Introduction What Is a Demagogue?
For students of history or political science, it seems self-evident: A demagogue is a politician or ruler who incites his audience through appeals to emotion, denigration of his enemies, blatant lies and insults, and impossible promises of a greater world to come. He may also call for a return to a mythical past, in which strength and tradition held sway before the modern world ruined everything with corruption and weakness. A demagogue can be merely a public agitator and gadfly, or he can evolve into a murderous dictator, depending on how much power he can accrue through public opinion, mass propaganda, government bureaucracy, and armed force.
Though there are exceptions, demagogues are almost always men. They may rise to notoriety through elected office, corporations, the media, the military, or simply appear out of nowhere—magnetic personalities blessed with the gift of oratory that attract a mass of followers and build a cult of personality. Our Western understanding of them goes back to ancient Greece and Rome and continues with today’s politicians. Such firebrands represent all that is combustible and dangerous in public life, and demagoguery is said to be like an electric shock to the body politic.
Defining who is a demagogue can be a challenge, as the term has been used as an “attack word” for hundreds of years. In the context of Western democracies, its meaning is fluid and subject to interpretation. For one person’s menace to society may be another’s tribune of the people; and scabrous rhetoric to the ears of an enemy may sound like common-sense wisdom to an ally. The judgment about who is and isn’t demagogic is based as much on human emotion and tribal loyalties as it is on partisan politics. The reaction of the heart to such a public figure—whether it be praise or revulsion—matters more than the rational judgment of the brain.
At present, Donald Trump has the reputation of being the architect of contemporary demagoguery. And indeed, he shows many of the characteristics: the emotional harangues delivered to mass audiences, the attacks on minorities like Hispanic immigrants, talk of conspiracies like the “deep state” bureaucracy, the barrage of fake news (either denounced or defended), juvenile insults against his foes, and the slogan Make America Great Again emblazoned on a wide range of affordably priced merchandise. He heralds a return to the halcyon days of the mid-20th century, or perhaps the mid-19th century, and condemns the various opposition politicians, reporters, judges, veterans, statesmen, world leaders, and common citizens who have questioned or criticized him. Indeed, to his opponents, Trump is such an ideal example of a demagogue that it stands as a wonder he does not read or study history, since so much of what makes him typical of demagoguery has appeared again and again in the annals of American life. Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, the Know-Nothings, the Dixiecrats . . . the list goes on.
That said, demagoguery is not confined to a single person or political party. Although few leaders exhibit as many characteristics of the incendiary style as Trump, there are a number of individuals on the political left and right who inflame public opinion in pursuit of money and votes. Some of them warn against a sinister cabal of billionaires who would rob common people of their dignity and delight in their misery, all to make a quick buck. Others claim to speak for average Americans, whoever they might be, and imagine themselves as their champion against the wicked designs of those who would oppress them—i.e., members of the other party. Still others go for the rhetorical throat and employ weasel words to defame one minority group or another, using terms like “welfare queens” or “international bankers” or “immoral deviants” to summon outrage and inspire their audience to offer more campaign donations, often at the same time. The variety of hateful, instigating language in public life is almost endless, though the reaction to it is often the same: offense from those attacked, followed by a hardening of tribal loyalties and a greater schism between factions.
Demagogues were present in American public life even before there was an America—and the notion that a figure like Trump could only emerge from our technology-saturated, hyperconnected world is false. A contemporary demagogue might use that hyperconnectivity to better spread his message to his followers, but such figures have always seemed to possess a unique insight into how to use technology to their benefit, regardless of how advanced that technology may have been. What an angry tweet is to the 21st century, an angry pamphlet was to the 18th: a method of mass communication that enabled the demagogue to target his audience in the quickest and most effective fashion.
For hundreds of years, the demagogue’s methods have been consistent. He uses fear and terror to agitate his followers, denounces his enemies with stirring and dramatic rhetoric, and finds new and groundbreaking ways to build his reputation and power. He glories in controversy and never backs down from a fight. He inspires passion, breeds division, turns friends into enemies, and leaves society reeling. He is bold and clever and adroit, and can spread turmoil with ease, but can never seem to master the forces he unleashes. For while the demagogue plays a key role in any social upheaval, sparking it and feeding its flames, he is often consumed by it when the fires became too hot to be contained.
Which brings us to the Great Awakening.
Firebrand ministers were essential to the growth and spread of this religious movement. They built their reputation through mass communications and exhausting travels over hundreds of miles, proclaiming the beauty of the “New Birth” in Jesus Christ and denigrating those who resisted it. Using powerful rhetoric, they compared their foes to agents of Satan and the Antichrist, yet they also inspired such devotion in their followers that their preaching tours had a joyful, carnivalesque quality. They outraged their enemies, and divided Christian denominations into hostile factions. They lionized the antique Puritan past and criticized the failings of 18th-century contemporary life, but also promised a bold new future of piety and transcendence. Above all else, they were fundamentally American and set a precedent for the kind of political religion, or religious politics, that is still with us in the 21st century.
Surprisingly, their story is little known today. Indeed, discussions of the movement rarely take place outside of religious studies, colonial American history, and evangelical Christianity. When the revival does appear in textbooks, it is often mentioned solely as a forerunner to the more familiar Second Great Awakening of the 19th century, or as an example of the kind of late-period Puritanism that reveled in hellfire and brimstone. But to those who study this period, the truth is much richer. The Great Awakening was a transformative event that opened a chasm between the stodgy traditions of the colonial world of the early 18th century, and the trailblazing, tumultuous nation of the Revolution. It represented a boundary change in how Americans thought of themselves, or even that they thought of themselves as American at all, instead of simply being British.
Consider: Before the Awakening, American religion was clearly on the decline. In the Middle Colonies like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, there were too few clergymen to attend to the needs of their parishes—and some parishes lacked ministers entirely. As ordination in Europe was a requirement for many faiths, and many pastors refused to come to the New World, or had to be cajoled with the equivalent of hardship pay. In New England, churches had become insular and hidebound, and delayed or denied admission to those who wanted to become new members. This caused many parishes to be hollowed out, as community meetinghouses became increasingly cliquish and suspicious of those who might have enlivened the faith or populated the pews.
Ministers themselves stood at a distance from their flocks. Unlike the clerics of Europe, who drew their income from state-supported churches, American pastors had to fight and scrape for their income from skinflint congregations, whose coffers were often too threadbare to provide for a fair wage and whose members resisted paying that wage. Pastors were paid so little, they couldn’t even provide for their families. Parishioners lobbed accusations of greed, immorality, and incompetence at men who were supposed to be their spiritual leaders. In return, ministers charged the members of their flock of being sinful and depraved. They worried that overseas trade and imported goods gave laypeople a taste for luxury and consumerism. They accused them of having more interest in acquiring wealth and possessions than in living a virtuous life and caring for the sick and the poor—of which there were increasing numbers in a world plagued with social inequality.
At the same time, the colonies attracted waves of new migrants from Northern Ireland, Scotland, and the German states, many of them looking to practice their faith as they had across the Atlantic, or to find new faith in a community that would welcome them to the fold. Too often they found neither. Not only were there scant pastors to care for them, but the pastors they did encounter typically delivered dry, airless sermons that argued the finer points of theology when most of their congregants were looking to learn more about their own salvation. The “legalism” they preached had more to do with church members behaving well and following proper doctrine than it did with helping them find God’s grace, and it made Christian worship a drab and formal ritual deprived of color, life, and energy. As a result, people started to drift away from the churches or became indifferent in their beliefs, and faith in America looked ready to become just as institutional and declining as it was in the Old World. As one historian put it, “organized religion seemed on the verge of collapse when the Great Awakening . . . rescued the floundering churches.”
The Great Awakening had a broad and turbulent effect—though no one at the time called it by that name. Historian Joseph Tracy invented this term for the movement in 1842, a century late and long after most of the chaos of the era had been forgotten. Mid-18th-century colonists knew it as the “revival” or “revivals,” or used one of several other terms, and a few theologians like Jonathan Edwards wrote of a “general awakening,” though the term was not widespread. It began with a few isolated events in the 1720s in which communities experienced a spiritual rebirth; achieved a measure of fame around Northampton, Massachusetts, in the mid-1730s; and exploded throughout America in the early 1740s before collapsing and transforming later in the decade into a different kind of movement. However, before attempting to further explain the characteristics of the revival, it’s worth clarifying what the revival wasn’t.
Namely, we have to put aside our 21st-century notions of what social change and conflict look like. We’re used to sharp-edged partisan battles between ultraconservative Christians and secular leftists fighting each other over school prayer, abortion rights, gay rights, gun rights, and socialism, among other issues. We might be tempted to assume the same warring sides had direct equivalents in the 18th century—say, with Ben Franklin playing the liberal Deist role against Jonathan Edwards the fundamentalist. But once you realize that Franklin actually helped create the Great Awakening through his print operation, and that Edwards both supported and questioned the movement, the assumption begins to weaken. It further weakens with the understanding that some of the most ardent critics of the revival were fierce defenders of tradition and hierarchy (and the attendant economic inequality) and the most extreme revivalists preached against slavery, the rule of the wealthy, and the oppression of workers and the poor. And the assumption altogether vanishes upon realizing that those groups with little to no political authority in British North America—women, enslaved blacks, and Christian Indians—became some of the revival’s greatest supporters and gave powerful testimony to God in the most zealous congregations. Far from a bastion of the political right, radical Christianity in mid-18th-century America was a daring and unsetthng force for social change and contributed in no small part to the psychological transformation that led Americans of all kinds toward the Revolution.
This book attempts to explain the Great Awakening through the lens of populism. The idea of populism in its classic American form relates to the revolt of rural Midwesterners against the plutocratic two-party system of the Gilded Age. But the elements of that movement are also evident in the earliest roots of populism in the mid-18th century. They include a broad appeal to common workers and the middle class, praise for tradition and homespun religion, a return to a simpler time before moral laxity and corruption set in, furious attacks on economic privation, social inequality, and cultural elites, and brilliant orators who sometimes had the reputation of demagogues. William Jennings Bryan was the symbol of the populist revolt in the late 19th century; a century-and-a-half earlier, it was George Whitefield.
Whitefield was both a catalyst for the revival and a skillful provocateur—to his friends and allies a pious crusader who converted thousands of people to be reborn in Christ, and to his enemies a fearsome zealot who wielded a unique power to destroy social convention. At his apex, on his second tour of America from 1739 to 1741, Whitefield achieved fame as a masterful evangelizer, his travels reported and publicized in the press, his pamphlets and sermons selling thousands of copies, his name and notoriety increasing with each stop on his relentless tour. Historian Harry Stout wrote, “he can rightly be labeled Anglo-America’s first modern celebrity.”
Whitefield is still adored in evangelical circles and for good reason—he brought to America a new kind of passionate, emotional, individual style of worship by speaking to the common desires and interests of ordinary Christians. He was devout and earnest in what he preached, and he crafted the template for the frontier preachers, tent-show evangelists and circuit-riding ministers of the 19th century, and charismatic revivalists like Billy Sunday and Billy Graham of the 20th. But at the outset of the Great Awakening, Whitefield inspired much more dissension than any of those figures, and reveled in it.
He had all the hallmarks of a controversialist: provoking public fights with adversaries in his own Anglican church, achieving a cult of personality by comparing aspects of his own life to that of Jesus Christ, causing schism between his followers and detractors, and showing a stunning hypocrisy on issues like slavery, publicly arguing for the education and kind treatment of the enslaved while privately seeking to profit from their labors. On his later trips to America after the peak of the revival, he adopted a moderate tone and sought to mend fences with those he offended, and established a reputation in some quarters as a near-saintly agent of God’s grace. However, at the turn of the 1740s, when his social impact was at its greatest, Whitefield also trafficked in demagoguery. The first section of this book, “Fathers,” concerns his influential tour of British North America and the widespread influence he had over the hearts and minds of colonists.
Whitefield’s journeys led to a spiritual revolution. His friend and ally Gilbert Tennent followed up on his work by demanding his listeners be reborn in Christ and excoriating his enemies with a venomous tongue and spine-chilling rhetoric. Whereas Whitefield inspired greater love than hate, Tennent mainly trafficked in fear. His itinerant ministry had a galvanizing effect on those who witnessed it, and he enflamed souls from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire, and helped divide his own Presbyterian church into warring camps. Many Christian sects became similarly split over the right way to worship, with the so-called New Lights championing the revival and Old Lights fighting it vigorously. Jonathan Edwards, who had sparked revivals long before Whitefield ever came to America, used the power of his pen and pulpit to offer a thoughtful view of how God’s grace could transform a human soul, and a frightening view of how his wrath could destroy it. Ben Franklin also promoted the revival, for reasons both ethical and financial, and delivered the revivalists’ message to new audiences through his newspaper and print operation—despite his own misgivings about the harsh Calvinism of such preachers.
The second section, “Sons,” describes how radical forces grew out of the revival and transformed it into a movement with shocking social implications. Evangelists like James Davenport and Andrew Croswell stunned royal authorities with their wild behavior and threats against the hierarchy. They and other preachers encouraged the exhortations and testimony of those who had been silenced in most churches—Indians on the frontier, enslaved blacks, and women. Notably, Sarah Osborn (née Wheaten) rose to prominence as a religious leader and teacher, despite being stricken with poverty and physical ailments. Other women expressed divine revelations, or forecast the apocalypse, or claimed to see heaven in their mystical journeys. As this kind of radical enthusiasm spread and Americans from all stations of life joined the uprising, the original revivalists found that the movement had escaped their control. The demagoguery they used to stir people up had altered the colonial mind in ways they didn’t expect and could not have imagined.
The enthusiasm of worshippers and the extremism of some revivalists brought a backlash. Traditionalists like Charles Chauncy castigated the revival and its emotional displays and frenzied worship. They catalogued the errors of the radicals and accused them of inciting anarchy and encouraging blasphemy. Americans found themselves divided into mutually hostile camps: the supporters of the old traditions, the promoters of the new faith, and the iconoclasts who began to question all orthodox beliefs. Like the traveling preachers who began the movement, colonists developed an aggressive style of civic discourse, one that used caustic language to corrode long-held ideas of civility. The peak of the movement had passed, but the methods its leaders used were still employed by all sides.
The most surprising result of the revival, however, was what it did to Americans’ view of the British. No longer willing to accept unjust imperial actions, and trained by a half-decade of batthng each other over religion, colonists in the late 1740s turned to public protest and riots against policies like naval impressment, repression of religious liberty and speech, and conversions of non-Anglicans. Aiding these efforts were Samuel Adams, the son of a Boston maltster who published contentious pamphlets, and Jonathan Mayhew, who agitated an entire region with his religious liberalism and his preaching against English tyrants.
Section three, “Spirits,” explores the aftermath of the Great Awakening: the later lives of the revivalists, the early crusade against slavery, and the struggle against Great Britain. It discusses how Chauncy and Mayhew transformed from opponents of the revival into firebrands against imperial rule, uniting even their former evangelical enemies in a campaign for religious liberty and colonial rights. This “Black Regiment” of clergymen provided godly sanction for revolutionary activities and produced some of the most vehement anti-imperial sermons American colonists had ever heard. They bridged the gap between the sectarian battles of the revival and nationalist resistance to the mother country.
The role of the Great Awakening in the story of the Revolution is one focus of this book, but doesn’t exclude other, more familiar causes of the drive for independence. These include Americans’ participation in, and reaction to, multiple rounds of imperial warfare and the outrage over the taxation and trade policies of Parliament. Also important are the liberal philosophies of the European Enlightenment advanced by Rousseau, Locke, Smith, Montesquieu, and others, who provided the intellectual backbone for the theory of government that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Founders championed.
These ideas form the basis for the classical scholarship of the Revolution, though it should be noted that a revolution cannot be waged by men of wealth and status alone, and the other side of the story has its roots in the artisans, the shipyard workers, the female teachers and seamstresses, the urban poor, and the enslaved who made up a much greater part of the polity of colonial America. The common people would not have fought so vigorously in American armies against the British, would not have sacrificed their lives and livelihoods, only on behalf of Enlightenment philosophies, or anger over taxation, or dislike for trade mandates. They brought so much zeal and passion to the fight because many of them saw it in a cosmic, often apocalyptic light—as a struggle for religious liberty against forces of oppression, as a battle between dissenting Christians and the Church of England, and as a war between God’s armies and those of Satan.
These ideas make some of us uncomfortable in the modern age. The notion that the United States didn’t just evolve out of the genteel philosophies of Western Europe, but also out of uneducated, homegrown wildcat evangelism seems vaguely unacceptable, a breach of decorum, an uncomfortable assertion. But the scholarly research on the subject over the last half-century has proved to be convincing. Ever since Alan Heimert’s monumental 1966 study, Religion and the American Mind, we have begun to appreciate how much the creation of an independent America owes to the religious upheaval. Scholars have followed up on Heimert’s work and broadened it with significant research in the five decades since, and the evidence has only increased that there is a clear link between the “psychological earthquake” of the Great Awakening and the political tempest of the Revolution.
This book validates that argument, showing that an upsurge in Christian evangelism, first using the tools of demagoguery, brought forth a powerful counterreaction that created a climate of anger and dissension. After the revival peaked, those strong emotions lingered and became redirected into protests over British imperial policy—often led by the same figures who had battled during the revival—and eventually warfare. In the process, the minds of Americans changed, from valuing social cohesion and unity to valorizing political and religious liberty, even at the cost of violence. As John Adams himself wrote, “the Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people. A change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.”
Americans had once been loyal and complacent subjects of the king, offering their affection and servility in exchange for his protection. But once he violated their trust, they turned on him with a skill for revolt honed from years of practice, and they expressed outrage that he had exceeded his authority and infringed on their liberties. As Adams wrote, “this radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affection of the people was the real American Revolution.”