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)

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Trauma

5 June 2025

5 min read

This bad TV version of The Last of Us ruins much more than storytelling

Following up the acclaimed video game doesn't deliver prestige viewing.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A pensive looking woman glances to the side.

Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey.

HBO.

What’s the point of the TV adaptation of The Last of Us?

Throughout its second series, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this question. I’m still short of an answer.

Turning the two The Last of Us video games into prestige TV was always going to be problematic, because those video games already were prestige TV. You just had to press buttons on a controller now and then.

The first The Last of Us video game is regularly included in lists of the best video games ever, and it’s not because of any ground-breaking gameplay or because of any technological advancements it made. It’s because of its story.

It is richly character-focussed, gritty, realistic, and utterly human. The Last of Us Part I (as it’s now known) carries the kind of gravitas and emotional complexity you might expect from the likes of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Chernobyl, or The West Wing. It’s already prestige TV.

So, is the TV adaptation simply an attempt to make this same story accessible to people who don’t play video games? Maybe. That would make sense, were it not for its deeply frustrating second series, the finale of which has just aired.

The Last of Us Part II was massively controversial when it released in 2020. (WARNING: absolutely colossal spoilers ahead, for both the games and the TV show). Joel – the main protagonist of the first game – is abruptly and brutally murdered in its opening act. This leads Ellie – his pseudo-surrogate-daughter – to hunt down those responsible in attempt to enact a reckoning.

In the video game, most of the story is told over the course of three days. First, from Ellie’s perspective, then from the perspective of Abby, Joel’s killer. In the TV show, the second series covers Ellie’s side of the story before very abruptly shifting to Abby’s side in the final seconds, leaving the viewers with a cliffhanger. Even as someone who’s played the game and knows what’s going to happen, it felt like a bit of a slap in the face.

But for someone who hasn’t played the games it must be bordering on nonsensical. Even spread over two series, the story is so truncated, and so much is left unsaid. I can’t imagine making sense of this series without having played the video game first. But the TV show is basically just a live action remake of the game. Which again begs the question: what’s the point of the TV adaptation of The Last of Us?

I’ve found this series, and the video game it’s based off, hugely frustrating. Because it’s trying to convey an important message. But both the game and the show contrive to undermine their important central ideas through poor storytelling techniques and structures.

But in making clear what was left unsaid in the game, the power of the moment is undercut. Much is spoken; little is said.

Let’s take one example. Half-way through the game (or towards the end of series 2), Ellie has tracked down and tortured one of Abby’s friends for information on her whereabouts. Afterwards, she talks to her lover Dina about what happened.

In the game, it’s harrowing. Ellie is visibly shaken by what she’s just witnessed herself do. “I made her talk.” She says. And then to Dina: “I don’t want to lose you.” “Good,” comes Dina’s reply. And that’s it. Cut to black. Little is spoken; much is said.

But where the scenes last about 30 seconds in the game, in the TV show it’s over five minutes long. “I made her talk. I thought it would be harder to do, but it wasn’t. It was easy. I just kept hurting her.” So says Ellie, halfway through the conversation. The writers are clearly trying to make explicit Ellie’s fear that she’s losing herself, and Dina by extension, in her thirst for revenge. But in making clear what was left unsaid in the game, the power of the moment is undercut. Much is spoken; little is said.

“I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards,” Garth Marenghi once said. I can only assume he writes for HBO now.

It’s a shame the scene gets fluffed as badly as it does, because really it’s the centrepiece of the narrative. Faced with unthinkable violence, Ellie chooses to repay the act in kind. But, in hunting down and torturing those responsible, ultimately Ellie finds herself becoming less and less human with each act of revenge. Here, in this conversation with Dina, Ellie begins to glimpse the reality of this. That acts of violence towards others are ultimately also acts of violence towards her own nature.

This is, as it turns out, a deeply Christian notion. Where other Ancient Near Eastern creation myths depict their gods as creating the world through violent and bloody struggle, in Genesis God merely speaks life into being. Where Jesus’ disciples would violently overthrow their Roman oppressors, he instead says “those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”

Moreover, Jesus’ death by crucifixion was unspeakably cruel and violent, encompassing protracted public humiliation, sexual abuse, and mutilation. It is here that Christ draws the suffering of the world to himself, that we might be given the opportunity to live free from the ongoing cycle of violence that surrounds us. Not that we might avoid having violence done to us, but that we might find the strength not to be violent in turn.

And this is the ultimate paradox at the centre of Christianity: that the greatest show of strength the world has ever seen is found in Christ’s being nailed to a tree.

Violence begets violence begets violence begets violence. That’s the message of The Last of Us Part II; albeit one conveyed in a rather ham-fisted way. While I’m not optimistic, I hope the next series of the TV show manages to fix the game’s wobbly narrative structure to convey this in a way that is nuanced and compelling. Because it’s a message we desperately need to hear.

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