A Study in Cultivating Greatness
William Wilberforce is a hero to many evangelical Christians. When I hear Christians talk about Wilberforce, the focus is often on how his religious beliefs compelled him to seek to end the slave trade in England. Wilberforce was successful, and so it is almost put forward as if there is a simple equation for us as well: “Be pious and the Lord will bless you with success. You too can change the world.”
What is often missed in discussions of Wilberforce, however, is what actually enabled him to succeed. What was it? I recently began asking myself this question. It was prompted by a simple observation. I could not think of many successful evangelical Christians who were also lifelong politicians. Wilberforce came to mind, so I began looking into different Wilberforce biographies. One that I came across stuck out immediately. It is the 2002 biography of Wilberforce written by William Hague. Hague was a Conservative Party member of the British Parliament from 1989 – 2015, serving as that party’s leader from 1997 – 2001. Today, he is a member of the House of Lords and Chancellor of the University of Oxford. I wondered whether Hague, as a prominent politician himself, might have insight into Wilberforce’s life that other biographers, especially evangelical ones in their focus on Wilberforce’s religious motivations, might miss.
I was not disappointed. Hague’s biography is extremely well-researched, engaging in its prose, and provides exactly what I was looking for. In fact, it is one of the best biographies I have ever read. What sets it apart? Hague presents a full portrait of Wilberforce, describing the influences on his early life, his personality, his family, and more. In doing so, he presents the figure of man almost universally well-liked, even by his opponents. In one instance, a very wealthy man who had once lost a major parliamentary election to Wilberforce was so moved by the financial hardship Wilberforce’s son plunged the family into late in Wilberforce’s life that this man offered to pay the entirety of Wilberforce’s extensive debt. Wilberforce refused, because his honor would not allow it, but such an episode revealed the impact he made on others. Hague also has an excellent grasp of Wilberforce’s evangelical convictions. I do not know a lot about Hague’s own religious convictions. He appears to be nominally Christian, but fairly liberal on social issues. That made it all the more surprising to me that he was able to competently and accurately explain the specific evangelical practices and beliefs that animated Wilberforce’s life.
Nonetheless, it is not Wilberforce the evangelical that is the focus of the book, but Wilberforce the politician. Wilberforce was born in 1759 to a prominent merchant family in Hull, England. His grandfather had made a large fortune in the shipping trade, particularly with the nations of the Baltic. While his family was not nearly as wealthy as the great aristocratic families of England, Wilberforce grew up in an atmosphere of great comfort and with excellent schooling. His father died when he was around 10 years old. His grandfather and uncle had died by the time Wilberforce was 18, causing him to become the sole heir of a large fortune. Although Wilberforce was given to drink, gambling, and general rowdiness during his initial time at Cambridge, he had a very sudden spiritual transformation while there, which firmly established him in his lifelong evangelical Anglican beliefs and practices.
Evangelicals sometimes act as if spiritual convictions are the only thing that matter in one’s vocation. But it is a simple fact that Wilberforce could not have accomplished any of the things he did without being wealthy. Wealth opened doors all his life. It enabled him to go to Cambridge, where he began to establish important, lifelong friendships with other wealthy and important men, including the future British Prime Minister William Pitt (of whom Hague has also written a biography). “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Tim 6:10), but God has also enabled some men in history to use their vast wealth to do much good. Wilberforce was one of those men. His wealth placed him in an elite circle in English cultural and political life, and he routinely leveraged those connections to advance his political aims. One of the things Hague highlights is the many ways in which Wilberforce’s elite status enabled him to seek and gain favors from fellow elites that no non-wealthy man would ever have been able to do. Wilberforce did not appear to fall into the common dilemma of the wealthy, feeling guilty for being so privileged. Instead, without compunction, he used his privilege to do good. He simply saw it as a stewardship from God, not a reason to become self-loathing, nor one to prompt him to seek atonement in the various righteous causes he supported (and they were many).
Wealth was not Wilberforce’s only means of advancement. He was also a gifted speaker, political campaigner, and eventually a member of parliament. Those who listened to him speak routinely commented about how his hours-long speeches (common in the day) never wearied them because he was so persuasive and enjoyable to listen to. Wilberforce clearly had a gift, but he was also diligent in developing it throughout his life. His wealth, his gift in speaking, and his natural affability began to open doors for him when he initially sought political office. Though a very small man (he was around 5’3” and probably weighed around 115 pounds), he was a mesmerizing speaker and conversationalist. Samuel Johnson’s famous biographer James Boswell said of watching Wilberforce in parliamentary debate: “I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but as I listened, he grew, and grew, until the shrimp became a whale.” The socialite Madame de Staël called him the “wittiest man in England.”
Wilberforce won his first election to Parliament at the age of 21 in 1780 as the member for Kingston on Hull, his hometown. Four years later, he sought and won one of the two seats for the county of Yorkshire, the most significant county seat at that time. The personal expenditure necessary to secure the seat was enormous. It is estimated that Wilberforce spent nearly £8,000 of his own money to win, which is roughly 2 million dollars (US) today.
Wilberforce was good at politics. He knew how to win elections, how to navigate power networks, and how to operate shrewdly behind the scenes to accomplish his political agenda, most famously manifest in his lengthy crusade to end the slave trade in Great Britain. Though he was an intensely pious man, he did not see politics as merely a means for evangelism or other purely spiritual matters. He saw the political life as a worthwhile vocation in its own right and sought to employ the power of the state to accomplish the good of the nation in a comprehensive sense: moral, spiritual, political, and economic.
Wilberforce certainly desired the spiritual well-being of his nation, but he also understood that good and just laws are indispensable to a healthy nation as well, even to its spiritual state. He once wrote a friend, for example, about specific legislation: “I know that by regulating the external conduct we do not at first change the hearts of men, but even they are ultimately to be wrought upon by these means, and we should at least so far remove the obtrusiveness of the temptation, that it may not provoke the appetite, which might otherwise be dormant and inactive” (quoted in Hague, 105). Good laws, in other words, would remove tempting barriers to moral goodness and would be good for the whole nation.
Wilberforce was a master of political prudence as well. Though he strongly desired many legislative actions and numerous moral reforms in society, “his idealistic objectives were always pursued by means which took into account practical and political constraints” (Hague, 109). He did not, in other words, think that simply having the right moral convictions and pushing them aggressively was sufficient. Tact, prudence, and relational skill were all necessary if the goal was to be attained. “You know enough of life,” he once wrote his friend Hannah More, “to be aware that in parliamentary measures of importance, more is to be done out of the House than in it” (quoted in Hague, Wilberforce, 409). That is to say, pressure had to be exerted in informal means through personal relationships if anything was to be accomplished. There was no sense of mere moral posturing for the sake of assuaging a guilty conscience in Wilberforce. He had a clear-eyed sense for what was possible politically, and he acted accordingly. He was all the more effective precisely for this reason. He understood that politics is not a theater for the display of personal godliness. It is a source of hard and soft power to be deployed for the good. Wilberforce was consistently successful in accomplishing his political aims, and not just with regard to abolishing the slave trade.
Wilberforce is a powerful case study for recent discussions prompted by Aaron Renn’s writing on the lack of elite status among evangelicals. While Renn does note that politics is one realm in which evangelicals have had some success, he rightly highlights the near-total lack of elite evangelicals in American society as a whole.
Some of the main factors accounting for this lack of elite development within evangelical churches that Renn mentions are a neglect of creation (in favor only of evangelism), a deficient understanding of vocation, a deep suspicion “of power and its use,” and an aversion (or perhaps inability) “to form networks and institutions” of patronage. The one partial alternative to these failures that Renn sees is the “faith and work” movement. But even this movement, Renn notes, usually “stresses conducting business ethically, doing high-quality work, sharing the gospel in the marketplace, practicing love-your-neighbor relationships with colleagues, and taking a ‘redemptive’ approach to business or entrepreneurship.” In other words, despite the good of all of those things, what this movement does not do is emphasize the creation of successful elites in every realm of society. A successful elite is one who builds successful companies, who creates excellent art and music, who directs political power to the accomplishment of good and just aims, and so on.
I suspect that most evangelicals who revere Wilberforce actually know very little about the details of his life: his effective use of wealth, his skill in parliamentary debate, his sense of politics as a valuable vocation, his comfort with and facility in the use of political power, and his lifelong cultivation of networks of political influence. In the sense in which Renn describes it, William Wilberforce was a true evangelical elite. He is a model for those who would aspire to the same, and William Hague’s biography is essential reading for those who would seek to understand what truly made Wilberforce great.
