Hannah More: Story-teller, truth-teller, world-changer by Olivia Hajicek

By the mid-18th century, the port city of Bristol, England, where Hannah More spent much of her life, had grown wealthy through the international slave trade, but few were aware what the African captives suffered. Much like modern-day human trafficking, the slave trade silently cast its shadow over all of society. More used her writing to expose its evils and persuade people to support abolition. Thanks in large part to her work, both the slave trade and slavery itself were illegal throughout the British Empire by her death in 1833. While More would not have called herself a journalist, she is a role model for Christian journalists today.

In her anti-slavery efforts, More worked with William Wilberforce, the parliamentary champion of abolition and one of her closest friends. More wrote her poem “Slavery” in 1788 to coincide with an effort by Wilberforce to limit the number of slaves a ship could carry. The poem asked the men who missed their homes and families on slave voyages to “think how absence the loved scene endears / To him, whose food is groan, whose drink is tears.”

More could be confident that the Africans had the same human longings as she would because she knew from Paul’s words in Acts 17:26 that God had “made of one blood all nations of men.” Her final appeal in the poem was to the one “Who of one blood didst form the human race.”

Likewise, journalists fighting the injustices in our time must not fear to ground the rights of man in the law of God. Abortion is wrong because God made humans in his image. Human trafficking is wrong because what we do to the least of these we do to Christ himself. Indoctrinating children with immorality is wrong because whoever causes them to stumble would be better off drowned in the sea with a millstone around his neck.

Yet, like journalists must do, More appealed to more than morality and Scripture. She also showed the slave trade for what it was. She carried a detailed illustration to show people how hundreds of men, women, and children could be packed into a slave ship.

Even her private letters contain accounts showing the humanity of the Africans: a man recapturing a runaway girl he had threatened to sell into slavery, a slave sacrificing his life to rescue his master’s children in a shipwreck, and a woman reunited with her baby after a man bought the child for a mug of brandy from slave traders ready to kill it. More’s dedication came out of her love for the African people, and Christian journalists today must likewise do their work out of love for others.

More not only gave a voice to the voiceless but sought to uplift her readers as well. She used the popular format of tracts to provide moral, political, and practical instruction to the newly literate poor. She wrote a novel to promote a biblical understanding of marriage within the growing middle class. She wrote treatises to persuade the elite to set an example of morality and charity. Like a good journalist should today, she sought to educate and better her readers, not merely to inform and entertain them.

Partly through the fault of her early biographers, More’s world-changing legacy was largely forgotten until 2014, when Karen Swallow Prior wrote “Fierce Convictions: Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist.” Eric Metaxas also included her story in his book “Seven Women and the Secret of Their Greatness.”

Just as More lived when England most needed her skilled writing and strong principles, her story is being rediscovered when journalists striving to honor God most need her faithful example.