8 SEPTEMBER 2001, Page 31

From Mr Chris Carmichael Sir: Andrew Kenny suggests that the

campaign against slavery was prompted 'by Christian conscience'. This is tenuously true, but the great impetus to abolitionism resulted from the age of scientific enlightenment — men like Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham influenced those for whom slavery was revealed Biblical truth. Indeed, the revalorisation of black Americans has yet to occur, the deeply religious framers of the constitution defining a black man as 'three-fifths of a human being'.

As the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg said, 'With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil: but for good people to do evil — that takes religion,'

Chris Carmichael

Newcastle upon Tyne