Mark Tooley continues his excellent reporting and commentary, this time on England's orgy of repentance for slavery while failing to give credit to the Christians and the movement that rose up to abolish slavery. His current article should be read in its entirety. Some excerpts:
One of Britain's most outspoken prelates is Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali, an ethnic Pakistani, who most recently broke with political correctness by refusing to join in the chorus of apologies for Britain's role in slavery
The Anglican bishop was responding to British elite culture's rhapsody of shame over the 200th anniversary of the slave trade's abolition. British statesman and abolitionist William Wilberforce waged a decades-long crusade in parliament and British society to abolish British slave trading and ultimately slavery itself. Wilberforce's triumph, fueled by his devout evangelical faith, is one of the most heroic sagas in British history. Britain not only freed its slaves throughout the empire. Its Royal Navy aggressively battled against the slave traders on the high seas.
Naturally, British cultural elites would prefer not to celebrate such a victory for British concepts of freedom. That the anti-slavery campaign was waged by vigorous Christians makes the Wilberforce epic all the more distasteful to them. Many urged that the abolitionist anniversary should
instead be a time of mourning and guilt. Some paraded in London with shackles and with signs saying, "So sorry."
In an editorial for the Daily-Mail, Bishop Nazi-Ali explained: "Why I am not saying sorry for slavery." The bishop observed that "politicians, religious leaders and social activists have all joined in to bewail the undoubted horrors of slavery and to apologize for British complicity in this social evil." But the commemoration of Wilberforce should instead be a time of "celebration and of thanksgiving for Britain's role in bringing this great oppression and cruelty to an end," he urged.
"Why do the leaders and people of this country find it so difficult to acknowledge their achievements and to recognize the true source of their moral commitments," the bishop wondered. "If a civilization is constantly criticized, run down and apologized for, the danger is that its virtues will cease to flourish." Bishop Nazir-Ali's father was a Muslim convert to Christianity. Growing up as part of Pakistan's small Christian minority after the British had given Islamic Pakistan its independence, the bishop's view of Britain, the West, and Christianity is not as jaded as the perspective of Western elites, who scornfully deride their own culture, especially its religion.
. . . His recollection goes against elite Western opinion, which remembers Western history as little more than a nightmarish chronicle of exploitation, thievery and environmental degradation. For Western elites, the earth was a Garden of Eden until corrupted by Western imperialism and capitalism, not to mention Western religion, with its patriarchal and rigidly moralistic religion.
Of course, these Western elites prefer not to acknowledge the slavery was a universal sin, unquestioningly practiced for millennia in every section of the globe. It was not until Western culture, inspired by its nobler religious impulses, affirmed the full humanity of slaves that eventual abolition became not only a possibility, but an imperative.
Bishop Nazir-Ali recalled that the heroes of the British anti-slavery movement, such as Wilberforce, abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, and "Amazing Grace" hymn writer John Newton, were devout Christians. "All of these people came to oppose slavery, and the slave trade on which it depended, because of their deeply-held Christian beliefs," the bishop wrote. "They were not content with the humane treatment of slaves or with the amelioration of their working and living conditions."
The heroes of the anti-slavery crusade "had read in their Bibles that all human beings had been created from 'one blood' and in the image of their Creator," the bishop noted. "The African was 'a man and a brother' and could not, therefore, be enslaved." The bishop also pointed out that the anti-slavery activists were zealously interested in missionary work and could not tolerate enslaving persons whom they wanted to evangelize for Christianity. . .
"The mea culpa brigade is so vociferous about Western involvement in the slave trade that it neglects the role Africans themselves played," Bishop Nazir-Ali wrote. "It ignores also the huge involvement of Arabs, particularly in East Africa." . . .
British missionary pioneers who pushed into central Africa were "vigorously opposed by the Arab slave-traders who feared that the coming of Christianity would spell an end to their trade - as, indeed, it did," Bishop Nazir-Ali wrote. Arab slave traders sold their human merchandise as far as South Asia. When the British conquered what is now Nazir-Ali's native Pakistan, they demolished the slave market in Karachi.
Contrary to the demonstrators pleading, "So sorry" for slavery, the Bishop of Rochester concluded that Britain has a "proud history in this area, which can be a source of inspiration for us in our efforts in our own times." The bishop would readily admit that Western civilization, like all cultures, is sinful and even corrupt. But its Jewish and Christian traditions have uniquely given it a reforming impulse that has enabled vast humanizing improvements across the centuries.
Many of Britain's and Europe's churches are increasingly empty of native Europeans, who have lost their both their Christian faith and their confidence in the principles that built Western Civilization. But some of those same churches are filling with immigrants from Europe's former colonies, whose faith is still new and vibrant. Perhaps many of these immigrants will provide the cultural confidence in Western moral traditions that Western elites have sadly long since lost.