Review

Culture

Grace

Music

Race

15 November 2024

5 min read

Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs

Today’s musicians capture both the barbaric and the beautiful.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

three folk musicians face the camera across a meadow

Angeline, Cohen & Jon.

John Newton’s Amazing Grace was originally written to accompany his sermon for New Year’s Day 1773 and has become the most recorded and most sung hymn in the world. Last year was the 250th anniversary of the hymn’s creation while next year is the 300th anniversary of Newton’s birth.

The former slave trader who became a Church of England minister and abolitionist, preached his sermon on the theme of God’s mercy as outlined in a biblical passage from the first book of Chronicles. There, King David prays ‘Who am I Lord and what is my family that you have brought me thus far?’ Newton found parallels with his own life, having been saved from sinfulness and a storm at sea.

Among the many events and projects marking the two anniversaries, a folk album entitled Grace Will Lead Me Home may well be one of the most interesting. That is because, while it celebrates the hymn and its legacy, this album also explores “the distance between the world’s most beloved hymn and a most vile and shameful period in history, the trans-Atlantic slave trade”.

As captain of a slave ship when he became a Christian, Newton continued shipping Africans across the Atlantic. Later, he became Curate in Charge at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Olney, where he befriended William Cowper and wrote the words to many hymns, including ‘Amazing Grace’. Later still, he lent his voice to the abolitionist cause. Despite these tensions in Newton’s life-story, the love that people have for ‘Amazing Grace’, including those who are descended from the slaves that Newton shipped across the Atlantic, became very apparent in a series of interviews conducted as part of the project before the songs forming the album were written and selected.

‘I’m going to hear John Newton preach’ is a key track on the album in which Jon Bickley describes Newton’s transformation from “foul-mouthed drunken sailor” to the captain able to “talk about how Grace can set you free”. In between, however, Bickley notes that the slaves disembark “leaving a trail of blood across the quay” while “the Captain’s in his cabin” writing about grace. Bickley’s songs on the album culminate in a powerful plea for reparations for slavery entitled ‘Sorry’. He writes:

“300 years after the birth of John Newton the road to redemption for those nations who profited from the slave trade looks long and difficult but surely it starts by saying Sorry.”

Bickley collaborated on the album with two musicians who have also played on other recent folk albums exploring the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy. Both Angeline Morrison and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne played on a project by Reg Meuross entitled Stolen From God, while Morrison had also released The Sorrow Songs, which featured Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, to considerable acclaim. Both artists brought the weight of their study as well as their considerable artistic talents to the Grace Will Lead Me Home project.

Braithwaite-Kilcoyne brought the profound and arresting ‘Press Gang Song’ to the album. This is a resume of what it takes to become a slave trader from a readiness to “sail the fierce sea” to the willingness to “abuse your fellow man lead him shackled in chains”, “brutalise and violate, disregard their cries of pain”, “cast them overboard to a watery grace”, “for when that you do you shall master your trade”. This was the journey taken by Newton in becoming a slave trader.

Morrison, whose ‘Grace will lead me home’ is based on the Christian hope of resurrection, also writes from that perspective in ‘The Hand of Fanny Johnson’ from The Sorrow Songs. There, having noted the universality of death which “comes for the rich and the lowly”, she sings:

“My dear mother said that a funeral is holy,
The sanctified earth receiving the body,
And in the hereafter that’s when we will all be
Remade, entire and whole.”

Stolen from God, while clearly noting and condemning the way in which European Christians viewed the degradation inflicted on others as their God-given route to wealth, also makes some words of Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned abolitionist, writer and orator, central to the song cycle:

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference… so wide that to receive the one as good, pure and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked… I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

The song ‘Stolen from God’ makes this contrast its central theme:

“God made these hands to hold and caress
He made these hands to worship and bless
He made these hands to hold my own child
God made these hands to be mild”

Yet, those involved in the slave trade:

“You made these hands to blister and bleed
To slave for the white man and bend to his greed
To cut coffee for gentlemen cane for their wives
At the cost of my family’s lives”

As a result, your legacy is “written in blood, everything stolen from God”.

This contradiction in the Christianity that underpinned the transatlantic slave trade is central to the story of Amazing Grace and its legacy (see Bickley’s ‘The choir still sings Amazing Grace’). Newton did come to see the error of his ways and lend his voice to the abolitionist cause in support of those like William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Olaudah Equiano. Meuross effectively captures the beginning of this change in a song called ‘Bridgewater’ about an early petition against slavery:

“Reverend Chubb Mr Tucket Mr White
Call on every Christian soul to join the fight
To stand up as a nation ‘gainst this wicked violation
Though it might be bad for trade you know it’s right…
O brother oh brother oh brother
First the tide must turn before the flood”

The Sorrow Songs, Stolen From God and Grace Will Lead Me Home are three deeply moving and challenging albums, with Morrison and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne as the exceptional musicians linking all three, that tackle the history of the transatlantic slave trade, unearthing both incredible tales and uncomfortable truths. The Church is among the institutions that need most to hear and receive the truths and tales these albums share.

Angeline Morrison – The Sorrow Songs (Topic Records 2022)

Reg Meuross – Stolen From God (Hatsongs Records 2023)

Angeline, Cohen & Jon – Grace Will Lead Me Home (Invisible Folk 2024)

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Romance

8 September 2025

5 min read

The summer we turned romantic

Belly, the other Taylor, and the defiant desire to get married

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

The cast of The Summer I Turned Pretty pose on a wedding set.

Netflix.

A new communal rhythm has been unearthed over the hazy summer months, a fresh ritual has made its home among us. Every Wednesday, twenty-five million people are tuning into Amazon Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty. This show, an adaptation of Jenny Han’s novel of the same name, tells the story of ‘Belly’ – a young-ish girl who spends her summers staying with family friends at their beach house in the fictional yet notably Hamptons-esque town of Cousins Beach.

It has all the ingredients of a wistful watch:

A summer that we can vicariously bask in – tick.

An absurdly chic beach house – tick.

Two love interests who happen to be brothers and also happen to be tremendously easy on the eye – tick and tick.

It’s time for me to lay my cards on the table, if it wasn’t already obvious, I am one of those 25 million people tuning in.

Every darn Wednesday.

I find the pull that this (OK, I’m going to say it… don’t hate me…) undeniably silly show has on us fascinating. I’m acutely aware that it’s been crafted to hit all the right notes, it is a masterclass in escapism. The show’s writers’ room probably had a tick-list of binge-ability traits plastered on the wall, the writers adhering to each one thoroughly. But there’s also something about our insatiable appetite for romance that shouldn’t be dismissed with an eyeroll. We are romantically-inclined beings, to a notable degree. And, what’s more, we feast on the presumption that romantic love is something that happens to us - some kind of cosmic inevitability, sitting just beyond our control, making fools of our will.

In his essay, ‘Love and Need’, Thomas Merton wrote ‘the expression ‘to fall in love’ reflects a peculiar attitude toward love and life itself – a mixture of fear, awe, fascination and confusion. It implies suspicion, doubt, hesitation in the presence of something unavoidable yet not fully reliable’. While C.S. Lewis similarly speaks of its ‘strength, sweetness, terror and high port.’

Thus, our obsession with romantic love takes a hammer to one of our most ingrained lies: that we want, above all else, to be in control. To be the most powerful force in any room. Immovable. Unshakable. It’s hard to keep up the façade that we want to be steady on our feet when we’re endlessly nurturing the idea of being swept off them.

I could, as I have done before, suggest that this is an inherently spiritual matter. It’s a symptom of not believing in God, but craving him nonetheless.

But, alas, my attention has wandered elsewhere.

The Summer I Turned Pretty is currently running through its third series – so, we’re familiar with the love-triangle at this point, the internet has already decided which brother they’re routing for, we’re chomping down our third helping of Belly’s story. And so, what is the extra ingredient added to this third and final series? What’s keeping us on our toes? What’s ensuring that the stakes stay high enough to captivate 25 million of us? Well, interestingly, it’s the prospect of marriage.

Belly getting engaged to one of the brothers truly upped the ante. At the tender age of 21, the show’s supporting characters are less than elated at Belly’s engagement, with whole episodes dedicated to her mother’s desperate - can’t you just live together?! – pleas. Marriage is too huge. Too weighty. Too significant. Nevertheless, Belly and her fiancé defiantly plan a wedding, determined to dedicate themselves to each other in the most consequential way they know how.

And that interests me. the role that marriage still plays in our collective imagination interests me.

This is a way we still imbue our love (even the fictional kind) with the utmost meaning.

All of the data suggests that we are falling rapidly out of love with the very concept of marriage. In 2022, the UK’s Office for National Statistics told us that – for the first time ever – less than 50 per cent of people in the UK (above the age of 16) were married. And, of course, the minority who are married famously have a fifty-fifty percent chance of staying that way. You could make a robust argument that our society is pretty disenchanted with the whole institution.

And yet, we seem to keep suspending that disenchantment. The Summer I Turned Pretty’s popularity is exhibit A. Exhibit B is Taylor Swift’s obscenely newsworthy engagement announcement. This August, she posted a collection of photos of her and her new fiancé, Travis Kelce, quaintly captioned ‘your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married’. Her words alluding to her songwriting and Kelce’s football career. Journalist, Helen Lewis, notes the ‘defiant conventionality’ of it all. A defiant conventionality that is also woven into Belly’s rebellion – her audacity to rebel against her parents’ wishes and… get married.

It's all just left me wondering, as old-fashioned as it sounds – is there anything more romantic than marriage? Is it ever fully dis-enchant-able? I guess I’m just struck by how it’s still something we do, you know? We are meaning-making creatures, and this is a way we still imbue our love (even the fictional kind) with the utmost meaning.

We bind ourselves to someone else; perhaps defying our survival instincts in the process (it’s certainly the case that unmarried women live longer). It’s costly, it’s hard, it has a certain prodigality about it. Henna Cundill thoughtfully studies marriage as a ‘much slower kind of martyrdom, a decision made not once but daily, in a society where such decisions are frequently undone’. We lay our lives down for something that is bigger than us. It’s a weird human idea, if you think about it. So odd, in fact, that I’m confident in my inkling that it isn’t a human idea at all. It’s dripping with sacrality.

This really has been the summer we turned romantic. Well, 25 million of us, at least.

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