Bicentennial project

There’s still time to create William Wilberforce’s “better hour” | Joel Belz

If you're a bit bewildered, as the year 2007 rolls into its final quarter, by all the ballyhoo over William Wilberforce, get set—because the tempo is about not to die down but to pick up. Just about everybody, it seems, wants to hitch his wagon to the Wilberforce star.

That's partly because Wilberforce was some star. His story, popularized especially for Americans earlier this year in the very well done film Amazing Grace, was a picker-upper during a period when Christians seemed so regularly frustrated in their efforts to do anything significant to influence public policy in the United States. If that little pipsqueak of a man could make an impact, people seemed to respond, why should we give up?

The Wilberforce story is getting special attention this year, of course, because 2007 is the 200th anniversary of his success in bringing an end to Great Britain's approving involvement in the transatlantic slave trade of that time. But to narrow the Wilberforce story to a single year would be to miss the heart of the drama. It was, after all, the man's relentless persistence—his disciplined year-after-year-after-year determination—that accounts for the fact there's even a story to tell a couple of centuries later.