A new movie, Amazing Grace, opens today, all about the efforts of William Wilberforce to bring about the abolition of slavery in Great Britain. It stands as a pointed reminder of the power of religious faith for motivating social change.

Joseph Loconte has this to say about the abolition movement and the message it should hold for those who express hostility to the involvement of people of faith in the political process.

A convert to evangelical Christianity, Wilberforce is greatly admired in religious circles today, if not always imitated. Early in his parliamentary career, he made a vow to avoid the corruptions of political influence — and kept it. He was known for his intellectual seriousness and personal charm. French author Madame de Stael confessed her surprise after dining with him: "I have always heard that he was the most religious, but I now find that he is the wittiest man in England."

Wilberforce sought to change hearts and minds, not just laws. So he organized boycotts and petitions, staged demonstrations and commissioned artwork to mobilize public opinion on a national scale. Wilberforce suffered many setbacks — his abolition bills were repeatedly killed in committee or defeated in the House of Commons — but he kept on.

Most important, he was unafraid to invoke the Gospel to challenge the consciences of slavers and their supporters in Parliament. In his "Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade," published in January 1807, Wilberforce placed the brutish facts of human trafficking against the backdrop of Christian compassion and divine justice.

"We must believe," he warned, "that a continued course of wickedness, oppression and cruelty, obstinately maintained in spite of the fullest knowledge and the loudest warnings, must infallibly bring down upon us the heaviest judgments of the Almighty." A month later, on Feb. 23, the House of Commons voted 283 to 16 to abolish the slave trade.

In our post-Sept. 11 era, there's suspicion and antagonism toward religious belief, especially when it mixes with politics. Secularists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris describe the beliefs of the faithful as a "delusion" and akin to "insanity." Wilberforce endured similar scorn. He was lampooned for his "damnable doctrine" and dismissed as a "treacherous fanatic."

Modern skeptics should remember that the great campaign against the international slave trade was not led by atheists. It was fought by people with deep Christian convictions about the dignity and freedom of every person made in the image of God.

In my lifetime, we have seen a civil rights movement that centered around the churches of America, black and white, for support, and a host of other efforts by people of Christian faith to be salt and light in the world. And yet all too often those efforts have clashed with the secular ideology of opinion elites, who have then attempted to delegitimize the efforts of those who, like Wilberforce, seek to denounce the moral evils of the day and bring about solutions to them.

We ignore and marginalize such voices at our peril.

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