. They justify their way by pointing to John the Baptist, who was portrayed as something of a wild man. Times are different. And Jesus himself, except for the driving of the moneychangers from the temple, is portrayed as more gentle and humble, more calm and sensible.

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I liked the movie "Amazing Grace," but I did not think it was a great movie. I liked it because of its general tone and tenor -- quiet, dignified. But it had some flaws.

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I often wonder if any American folk actually think English people in England are really like that? I would bet "yes", and I think it's those folk that The Simpsons is making light fun of.

I think there's a large swath of America that does think England is Buckingham Palace, the changing of the guard, and Big Ben. Just like some people in other parts of the world think America is just people in huge cars with lots of money and cowboys dotting the horizon.

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It's really hard not to fight sometimes isn't it?

You're right. There's a powerful driver within our souls to prove ourselves right ... even when it doesn't really matter if we do. Pride? Stubbornness? Fear?