Amazing Grace: …Could See But Now Am Blind

The Song vs the Movie

Orthodox Christianity, as taught by the Bible, focuses on the belief that when a person accepts Christ, he is saved and given a new heart, and as he grows in the Lord, he comes to love everyone, including his enemies, as commanded by Christ. The blindness of sin is lifted as God grants spiritual sight, or discernment. Social progress is inevitable after this, as evidenced by the great humanistic strides—including the abolition of slavery at the time of the early church—made as the new religion took hold.

By contrast, the Christian Left focuses on certain aspects of the social gospel such as eliminating poverty and disease and cleaning the environment, and utilizes a form of Christianity as a minor tool in the Left’s vast arsenal ranging from bloody revolution to stealth, all aimed at wearing down traditions that it perceives as obstacles to its ends. In this process, Christianity is used mainly to bolster a thinly veiled secularist-humanist agenda that is ultimately intended to neutralize traditional orthodox religion. As the church is gradually mesmerized by this idolatrous concept, which is alien to the faith, doctrine after doctrine falls prey to a diminishing spirituality, with a vague and tepid deism, eventually accompanied by a near-total loss of faith, supplanting the dynamic supernatural Christianity taught by Jesus and the apostles. Ultimately, spiritual sight is lost and blindness sets in.

The result is a gradual, then accelerated, return to the paganism that prevailed in the known world around the time of Christ, with creature comfort and the convenience of the strong being upheld over the needs of the helpless.

To illustrate:

The ancient pagans in Rome had a custom of taking their unwanted newborns out to the wilderness and leaving them at the side of the road to be eaten by vultures and jackals. Their consciences were spared because they were not direct witnesses to the savagery against their own children.

Today, for the convenience of our modern consciences, we have clean well-lighted abortion clinics, and instead of opposing the practice of killing the unborn, the “Christian” Left, far from registering horror, condemns the Christian Right for focusing too much on abortion and supposedly ignoring other social issues.

Yet, anyone with eyes, or at least spiritual eyes, can see that it is precisely social progress that occurs in proportion to the degree of Christianization of society, not because the movers of Christianity, starting with Christ himself, set about precisely to accomplish such progress, but because God changes people in positive ways that effect such progress as they manifest their love of mankind.

One of the most important social issues tackled by Jesus Christ and the apostles was slavery, and that at a time when about half of the entire population of Rome was made up of slaves.

What a threat that was to the economic stability of the empire!

Amazing Grace, the Song

The song Amazing Grace, written by former slave trader John Newton, is about God’s freely-proffered grace and how it works in our hearts when we accept it.

That this song is not about social justice but rather biblical religion is evidenced by the words:

When we’ve been there [in heaven] ten thousand years

Bright shining as the sun,

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,

Than when we’ve first begun.

The Real William Wilberforce

The real Wilberforce, credited with the abolition of slavery in England, was an orthodox Christian, among whose impressive list of causes we find “manners,” which translated into a campaign against licentious behavior, such as gambling, drunkenness and promiscuity.

His son, Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, followed in his footsteps, writing a strong critique of “The Origin of the Species,” sensing, in his spiritual discernment, that Darwin’s new theory could not account fully for the origin of human beings—and that in a time when DNA, the genetic Achilles heel of Darwinism, had not yet been discovered.

Amazing Grace, the Movie

I went to the cinema with great expectations, hoping to inch a bit closer to God but found myself closer to Hollywood instead.

I was somewhat put off when Wilberforce is shown lying in the dewy grass outside his country home contemplating nature and saying things that made it clear that nature and God were one to him. I kept expecting him to quote the Bible or to pray to Jesus, as he certainly must have done daily in real life. But the cinematic Wilberforce’s notion of religion seemed to be deistic at best, more akin to the world view of self-avowed agnostic director Michael Apted than that of the real William Wilberforce.

Secular authors like Francis Bacon and Shakespeare are quoted liberally, while the Bible is given short shrift in this screen play.

In contrast to Wilberforce’s efforts to establish strict manners in England, we see him consorting with people who imbibe unabashedly in his presence, yet elicit not so much as a raised eyebrow from him.

Biographers report that Wilberforce’s wife, Barbara Ann Spooner, was from an Evangelical family and that after their marriage, the two prayed together.

In the movie, this Barbara person displays a plunging neckline, carrying herself and speaking like a haughty radfem.

At their first extended one-on-one meeting, the fictitious Barbara Ann suggests they pretend to be quarreling to throw off the match makers who set them up. She ticks off a litany of topics and asks Wilberforce’s opinion to see if they can find some uncommon ground, of which there proves to be essentially none. However, in this list, not a single one of the topics is biblical or remotely spiritual. She comes off sounding more like Barbara Streisand in “The Way We Were” than a serious young Evangelical of her day.

Likewise, the great Olaudah Equiano, while correctly portrayed as the abolitionist activist he was, is also sold to us as more of a humanist than a Christian. His book “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,” is replete with biblical quotes and episodes of answered prayer, as well as quotes from literary classics. Yet, Apted's Equiano utters nary a word about his religious convictions. To add insult to injury, the script writer shows a libertine associate of Wilberforce’s drinking whiskey from a small flask and pouring out the remainder on Equianus’ grave after the latter’s demise, suggesting to the audience that the two may have been drinking pals. The autobiography, however, cites a letter from one of Equiano’s former employers, who says that the latter had served him with “sobriety.” Hardly a wine-bibber, I think.

John Newton, played by Albert Finney, is the only character who finally manages to unself-consciously utter the C word, giving full credit to Christ for his conversion, in a heartfelt performance such as one has come to expect from that venerable actor. But by then this little monologue seems strangely out of place. One senses that Apted is relieved to have it over with because nothing like it recurs thenceforth.

Dutifully, the theme of slavery is interwoven with the insinuation that the capitalist system is itself a form of slavery, a favorite mantra of the Religious Left. Apted-Wilberforce himself laments that some classes of people live in luxurious mansions while so many live “in boxes.” To use slavery as a stepping stone to Marxist agitation is at best a tasteless trivialization of the theme of slavery.

The Religious Left is Agush

No wonder that Jim Wallis, Religious Lefty par excellence, has such high praise for the film.

In an article entitled Revival for Justice, Wallis writes of a trip he took to the Holy Trinity Church of Clapham Common in South London. He writes of a guided tour there:

The vicar pointed to an old well-worn table. “This is the table upon which William Wilberforce wrote the antislavery act….We now use this table every Sunday for communion.” I was struck—here in dramatic liturgical symbol, the secular and sacred are brought together with powerful historic force. How did we ever separate them? What became of religion that believed its duty was to change its society on behalf of justice?

Let me take a shot at answering that, Jim.

Religious leaders like you nodded in assent as the Supreme Court declared that church and state must be separated with an insurmountable wall. Now you want your brand of Christianity to permeate public life.

But beyond that, Christianity—and I don’t mean the leftward tilted variety thereof—has always been social-justice oriented. The traditional church has always striven to protect the innocent and the poor. But religion never “believed its duty was to change its society on behalf of justice,” as you—and Michael Apted—wrongly postulate. Religion believed its duty was to change society one heart at a time on behalf of Jesus Christ.

But you see, Jim, before your kind entered the fold through the back door, Christians universally thought of the young and unborn as human beings. That is one thing that set us off from the pagans, and yes, it actually made them sit up and take notice of us. But it is “Christian” leaders like you who condemn us for wanting to reign in this barbaric practice. Are you really so naïve as to think Wilberforce would have stood idly by and allowed partial birth abortion, or abortion on demand for that matter, to go on unchallenged as you are content to do?

As for poverty, you folks on the Left are keen to do away with it through the kind of political machinations recommended by your Marxist models, and, in your inimitable holier-than-thou way, you claim that other Christians are turning a blind eye to poverty. Yet, contrary to your blind and witless pontifications, churches and missions have always been focused on charity as a way of reaching the lost. This approach made sense and without it Christianity could not have succeeded. My church supports a charitable group that you would view with a jaundiced eye: they provide sustenance and shelter for women who keep otherwise unwanted babies, instead of killing them with the tacit approval of your group.

The metaphor of John Newton as a blind man at the end of his days reminds us for all the world of Wallis, who was the son of devout Evangelicals yet ended up as spiritually blind as a bat.

If the Religious Left, whose viewpoint prevails in the movie Amazing Grace, ever does manage to fool enough naive Christian leaders into submitting to their agenda, slavery does indeed await us, just as it did the unfaithful Israelites in Jeremiah’s day. For religious dissolution goes hand in hand with national weakness, as Europe teaches us daily, inching closer and closer to self-imposed genocide.

And our enemies are at the gates, and in our midst.

How long, oh Lord? How long?

By Donald Hank Click here for bio and archived articles