c. 2007 Religion News service

(UNDATED) Chances are many Americans haven’t heard of him. But if U.S. evangelical leaders and others have their way, the 19th-century evangelical and abolitionist William Wilberforce soon will become a household name.

A new film, “Amazing Grace,” opens nationwide on Feb. 23 to mark the 200th anniversary of the end of the British slave trade _ a cause championed by Wilberforce in Parliament as the first step in eventually abolishing slavery itself.

The bicentennial events, including the film, are not solely evangelical projects. But evangelicals hope to use the film to reclaim Wilberforce as one of the early architects of modern-day evangelism and to raise awareness about modern-day slavery.

The film was produced partly by Bristol Bay Productions, the sister company of Walden Media, a leading distributor of faith-friendly films _ “The Chronicles of Narnia,” among others _ that is led by influential Colorado evangelical Philip Anschutz.

Director Michael Apted said he initially turned down the project because he didn’t like the film’s direction as a linear biopic focusing on Wilberforce’s evangelical faith.

Apted, who was raised an Anglican and now considers himself an agnostic, suggested switching the story to focus on Wilberforce’s anti-slavery crusade. He brought on Oscar-nominated screenwirter Steven Knight to develop the idea.

“Christianity, of course that’s very important to the inner man,” said Apted, the current president of the Directors Guild of America, “but (we wanted) to make the slave trade the center of the film and then to cherry pick, as it were, from his life as you needed.”

Wilberforce was born into a wealthy trading family in 1759 in Hull, England. By 1780, at the age of 21, he was a member of Parliament. Around that time, he converted to evangelicalism.

Albion Urdank, a professor of British and European history at UCLA, said about 500 Churh of England clergy would have called themselves evangelicals when Wilberforce joined the movement. Evangelicals were considered part of the “low church,” along with John Wesley’s Methodists, and somewhat radical.

The Methodists and evangelicals worked closely together. Wilberforce teamed up with John Newton (played by Albert Finney), a former slave ship captain-turned-evangelical who penned the words to the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Wilberforce used Newton’s hymn as an unofficial anthem for his mission.

Wilberforce also collaborated with a group known broadly as the Clapham Sect _ the “Anglican elite,” Urdank said _ who “took a humanitarian-reformist interest in the question of slavery.”

Wilberforce worked the political structure for two decades to launch a petition against slavery and boycott the sugar industry and its reliance on slaves. The bill to end the slave trade passed in 1807, and Wilberforce left politics in 1825. By 1833, Parliament outlawed slavery outright and Wilberforce died that summer. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Ioan Gruffudd, the Welsh actor who plays Wilberforce in “Amazing Grace,” said he was struck by Wilberforce’s extensive daily diary entries.

“He would write down in his diary what he felt bad about he had done that day,” Gruffudd said. “Sort of beating himself up, at the same time doing this noble thing.”

Now, evangelical groups _ led by the Wilberforce Central Coalition, including the John Templeton Foundation, the Wilberforce Forum within Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries, the Trinity Forum, the anti-slavery group Gilder-Lehrman Center, Ohio’s Wilberforce University and Walden Media _ and others are organizing events to commemorate Wilberforce’s life and his fight against slavery. Groups are especially focusing on ending “modern-day slavery,” which they say entraps some 27 million people around the world.

Among activities:

_ Walden Media’s Amazing Change Campaign has set up a Web site (http://www.theamazingchange.com) to “carry on Wilberforce’s vision of mercy and justice.” Visitors are urged to sign a petition to end modern-day slavery.

_ Amazing Grace Sunday, which is set for this weekend (Feb. 18), hopes to spark a modern abolitionist movement in America and is supported by the National Council of Churches, the National Association of Evangelicals, Sojourners, the Salvation Army and the Faith Alliance Against Slavery and Trafficking, among others. Congregations are asked to sing “Amazing Grace” during worship services.

_ The World Evangelical Alliance has created a resource guide for the film, including sermon tips, small group guides, PowerPoint presentations and video clips.

Apted, the director, says the modern anti-slavery campaign is “really Anschutz’s baby; it’s his vision.”

Anschutz “also likes to own Wilberforce,” Apted said. “He feels that Wilberforce is a spectacular role model for everybody.”

The evangelical push to reclaim Wilberforce, however, is not without its critics. Randall Balmer, an expert on American evangelicals at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York, said religious conservatives “are taking great pains to style themselves as the so-called `new abolitionists’ in order to emphasize the moral parallel between their opposition to abortion and the abolitionist movement in the early 19th century.”

Balmer, author of last year’s “Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament,” finds that a bit disingenuous.

“As I see it, the great contribution of 19th-century evangelicals was to work on behalf of those on the margin of society, including slaves but also women and the poor,” he said. “I simply don’t see that range of concerns reflected in the actions and the agenda of the Religions Right at the turn of the 21st century.”

For his part, Apted hopes “Amazing Grace” will be a crossover film attracting evangelicals _ and non-evangelicals like himself _ who are drawn to Wilberforce as a man of principle.

“He wanted to make the world in his own terms a better place,” Apted said, “(and) he didn’t do it by lecturing people (and) taking the morally superior position.”

KRE/LF END BAKHSHIAN

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