The Poet Who Ended SlaverySýnishorn

As we saw yesterday, the most proven strategy for cultivating large-scale cultural change is not through legislation. Mass change happens when hearts and minds are transformed. And hearts and minds are transformed not by laws but by acts of culture. As Andy Crouch says in his exceptional book, Culture Making, “The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”

But if we’re honest, creating for change requires a level of engagement that many in the Church aren’t used to. Part of the appeal of merely voting for change is that it is relatively easy. If you don’t like the direction the world is heading, it’s far easier to sit on social media and rage against the machine than it is to roll up your sleeves and actually do something. So we vote and pray that politicians in Washington, London, or Brasília will do the work for us.

In a way, this is a form of retreat. This is our “temporary home,” so rather than work to change the world, we create Christian subcultures and sit back and wait for eternity. But as today’s passage in Jeremiah shows us, that is not the call of the Church. Like Israel was in Babylon, we too are in exile, awaiting the arrival of our eternal home. But that doesn’t let us off the hook in the present. No, we are called to create and engage—to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city.”

Hannah More understood this call well. In 18th-century London, More was a prolific playwright and author “whose works at the time outsold Jane Austen’s ten to one.” From humble beginnings, More was catapulted into great wealth, fame, and the distinction by historians as “nothing less than the most influential woman of her time.”

More’s remarkable influence had everything to do with how she used her talents to advance God’s Kingdom. She didn’t view her faith as a private thing to be disconnected from her work. More saw her work as a means of shaping culture and putting every square inch of creation under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

As More’s biographer wrote, “She did not wish to retreat from culture into a religious sphere, but rather to advance with the wisdom and truth of religion into the cultural sphere.” Indeed, themes of the “wisdom and truth” of the gospel made their way into much of what More wrote, making her a powerful combatant in the “culture wars” of her own day.

As she once wrote, “One must not merely rail against the darkness, but must instead light a proverbial candle by creating literary and cultural works that rival and surpass the bad.”

As we’ll see tomorrow, the greatest “darkness” of More’s time was the abomination of slavery. And it would be this poet’s partnership with a politician named William Wilberforce that would lead to slavery’s abolition.