Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

Reading Metaxas’ Amazing Grace presents a couple of challenges. The first challenge is devoting the time and mental space to wrap your brain around Wilberforce’s story, which cannot be told outside of a historical context. Amazing Grace is a historical book, and it presents fact and detail after detail, much of which will be hard to retain. The second challenge is simple enough: Amazing Grace is an important book but education through a book and a movie is not enough. More people should understand and know the impact of Wilberforce’s influence on a movement that continues to this day. (See Not for Sale review.)

Polite Christians do not like to discuss the impoliteness of slavery and the slave trade. Why dredge up something so ugly – it’s in the past; right? Well, an overused, yet wise cliché states that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Good for Metaxas for reminding us that we are currently reliving the mistakes of the past in Darfur and other parts of the globe, because human trafficking is very much a part of our present. And bless God for the William Wilberforces of the world, because without them, we have little hope for ending that peculiar institution.