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Grace

Music

14 March 2023

6 min read

Aside from Amazing Grace

Helping win a historic victory for humanity was an influencer with a shocking back story. Biographer Jonathan Aitken discovers there’s more to John Newton than penning Amazing Grace.

Jonathan Aitken

Jonathan is a former politician, and now a prison chaplain.

John Newton is back in the news. 250 years ago in January 1773 he wrote the words of what has become the most recorded, performed and loved hymn of all time – Amazing Grace.

As a popular song it is right up there competing with Happy Birthday and I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas. And the spiritual power of its lyrics shines out at an estimated ten million annual weddings, funerals, celebrations and services across the world.

As a biographer of John Newton I have paradoxical feelings about Amazing Grace. I love the hymn as much as anyone particularly when it brings tears in the prison chapels where I serve as a chaplain.

Yet for historical reasons I am disappointed on this great man’s behalf that he is largely remembered only for this hymn.

For there is much more to John Newton than Amazing Grace.

For starters he was so close a mentor to William Wilberforce, and so important a witness as an ex-slave ship captain to the horrors of the evil trade, that without Newton the Abolition of Slavery Act 1807 would never have won the necessary Parliamentary votes to pass into law.

If this great historical achievement was not enough Newton’s colourful back story was the stuff of which best sellers and movies came to be made.

In his wild youth Newton was a serial rebel. He ran away from home, church, school and military service. He was jailed and publicly flogged for desertion from the Royal Navy.

After being thrown out of the Navy he ended up working as a slave trader in West Africa.

There the hard drinking, riotous and ruthless young Newton indulged in every imaginable vice. His business as a brutal kidnapper of natives, whom he sold to slave ships, made him a fortune.

Then came a dramatic change, Newton got religion. This happened on the 9th of March 1748. Newton was on board a ship, The Greyhound, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Suddenly a massive storm wave hit the ship and almost broke it apart. Newton was roused from sleep by a cry of “all hands on deck, the ship is sinking.”

The storm of gale force winds which ripped a huge hole in The Greyhound lasted for the next seven days. For most of that time Newton, a strong young seaman, took the helm. He was certain that he and everyone else on board would be drowned. In desperation he remembered some of the prayers he had learned from his mother, in his childhood, and started to pray for God to save his life.

So when, against all the odds, The Greyhound did not sink and limped into the Port of Londonderry, Newton decided that perhaps there might be a God and began going to church.

Although Newton did start praying and reading his Bible, he did not stop slave trading. Promoted to being a slave ship Captain he made five further voyages to West Africa. On his ships he indulged in many of the vicious cruelties that characterised the slave trade.

Newton kept diaries of these horrors which included chaining, shackling, flogging, thumb screwing and throwing overboard the slaves during their long and dangerous voyage from the West Coast of Africa to the East Coast of America.

Yet gradually, his self-educating Bible study and some teaching from Christian friends caused Newton to see the light. He gave up the slave trade. He got a good shore job in his home port of Liverpool, a city which was being targeted by Methodist preachers such as Wesley and Whitefield.

Newton, by now a soul on fire, became a preacher in dissenter chapels in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

After some years he applied for ordination in the Church of England. But he was turned down for ordination seven times in six years by various Bishops and Archbishops.

These rejections had nothing to do with Newton’s sinful past career as a slave ship Captain. For in the 18th Century, the Church of England was not merely tolerant of the slave trade. It reaped many benefits from its large investments in it and the large donations it received from it. All documented in a recent Lambeth Palace Library exhibition.

Astonishingly the reason why Newton was turned down for ordination was because he was thought to have ‘too much enthusiasm’.

This was a coded phrase meaning that he was felt to be too close to the Methodists whose evangelical preaching and hymn singing was disapproved of by the established church hierarchy.

But with the help of an admiring patron, the Earl of Dartmouth, Newton was ordained as a Church of England priest and appointed to a Dartmouth living at Olney church in Buckinghamshire.

As a Parish Priest Newton was a huge success. He trebled the size of his congregation to over 600 worshippers. As a result, the church had to build a gallery to accommodate them.

But his biggest break through was that Newton started writing articles, books and hymns. These bought him fame and a move to the strategically important church of St. Mary Woolnoth in the heart of the City of London.

During his 28 years of service there, Newton continued to be a best-selling author, a campaigner for social reforms and a renowned preacher. Influential people flocked to hear his sermons including an unknown young MP called William Wilberforce.

Wilberforce first approached Newton to ask him to resolve what the young MP called “my anguish of soul”. He said he wanted to give up being a Member of Parliament in order to become a Minister of Religion.

Newton persuaded Wilberforce that it would be better for him to serve God by staying in Parliament. After taking that wise advice, Wilberforce developed a close friendship and mentoring relationship with Newton.

During the next 15 years there were periods when Wilberforce became depressed and wanted to give up his abolitionist campaign. It was Newton who persuaded him to keep going.

More importantly Newton became Wilberforce’s most vital witness about the horrors of the slave trade in front of a Select Committee in the House of Commons and in front of William Pitt and his Cabinet.

Newton’s authentic eye witness accounts of the suffering of the Africans on board slave ships were devastating.

His evidence and his best-selling pamphlet Thoughts on the African Slave Trade were game changers. Gradually the tide of public and parliamentary opinion turned against the slave trade. Eventually in 1807 when 82 year old Newton was still the Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, William Wilberforce’s Abolition of Slavery Bill was voted into law by the House of Commons by 283 votes to 16.

It was an historic victory for humanity. And a political triumph for William Wilberforce. But that victory and that triumph would never have been achieved without John Newton’s mentoring, supporting and his giving of vital evidence to Wilberforce’s campaign.

In his last years John Newton was venerated as an iconic church leader, bestselling author, and abolitionist reformer.

Surprisingly, he was not well known in his lifetime for Amazing Grace which only became famous when American churches took it up and made it an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. So Newton was regarded as a great man long before he was recognised as a great hymn writer.

Fame was of little interest to John Newton. He remained endearingly humble. When he was on his deathbed the 18th century equivalent of a tabloid reporter burst into his bedroom and asked:

“Any last words Mr Newton?”

He replied:

“Sir I know only two things. That I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Saviour!”

What an exit line! What a life!

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.