Eight The Bow of Jonathan
The governors, magistrates, and town councilors of British North America did not stand by and let New Light firebrands like Andrew Croswell wreak havoc. They passed a series of laws to turn back the tide of enthusiasm that had washed over the region, and to reestablish control over civil order. Connecticut led the charge, having already forbidden itinerants to ply their trade in the colony without permission, to undercut the power of ministers like James Davenport. Its leaders followed that legal maneuver with another that revoked the toleration of dissenters and cracked down on Separatist churches and ministers—effectively trying to silence religious freedom and speech.
New York followed suit. Alarmed by the Moravians’ and other evangelists’ attempts to Christianize Indians of the frontier, that colony’s leaders outlawed missionaries who brought the gospel to so-called “ignorant savages.” Other colonies prohibited the more extravagant behavior of the radicals, to fight the “perfect mess-medley of all kinds of disorder and error, enthusiastic wildness and extravagance.” However, while these new laws and public campaigns were a clear exercise of raw power, they also displayed a great deal of wishful thinking. For nothing could undo the changes wrought in the previous five years, no matter how much the authorities tried.
The legal prohibitions prompted the New Lights to become more active in politics, and to make concerted attempts to remove their adversaries from political office, whether they were magistrates or justices of the peace. And as secular leaders increasingly meddled to control spiritual practices, clerics and laypeople became a force in lawmaking. In Connecticut they formed a party that eventually wrested control from their establishment foes, and other colonies saw nasty partisan battles break out in the pages of newspapers and in the public square. Matters of God and matters of state started to intertwine: royal authorities tried to clamp down on any practices they saw as aberrant or a threat to their power, while ministers made brazen attempts to outlaw ideas and practices they saw as depraved, and to give the sanction of law to their own theology over others. It was called “preaching politics” and it became common wherever the revival left its mark.
Amid all the tumult between the New and Old Lights, the denomination whose members actually controlled much of colonial government continued to advance in power. The Church of England made progress in turning weary parishioners, exhausted by the battles among revivalists, into good and proper Anglicans. They used the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) to change the beliefs of many colonists and created much controversy in their wake. The Anglican Church had emerged as the foremost nemesis of the revival, and its clerics used whatever platforms they had to attack it. Most were paid by the church as missionaries for the SPG, so they could denounce the Calvinist uprising with little fear of popular backlash to their positions or salaries. And they did so with vigor.
For a long time they had seen dissenters plagued with “visions and delusions” that appealed to the “vanity and vapours of an empty skull.” Now, with their claims of lunacy against their rivals borne out in the mad antics of the enthusiasts, they extended their critique. They decried the extemporaneous preaching of the New Lights as uncontrolled and dangerous. They saw the revivalists as obsessed with damnation, predestination, and other unpleasant notions, which only served to create a climate of “endless feuds, censoriousness, and uncharitableness.” And they saw all dissenters as heirs to the Puritans who had murdered King Charles I a century before. Thus, not only were the Anglicans’ adversaries touched with madness, they were outright traitors and a continuing threat to the British state.
Amid this spiritually unsettled landscape, a ship arrived from Britain in 1744 bearing an Anglican traveler who had much to do with the recent upheaval in America. George Whitefield returned to the colonies, to face the consequences of his actions and answer for them.
As with his previous trip to the colonies, Whitefield’s arrival followed a flurry of newspaper reports of his travels: his recent doings in Britain, his fundraising for the Bethesda orphanage, and his plans for fresh soul-saving in America. However, he arrived gravely ill in York, Massachusetts (now part of Maine), and had scarcely begun his ministry before he faced a series of ugly accusations from enemies who had multiplied in his absence. One writer in a Boston paper demanded he apologize for all the harm he had caused to colonial pulpits, while others linked him to the radicals who greeted him in York as proof of his rebellious nature.
Whereas in 1740 he faced few critics in New England outside the Church of England, now many of the moderate dissenting churches he had once preached in shut their doors to him—and his old friends remained silent in response to attacks on him. The critics produced a lengthy list of transgressions for which they blamed Whitefield: inspiring wild enthusiasm in worship, encouraging armies of lay exhorters to degrade the word of God, mismanaging his orphanage and misusing its funds, offering maudlin and hollow sermons, abusing clergymen with differing views, and impugning the reputations of native colleges. In turn, eight associations of New England ministers denounced him; many Old Side Presbyterians condemned him; a series of pamphlets picked apart his ideas and tore apart his methods; and college leaders repudiated his itinerant ways. Almost all of his foes accused him of grievously harming the ministry and ruining the harmony of Christian worship.
Even the revivalists who had befriended him years before now seemed to turn their backs on him. With the specter of James Davenport still fresh in their minds, they worried Whitefield had been too eager a disruptor, too ready to divide congregations to conquer them. Harvard authorities spoke for many when they claimed he had caused “the detriment of religion, and the entire destruction of the order of [some] churches” and was nothing less than “an enthusiast, a censorious, uncharitable person, and a deluder of the people” whose mischief needed to be stopped, and soon.
By 1744 Whitefield had become used to being the target of abuse. In Britain, his Methodist movement to reform the Anglican Church had split into competing factions, with John and Charles Wesley espousing “free grace” and dismissing old-fashioned Calvinism like Whitefield’s as cruel and fatalistic. Yet regardless of ideology, Methodists of all kinds came in for withering scorn from the priests and bishops of the state church, and that in turn inspired crowds to attack revivalists and those associated with them. Whitefield learned this in 1741, when he returned to England to discover that his press agent William Seward had been beaten to death at the hands of a mob. In other cases, his colleagues faced gunfire, beatings and (if female) rape and sexual abuse due to their beliefs, and the authorities often chose to look the other way as the mob held sway.
On more than a few occasions when he preached, miscreants climbed into trees to mock him and shout him down, also exposing themselves or trying to urinate on him. At Hampton, one unruly crowd hurled a fellow minister into a lime pit, as Whitefield narrowly escaped and a female follower had her arm broken. At Moorfields, Whitefield faced off with stage actors, puppeteers, and clowns, as the masses threw rocks, eggs, and chunks of dead cats at him, a clown tried to whip him, and a would-be assassin nicked him in the temple with a sword. But his luck ran out at Plymouth, just before his trip to America, when he was staying at an inn and an intruder burst into his room and nearly beat him to death with a cane. Whitefield finally escaped in his nightclothes screaming “Murder!” down the stairs.
Adding to the danger was the reality that, unlike in America, where critics merely accused Whitefield and his revivalists of damaging the church, in Britain the authorities considered them an active threat to the nation. The ongoing war with France fueled charges that he was disloyal to the Crown and defied the monarchy with his brash actions and seditious beliefs. Worse, he recalled the murderous habits of the 17th-century Puritan radicals who had committed regicide, and thus aroused “the body of the people into a national madness and frenzy in matters of religion.” To avoid being further accused of treason or tossed into prison, Whitefield had to pen pamphlets and official statements attesting to his patriotism and support for the king, even to the point of slavish adoration—“May the Crown long flourish on his Royal Head, and a Popish Pretender never be permitted to sit upon the English throne!”
In York, Massachusetts, as Whitefield recovered from the beating he had endured in Plymouth, he found that the strong emotions he had provoked remained palpable. While his critics derided him in print, his remaining New Light supporters flocked to his bedside with words of encouragement, from radical clerics to Boston merchants to assorted laypeople. As he listened to the sermons of sympathetic ministers, he learned that York had recently experienced a fresh revival and, if he so chose, he could spark an even greater upheaval. He wrote that when he preached, “the invisible realities of another world lay open to my view. . . . I spoke with peculiar energy. Such effects followed the word, I thought it was worth dying for a thousand times.” But Whitefield did not return to his old ways. Instead he chose to explain himself, and to control the passions of the masses instead of enflaming them.
With memories of the tumult in Britain still fresh in his mind, he began his latest New England tour chastened and humbled, and more than a bit wary. In Boston he met with a group of moderate ministers and announced that he had never meant to cause division or church separations, and only wanted to “preach the gospel of peace . . . and promote charity and love among all.” He apologized if anyone had taken his earlier sermons the wrong way and said that he had no interest in the radical transformation of American religion. He even qualified his endorsement of Gilbert Tennent’s attacks on unconverted ministers: “I told them that these words were not wrote to imply that it was absolutely impossible but that it was highly improbable that an unconverted man should be made instrumental to beget souls to Christ.” Surprisingly, this hair-splitting legalism convinced several key ministers of his good intentions. Some like Benjamin Colman even opened their meetinghouses to him and his new, subdued version of the gospel.
From the pulpit he adopted a balanced tone that encouraged a sober and thoughtful faith, with much less preaching of terrors and fewer threats of damnation. He regretted being zealous and judgmental in his behavior and, having just turned thirty years of age, looked forward to having a more mature perspective. He even apologized to Harvard for his unfair criticisms of the school and resolved to preach nothing but old-fashioned Calvinism as the “pious ancestors and the founders of Harvard College preached long before I was born.” At the same time, his remaining allies defended his conduct in pamphlets and newspapers, and they persuaded more clerics to open their church doors to his restrained, and much milder, orations.
Not all were convinced. One of the most aggressive of Whitefield’s critics continued to be Thomas Clap, rector of Yale, who had seen his college consumed in enthusiastic wildness after the visits of Whitefield and, especially, James Davenport. With the Grand Itinerant once more making the rounds in the Northeast, Clap made the bold claim that Whitefield had secret plans to swap out the region’s Old Light ministers with radicals of his choosing. Clap claimed he had gotten the news from Jonathan Edwards—which Edwards claimed was a lie, and which embroiled him in a public dispute for several months that embarrassed all parties involved.
Troubled that Whitefield had to endure such charges, Edwards took pity on him and defended him in print. He allowed the Itinerant to preach in Northampton, and hosted him for nearly a week, convinced that his rival for the affections of worshippers had set a more temperate course. In return, Whitefield criticized the “wild and extravagant people” in eastern Connecticut—where Davenport’s revival had burned the hottest, and still continued to smolder—and praised Christ in a manner that would neither challenge dogma nor raise any eyebrows. He spent nine months in New England repairing the damage the moderates thought he had caused. In the end he won over men like Edwards, who saw that Whitefield had truly repented for his earlier behavior, and now bowed to the wisdom and stature of men like himself.
Whitefield made further strides, engaging once more with former radicals like Davenport, who offered apologies for his conduct. More importantly, he met Gilbert Tennent and appeased him with a long-overdue denunciation of the Moravians and began rebuilding his friendship with him.
He soon discovered Gilbert was no longer the agitator he had once known. Instead, Gilbert issued sermons on topics like “The Necessity of Studying to Be Quiet and Doing Your Own Business,” in which he warned against “taking up evil reports against our brethren without sufficient evidence, and spreading of them with delight; both which are expressly forbidden by the Almighty.” Whitefield realized that Gilbert had become a cautious and prudent man in recent years and had begun trying to repair the damage he had caused to his church. And once he learned more about Gilbert’s struggles, he understood how much the revival fires had burned him.
THE SECOND REBIRTH OF GILBERT TENNENT
The frightening zenith, and spectacular collapse, of James Davenport affected Gilbert Tennent deeply. Not only did the Long Island minister defame the worthy aspects of the revival, he also brought disrepute on Gilbert directly. For Davenport’s methods were just an extreme version of Gilbert’s own. While he had vilified Davenport in the press as a monster whose various sins had led his “deluded votaries into the strangest absurdities in opinion, and most enormous evils in practice,” he also feared the line between his own rhetoric and Davenport’s was uncomfortably thin. He knew the consequences of his own actions had caught up to him and had trampled over his reputation.
In the summer of 1743, just after Davenport’s implosion, the congregants of the New Building in Philadelphia had asked permission for Gilbert to become their minister. The meetinghouse once built for Whitefield’s evangelizing had since become the center of revivalism in the city, but as yet had no regular pastor—and the Moravians had begun to preach there more frequently. To have a minister of Gilbert’s stature would be a spiritual and political coup for the Philadelphians, and would help counter the influence of the Moravians. It would also make him the only full-time revivalist pastor in town, though it would require the assent of Gilbert’s own New Brunswick Presbytery, which he had led for seventeen years.
Gilbert’s New Jersey flock readily agreed to let their preacher go. They had become used to his lengthy absences and high profile, but chafed under his pastoral care. What might work well in the pulpit—maligning his enemies with the wrath of God—did not help those who simply wanted spiritual advice, or blessings for a major life decision, or comfort in a time of crisis. Gilbert had outgrown his church, and its members had outgrown him. It was time to move on.
In late 1743, a wiser and warier Gilbert Tennent came to Philadelphia. As the leader of a parish of 140 souls, he continued to support the revival, but now took the role of a moderate cleric. He toned down his rhetoric, began preaching with notes, and even changed his attire, trading in his leather girdle and unkempt hair for a proper wig and robes. Emphasizing church doctrine became central to his ministry, and freewheeling evangelizing and judging others much less so. He had learned the hard way that merely firing people up into fits of terror was not enough to bring them closer to God. They had to understand their faith, to appreciate the rich theology and ideas of the Reformed Christian tradition, and to never assume they were any more righteous than their neighbors. For him, “experimental knowledge was not enough to create a steadfast faith,” which was the very opposite of what Whitefield had preached in 1740 and what Gilbert had championed during the height of the revival.
He had come quite a way from his early days preaching hellfire in log houses and frontier meetinghouses; and his style in the pulpit wasn’t the only thing that would change in Philadelphia. In a few years this son of Northern Ireland would hold formal services in an ornate, Anglican-style brick building with a steeple and glass chandeliers. The Second Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia would become one of most important in the colonies, its congregants among the wealthier and more influential in the city, and its minister a force for unity and reconciliation instead of mockery and damnation.
Still, peace and contentment would not find Gilbert any time soon. As he wrote upon departing New Brunswick, “I leave this place with no expectation of worldly comfort.” He continued to face battles with the Moravians, with the enemies in the Synod, even within his new church, which split into schism once he became the minister. The specter of figures like Andrew Croswell also continued to vex him and other revivalists, and Gilbert would forever have to answer for The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry and everything it had unleashed in the church and wider society. Even some of the successes of the revival he saw as ephemeral, and he noted how a number of converts “have lost their religious impressions and returned with the dog to his vomit, and some others have fallen into erroneous sentiments.”
He seemed to realize, too, that he had been both a champion and casualty of the forces he had released, and that his new ministry did not portend an improvement in his fortunes or make his sins any less onerous. As he wrote, “I am fully persuaded that change of place and outward circumstances is very often but a change of miseries, and little else is to be expected on this side of eternity.”
After several months in the colonies, and encounters with the likes of Gilbert Tennent and other repentant evangelists, George Whitefield had sufficiently ingratiated his listeners with his newfound moderation that some of the controversy that had attended his American tour began to subside. He even placated the Crown by offering his support for the upcoming military action against the French fort at Louisbourg (in Nova Scotia), in which an all-New England force of 3,600 soldiers and a thousand sailors would mount an attack against the stronghold that guarded the St. Lawrence River. The British government enlisted the aid of 450 preachers to stir up support among the public, and Whitefield proved to be one of the most eager to promote the expedition. He announced, “Christ leads! Never despair!”—which became an unofficial motto for the troops—and stood dockside in Boston exhorting mariners to fight as they entered their transports. Many of the soldiers faced mounting debts and desperate conditions, and Whitefield promised that war would bring them relief from their woes and glory in battle. His presence was an undoubted success in recruitment and helped bring spiritual sanction to a military campaign that was widely opposed by many New Englanders. It also won him much-needed favor from imperial authorities.
He had another opportunity to rally the troops the following year when British armies crushed the Jacobite rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie in Scotland. Although his role this time was to exhort victory from afar, Whitefield nonetheless made an impression on the colonists by summoning every bit of anti-Catholic invective he could muster. Recalling the fire-and-brimstone sermons of earlier years, this time the Itinerant warned against the wickedness of the Pope’s legions—instead of unconverted Protestant ministers.
In his Philadelphia sermon, Britain’s Mercies and Britain’s Duties, he announced that the Scottish uprising was a “horrid plot, first hatched in hell” by the enemies of the government, with threats of monks and friars swarming over the landscape like locusts, Bibles ripped from innocent hands and liberty of conscience denied with “bigoted zeal.” He described Catholicism as “a religion that turns plowshares into swords, and pruning hooks into spears, and makes it meritorious to shed Protestant blood,” and asked, if not for the military campaign, “How soon would that mother of harlots have made herself once more drunk with the blood of the saints[?]” While Whitefield would no longer deploy such hateful rhetoric against the enemies of the revival, he found it convenient to use it against the Church of Rome. In Calvinist America, this helped him to further rebuild his reputation and restore his standing with clerical and civic leaders.
Moreover, Whitefield was now a married man, and this gave him a certain esteem that he had lacked while still a bachelor priest. A few years before he had wed a woman named Elizabeth James, who was a decade older than him and had initially resisted being married to the Itinerant—indeed, the prospect even kept her from eating or sleeping for a time. She had no desire to be his helpmate in a union that would be largely free of intimacy and romance. Whitefield’s own words about her didn’t help, writing in a letter to Gilbert Tennent that he found her neither wealthy nor attractive, but she was at least “a true child of God [who] would not, I think, attempt to hinder me in his work for the world.”
Once he wore down her resistance and no better prospects seemed available for her, they married and he set her to work helping him manage his traveling ministry and, later, the Bethesda orphanage. He quickly became more interested in having her attend to his stateside affairs as a “ministry coordinator” than building a loving relationship, and often acted more as a work supervisor than a dutiful husband. On one occasion he was so intent on keeping her at Bethesda—despite her strong desire to return to England—that he sailed home without her, not even bothering to inform her of his departure. Such behavior bred frustration and anger in Elizabeth, but Whitefield seemed indifferent. Though he respected her faith in God, he often did not respect her, and would no more treat her as an equal than he would relieve her of her duties as his assistant. This made him all too typical for an orthodox preacher of the era. Unlike the radicals he had helped inspire, he remained callous and regressive in his views of women, and no one knew this better than Elizabeth.
In the autumn of 1745, the Whitefields headed south to South Carolina and Georgia, to inquire on the state of affairs at the orphanage. The revival had still not greatly affected the South, its residents either too wedded to Anglican ways or too uninterested to take part in the commotion that had upended the North. While a different movement, Separatist Baptism, was on the rise in the region, to Whitefield the South didn’t look much different from its earlier appearance. Most of the people were still unchurched in the true faith, and what allies he had were either scattered or had defamed themselves.
The most notorious example was his old friend, Hugh Bryan, who had taken a wild turn at the height of the revival and had rivaled James Davenport in ferocity. When Whitefield was in Britain, Bryan had led passionate meetings of slaves that had enflamed the fears of their masters and the colony’s racial hierarchy. The slave owners accused Bryan of ignoring the teaching of proper Christianity and instead inspiring their bondsmen with “a parcel of cant-phrases, trances, dreams, visions, and revelations,” which took a turn for the apocalyptic when he began behaving like a sibyl preaching the end of the world. As one observer wrote, “he came to working miracles and lived for several days in the woods barefooted and alone and with his pen and ink to write down his prophecies.” He foresaw the destruction of Charles Town for its wickedness, and promised that slaves would rise up from their bondage with sword and flames to avenge their captivity. Bryan was himself a slave owner, and the authorities realized how dangerous his threat was to the social order and tried to stop him before he caused another uprising like the Stono Rebellion.
But just as Bryan posed his greatest danger, he seemed to lose his mind. An “Angel of Light” ordered him to take a wooden rod and use it to “smite the waters of the river,” dividing it like the Red Sea, until he reached dry land on the other side and proved himself to be a miracle worker. Bryan duly followed the angel’s command, but instead of finding transcendence, he nearly drowned. His brother had to rescue him from the river current, and the incident turned Bryan from social rebel to public buffoon. His reputation destroyed, he lost his zeal for revival and—like so many others of his kind—apologized for his conduct, and “the dishonor I’ve done to God, as well as the disquiet which I may have occasioned to my country.” He turned his back on justice for enslaved people and returned to his comforts as a plantation owner. The authorities and much of the public chalked up his temporary madness to “the workings of Whitefieldism in its native tendency.”
When Whitefield came to Charles Town he had to answer for Hugh Bryan’s behavior. Again he spoke against radicalism and accepted Bryan’s apology, but still had to address lingering concerns that he cared too much for the welfare of slaves. Remembering his 1740 attacks on the vicious treatment Southern planters meted out to their captives, Whitefield’s critics branded him a potential troublemaker and waited to see what fresh outrages he might have in store. But he was too distracted by his own affairs to answer them.
Upon his arrival at Bethesda, Whitefield saw the perilous state of his orphanage’s finances, and it daunted him: “through the badness of the institution, and the trustees’ obstinacy in not altering it, my load of debt and care was greatly increased, and, at times, almost overwhelmed me.” He’d been soliciting funds for its improvement throughout his preaching tour, but couldn’t seem to silence his opposers, who claimed he had squandered money raised to support the orphans, or abused those orphans with excessive moral instruction, or had left the place filthy and abandoned and the children starving.
Whitefield defended himself in print from such charges, provided an accounting of the orphanage’s finances to Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, and gave Elizabeth a greater role in keeping track of the affairs of the institution. He also began to see the answer to the orphanage’s problems in the ownership of human beings. First privately, then increasingly in public, Whitefield agitated for the legalization of slavery in Georgia. He spoke in favor of both Christianizing enslaved people and keeping them in chains, and even advocated for using forced labor to support the finances of his institution. Less than eighteen months later, he claimed it was “impossible for [Georgia’s] inhabitants to subsist without the use of slaves. But God has put it into the hearts of my South Carolina friends, to contribute liberally toward purchasing, in this province, a plantation and slaves, which I propose to devote to the support of Bethesda.” And so this once-fiery critic of the slaveholders, and all their attendant cruelties and barbarism, now looked forward to becoming one himself. As he wrote, “one Negro has been given me. Some more I propose to purchase this week.”
Thus, on his third trip to America, Whitefield became something very different than the man who had left it blazing just a few years before. In that earlier visit, he had come as a whirlwind, inspiring passion in the New Birth and inciting a frenzy by his grand theatrics. He declaimed, he exhorted, he offended at will—and he left America reeling after spending only fifteen months there. But now, on his current visit, he would stay nearly four years, until 1748. The crowds would be smaller and less fervent, the issues more complicated, the politics harder to navigate. Whitefield had grown up and perhaps even outgrown his notoriety, to become an icon of orthodox Calvinism. No longer a threat to the Northern civil order or the Southern racial order or the British nation, he was now a bland and inoffensive supporter of Christ, a slaveholding preacher who no longer inspired ecstasy or fury or other dangerous emotions, but instead protected the colonial hierarchy and the primacy of the established churches . . . with one notable exception.
While Whitefield had cast himself as a champion of British arms, he remained no friend to the Church of England. In previous trips, he had condemned its priests as unregenerate and its idols like John Tillotson as villainous. He declared its leadership to be corrupt, and its practices suspect. He had defamed its commissaries and the church, in turn, had denigrated and ridiculed him. And he had twice been arrested for his actions by Alexander Garden, who, upon Whitefield’s latest trip to America, formally suspended him from the ministry, only to have the Itinerant disregard the edict and continue to preach however he liked.
Regardless of the Anglican clerics’ actions against Whitefield, he still brought the legitimacy of the church into question throughout the colonies—while strengthening the hands of its adversaries. Many churchmen recognized this, none more so than Boston commissary Timothy Cutler: “Whitefield has plagued us with a witness, especially his friends and followers, who are like to be battered to pieces by that battering ram they had provided against our Church here.” Although the SPG and Anglican ministers had made headway in converting dissenters while Whitefield was in Britain, they had no interest in seeing him undermine their progress now that he had returned to America.
Though Whitefield had been more benign in his recent orations, his very presence seemed to cause trouble. During his New England trip, a public debate broke out over the character of the Anglican church and the perils its missionaries presented to other churches. Inspired by Whitefield, dissenting preachers condemned the Church of England as a menace to the true worship of Christ; and one of them, Noah Hobart, created a firestorm in his Sermon Delivered at the Ordination of the Reverend Mr. Noah Welles, on the last day of the year in 1746. He questioned the primacy of the church and rejected the idea that Anglicanism was essential to the British state and defended dissent and disobedience against the church’s practices. He claimed any good Christian knew better than to follow its questionable theology instead of the “serious religion and practical godliness” of old-fashioned Calvinism.
Yet another pamphlet battle broke out between Congregationalists and Anglicans, this one without the involvement of Whitefield. Still, his presence was felt in the slashing rhetoric issued from both sides, in the accusations of corruption, and in the conspiratorial claims that ran rampant. Hobart saw the Anglican Church as little better than the Roman Catholic Church, for just as the latter “has made herself drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus,” Protestant faiths with similar ideas “are to be esteemed and detested as relics of Popery.” Opportunistic ministers took Whitefield’s calumnies against the Catholic faith and certain Anglican practices and blended them into one comprehensive slander, and Whitefield could no more control its spread than he could stop the revival that he had unleashed a half-decade before.
In their paranoid mindset, the warring sides now saw Whitefield’s legacy through opposing lenses—whether as a truth teller who had exposed the moral rot in the Church of England, as a subversive who had undermined the strength of that church, or as a clever rogue who had driven dissenters away from each other and gave Anglicans “a providential opportunity to divide and triumph.” In fact, the name of Whitefield could be invoked to make any kind of argument. He was both radical and conservative, divider and conciliator, demagogue and unifier, patriot and subversive, conformist and dissenter. The shadow of his reputation had long since escaped him, and he came to learn that the colonists didn’t exalt or condemn only one Whitefield, but many versions of him—and took vastly different lessons from whatever phantom they imagined him to be.
Without question, recent college graduate Jonathan Mayhew looked at Whitefield and saw a menace—a person who preached to “enlightened idiots” and made “inspiration, and the spirit of truth and wisdom, the vehicle of nonsense and contradiction.” To his father he wrote that Whitefield’s adherents were “chiefly of the more illiterate sort” who followed a rascal that delivered “as low, confused, puerile, conceited, ill-natured, enthusiastic a performance, as I ever heard.” This attitude marked a dramatic change, for just a few years before, Jonathan had been swept up in the evangelical fervor that had swept New England and had seen the workings of the Holy Spirit upon the hearts of sinners and found comfort in it. Since then, however, his views had become wary, even cynical, and his mentors had no small part in it.
His father, Experience Mayhew, for one, had proved to be a relentless critic of the New Birth. He saw ministers like Whitefield “under the power of Satanical delusions” and advised his son that preachers who offered such appeals to low emotions were opponents of God and threats to a reasonable, well-understood Christian faith. More importantly, Jonathan proved highly receptive to the arguments of Harvard’s president and tutors that Whitefield was “an uncharitable, censorious and slanderous man” and “a deluder of the people,” as they said in their official statement upon the Grand Itinerant’s return to New England.
Jonathan was eager to read many of the “Bad Books” Whitefield had condemned, including those of John Tillotson. From them he came to appreciate that the rigors of faith meant nothing without rationality. He learned how Christian ethics and morality could reflect a devout faith in God and enable earthly happiness, and he came to trust his own judgment about salvation and redemption. In turn he crafted an innovative ideology that rejected the ideas of the New Light radicals, the moderate revivalists, and even the Old Light Calvinists. None of them seemed to reflect the truth of God as Jonathan understood it, which in its universal power went beyond Congregationalism, Presbyterianism, or classical Puritanism. It was his own handcrafted philosophy, and he not only believed it, he began to state it publicly—to some controversy. But this was no great matter, for Jonathan reveled in controversy, and his life was marked by it, even before he left Harvard.
He broke college rules and was fined. He spoke his mind freely and raised provocative points. He kept a circle of friends that included Samuel Cooper, John Brown, and Gad Hitchcock, whose irreverent ideas made them seem like “a pack of young heretics.” And during his thesis, when Jonathan argued that faith and reason were compatible with Christianity, a questioner proposed that any religion that upheld an idea like original sin was not rational. He readily agreed.
His changing beliefs set him apart from his father, who continued to act as an Indian missionary and wrote books like Grace Defended, which offered his own view of Calvinism. Jonathan took his father’s writings to one of his Harvard professors, Edward Wigglesworth, and asked for his opinion. The professor pointed out the contradictions of Experience’s argument, and that the idea of free grace and divine election were actually in conflict. So Jonathan was forced to choose: either human free will provided the key to salvation, or God chose to save some people and doom others to hell. He chose the former idea and drifted further away from orthodoxy.
He graduated from Harvard with a master’s degree in divinity in the summer of 1747 in search of a pulpit to preach in. Not only did he wish to expound on his ideas before a congregation, he also needed a steady income to reduce some of his college debt load. A parish in Worcester invited him to partake in a preaching competition with one Thaddeus McCarty, a vigorous young man with a booming voice and a “black penetrating eye.” Over the course of a month, the two gave sermons to the parishioners who would ultimately decide the victor. In the end the revivalist beat him forty-four votes to two. This frustrated Jonathan and pushed him still farther away from evangelicalism and closer to a liberal pulpit in the city.
Although an isolated church in Cohasset pursued Jonathan as its minister, he was much more interested in an open position in West Boston. Here, at West Church, a growing population of affluent merchants and upstarts looked to find an open-minded minister as their leader—someone who rejected the fanaticism of the New Lights and could assure them of their salvation by their own good conduct on earth. They had just seen their beloved pastor William Hooper change faith to Anglicanism and become the pastor of Trinity Church, a troubling sign of the Church of England’s continuing advance in New England in the chaotic aftermath of the revival.
In replacing Hooper, Jonathan couldn’t have imagined a better opportunity: an urban pulpit, a wealthy congregation, and a competitive salary of 15 pounds per week, plus an allowance for rent and firewood. For the congregation, the choice was easy. After hearing him preach, they overwhelmingly chose Jonathan to be their minister. Then the trouble began.
Jonathan still had to be ordained. Typically, an ordination ceremony would confer the blessing of the area’s churches on a proposed minister. Various pastors received invitations, most of them accepted, and the ceremony proceeded with much solemnity, followed by feasting on delicacies and choice liquors. But the West Church congregation was aggrieved. Because their church had been the most opposed to the revival in Boston, their new minister had only been invited to preach in two of the nine other Congregational pulpits in town, which they saw as an affront. Therefore, the congregation only offered invitations to ministers of those two churches. These included such figures as Benjamin Colman and Thomas Foxcroft, both old allies of George Whitefield, and Charles Chauncy, a new friend of Jonathan’s.
This set the uninvited clerics astir. Such arrogance offended tradition and made Jonathan’s ordination suspect. Not only was the lack of proper respect regrettable, but the new minister’s ideas were so close to heterodoxy that they found it difficult to endorse his ministry at all. So none of the invited pastors chose to attend (Chauncy because he had to defer to senior authority in his church), and on the eve of the ceremony, it looked like Jonathan wouldn’t find enough ministers to confirm his appointment. The leaders of West Church then postponed the ceremony, sent out letters to a fresh crop of ministers throughout Massachusetts, ignoring the Boston pastors entirely.
Eleven liberal country pastors accepted, and Jonathan’s ordination proceeded smoothly. However, everyone now understood that West Church and its minister were at odds with most of the other pastors in town and had become outcasts. The Boston Evening Post accused establishment ministers of trying to undermine Jonathan before he even took the pulpit and blamed it on their secret New Light sympathies. In his sermon for Jonathan’s elevation, Ebenezer Gay understood this, and instead of offering friendship and unity to their rivals, he delivered a bracing call to arms: “Be valiant for the truth against all opposition from the lusts of men. . . . So that from the blood of the uncircumcised slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan turn not back empty!”
It was a fitting metaphor that recalled Reverend Edwards’s claim that God’s arrows would be drunk with the blood of sinners. But now, instead of God, Jonathan Mayhew would be firing them at men who preached such terrors.
Jonathan settled in quickly as minister of West Church. His parishioners appreciated that he spoke in a clear and forceful manner, and that he attended to his pastoral duties and gave lectures on critical issues. They saw him as “candid, sincere, diligent, amiable, publicity-conscious, supremely aware of his many powers and few limitations.” However, to his enemies in Boston, he could also be cruel and merciless. One writer who opposed him in print came away from a battle with Jonathan feeling like “Old Nick had thrown acid in his face.”
Most of the controversy Jonathan caused arose from his view of God. Ironically, his claim that the Divine Spirit was “a merciful and faithful creator, a compassionate parent, a gentle master” and a being who offered “immeasurable, immutable, universal and everlasting love” inspired some of the greatest venom in his foes. Calvinism had become so entrenched in the beliefs of New Englanders that any claim that God was not capricious and authoritarian could cause great upset, as did any doctrine that said people were not inherently wicked and destined to go to hell unless they were offered divine grace. Whether Old Lights or New Lights, most ministers in Boston still descended from Puritan stock, for whom the God of predestination and divine election and the covenant with his chosen people were matters of strict orthodoxy. But Jonathan—to an almost unprecedented degree—now claimed those things were untrue.
In his view, not only did such a theology have no basis in scripture, it was brutal and inhuman and could only drive Christians away from God, not toward him. By contrast, Jonathan’s theology was humane and rational. He emphasized good works as much as faith, and exalted morality, virtue, and ethical behavior. In previous years, churchmen like Samuel Hemphill and John Tillotson had been denounced for such ideas, but in 1747 Jonathan boldly took those notions and pushed them even further into heterodoxy—and closer to the natural religion of Ben Franklin. But instead of being pilloried for his ideas, he prospered by them and convinced many other Bostonians to follow his lead.
He described a new, modern God worthy of love and adoration, one well suited to local pride and self-determination, who had no desire to make believers shrink in fear from his awesome power. This deity cared little for the finer points of dogma or tallying who was converted and who wasn’t. He was infinite in his love and mercy and rose above the petty human squabbles that had lately defined America. Jonathan inspired his parishioners with these ideas and let them know that the good-hearted among them would be rewarded in the afterlife instead of punished. Because of this, he did not need to preach terrors to them or threaten them with damnation, as the evangelists did with such feral energy. Rather, his gospel was tolerant and accepting, and his God was kind and merciful to sinners—even if his own attitude toward his enemies was anything but.
In the face of opponents in his own Anglican church, George Whitefield once said, “the more I am opposed, the more joy I feel.” In the face of opponents in his own Congregational church, Jonathan Mayhew said, “I live very happily and contented without them.” Yet while Jonathan’s attitude recalled Whitefield’s, in many ways he was the braver figure, for while the Itinerant could always depart for the next meetinghouse or field to preach in, Jonathan had to live in the same town with his adversaries and face them constantly. In short order, once he began to preach, a slew of anonymous accusations in the local press questioned his doctrine, his unorthodox views, his contentious ordination, and his disreputable sermons. He and his ally Charles Chauncy responded in kind to their opponents, attacking them and the turbulent revival they had promoted.
Despite their differences, though, even the most ardent opposers of the revival and its most committed supporters had a bit more in common than they would admit. None of them seemed interested in returning to the more placid state of affairs that had characterized American churches in the 1730s; too much hostility had been exchanged, and too many emotions released for anyone to go back to the old days. Jonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncy and others had learned much from their foes: how to mount effective publicity campaigns and use controversy to their benefit; how to defame their rivals on the basis of thin evidence or imaginary conspiracies; how to develop a following in the countryside through handbills, pamphlets, public sermons, and other tools; and how to convey their message to other churches and, if necessary, in the streets.
Though much of the religious passion would subside, the conflicts in America would not end, and the energy of the combatants would only find new outlets. And with Jonathan in the pulpit of West Church, the antirevivalists would finally capture the power of the revival and turn it on its head. The great spiritual awakening may have led to schism among Christians and called into question firmly held beliefs about church and society. Yet in the end, the subversion of faith had an unexpected effect: the rise of what was once called heresy. The liberals, the rationalists, and even the unconverted now carried the force of God, and in Jonathan Mayhew they found their greatest champion.