The Infidel by Joe Musser

First published: Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman & Holman, 2001

Genre(s): Novel

Subgenre(s): Historical fiction (eighteenth century); literary fiction

Core issue(s): Conversion; doubt; forgiveness; grace; redemption; social action

Principal characters

• John Newton, a sea captain, hymn writer, and minister
• Abigail Newton, John’s mother
• John Newton, John’s father and a sea captain
• Polly Catlett, John’s wife
• Job Lewis, a sailor whose Christian faith John destroys
• Clow, a slave trader
• William Wilberforce, an abolitionist
• William Cowper, a poet and hymnist

Overview

Joe Musser’s fictionalized account of the life of John Newton, The Infidel, traces his development from an atheistic slave trader to a minister and abolitionist. Despite the religious teachings of his mother, Abigail, and the support of the Catletts, Newton drifts from the straight and narrow after his mother’s death and his father’s speedy remarriage. His father, stern and aloof, and his stepmother, soon preoccupied with her own children, abandon Newton emotionally, and he is soon involved with unsavory companions. When he turns eleven, his father takes him along on his ship as a member of the crew, but at fourteen he is back home again, where he has three close brushes with death. After a year in Spain on business, for which he proves ill suited, he returns home, and after his father’s retirement from the sea, Newton serves on a ship captained by one of his father’s friends. Though he continues to read the Bible, Newton becomes a drunkard, brawler, and shirker. He is torn between temptation and his mother’s teaching, but in Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), which made people the judge of right and wrong, Newton finds a replacement for the Bible.

His father, desirous of seeing Newton established, secures him a post on a vessel bound for Jamaica, where he can make his fortune, but Newton meets Polly Catlett before he is to ship out and decides not to go to Jamaica. He spends a year at sea, returns home, and again misses the sailing of his ship. On a spontaneous trip to see Polly, he is caught by a press gang and is assigned to five years aboard the Harwich, a British naval vessel. Fellow midshipman James Mitchell and Newton discuss Shaftesbury’s ideas, and Mitchell persuades Newton to become a freethinker, to deny the existence of God, and, implicitly, to ignore his mother’s teachings. To win a wager, Newton destroys the Christian faith of shipmate Job Lewis. After the voyage is over, Newton returns to see Polly, whose father begins to sour on the unreliable young man, who once again shirks his responsibilities and is charged with desertion and flogged for his crime. By a stroke of luck (or divine intervention) he is freed of his five-year stint on the Harwich when he is exchanged for a man on a slave ship.

On the Pequod he learns the slave trade—how they are purchased, housed, and transported—and impresses Clow, a plantation owner who is part owner of the ship. When first mate Collins, who despises Newton, becomes captain of the Pequod, he threatens to exchange Newton for a man on a naval vessel so that he will have to complete his five years in the navy. So anxious is Newton to avoid this fate that he persuades Clow to take him on as an assistant. For a while the arrangement works, but then Clow’s African mistress begins to resent Newton, and in Clow’s absence, she poisons him and then lies to Clow about him. As a result, Newton becomes one of Clow’s slaves. Eventually Newton recovers, and his hard work impresses a plantation owner named Barker, who buys him from Clow and makes him an overseer on one of his plantations. In that position he treats his slaves fairly well, but he has sexual relations with slave women and participates in voodoo ceremonies.

Newton is unwillingly rescued from his situation when the captain of a slave ship recognizes him and brings him to England. The voyage home on the Greyhound is a memorable one. He begins the trip as a blaspheming atheist, but his reading of Thomas á Kempis’s Imitatio Christi (c. 1427; The Imitation of Christ, c. 1460-1530) makes him a believer fearful of judgment. When the ship encounters a violent storm and the superstitious crew thinks him a Jonah (someone who brings back luck), he is instrumental in the ship’s survival, and he knows that God has forgiven him. As a result of his exemplary behavior during the storm and his conversion, he is offered the post of captain, but he advises the shipowner that he wants to first prove himself as a first mate on the Brownlow. Though he performs his duties well, he reverts to his old ways (except for swearing), but he again accepts God’s forgiveness. After his return to England, he persuades Polly to marry him.

Newton makes successful trips as captain of a slave ship, but he is increasingly opposed to slavery, the evils of which he has seen firsthand. On one of the trips his friend Job Lewis, whom Newton had earlier made an atheist, dies unrepentant, and Newton is wracked with guilt. When at the age of twenty-nine he has to leave the sea because of ill health, he is relieved.

Newton then works briefly for the government customs office, but soon becomes a clergyman and works as a vicar for the rest of his life. In 1764 he writes a popular anonymous autobiography about his conversion, meets the troubled William Cowper, with whom he writes a hymnbook including “Amazing Grace,” and campaigns against slavery. William Wilberforce, one of his congregation as a boy and in Parliament a staunch foe of slavery, persuades Newton to speak out in Parliament against slavery, even though he knows that all his previous sins, some of which have not been widely known, will be made public. Threatened with being defrocked and excommunicated, Newton nevertheless refuses to betray his conscience and speaks for the abolitionist cause. His actions contribute to the end of slavery.

Christian Themes

God’s amazing grace is the theme of the hymn and the novel. Musser sees Newton as a person whom God repeatedly saves physically so that he can be converted spiritually and act socially and politically to aid humankind by working to abolish slavery. Newton acknowledges that as a boy he has escaped death three times, once when he misses a boat that later capsizes. He later is saved from death by not being on two more boats that sink with all hands lost, and he comes to believe that divine intervention, not coincidence or luck, saved him. On the pivotal voyage home to England, the ship is almost lost, and he is seen as a Jonah. The allusion is appropriate because, like Jonah, Newton had attempted to escape from God only to be saved to serve him. Although he had early religious instruction from his mother, lack of church attendance and the want of fellow Christians led him astray. He is saved in stages, with several backward steps. His conversion is sparked by his reading of The Imitation of Christ, but reading without input from preachers and other Christians is not enough. At Alex Clunie’s urging, Newton becomes evangelical, and he hears the preaching of George Whitefield, an associate of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. At the end of the book, Newton reflects on his dissolute life and stresses the point that God’s grace is not earned but given freely to those who do not merit it. Although Job Lewis rejected that grace and “languishes in hell,” Newton is saved to serve God and humankind.

Sources for Further Study

Cecil, Richard. John Newton. Edited by Marilyn Rouse. Fearn, England: Christian Focus Publications, 2000. Includes Cecil’s Memoirs of Mr John Newton (1808), plus Rouse’s notes, background information, a time line, an invaluable “Who’s Who” of persons Newton knew, manuscript sources, and a thorough bibliography. Indispensable.

Edwards, Brian H. Through Many Dangers: The Story of John Newton. Auburn, Mass.: Evangelical Press, 2001. Lengthy biography of Newton with chapters on William Cowper and William Wilberforce. Includes a helpful time line for Newton and his wife as well as a select bibliography.

Hindmarsh, D. Bruce. John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1996. Biography mixed with comments on Newton’s views on ordination, Calvinism, and hymnody, plus a comprehensive bibliography, a short chronology of Newton’s life, and a list of the books known to have been read by Newton.

Phipps, William E. Amazing Grace in John Newton: Slave Ship Captain, Hymn Writer, and Abolitionist. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001. Biography that includes a great deal of information about the African tribes Newton dealt with and about plantation societies in the Caribbean and the Carolinas. Brief time line, many illustrations, and thorough bibliography.

Turner, Steve. “Amazing Grace”: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song. New York: Ecco, 2002. Divided between a short biography and an account of the hymn’s transformations and reception through the ages. Also includes a “Who’s Who,” a select discography, and lists of artists who have sung the song, films in which it has appeared, and polls in which it is listed as the number-one hymn.