September 5, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, William Wilberforce was not a soldier, but he fought one of history’s fiercest battles. From the floor of Parliament, he challenged the powerful slave trade that enriched Britain while enslaving millions. For decades, he introduced bills, built alliances, and spoke against slavery until the tide finally turned. The abolitionist movement he led brought an end to the British slave trade in 1807 and helped pave the way for full emancipation in 1833. Best-selling author Eric Metaxas shares the remarkable story of Wilberforce, the man who stirred a nation’s conscience and proved that moral courage can change the course of history.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
Slavery to this day remains one of the ugliest blots
in the long history of humanity. It can be traced
(00:30):
back as early as four thousand BC. The man, who,
perhaps more than any other, stirred the conscience of the
world about this evil was William Wilberforce. His efforts help
bring liberty to untold millions, and his persistence and conviction
influenced major change in thinking and the history of the
world too. Eric Metaxas, the New York Times bestselling author
(00:51):
of Bonaffer, Martin Luther, and Amazing Grace. His biography, Amazing Grace,
William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, was
the official companion book to the feature film, also titled
Amazing Grace. We'd like to thank Eric Buttexas for allowing
us to share his story with our listeners. Here's Eric
(01:11):
with the remarkable story of William Wilberforce.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
The story of Wilberforce is kind of funny because once
you know the story, you're embarrassed you didn't know it before.
And that happens to me over and over with the
characters I write about that you.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Think this is so important.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
How have I lived this long and I've missed this
because this is so important.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Let's put it this way.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
He's most famous if you have heard anything about him,
he is the man who in Parliament in eighteen oh
seven had the victory over the slave trade in the
British Empire. Right now, a lot of people you know
it kind of like what's that was? Was in slave
trade and slavery or whatever. Well, the slave trade, just
(01:51):
to make it clear, it's a really weird thing, right
because in America we had slavery here, so you saw
it in front of you. But in England they had
a huge slave trade, but they didn't have any slaves
in England. What they would do was they would send
these ships from the four Harbors or really was three
(02:13):
of their major four harbors, and the ships would go
down to the west coast of Africa pick up their
human cargo, and then they would take it across to
the West Indies and all the sugar plantations were there,
so they would then take the molasses and whatever back
(02:37):
to England. Nobody in England ever saw what was going on.
They just knew that their economy is booming and whatever.
Most english people didn't know that they're participating in a
satanic slave trade. They just knew that the economy is good,
and we get sugar in our tea and that kind
of stuff, you know. And so Wilberforce believed that if
(03:00):
he ended the slave trade, slavery would go away. So
let me just start at the beginning. He was born
in seventeen fifty nine into a family that really was wealthy.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
They were merchants.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
But the funny thing when I tell the story, and
I have to say again, I didn't know this either, right,
I'm not like a guy who knows a lot of stuff,
and they say, I think I'll write a book about this.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
I just knew.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
That this man had led the battle to end the
slave trade, so he's a hero. Okay, I'll write a
book about him. But when I wrote the book, I discovered
all kinds of stuff I didn't know. For example, when
he grew up in the middle part of the seventeen hundreds. Okay,
he's born in seventeen fifty nine. England was nominally Christian. Okay,
officially Christian. But do I need to tell you that
(03:46):
if you have a booming slave trade, you're not that Christian.
There are a lot of countries that are officially Christian
that don't behave very Christian.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
You could talk about Germany in the nineteen thirties, I
wrote about Detri Bonhoeffer. Germany was officially Lutheran, right, well, everybody,
we're German, we're Lutheran.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Great, except they're not living it out.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
If you don't understand that, you know, hating Jews is
not part of God's plan or speaking against Nazis that
you know.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
If you don't get that, how Christian are you? Okay?
So a lot of people can be Christian in name only.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Or sometimes Christians are Christians more than a name only,
but not nearly where God wants them to be, And
so people can reconcile all kinds of wicked behavior. But
in England at this time you could really say that
they really were Christian in name only. When they said
we're Christian, it means we're not Turks, We're not Muslims.
(04:44):
We're not atheists, we're not Buddhists, we're not Jews, we're Christians.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Well they didn't behave as Christians.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Now the irony is that America today is not officially Christian.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
We're not a fish anything.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
But I would say when you're not officially something, you
have the freedom to really be Christian, because when it's
enforced by the government, you just go, well, you know,
my birth certificate it just says that I'm this, and
you know, and you know it's not you don't own.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
It, it's not yours.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
So everybody in England says I am a Christian because
Christian we have the Church of England and the Queen
or the King is the defender of the faith, and
so we're an officially Christian nation.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
But something happened in the previous century.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
In the sixteen hundreds, there have been some religious wars,
and so the culture of England, not that it ever
was tremendously Christian, but in the eighteenth century they began
to retreat from robust faith of any kind, and the
Pulpits were preaching what you'd call French Enlightenment rationalism, right,
French Enlightenment rationalism means we believe in you know, there's
(05:51):
a God up there someplace, but we don't believe in
Jesus and the Bible. So England is officially Christian, but
they're not living it out at all. So Wilberforce is
born in the middle of this century into a family
that has a good amount of money. But just like
all the elites in particular in that century, they look
down on anybody who had serious Christian faith. If you
(06:13):
think about the eighteenth century, you have the Great Awakening,
because of the preaching of George Whitfield, and because of
the preaching of the Wesley brothers, John and Charles Wesley.
You have this revival, but it's only among the poor.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Mainly.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
The elites look down on the poor, and they look
down on anybody who had serious Christian faith. In fact,
they called them Methodists. They're sort of making fun of
the fact that the Wesleys, when they got saved at
Oxford University, they became sort of so obsessed with religion
and prayer and stuff that they said, they're very methodical.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
So they made fun of them.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
They called them Methodists, and of course they eventually took
it as a badge of honor. But the Brits also said,
if you're really serious about God and all that stuff,
you're an enthusiast, which is like saying a holy roller
a Bible thumper.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
The whole culture looked down on it.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
So the elites were really hostile to any of this
Christian faith, and so throughout the culture you don't have
much Christian faith.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
And when we come back the story of William Wilberforce
with Ericmataxis here on our American Stories, Leehabib here, as
we approach our nation's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, I'd
(07:33):
like to remind you that all the history stories you
hear on this show brought to you by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn't just a great
school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for
you as well. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to find
out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on
Communism is one of the finest I've ever seen. Again,
go to Hillsdale dot edu and sign up for their
(07:55):
free and terrific online courses. And we continue with our
American Stories and the story of William Wilberforce, and now
let's return to Eric Metexas and the story of William Wilberforce.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
The elites were really hostile to any of this Christian faith,
and so throughout the culture you don't have much Christian faith.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
So Wilberforce grows up in a family just like that.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
When he is about nine years old, his father dies
and his mother gets very ill, and the grandfather and
the mother say, we need to send him to live
with this aunt and uncle because she wasn't able to
care for him. And so they send him to live
with this very wealthy.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Aunt and uncle.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
They were so wealthy that, you know, the mother and
the grandfather, how can we go wrong sending him to them.
This is going to be, you know, wonderful. Well, what
they didn't know is that the aunt and uncle were Methodists,
born again, evangelical, whatever you want to call it. In fact,
not only that they were so wealthy, they were practically
(09:06):
funding the entire Methodist movement.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
So they send this little.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Boy off to live with them, and he encounters this
loving aunt and uncle and he comes to faith. He
was very intelligent, very sensitive, and he comes to faith.
He comes to love this ant and uncle with all
his heart, and they love him like a son. And
John Newton, who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace. He was
the slave trader who became a Christian and then became
a preacher. He would visit this home and little Wilberforce
(09:35):
thought of him like a father figure.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
And so it's this wonderful time.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
But then the mother and the grandfather, being classic elites
of that day, when they discovered this about two and
a half years into this, they were horrified. It's like
he'd been kidnapped by a cult. You know, those Christians,
they're nuts. So they bring him back home and they
are determined to scrub his soul clean of Methodism. They
don't even let let him go on Sundays to their
(10:02):
Anglican church because he might hear the scriptures read, and
so they do everything they can. He tries to cling
to his faith, this brilliant young man. He sends letters,
secret letters via the maid to his aunt and uncle.
He's trying to cling to his faith. But by the
time he's sixteen and goes off to Cambridge University, it's
really evaporated, and he's become exactly what they hoped, you know,
(10:24):
an intelligent, insouscient man about town sophisticated, knowing that you know,
the enthusiasts are just way too much.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
It's not for me.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Well, while he is there at Cambridge, he becomes friends
with William Pitt the Younger. William Pitt the Elder is
one of the great statesmen of that time, right, he
was in the House of Lords, but he was a
great political figure, and he was training his young son,
William Pitt the Younger, to be a great statesman, you know,
(10:55):
memorizing Latin phrases, you know, at his father's knee, and
so Wilberforce he comes from this merchant background, but he
meets William Pitt the Younger and they start going together
from Cambridge to London to visit the Houses of Parliament,
to sit in the gallery and to watch the debates
on the floor below. And Wilberforce, eighteen nineteen years old,
(11:15):
is mesmerized by what's going on. He thinks, I think
I want a life in politics now. You know, you
have to understand what was the debate going on at
that time in the House of Lords that he was watching. Well,
this is about seventeen seventy six, so this was about
the fate of the colonies. I mean, this was historical,
and he says, I want to become a politician. So
(11:36):
he graduates at the same time as friend William Pitt
the Younger graduates, and they immediately get elected to Parliament
and the two of them rock it up in the
ranks of the political order in their early twenties, so
that by the time William Pitt the Younger is twenty
four years old, he's elected Prime Minister of England.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Now William A.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Pit is Prime Minister, but his best friend Wilberforce also
gets this incredibly powerful position and they become very powerful figures.
They're members of all the top gentlemen's clubs and their
pictures are in the papers.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
That's not true, there's no photography.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
In seventeen eighty I tricked.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
You can you imagine all this comes to him and
then one day he decides, because you know, the recess
from Parliament is months long, he wants to take a
long vacation.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
His mother's health, you know, was not so good.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
So they thought, oh, we need to go to the
French and Italian riviera's for the climate.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
So this is a trip.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Can you imagine to go from England all the way
across the continent with you know, horses with a coach
to the southern part of France.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
It's a vast journey. Okay.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
So his mother was going to travel in a coach
with a cousin and he was going to travel in
a coach with a friend.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
So he picks a friend.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
The friend can't come, and then he says, well, I
need somebody to you know, it's going to be very boring.
So he's stumbles on an old schoolmate who is my
favorite character in the book. In the story, his name
is doctor Isaac Milner. And Isaac Milner was a physical giant.
I don't know how big he was, but he was
everybody just he was a giant of a man. Now
it becomes funnier when you think Wilberforce was literally five
(13:16):
foot two and at one point during his illness he
weighs seventy six pounds. So he picks Milner. Now, Milner
was not just famous for being a giant. He was
probably literally the smartest man in England at the time
he was. He had the location chair in the chemistry
of physics I forget at Cambridge. Okay, Isaac Newton, who
invented calculus, and Stephen Hawking who just passed away. You know,
(13:39):
they have this lifetime appointment. So it's super smart people,
smartest people in the world. So that's Isaac Milner. Okay,
so not only is this super genius, but he also
was famous for being a teller of comic stories, funny stories,
and so you think, who could possibly be a better companion,
And they just, Okay, we're gonna go together. We're gonna
(14:01):
we're gonna take this trip across the continent. Is this
going to be months you know to get to get
there and months to come back. So they go on
the journey and they're talking about everything. Wilberforce was a
fascinating conversationalist himself and very witty, and uh, they've gone
just far enough that they can't turn back. I don't
(14:22):
know how far that is, five hundred miles something like that,
And the subject of religion comes up, and to Wilberforce's horror,
Isaac Milner reveals that he is a Methodist, and he
kind of tries to crack some jokes to kind of
bat it away, but Milner says, well, you know, no, no, no,
(14:42):
I think you know you're you're above that, mister Wilberforce.
I think, you know, if you'd like to have a
serious conversation, we should. So they have a serious conversation.
And I always picture this giant Milner crushing Wilberforce's intellectual
objections like walm nuts in his big meaty poils. You know,
I'm throwing the shells out the window. As the miles
(15:05):
go by, He's just one by one. And wilberforcet to
his credit, was intellectually honest. Okay, like a lot of
people today would just be like, hey, I don't care.
Wilberforce thought, if you're making the case and you're right,
I'm stuck. And by the time of this trip ending,
he knows that he's been wrong, that the Bible is true,
that Jesus is his Lord and savior. There's no way out.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
I'm in. It's true.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
But when he gets back to London, he's very bummed
out because he knows the world in which he has
been traveling. He's remember these five gentlemen's clubs where they
stay out drinking and singing and gambling and joking till
four and five in the morning, and that whole life.
You realize, I can't do that anymore, I probably have
to leave politics.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
What am I going to do? He was not happy.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So he goes to visit his old friend John Newton.
Remember I said he when he was a little boy,
he'd befriended him. He hadn't seen him in all these years,
and I imagine John Newton had been praying for him.
Can you imagine that this guy that you knew back
then has drifted away from the faith and now he's
one of the most powerful people in England. So he goes,
like Nicodemus, secretly to meet John Newton to ask him
(16:12):
what do I do? But he didn't want people to
see him going there because he was so famous at
this point that if people see him going there, they're
gonna know something's up. So he goes there secretly and
John Newton says to him, I think God would call
you to bring him into politics and to let him
(16:33):
use you as a top political figure for his purposes
in history at this time. Wilberforce, to his credit, accepts this,
and he says, even though it's going to be hard,
even though I'm going to be mocked by these elites,
I believe this is God. And so he decides to
stay in politics, but he's going to pray and study
the scripture and other books about Lord, what.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Would you have me do? So?
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Two years into his faith, he writes in his journal
twenty famous words.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
I don't remember what they are, but there's twenty of them.
Just kidding, I do so.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Basically, he writes these words in his diary, and these
are the twenty words. He says, God Almighty has set
before me two great objects. Okay, God has set before me.
He didn't say this is my idea. He believes that
the Lord has called him to these two great objects
of his life.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
The suppression of.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
The slave trade, which was basically impossible. And if that's
not enough, the reformation of manners or morals or culture,
which is you could describe it as, oh and everything else.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
And my goodness, what a storyteller we have on hand,
the great Eric Metexas, who wrote Amazing Grace, William Roberforce
and the heroic Campaign to end Slavery. We continue with
this great story here on our American stories. And we
(18:09):
continue here with our American stories and the story of
William Wilberforce. And it's one of the great faith stories
in world history. And by the way we tell the
story of British history, because periodically, what happens across the
pond is either happening here or will soon happen here,
and vice versa. And of course, the abolition movement here
(18:32):
in this country in the nineteenth century was spawned in
large part by Christians, and indeed they were pursuing the
same kind of justice that Wilberforce was pursuing, and that,
in their estimation, was God's justice. And now let's return
to the story, the untold story in too many of
our schools and colleges of William Wilberforce.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
I don't think I share the statistics, but it was
such a broken culture that you don't just have this
abomination called slay and the slave trade, you also have
a lack of Christian worldview evident in everything.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Nobody cared for the poor. Imagine living in a.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
World today we argue about how to care for the poor,
not whether we all know. Of course we're supposed to
do something to help people who are struggling. The question
is what imagine living in a time where everybody says, no,
we're not and we don't even give it a thought.
The reason you're poor is because you made bad decisions
and tough luck. It's not my problem. And the reason
(19:27):
I'm rich is because God likes me and He's blessed me.
Imagine having that worldview that is the opposite of a
Christian worldview, is it not?
Speaker 3 (19:34):
God tells us we are blessed to be a blessing.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
If God has given you anything, time, money, talent, good looks,
doesn't matter what it is. If it's good and He
gave it to you, he gave it to you for
His purposes. So imagine living in the world where nobody
knows that, living in a world everybody says us, whatever
I have that's good is for me. So Willberforce grows
(19:57):
up in a world like that, he becomes a Christian
and the first thing he sees through his Christian eyes
is the slave trade is evil?
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Okay? Is God calling me to that? Well?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Two years into this faith he realizes God is calling
me in parliament to be a voice in politics for
this issue. There's been a lot of serious Christians, Methodists,
born again believers who knew this was an issue, but
they had no political power. They're praying for a figure
in parliament. So Wilberforce steps up says yes. But then
the everything else is the brokeness of the culture. Beyond
(20:35):
the horror of the slave trade, there was child labor,
little kids working six seven years old in dangerous conditions,
fourteen hours a day. Imagine that kind of a poverty
where there's no rules against that. Alcoholism was utterly rampant
in that culture on a level we can't even imagine.
Some of you might be familiar with the Hogarth Prince
of jin Ali. I mean, these people just absolutely lost
(20:58):
in poverty and misery, dying of young ages, of all
kinds of diseases, and unable to raise their kids.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
This was absolutely endemic in this culture.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Twenty five percent of all the women in London who
were single were prostitutes. What does I tell you about
the men in that culture. The average age of the
prostitutes was sixteen. That's the average age. When Wilberforce becomes
a Christian and sees through God's eyes, he sees all
this and he realizes God is calling me to step
(21:30):
up to use my talent, the power He's allowed me
to have, my abilities, my networks, friends that I know,
to work for God's purposes. So he writes this in
his journal. The other fact, if you want to know
how sick the culture was, Wilberforce said, this culture is
so far away from God, even though we call this
(21:51):
I was officially Christian. He said he wanted to make
goodness fashionable. In other words, it was fashionable. It was
the cool thing to be bad. Right, we see that
in our culture. Right, what do we call it? He says, Well,
he's a player, okay. Who was the leading figure in
the land in this time? It was the man who
(22:12):
was going to be King George the fourth Okay, the
eldest son of King George the third was the prince
of Wales, who's going to be the king. He was
famous for being immoral. So in that culture, the greatest
guy there is who's going to be the king.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
That's how he behaves. So Wilberforce says, I've got an
uphill climb.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
He says, I want to make goodness fashionable and not
that kind of behavior. I want to make goodness fashionable.
I want people to know that doing good is the
right thing. So he's facing all of this, he's born again.
And the first thing, of course, that the thing that
he's most famous for is this huge battle for the
slave trade. And he fights and fights and fights. He
fights for eighteen years. It's a brutal battle. If you
(22:53):
read the book honestly, you realize that if God doesn't
call you to the battle, you know the enemy will
just chew you up. You need to know this is
God's battle. You need to know I'm here to obey,
not to win. I play to win, but I ultimately
am here to obey God. Because Jesus obeyed God and
he was nailed to a tree. Bonafer obeyed God and
(23:17):
he was hanged. It's not about winning, it's about obeying God.
If you obey God, you already won. Wilberforce does win,
but the battle is unbelievable. He obeys God, he does everything,
and in eighteen oh seven he gets this grand victory.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
After many years.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
He also had health issues, al sort of colitis, and
I mean he really struggled, but he knew God has
called me to this battle. But he also knew God
had called him to the battle of the reformation of
manners of culture whatever, and he oversaw the transformation of
this culture through all kinds of little groups.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
He basically was able to speak to the elites.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Of the time, and that you know, a wealthy woman
with nothing really to do, was suddenly now thinking that, oh,
why don't I get together with the other wealthy women
and we can do something for the poor. They began
to get this idea in these elite circles that we
need to do something for those who can't help themselves.
(24:18):
He had a group of friends around him. I called
them the Clapham Circle. Sometimes they're called the Clapham Saints
or whatever. But one of this group was John Thornton.
He was the head of the Bank of England. He
was one of the wealthiest people in Europe. He decides
to use his money for God's purposes, and so he
builds a couple of houses so that these people, he
(24:39):
invites them, what why do you live?
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Will live in a kind of community.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
And will pray together in the mornings, and we'll meet
together and will be part of what God.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
Can do in England.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
It's an amazing story really, of how many different people
got involved. One of my favorite figures I mentioned Isaac Milner.
There's a woman named Hannah Moore, and she's one of
the great figures of this era.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
He's a literary figure.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
She was friends with the famous actors David Garricka, and
the famous poets and the famous painters, Josh Reynolds.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
She was part of that world.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
And she, like Wilberforce, had a heart for God, and
she's thinking and how can God use me? And the
Lord used her in her giftings. And one of the
most amazing things she did was she said, you know,
I've been writing all these books and poems and stuff.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
I need to.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Write literature for poor people who don't know how to live,
stories that help them, like morality, stories to help them
think about their lives. And then she founded a Sunday
school because the rural poor we're getting zero education, and
she said, I'm going to start educating them and educating
them in the things of God. So you have all
(25:45):
these different characters who have different pieces of this, and
they start to fan out through the culture and they
start to change things.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
So you have this huge.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Victory in eighteen oh seven. But Wilberforce went on to
either lead or be a part of innumerable social reforms.
Oz Ginnis, my dear friend who really introduced me to
the life of Wilberforce, considers Wilberforce the greatest.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Social reformer in history. Now, all that he did.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
He did because of Jesus, because he understands Jesus changes
everything is. I don't just get saved and about saving
other people. We get saved, but then we're still here.
We don't go straight to heaven. What are we supposed
to do? We save other people? Yeah, yeah, that's part
of it, but we're supposed to also serve God in
our gifts and care for the poor, care for the slaves.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
If you say, oh, I just.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Want to preach the gospel, I don't want to get
involved in politics or whatever, you think, well, you don't
care about the slaves rotting in the hold of a
slave ship. If you don't care about them, you are
missing Jesus and his heart. And what gospel are you
going to preach? And so bonhoffergets that right. He says,
I'm not just gonna pray. I'm going to get involved
in the plot to overthrow Adolf Hitler because millions of
(26:59):
peace people are being murdered.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
And when we come back, we're going to hear more
from this remarkable storyteller. And you're listening to Eric Matexas
tell the story of William Wilberforce, and they should be
taught in every school. Of course, it's not. And that's
why we tell you the stories that we tell you,
because no one else is telling them. When we come
back more of the life of William Wilberforce, this is
(27:23):
our American stories, and we return to our American stories
and the story of William Wilberforce told by one of
America's great storytellers and writers, Eric Matexas. Let's pick up
(27:49):
with Eric where he last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
So Wilberforce, after the abolition of slave trade in eighteen
oh seven, he gets involved in all these other things.
One of them is abolition itself, because they saw as
time passed that the abolition of the slave trade is
not ending slavery, and so he gets involved in abolition.
Another thing he did, which there's a chapter in my book.
He should be famous for this too. Most people don't
(28:15):
even know this. He considered it, next to the slavery issue,
the most important thing he ever did. And this might
sound odd at first, but it was to get missionaries
into India.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Think of this.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
The British were making tons of money in India, but
they were not concerned about the lives of the Indians.
They just thought, let's just go there. And we'll make
our money and we don't have any responsibilities we Wilberforce says, yes,
you do. Wilberforce were reading the paper how in India
when usually a wealthy man dies, he's burned on a
(28:52):
funeral pire, his body is burned on a funeral pyre,
and along with his body burned on the funeral pire,
his living widow.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Is burned to death on the funeral pyre. Wilberforce would read.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
This and be outraged and say, we are there, we
are in England.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
We are English.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
People are there in India making tons of money of them.
Do we not have a responsibility to help these women
and to tell them that we don't care what your
customs are. By the way, in England we have a
custom when you do that to a woman, we hang
you to death.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
You have your customs.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
We are going to bring our values, our Western Christian
values that you don't murder a woman because her husband died.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
We're going to bring these values.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
He said, we need missionaries there, and of course the
business interests nothing changes.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
They're making a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
They didn't want missionaries there because they said if missionaries
come here to India, they're gonna mess up a good thing.
We got a good thing going on there. You know,
there were men there that would have, you know, five
or six teenage.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Wives hanging out. I don't want missionaries coming here.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Wilberforest fought and fought, but by the time he died
in eighteen thirty three, you're on the verge of what's
called the Victorian era.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
The Victorian era is famous.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
For what morality. It became what he had prayed for.
He made goodness fashionable. So by the time he dies,
everybody in England knows if I have something, probably I'm
supposed to do something good with it. Now can you
imagine we live in a day today where everybody knows that.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Why do we know that? We know that?
Speaker 2 (30:29):
And this is what's incredible to me, is because William
Wilberforce and his group of friends managed to import these
gospel ideas into the mainstream of the culture, and they
did it so successfully that it became part of the
warp and woof of Western culture. So that anybody in
the West today knows slavery's wrong, racism's wrong. If there
are people suffering in poverty or this or that, we
(30:51):
have some obligation to do something the social conscience.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
Can you imagine living in a world with no social conscience.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Wilberforcet brought the idea of helping the poor in all
this into the mainstream. So today, as I said, we
argue about how to do it, not whether to do it.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
He was on his deathbed, by the way.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
When he received word this was his last day of consciousness.
A young member of Parliament in eighteen thirty three comes
to the bed of Wilberforce to tell him today in
Parliament we have just voted to outlaw slavery, not the
slave trade, which was the feat in eighteen oh seven,
but in eighteen thirty three, to defeat slavery and wipe
(31:32):
it out in all of.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
The British Empire.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Can you imagine that the Lord gave him this victory
on his deathbed and our hours before he slips into unconsciousness.
His life changed things so dramatically. Because everybody today has
a social conscience. We can't even imagine a world without it.
So we don't even think about the guy who kind
of made it happen. We're like, what are you talking
about it? That's like the guy who made oxygen happen.
(31:56):
We it's always been here. Like I don't even know.
I don't even know what you're talking about. We can't
imagine it because this happened over two hundred years ago,
or roughly two hundred years ago. But it's been part
of the West ever since. We know that we're blessed
to be a blessing. Every atheist, every agnostic, we all
know this stuff.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Where did it come from?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Came from the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and it was
not brought into the mainstream of culture until William Wilberforce.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Was called by God to do those things.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Before I close, I just want to tell you a
couple of things that he did that with part of
how he was able to do this, I mentioned that you.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
Have to be called.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Sometimes people have just called to be a good spouse,
a good father, good mother.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
That's more than enough. It's not about saving the world.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Wilberforce did what God called him to do humbly, so
that's important. The second thing is that Wilberforce had a
humility that he was able to love his enemies. Wilberforce
knew that apart from the grace of God, I'm on
the other side of this battle, so I can't get
all cocky and you know, morally superior.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Because why am I on the right side of the battle.
I didn't work my way here.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
The Lord by revelation gave me the gift of seeing
what I was blind to before. So he had a
humility and a love in the way that he dealt
with his opponents that is very powerful. Wilberforce was able
to speak to the people on the fence with a
grace that a lot of them were able to change
(33:26):
their minds because of how he communicated. He had the ability,
because of his wit and sarcasm, to wipe the floor
with his opponents. When he became a Christian, he no
longer did that. Even though he could, he didn't do it.
There was a grace to him. Wilberforce also understood that
I need to have people around me. For him, it
was this Clapham circle people brothers and sisters who are
(33:48):
with me on the journey, maybe not doing exactly what
I'm doing, but encouraging me, praying with me. He would
say that it's his friends in Clapham. He never could
have done what he did. But then, in a way,
the final point is that he was willing to work
with his enemies. In other words, there were people in
parliament who were, you know, dissolute swine. Okay, people who
(34:10):
are womanizers and drunkards and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Wilberforce said, I will work with you.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
If we can help end the slave trade, because I
care more about the suffering slaves than I do about
my reputation. Wilberforce said, I care about the slave and
if I'm gonna have to break bread with sinners, oh, incidentally,
someone who's a hero of mine, Jesus of Nazareth, broke
bread with sinners, So maybe it's okay to break bread
(34:38):
with sinners.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
If you don't care about.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Those slaves, it's very easy to say I'm not going
to work with the Charles Fox in parliament. He's a
horribly immoral person. But if you care about the slaves,
you care about the people suffering, you say, well, I
know that I'm morally no different than Charles Fox.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Maybe I can be an influence on him.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
I will not let him be an influence on me,
but if he will work with me on this issue,
of course I will work with him. That takes humility,
and it also takes perspective that Jesus was reviled by
the religious leaders of his day for hanging out with
tax collectors who are the scum of the earth and
(35:19):
sinners and drunkards and whatever. That's why Wilberforce is such
a hero of mine, not because he accomplished these things,
but because he accomplished them by obeying God and by
giving us a model in life in history, a real model.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
I'm not like, you know, blowing smoke here.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
This is all true, and this is just the peaks
of the mountains here, but that one life submitted to
God can sometimes be just so dramatically effective that it's
an inspiration to each of us.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
And you've been listening to Eric Mattexas one life submitted
to God, my goodness, what a difference it can make.
And we know this from our story of Martin Luther King,
not doctor Martin Luther King. The hour we did was
on Reverend Martin Luther King, and it was his faith
that animated everything he did, and it was the Bible
that animated everything he did. And you don't need to
(36:07):
be a Christian or a Jew, or an atheist or
an agnostic not to know that that was the reality
of King's life. And the impact he had on America
in the twentieth century. Perhaps no other man had the
impact King had. And we thank Eric but Texas for
just a remarkable a piece of writing and storytelling and
amazing grace. Is one heck of a book and one
(36:28):
heck of a movie, a great movie for the family
to watch. And again we tell these stories because no
one else does. You've got to ask yourself for wonder
why schools don't teach this story. That's for you to ponder.
And my goodness that just days before he died, that
Wilberforce learned that not only had he abolished the slave trade,
(36:49):
he had impacted the decision of the British Parliament to
abolish slavery in its entirety in all of the British Empire.
And the reason we tell this story about this the
British man is his impact on the American colonies and
the American continent, because the impact his life had on
Christians in this country is inestimable. And my goodness, the
(37:12):
abolition movement, well we know that it was Christians who
drove that in the North, and it was their faith
that drove it in the North. And these are stories
that need to be told. These are stories we love
telling here on our American stories. We're blessed to be
a blessing. Eric Mattax has said, and by the way
that we are now all of us talking about the poor,
(37:36):
faith people are not faith people. All good people today
think and talk about how to help the poor. But
before Wilberforce this just wasn't common. It was seen poverty
as a series of bad choices the poor person made,
and that mercy and grace need not be shown. The
(37:57):
story of William Wilberforce a part of British history and
American history too. Ear on our American stories.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
H
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
Slavery to this day remains one of the ugliest blots
in the long history of humanity. It can be traced
(00:30):
back as early as four thousand BC. The man, who,
perhaps more than any other, stirred the conscience of the
world about this evil was William Wilberforce. His efforts help
bring liberty to untold millions, and his persistence and conviction
influenced major change in thinking and the history of the
world too. Eric Metaxas, the New York Times bestselling author
(00:51):
of Bonaffer, Martin Luther, and Amazing Grace. His biography, Amazing Grace,
William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, was
the official companion book to the feature film, also titled
Amazing Grace. We'd like to thank Eric Buttexas for allowing
us to share his story with our listeners. Here's Eric
(01:11):
with the remarkable story of William Wilberforce.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
The story of Wilberforce is kind of funny because once
you know the story, you're embarrassed you didn't know it before.
And that happens to me over and over with the
characters I write about that you.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Think this is so important.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
How have I lived this long and I've missed this
because this is so important.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Let's put it this way.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
He's most famous if you have heard anything about him,
he is the man who in Parliament in eighteen oh
seven had the victory over the slave trade in the
British Empire. Right now, a lot of people you know
it kind of like what's that was? Was in slave
trade and slavery or whatever. Well, the slave trade, just
(01:51):
to make it clear, it's a really weird thing, right
because in America we had slavery here, so you saw
it in front of you. But in England they had
a huge slave trade, but they didn't have any slaves
in England. What they would do was they would send
these ships from the four Harbors or really was three
(02:13):
of their major four harbors, and the ships would go
down to the west coast of Africa pick up their
human cargo, and then they would take it across to
the West Indies and all the sugar plantations were there,
so they would then take the molasses and whatever back
(02:37):
to England. Nobody in England ever saw what was going on.
They just knew that their economy is booming and whatever.
Most english people didn't know that they're participating in a
satanic slave trade. They just knew that the economy is good,
and we get sugar in our tea and that kind
of stuff, you know. And so Wilberforce believed that if
(03:00):
he ended the slave trade, slavery would go away. So
let me just start at the beginning. He was born
in seventeen fifty nine into a family that really was wealthy.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
They were merchants.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
But the funny thing when I tell the story, and
I have to say again, I didn't know this either, right,
I'm not like a guy who knows a lot of stuff,
and they say, I think I'll write a book about this.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
I just knew.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
That this man had led the battle to end the
slave trade, so he's a hero. Okay, I'll write a
book about him. But when I wrote the book, I discovered
all kinds of stuff I didn't know. For example, when
he grew up in the middle part of the seventeen hundreds. Okay,
he's born in seventeen fifty nine. England was nominally Christian. Okay,
officially Christian. But do I need to tell you that
(03:46):
if you have a booming slave trade, you're not that Christian.
There are a lot of countries that are officially Christian
that don't behave very Christian.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
You could talk about Germany in the nineteen thirties, I
wrote about Detri Bonhoeffer. Germany was officially Lutheran, right, well, everybody,
we're German, we're Lutheran.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Great, except they're not living it out.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
If you don't understand that, you know, hating Jews is
not part of God's plan or speaking against Nazis that
you know.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
If you don't get that, how Christian are you? Okay?
So a lot of people can be Christian in name only.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Or sometimes Christians are Christians more than a name only,
but not nearly where God wants them to be, And
so people can reconcile all kinds of wicked behavior. But
in England at this time you could really say that
they really were Christian in name only. When they said
we're Christian, it means we're not Turks, We're not Muslims.
(04:44):
We're not atheists, we're not Buddhists, we're not Jews, we're Christians.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Well they didn't behave as Christians.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Now the irony is that America today is not officially Christian.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
We're not a fish anything.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
But I would say when you're not officially something, you
have the freedom to really be Christian, because when it's
enforced by the government, you just go, well, you know,
my birth certificate it just says that I'm this, and
you know, and you know it's not you don't own.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
It, it's not yours.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
So everybody in England says I am a Christian because
Christian we have the Church of England and the Queen
or the King is the defender of the faith, and
so we're an officially Christian nation.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
But something happened in the previous century.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
In the sixteen hundreds, there have been some religious wars,
and so the culture of England, not that it ever
was tremendously Christian, but in the eighteenth century they began
to retreat from robust faith of any kind, and the
Pulpits were preaching what you'd call French Enlightenment rationalism, right,
French Enlightenment rationalism means we believe in you know, there's
(05:51):
a God up there someplace, but we don't believe in
Jesus and the Bible. So England is officially Christian, but
they're not living it out at all. So Wilberforce is
born in the middle of this century into a family
that has a good amount of money. But just like
all the elites in particular in that century, they look
down on anybody who had serious Christian faith. If you
(06:13):
think about the eighteenth century, you have the Great Awakening,
because of the preaching of George Whitfield, and because of
the preaching of the Wesley brothers, John and Charles Wesley.
You have this revival, but it's only among the poor.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Mainly.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
The elites look down on the poor, and they look
down on anybody who had serious Christian faith. In fact,
they called them Methodists. They're sort of making fun of
the fact that the Wesleys, when they got saved at
Oxford University, they became sort of so obsessed with religion
and prayer and stuff that they said, they're very methodical.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
So they made fun of them.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
They called them Methodists, and of course they eventually took
it as a badge of honor. But the Brits also said,
if you're really serious about God and all that stuff,
you're an enthusiast, which is like saying a holy roller
a Bible thumper.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
The whole culture looked down on it.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
So the elites were really hostile to any of this
Christian faith, and so throughout the culture you don't have
much Christian faith.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
And when we come back the story of William Wilberforce
with Ericmataxis here on our American Stories, Leehabib here, as
we approach our nation's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, I'd
(07:33):
like to remind you that all the history stories you
hear on this show brought to you by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn't just a great
school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for
you as well. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to find
out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on
Communism is one of the finest I've ever seen. Again,
go to Hillsdale dot edu and sign up for their
(07:55):
free and terrific online courses. And we continue with our
American Stories and the story of William Wilberforce, and now
let's return to Eric Metexas and the story of William Wilberforce.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
The elites were really hostile to any of this Christian faith,
and so throughout the culture you don't have much Christian faith.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
So Wilberforce grows up in a family just like that.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
When he is about nine years old, his father dies
and his mother gets very ill, and the grandfather and
the mother say, we need to send him to live
with this aunt and uncle because she wasn't able to
care for him. And so they send him to live
with this very wealthy.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Aunt and uncle.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
They were so wealthy that, you know, the mother and
the grandfather, how can we go wrong sending him to them.
This is going to be, you know, wonderful. Well, what
they didn't know is that the aunt and uncle were Methodists,
born again, evangelical, whatever you want to call it. In fact,
not only that they were so wealthy, they were practically
(09:06):
funding the entire Methodist movement.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
So they send this little.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Boy off to live with them, and he encounters this
loving aunt and uncle and he comes to faith. He
was very intelligent, very sensitive, and he comes to faith.
He comes to love this ant and uncle with all
his heart, and they love him like a son. And
John Newton, who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace. He was
the slave trader who became a Christian and then became
a preacher. He would visit this home and little Wilberforce
(09:35):
thought of him like a father figure.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
And so it's this wonderful time.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
But then the mother and the grandfather, being classic elites
of that day, when they discovered this about two and
a half years into this, they were horrified. It's like
he'd been kidnapped by a cult. You know, those Christians,
they're nuts. So they bring him back home and they
are determined to scrub his soul clean of Methodism. They
don't even let let him go on Sundays to their
(10:02):
Anglican church because he might hear the scriptures read, and
so they do everything they can. He tries to cling
to his faith, this brilliant young man. He sends letters,
secret letters via the maid to his aunt and uncle.
He's trying to cling to his faith. But by the
time he's sixteen and goes off to Cambridge University, it's
really evaporated, and he's become exactly what they hoped, you know,
(10:24):
an intelligent, insouscient man about town sophisticated, knowing that you know,
the enthusiasts are just way too much.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
It's not for me.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Well, while he is there at Cambridge, he becomes friends
with William Pitt the Younger. William Pitt the Elder is
one of the great statesmen of that time, right, he
was in the House of Lords, but he was a
great political figure, and he was training his young son,
William Pitt the Younger, to be a great statesman, you know,
(10:55):
memorizing Latin phrases, you know, at his father's knee, and
so Wilberforce he comes from this merchant background, but he
meets William Pitt the Younger and they start going together
from Cambridge to London to visit the Houses of Parliament,
to sit in the gallery and to watch the debates
on the floor below. And Wilberforce, eighteen nineteen years old,
(11:15):
is mesmerized by what's going on. He thinks, I think
I want a life in politics now. You know, you
have to understand what was the debate going on at
that time in the House of Lords that he was watching. Well,
this is about seventeen seventy six, so this was about
the fate of the colonies. I mean, this was historical,
and he says, I want to become a politician. So
(11:36):
he graduates at the same time as friend William Pitt
the Younger graduates, and they immediately get elected to Parliament
and the two of them rock it up in the
ranks of the political order in their early twenties, so
that by the time William Pitt the Younger is twenty
four years old, he's elected Prime Minister of England.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Now William A.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Pit is Prime Minister, but his best friend Wilberforce also
gets this incredibly powerful position and they become very powerful figures.
They're members of all the top gentlemen's clubs and their
pictures are in the papers.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
That's not true, there's no photography.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
In seventeen eighty I tricked.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
You can you imagine all this comes to him and
then one day he decides, because you know, the recess
from Parliament is months long, he wants to take a
long vacation.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
His mother's health, you know, was not so good.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
So they thought, oh, we need to go to the
French and Italian riviera's for the climate.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
So this is a trip.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Can you imagine to go from England all the way
across the continent with you know, horses with a coach
to the southern part of France.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
It's a vast journey. Okay.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
So his mother was going to travel in a coach
with a cousin and he was going to travel in
a coach with a friend.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
So he picks a friend.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
The friend can't come, and then he says, well, I
need somebody to you know, it's going to be very boring.
So he's stumbles on an old schoolmate who is my
favorite character in the book. In the story, his name
is doctor Isaac Milner. And Isaac Milner was a physical giant.
I don't know how big he was, but he was
everybody just he was a giant of a man. Now
it becomes funnier when you think Wilberforce was literally five
(13:16):
foot two and at one point during his illness he
weighs seventy six pounds. So he picks Milner. Now, Milner
was not just famous for being a giant. He was
probably literally the smartest man in England at the time
he was. He had the location chair in the chemistry
of physics I forget at Cambridge. Okay, Isaac Newton, who
invented calculus, and Stephen Hawking who just passed away. You know,
(13:39):
they have this lifetime appointment. So it's super smart people,
smartest people in the world. So that's Isaac Milner. Okay,
so not only is this super genius, but he also
was famous for being a teller of comic stories, funny stories,
and so you think, who could possibly be a better companion,
And they just, Okay, we're gonna go together. We're gonna
(14:01):
we're gonna take this trip across the continent. Is this
going to be months you know to get to get
there and months to come back. So they go on
the journey and they're talking about everything. Wilberforce was a
fascinating conversationalist himself and very witty, and uh, they've gone
just far enough that they can't turn back. I don't
(14:22):
know how far that is, five hundred miles something like that,
And the subject of religion comes up, and to Wilberforce's horror,
Isaac Milner reveals that he is a Methodist, and he
kind of tries to crack some jokes to kind of
bat it away, but Milner says, well, you know, no, no, no,
(14:42):
I think you know you're you're above that, mister Wilberforce.
I think, you know, if you'd like to have a
serious conversation, we should. So they have a serious conversation.
And I always picture this giant Milner crushing Wilberforce's intellectual
objections like walm nuts in his big meaty poils. You know,
I'm throwing the shells out the window. As the miles
(15:05):
go by, He's just one by one. And wilberforcet to
his credit, was intellectually honest. Okay, like a lot of
people today would just be like, hey, I don't care.
Wilberforce thought, if you're making the case and you're right,
I'm stuck. And by the time of this trip ending,
he knows that he's been wrong, that the Bible is true,
that Jesus is his Lord and savior. There's no way out.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
I'm in. It's true.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
But when he gets back to London, he's very bummed
out because he knows the world in which he has
been traveling. He's remember these five gentlemen's clubs where they
stay out drinking and singing and gambling and joking till
four and five in the morning, and that whole life.
You realize, I can't do that anymore, I probably have
to leave politics.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
What am I going to do? He was not happy.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So he goes to visit his old friend John Newton.
Remember I said he when he was a little boy,
he'd befriended him. He hadn't seen him in all these years,
and I imagine John Newton had been praying for him.
Can you imagine that this guy that you knew back
then has drifted away from the faith and now he's
one of the most powerful people in England. So he goes,
like Nicodemus, secretly to meet John Newton to ask him
(16:12):
what do I do? But he didn't want people to
see him going there because he was so famous at
this point that if people see him going there, they're
gonna know something's up. So he goes there secretly and
John Newton says to him, I think God would call
you to bring him into politics and to let him
(16:33):
use you as a top political figure for his purposes
in history at this time. Wilberforce, to his credit, accepts this,
and he says, even though it's going to be hard,
even though I'm going to be mocked by these elites,
I believe this is God. And so he decides to
stay in politics, but he's going to pray and study
the scripture and other books about Lord, what.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Would you have me do? So?
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Two years into his faith, he writes in his journal
twenty famous words.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
I don't remember what they are, but there's twenty of them.
Just kidding, I do so.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Basically, he writes these words in his diary, and these
are the twenty words. He says, God Almighty has set
before me two great objects. Okay, God has set before me.
He didn't say this is my idea. He believes that
the Lord has called him to these two great objects
of his life.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
The suppression of.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
The slave trade, which was basically impossible. And if that's
not enough, the reformation of manners or morals or culture,
which is you could describe it as, oh and everything else.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
And my goodness, what a storyteller we have on hand,
the great Eric Metexas, who wrote Amazing Grace, William Roberforce
and the heroic Campaign to end Slavery. We continue with
this great story here on our American stories. And we
(18:09):
continue here with our American stories and the story of
William Wilberforce. And it's one of the great faith stories
in world history. And by the way we tell the
story of British history, because periodically, what happens across the
pond is either happening here or will soon happen here,
and vice versa. And of course, the abolition movement here
(18:32):
in this country in the nineteenth century was spawned in
large part by Christians, and indeed they were pursuing the
same kind of justice that Wilberforce was pursuing, and that,
in their estimation, was God's justice. And now let's return
to the story, the untold story in too many of
our schools and colleges of William Wilberforce.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
I don't think I share the statistics, but it was
such a broken culture that you don't just have this
abomination called slay and the slave trade, you also have
a lack of Christian worldview evident in everything.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Nobody cared for the poor. Imagine living in a.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
World today we argue about how to care for the poor,
not whether we all know. Of course we're supposed to
do something to help people who are struggling. The question
is what imagine living in a time where everybody says, no,
we're not and we don't even give it a thought.
The reason you're poor is because you made bad decisions
and tough luck. It's not my problem. And the reason
(19:27):
I'm rich is because God likes me and He's blessed me.
Imagine having that worldview that is the opposite of a
Christian worldview, is it not?
Speaker 3 (19:34):
God tells us we are blessed to be a blessing.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
If God has given you anything, time, money, talent, good looks,
doesn't matter what it is. If it's good and He
gave it to you, he gave it to you for
His purposes. So imagine living in the world where nobody
knows that, living in a world everybody says us, whatever
I have that's good is for me. So Willberforce grows
(19:57):
up in a world like that, he becomes a Christian
and the first thing he sees through his Christian eyes
is the slave trade is evil?
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Okay? Is God calling me to that? Well?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Two years into this faith he realizes God is calling
me in parliament to be a voice in politics for
this issue. There's been a lot of serious Christians, Methodists,
born again believers who knew this was an issue, but
they had no political power. They're praying for a figure
in parliament. So Wilberforce steps up says yes. But then
the everything else is the brokeness of the culture. Beyond
(20:35):
the horror of the slave trade, there was child labor,
little kids working six seven years old in dangerous conditions,
fourteen hours a day. Imagine that kind of a poverty
where there's no rules against that. Alcoholism was utterly rampant
in that culture on a level we can't even imagine.
Some of you might be familiar with the Hogarth Prince
of jin Ali. I mean, these people just absolutely lost
(20:58):
in poverty and misery, dying of young ages, of all
kinds of diseases, and unable to raise their kids.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
This was absolutely endemic in this culture.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Twenty five percent of all the women in London who
were single were prostitutes. What does I tell you about
the men in that culture. The average age of the
prostitutes was sixteen. That's the average age. When Wilberforce becomes
a Christian and sees through God's eyes, he sees all
this and he realizes God is calling me to step
(21:30):
up to use my talent, the power He's allowed me
to have, my abilities, my networks, friends that I know,
to work for God's purposes. So he writes this in
his journal. The other fact, if you want to know
how sick the culture was, Wilberforce said, this culture is
so far away from God, even though we call this
(21:51):
I was officially Christian. He said he wanted to make
goodness fashionable. In other words, it was fashionable. It was
the cool thing to be bad. Right, we see that
in our culture. Right, what do we call it? He says, Well,
he's a player, okay. Who was the leading figure in
the land in this time? It was the man who
(22:12):
was going to be King George the fourth Okay, the
eldest son of King George the third was the prince
of Wales, who's going to be the king. He was
famous for being immoral. So in that culture, the greatest
guy there is who's going to be the king.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
That's how he behaves. So Wilberforce says, I've got an
uphill climb.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
He says, I want to make goodness fashionable and not
that kind of behavior. I want to make goodness fashionable.
I want people to know that doing good is the
right thing. So he's facing all of this, he's born again.
And the first thing, of course, that the thing that
he's most famous for is this huge battle for the
slave trade. And he fights and fights and fights. He
fights for eighteen years. It's a brutal battle. If you
(22:53):
read the book honestly, you realize that if God doesn't
call you to the battle, you know the enemy will
just chew you up. You need to know this is
God's battle. You need to know I'm here to obey,
not to win. I play to win, but I ultimately
am here to obey God. Because Jesus obeyed God and
he was nailed to a tree. Bonafer obeyed God and
(23:17):
he was hanged. It's not about winning, it's about obeying God.
If you obey God, you already won. Wilberforce does win,
but the battle is unbelievable. He obeys God, he does everything,
and in eighteen oh seven he gets this grand victory.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
After many years.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
He also had health issues, al sort of colitis, and
I mean he really struggled, but he knew God has
called me to this battle. But he also knew God
had called him to the battle of the reformation of
manners of culture whatever, and he oversaw the transformation of
this culture through all kinds of little groups.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
He basically was able to speak to the elites.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Of the time, and that you know, a wealthy woman
with nothing really to do, was suddenly now thinking that, oh,
why don't I get together with the other wealthy women
and we can do something for the poor. They began
to get this idea in these elite circles that we
need to do something for those who can't help themselves.
(24:18):
He had a group of friends around him. I called
them the Clapham Circle. Sometimes they're called the Clapham Saints
or whatever. But one of this group was John Thornton.
He was the head of the Bank of England. He
was one of the wealthiest people in Europe. He decides
to use his money for God's purposes, and so he
builds a couple of houses so that these people, he
(24:39):
invites them, what why do you live?
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Will live in a kind of community.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
And will pray together in the mornings, and we'll meet
together and will be part of what God.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
Can do in England.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
It's an amazing story really, of how many different people
got involved. One of my favorite figures I mentioned Isaac Milner.
There's a woman named Hannah Moore, and she's one of
the great figures of this era.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
He's a literary figure.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
She was friends with the famous actors David Garricka, and
the famous poets and the famous painters, Josh Reynolds.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
She was part of that world.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
And she, like Wilberforce, had a heart for God, and
she's thinking and how can God use me? And the
Lord used her in her giftings. And one of the
most amazing things she did was she said, you know,
I've been writing all these books and poems and stuff.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
I need to.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Write literature for poor people who don't know how to live,
stories that help them, like morality, stories to help them
think about their lives. And then she founded a Sunday
school because the rural poor we're getting zero education, and
she said, I'm going to start educating them and educating
them in the things of God. So you have all
(25:45):
these different characters who have different pieces of this, and
they start to fan out through the culture and they
start to change things.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
So you have this huge.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Victory in eighteen oh seven. But Wilberforce went on to
either lead or be a part of innumerable social reforms.
Oz Ginnis, my dear friend who really introduced me to
the life of Wilberforce, considers Wilberforce the greatest.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Social reformer in history. Now, all that he did.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
He did because of Jesus, because he understands Jesus changes
everything is. I don't just get saved and about saving
other people. We get saved, but then we're still here.
We don't go straight to heaven. What are we supposed
to do? We save other people? Yeah, yeah, that's part
of it, but we're supposed to also serve God in
our gifts and care for the poor, care for the slaves.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
If you say, oh, I just.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Want to preach the gospel, I don't want to get
involved in politics or whatever, you think, well, you don't
care about the slaves rotting in the hold of a
slave ship. If you don't care about them, you are
missing Jesus and his heart. And what gospel are you
going to preach? And so bonhoffergets that right. He says,
I'm not just gonna pray. I'm going to get involved
in the plot to overthrow Adolf Hitler because millions of
(26:59):
peace people are being murdered.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
And when we come back, we're going to hear more
from this remarkable storyteller. And you're listening to Eric Matexas
tell the story of William Wilberforce, and they should be
taught in every school. Of course, it's not. And that's
why we tell you the stories that we tell you,
because no one else is telling them. When we come
back more of the life of William Wilberforce, this is
(27:23):
our American stories, and we return to our American stories
and the story of William Wilberforce told by one of
America's great storytellers and writers, Eric Matexas. Let's pick up
(27:49):
with Eric where he last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
So Wilberforce, after the abolition of slave trade in eighteen
oh seven, he gets involved in all these other things.
One of them is abolition itself, because they saw as
time passed that the abolition of the slave trade is
not ending slavery, and so he gets involved in abolition.
Another thing he did, which there's a chapter in my book.
He should be famous for this too. Most people don't
(28:15):
even know this. He considered it, next to the slavery issue,
the most important thing he ever did. And this might
sound odd at first, but it was to get missionaries
into India.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Think of this.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
The British were making tons of money in India, but
they were not concerned about the lives of the Indians.
They just thought, let's just go there. And we'll make
our money and we don't have any responsibilities we Wilberforce says, yes,
you do. Wilberforce were reading the paper how in India
when usually a wealthy man dies, he's burned on a
(28:52):
funeral pire, his body is burned on a funeral pyre,
and along with his body burned on the funeral pire,
his living widow.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Is burned to death on the funeral pyre. Wilberforce would read.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
This and be outraged and say, we are there, we
are in England.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
We are English.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
People are there in India making tons of money of them.
Do we not have a responsibility to help these women
and to tell them that we don't care what your
customs are. By the way, in England we have a
custom when you do that to a woman, we hang
you to death.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
You have your customs.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
We are going to bring our values, our Western Christian
values that you don't murder a woman because her husband died.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
We're going to bring these values.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
He said, we need missionaries there, and of course the
business interests nothing changes.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
They're making a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
They didn't want missionaries there because they said if missionaries
come here to India, they're gonna mess up a good thing.
We got a good thing going on there. You know,
there were men there that would have, you know, five
or six teenage.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Wives hanging out. I don't want missionaries coming here.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Wilberforest fought and fought, but by the time he died
in eighteen thirty three, you're on the verge of what's
called the Victorian era.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
The Victorian era is famous.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
For what morality. It became what he had prayed for.
He made goodness fashionable. So by the time he dies,
everybody in England knows if I have something, probably I'm
supposed to do something good with it. Now can you
imagine we live in a day today where everybody knows that.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Why do we know that? We know that?
Speaker 2 (30:29):
And this is what's incredible to me, is because William
Wilberforce and his group of friends managed to import these
gospel ideas into the mainstream of the culture, and they
did it so successfully that it became part of the
warp and woof of Western culture. So that anybody in
the West today knows slavery's wrong, racism's wrong. If there
are people suffering in poverty or this or that, we
(30:51):
have some obligation to do something the social conscience.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
Can you imagine living in a world with no social conscience.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Wilberforcet brought the idea of helping the poor in all
this into the mainstream. So today, as I said, we
argue about how to do it, not whether to do it.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
He was on his deathbed, by the way.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
When he received word this was his last day of consciousness.
A young member of Parliament in eighteen thirty three comes
to the bed of Wilberforce to tell him today in
Parliament we have just voted to outlaw slavery, not the
slave trade, which was the feat in eighteen oh seven,
but in eighteen thirty three, to defeat slavery and wipe
(31:32):
it out in all of.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
The British Empire.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Can you imagine that the Lord gave him this victory
on his deathbed and our hours before he slips into unconsciousness.
His life changed things so dramatically. Because everybody today has
a social conscience. We can't even imagine a world without it.
So we don't even think about the guy who kind
of made it happen. We're like, what are you talking
about it? That's like the guy who made oxygen happen.
(31:56):
We it's always been here. Like I don't even know.
I don't even know what you're talking about. We can't
imagine it because this happened over two hundred years ago,
or roughly two hundred years ago. But it's been part
of the West ever since. We know that we're blessed
to be a blessing. Every atheist, every agnostic, we all
know this stuff.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Where did it come from?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Came from the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and it was
not brought into the mainstream of culture until William Wilberforce.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Was called by God to do those things.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Before I close, I just want to tell you a
couple of things that he did that with part of
how he was able to do this, I mentioned that you.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
Have to be called.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Sometimes people have just called to be a good spouse,
a good father, good mother.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
That's more than enough. It's not about saving the world.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Wilberforce did what God called him to do humbly, so
that's important. The second thing is that Wilberforce had a
humility that he was able to love his enemies. Wilberforce
knew that apart from the grace of God, I'm on
the other side of this battle, so I can't get
all cocky and you know, morally superior.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Because why am I on the right side of the battle.
I didn't work my way here.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
The Lord by revelation gave me the gift of seeing
what I was blind to before. So he had a
humility and a love in the way that he dealt
with his opponents that is very powerful. Wilberforce was able
to speak to the people on the fence with a
grace that a lot of them were able to change
(33:26):
their minds because of how he communicated. He had the ability,
because of his wit and sarcasm, to wipe the floor
with his opponents. When he became a Christian, he no
longer did that. Even though he could, he didn't do it.
There was a grace to him. Wilberforce also understood that
I need to have people around me. For him, it
was this Clapham circle people brothers and sisters who are
(33:48):
with me on the journey, maybe not doing exactly what
I'm doing, but encouraging me, praying with me. He would
say that it's his friends in Clapham. He never could
have done what he did. But then, in a way,
the final point is that he was willing to work
with his enemies. In other words, there were people in
parliament who were, you know, dissolute swine. Okay, people who
(34:10):
are womanizers and drunkards and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Wilberforce said, I will work with you.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
If we can help end the slave trade, because I
care more about the suffering slaves than I do about
my reputation. Wilberforce said, I care about the slave and
if I'm gonna have to break bread with sinners, oh, incidentally,
someone who's a hero of mine, Jesus of Nazareth, broke
bread with sinners, So maybe it's okay to break bread
(34:38):
with sinners.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
If you don't care about.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Those slaves, it's very easy to say I'm not going
to work with the Charles Fox in parliament. He's a
horribly immoral person. But if you care about the slaves,
you care about the people suffering, you say, well, I
know that I'm morally no different than Charles Fox.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Maybe I can be an influence on him.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
I will not let him be an influence on me,
but if he will work with me on this issue,
of course I will work with him. That takes humility,
and it also takes perspective that Jesus was reviled by
the religious leaders of his day for hanging out with
tax collectors who are the scum of the earth and
(35:19):
sinners and drunkards and whatever. That's why Wilberforce is such
a hero of mine, not because he accomplished these things,
but because he accomplished them by obeying God and by
giving us a model in life in history, a real model.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
I'm not like, you know, blowing smoke here.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
This is all true, and this is just the peaks
of the mountains here, but that one life submitted to
God can sometimes be just so dramatically effective that it's
an inspiration to each of us.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
And you've been listening to Eric Mattexas one life submitted
to God, my goodness, what a difference it can make.
And we know this from our story of Martin Luther King,
not doctor Martin Luther King. The hour we did was
on Reverend Martin Luther King, and it was his faith
that animated everything he did, and it was the Bible
that animated everything he did. And you don't need to
(36:07):
be a Christian or a Jew, or an atheist or
an agnostic not to know that that was the reality
of King's life. And the impact he had on America
in the twentieth century. Perhaps no other man had the
impact King had. And we thank Eric but Texas for
just a remarkable a piece of writing and storytelling and
amazing grace. Is one heck of a book and one
(36:28):
heck of a movie, a great movie for the family
to watch. And again we tell these stories because no
one else does. You've got to ask yourself for wonder
why schools don't teach this story. That's for you to ponder.
And my goodness that just days before he died, that
Wilberforce learned that not only had he abolished the slave trade,
(36:49):
he had impacted the decision of the British Parliament to
abolish slavery in its entirety in all of the British Empire.
And the reason we tell this story about this the
British man is his impact on the American colonies and
the American continent, because the impact his life had on
Christians in this country is inestimable. And my goodness, the
(37:12):
abolition movement, well we know that it was Christians who
drove that in the North, and it was their faith
that drove it in the North. And these are stories
that need to be told. These are stories we love
telling here on our American stories. We're blessed to be
a blessing. Eric Mattax has said, and by the way
that we are now all of us talking about the poor,
(37:36):
faith people are not faith people. All good people today
think and talk about how to help the poor. But
before Wilberforce this just wasn't common. It was seen poverty
as a series of bad choices the poor person made,
and that mercy and grace need not be shown. The
(37:57):
story of William Wilberforce a part of British history and
American history too. Ear on our American stories.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
H
Host
Lee Habeeb
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