Book Excerpts

William Wilberforce and the Clapham Circle were truly extraordinary Christian reformers.  They changed their times for the better.  Our goal in creating this book is to recognize them for their great work and continuing influence on leaders today engaged in the same tradition and tasks.

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William Wilberforce was driven by his faith to be for something.  He was for the complete cessation of the slave trade.  He was for total abolition of slavery and the emancipation of all those held in bondage.  He was for education, for better conditions for prisoners, for full rights for Catholics, for prevention of cruelty to animals, and for a whole host of other causes that in their aggregate effected a reform of the manners and morals of British society.

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Abolition of the slave trade, the first of Wilberforce’s “two great objects,” was perhaps the greatest moral achievement of the British people, putting right a horrible wrong. For Britain two hundred years ago was the world’s leading slave-trading nation; uprooting the vile practice threatened the annual trade of hundreds of ships, thousands of sailors, and hundreds of millions of pounds sterling. It took Wilberforce and his colleagues twenty years, and the abolition of slavery itself nearly thirty more.

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The Clapham Saints introduced a dynamic of social change based upon a strategy of research, publicity, parliamentary lobbying, national campaigning, public meetings, and legislation into the situation. They made good use of the media, which in those days consisted largely of newspapers and tracts. Their objective was to change the mindset of the nation in order to prepare the way for successful legislation that would tackle some of the major issues of the day: slavery and religious ignorance in the British Empire, the exploitation of workers, and the reformation of personal and social morality in Britain.

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If the reformers had not succeeded in the task of abolition, Africa would have been transformed into a slave trading enterprise of monstrous proportions. The combination of slavery in nations such as the United States and the worldwide slave trade carried on by Britain and other European nations could have created the single greatest moral evil in history. More than any other person, Wilberforce blocked the course of that terrible possibility.

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Wilberforce’s many councils were usually organized around odd bedfellows and peculiar coalitions. Wilberforce insisted that his “measures, not men” motto would be the means by which persons of all persuasions and stations in life could be recruited to social reform. He believed that it could change everything, as it indeed did in England. It can also do that today.