The Hymns That Couldn't Drown Out the Chains

In 1787, the churches of Bristol, England, were magnificent. Their choirs sang anthems that echoed off vaulted stone ceilings. Their congregations filled polished pews every Sunday morning. Their clergy wore fine vestments and delivered eloquent sermons on the holiness of God.

But Bristol's harbor told a different story. Just blocks from those sanctuaries, slave ships were being loaded with shackles, branding irons, and provisions for the Middle Passage. Bristol was England's second-largest slave trading port, and many of its most prominent churchgoers had invested heavily in the trade. They tithed from profits earned on human flesh.

When William Wilberforce stood before Parliament to demand abolition, some of his fiercest opponents were devout, church-attending men who saw no contradiction between their Sunday worship and their Monday ledgers. They had perfected the rituals of faith while ignoring its most basic demand — that every human being bears the image of the Almighty.

This is precisely what the Lord confronts through Isaiah. "I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats," God declares to Judah. The incense had become detestable. The sacred assemblies, unbearable. Not because worship itself was wrong, but because the worshippers had divorced ritual from righteousness. God's prescription was blunt and unmistakable: "Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed."

Worship that ignores the suffering next door is not worship at all. It is theater performed for an audience of one — and that audience is not God.