From religious roots, the birth of social conscience

Raymond J. De Souza

Two centuries ago [March 25,1807],  the British Parliament passed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. It was the most important single moment in the worldwide abolition of slavery, as the imperial power, not shy about using the Royal Navy to impose its newly abolitionist values on a recalcitrant world, began to stamp out slavery throughout the empire.

The anniversary has occasioned a major push, especially by evangelical Christians, to celebrate the key figure behind the abolitionist movement, William Wilberforce (1759-1833), a devout Christian who led the fight as a British Member of Parliament. A feature film, Amazing Grace, opened in Canada yesterday and a lovely new biography of the same title has just been published by Eric Metaxas. The title of both is taken from the famous hymn written by a former slave trader who, having undergone a religious conversion, repented of his slaving days.

Aside from being a chance to correct historical amnesia in general, the bicentennial of the abolition of slavery is also a worthy occasion to reflect again on the role of religion in politics.

In his introduction, Metaxas produces an apposite quotation from Lord Melbourne, an opponent of Wilberforce's abolition movement. "Things have come to a pretty pass when one should permit one's religion to invade public life," the pro-slavery peer protested. Ah, the need to keep religion out of politics! Indeed, Lord Melbourne knew well the lay of the political land; if he could persuade enough people that abolition was merely a case of religious believers imposing their morality on everybody else, he would have had a fighting chance to preserve slavery. He was right: Without the activism of religiously motivated actors, abolition was not have been successful.

"No politician has even used his faith to a greater result for all of humanity, and that is why, in his day, Wilberforce was a moral hero far more than a political one," writes Mr. Metaxas. "Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nelson Mandela in our own time come closest to representing what Wilberforce must have seemed to the men and women of the nineteenth century."

The point could be made much more strongly than that. There is hardly a major progressive cause that hasn't been religiously motivated. Abolition in Britain, anti-apartheid in South Africa, anticommunism in the Soviet empire, the civil rights movement in the United States, anti-colonialism in India, democracy in the Philippines, autonomy in East Timor  -  in all of these cases religious motivation was a necessary condition (though not all always a sufficient one).

Moreover, Metaxas argues that Wilberforce's abolitionist movement gave birth to the very concept of a "social conscience" - the obligation to be concerned about the plight of fellow citizens. In the two centuries since then, that social conscience has given rise to, amongst other things, the expansive welfare state. In North America, the labour movement was animated by that religious social conscience, whether it was Moses Coady and the fisherman of Atlantic Canada, or Cesar Chavez and farm workers of California. Canadians more than most should know this, as it was the clergymen of the old CCF that laid the foundation for medicare and much else besides.

What has changed since Wilberforce's day? The progressive left today seems to think that secularism (or even atheism) is the necessary condition for social progress, and that religion is a retrograde force allied against the poor, the weak and the powerless. That is an argument that needs to be made, not merely asserted, and doing so runs against the clear weight of history.

The abolition anniversary should also be an occasion to lay aside tired arguments about religion and politics. Whether hurled against Wilberforce then or religious believers now, the idea that religion can be separated from politics is false. Politics is at the deepest level a moral enterprise  -  it is concerned with how people should act, and how the law should force them to act. Morality does not begin or end with religion, but for most people moral arguments are rooted in broadly religious principles, and to strip away religion from politics is to strip away from a moral project one of its most stable allies.

Slavery was abolished by Christian men, using the means of politics, enforced by military power. That's history, and a history that has enduring lessons to learn.

Raymond J. De Souza

National Post

Published: Saturday, March 24, 2007