The Reformation of Manners

William Wilberforce is the subject of a movie called "Amazing Grace" playing at a theater near you. He is generally credited with the movement to abolish slavery in the British empire. But, his legacy extends beyond the fight against slavery.

In addition to establishing mission societies to Africa and India, being a founding member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and many other local project and volunteer efforts, he also campaigned greatly for what he called the "Reformation of Manners". As noted in Mark Steyn's column in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable. . . . 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 mind-set 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.''

Steyn writes reminding us that Wilberforce wasn't just fighting the parliament, but as much as the movie makes him seem to speak for "the people", in fact the people (i.e. the culture) were a big part of the problem. The streets of London and society were completely corrupt and bankrupt morally.

Then as now, citizens of advanced societies are easily distracted. The 18th century Church of England preached "a tepid kind of moralism" disconnected both from any serious faith and from the great questions facing the nation. It was a sensualist culture amusing itself to death: Wilberforce goes to a performance of Don Juan, is shocked by a provocative dance, and is then further shocked to discover the rest of the audience is too blase even to be shocked.

What we think of as "the Victorian era" was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce that he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We children of the 20th century mock our 19th century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it's because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a "social conscience"

Amazing guy. "Amazing Grace"...see it.