We watched the film Amazing Grace tonight (yeah, we are always about 6-8 months behind the rest of the world). We both loved the film for a lot of reasons. I think we both appreciated that this 18th century man loved animals and established one of the first groups for the protection of animals. And we both loved that the film presented a person like Wilberforce who was dedicated to making the world a better place.
It is hard to watch a film like this and not see the world around us. A political environment where fear is pitted against morality and right. Or where dissent is suggested to be unpatriotic. Or where profit is leveraged against humanity. (And something missed by those who saw this in the theatre, I suspect, was a clip connecting the colonial slave trade to the contemporary and ongoing slave trade.)
I remember a wise friend of mine warning about the film Amistad. She noted that it was very easy for us to project ourselves backwards and ignore that many of the people we admire, or perhaps the ones most like us, would have been on the wrong side of the equation. Or at least, would have held views that today we find abominable. Kind of the historical version of Crash Davis asking Annie Savoy why people in past lives were always famous, and never, as he put it, "Joe Schmo."
Very easy to look at this slave trade and project ourselves onto the Wilberforce character or John Newton. Newton is a good example. Credited with the hymn "Amazing Grace" he became a Christian during his work in the slave trade. That part is often cited. But we often forget that he continued to work in the slave trade for the next decade and didn't really denounce slavery until later.
Perhaps I have an axe here, I don't know. I remember a very recent conversation with a very conservative Christian. I challenged him about the world had conservatives had their way. Would we have abolished slavery, segregation, women's inequality, child labor? He chided me that, "liberals didn't end slavery, Christians did."
I think he is right. Or perhaps at least partly right. Christians did play a strong role in abolishing slavery, and this film makes that point very well. That should be remembered and appreciated. But they also played a strong role in the perpetuation of slavery and racism in this country. And perhaps that is the sticking point for me. This film is a great reminder of people fighting injustice, and doing so often because of and informed by their religious faith. But it is easy to ignore that people of faith can defend injustice too. The past and the present collide. People of faith rally for civil rights, but also defend torture. People of faith weep for a world in poverty, but also rally around the rich and the powerful.
6 comments:
Liberal and Christian are not mutually exclusive categories.
Absolutely, and as I recall, that was my first response back on that subject.
I thought that was a fantastic movie. One message that stood out was that Christians shouldn't isolate themselves, but be active in the world around them.
Looking at Christianity (and other religions) in history is complicated task. I have had discussions with some people that have taken the position that religions have been the cause of most violence in the past. Others have suggested a total opposite. I think it is somewhere in the middle. People are capable of good and evil and I don't see why the religious would be immune to this.
Steve,
Those are great comments. I beleive the balance is in the middle somewhere myself. Religious people are responsible for many good things in the world, but yet so are many non-religious people. Is man incapable of accomplishing anything good without religion? I do not think that is the case.
This is one reason why I feel many conservatives have failed to address climate change in a meaningful way. They see the issue as at the most one championed by liberal Christians and at the least by the non-religious (hence the pejorative 'tree-hugger'). Unable to address it meaningfully religiously, they swipe it away as unnecessary.
The film was great. I appreciated that Wilberforce was portrayed as a flawed person and not superhuman, which is typically the case with most treatments of that story (i.e., Doug Phillips).
I seem to recall that many of the first liberals were liberal for theological reasons, not because they thought religion was inherently evil; but you all have already covered that topic.
It seems to me that many religious people who do evil are able to do as much as they do because they're a part of an abusive, exploitative system that discourages empathy, whether in general, or toward outsiders, or toward women or children; and many nonreligious people who do evil are able to do as much as they do because they aren't bound into a community that holds them to keep their darker impulses in check.
It's a tradeoff of sorts. When you're part of an intimate reference group, you're liable to pick up all sorts of collective evils without noticing, but you're also not as liable to go off and do really stupid things when there are people around to say "Hey, don't do that."
Insofar as religious groups in, say, developing countries discourage things like medicine and birth control that would make people's lives tangibly, physically better, I'm inclined to say they are a net force for evil. The same goes for young-earth creationist groups in the U.S. and Australia that promote ignorance of basic biology and by extension medicine. I think this is probably one kernel of truth in contemporary suspicion of religion as an institution. But it's also important to realize that this is just one more form of grasping at power, and not anything necessarily inherent in all religious groups. The essence of the matter is, as usual, more complicated.
I should say, too, that I think it's possible to be part of an intimate reference group without being part of a religion--just have good, mature and individuated friends. Religions are an attempt to extend that small-group dynamic to larger bodies of people, and I agree with Niebuhr that they always ultimately fail, but whether attempt is still (a) worthwhile and (b) does more good than not trying is something to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, not dismissed outright.
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