Conclusion: “Jesus Christ Has Got Thee at Last”: George Whitefield's Legacy
CONCLUSION: “JESUS CHRIST HAS GOT THEE AT LAST”: GEORGE WHITEFIELD'S LEGACY
John Marrant, a free African American apprentice and musician, was living in Charleston when he first encountered George Whitefield, who was in the city on his final visit to America. Like many others, Marrant came to Whitefield’s meeting not as a religious seeker, but to see what was happening and perhaps to have some fun at the itinerant’s expense. “Passing by a large meeting house I saw many lights in it, and crowds of people going in,” Marrant recalled. A companion told him that “a crazy man was hallooing there.” His rascally friend said he would go in with him, but only on the condition that Marrant interrupt the meeting by blowing his French horn. “I liked the proposal well enough,” Marrant said, so they pushed through the doors into the crammed audience. Marrant was taking his horn off his shoulder just as Whitefield named his text. Looking directly at Marrant, the aged itinerant pointed at him and quoted Amos 4:12, “Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.” The Word came with such ferocious power that it knocked Marrant down, and he lay “speechless and senseless” for half an hour.1
When he came to, people were giving Marrant smelling salts and throwing water on his face. Whitefield continued preaching. “Every word I heard from the minister was like a parcel of swords thrust into me,” Marrant said. “I thought I saw the devil on every side of me. I was constrained in the bitterness of my spirit to halloo out in the midst of the congregation.” This disturbed other listeners, so people carried Marrant into the vestry, where Whitefield came to see him after the service. The itinerant said, “Jesus Christ has got thee at last.” Marrant soon broke through to conversion, becoming one of the most remarkable evangelical preachers of the era. Fifteen years after his encounter with Whitefield, Marrant received ordination at the Countess of Huntingdon’s Bath chapel, and then went to Nova Scotia to minister to African Americans there. Insufficient support from the countess forced him to leave Nova Scotia, however, and ultimately he returned to London, where he died in 1791, the same year that the countess did.2
Perhaps Marrant’s retrospective account is stylized, but there can be no doubt that Whitefield’s preaching remained powerful. His meetings, as Marrant suggested, still attracted standing-room-only crowds: at another sermon in Charleston, his supporters had to “hoist” Whitefield in at one of the church windows because he could not get in at the door. His novelty may have worn off for many who, unlike Marrant, had heard him preach before. His style had moderated, and his health had declined, but that singular preaching prowess remained.3
In 1769, Whitefield passed his fifty-fifth birthday in Savannah, whose merchant shippers and planters had achieved economic prosperity (which Whitefield had predicted) after Georgia embraced slavery. “The increase of this colony is almost incredible,” he exulted. Savannah’s trade in everything from deerskins to rice had vastly expanded in the past fifteen years. Whitefield’s old friend James Habersham frankly admitted, “I am loaded with business.” The town boasted a population of about 2,000 people, about 1,200 whites and 800 blacks.4
In January 1770, Whitefield hosted Savannah’s leading politicians and merchants for a service dedicating newly built wings of the orphanage, which he hoped would become the base of a new academy, even if not a college. In Oxford-like pomp, Whitefield wore his “university square cap” and processed with orphans, faculty members, and slaves to a reception with delicacies including “cold tongue, ham, tea, etc.” Whitefield preached for forty-five minutes on Zechariah 4:9–10, “The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house,” reflecting on thirty years of the orphanage’s history. Bethesda’s success was improbable, he mused, the isolated property standing in a “pine barren, and in a colony where the use of negroes was totally denied”—and widely expected: “All beholders looked daily for its decline and annihilation.” But now, by the blessing of God, the orphanage and academy stood on a strong foundation. “The whole auditory seemed to be deeply affected,” an observer wrote, “and his own heart seemed too big to speak, and unable to give itself proper vent.” Following lunch, guests exchanged toasts. When James Wright, the royal Georgia governor, toasted George III, Whitefield added, “Let all the people say, amen,” which elicited a hearty response across the room. By the eve of the Revolution, Whitefield had become America’s spiritual founding father, but Bethesda was no patriot hotbed.5
The number of orphans in residence remained small in 1770: fifteen boys and only one girl. By contrast, there were seventy-five slaves at Bethesda’s properties. Whitefield left extensive regulations for the white students, giving detailed guidance on their liturgical practices and topics of study. They were to translate the Thirty-Nine Articles into Latin, learn the history of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as of England and Georgia, and study evangelical standards such as Matthew Henry’s Bible commentary, Philip Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, and the works of John Bunyan and John Owen. The itinerant provided cash prizes to be given for the best student lectures delivered on occasions such as Christmas, Easter, Whitefield’s birthday, and November 5 (Guy Fawkes Day), when students would speak on “the Glorious Revolution, and the infinite mercy of God, in delivering Great Britain from Popish Tyranny and arbitrary power.” Black boys, he briefly noted, were “to be baptized and taught to read,” whereas black girls were “to be taught to work with the needle.”6
Whitefield left Savannah in April and sailed for Philadelphia, spending the late spring and summer preaching throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. He said he felt better than he had in years, exclaiming that “a new scene of usefulness is opening in various parts of this new world!” In August he went to Boston, a town still unsettled by the “massacre” of five civilians in March 1770. British redcoats had opened fire on a crowd that had been taunting the soldiers and pelting them with snowballs. The patriot leader John Adams would successfully defend the soldiers in court three months after Whitefield’s arrival. Shortly after the massacre, the British administration repealed most of the Townshend Duties, which had provoked this phase of colonial resistance. For about two years, the repeal defused much of Boston’s patriot agitation, but the crisis boiled over again in 1773 with the passage of the Tea Act and the subsequent Boston Tea Party. Although Whitefield had only cautiously displayed his favor for the patriots, he expressed great sympathy for the colonists to an English correspondent, “Poor New England is much to be pitied; Boston people most of all. How falsely misrepresented!”7
Those lines appeared in one of the last letters the itinerant wrote. He had spoken of his declining health and of death for most of his adult life, and in this letter, written a week before his passing, he again predicted that his “day of release” would shortly come. His condition in precipitous decline, he missed an engagement at the Old South Church in Boston on September 21, leaving the assembled thousands disappointed. Regardless, he set out north of Boston, going as far as York, Maine. Returning to Newburyport, Massachusetts, on September 29, he stayed at the home of his ally, the Reverend Jonathan Parsons. Feeling ill, Whitefield retired early, but woke in the middle of the night complaining of an asthma attack. He was still well enough to talk and pray about his travel plans, debating “whether he should winter at Boston, or hasten to the southward.”8
He slept a bit more, but then woke again with a tight chest, hardly able to catch his breath. Finally, he stopped breathing altogether, and despite the doctor’s attempts to revive him, Whitefield died at six o'clock in the morning on September 30. Although offers to bury him immediately came from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and from Boston’s Old South Church, Parsons quickly arranged for Whitefield’s interment in the vault of the Newburyport Presbyterian Church. (A delegation came from Boston to retrieve the body, but in a tense scene, “the people at Newbury-port would not allow the corpse to be brought away,” Boston newspapers reported.)9
Whitefield’s old friend Daniel Rogers of Ipswich, who had experienced salvation while traveling with Whitefield’s entourage almost exactly thirty years earlier, prayed at the funeral. He said that “he owed his conversion to the labors of that dear man of God, whose precious remains now lay before them.” Then Rogers began weeping and crying, “O my father, my father!” The congregation melted into tears.10
Word spread quickly through the colonies and Britain of the itinerant’s passing. Cornelius Winter, who had remained at Bethesda while Whitefield went north, wrote, “You have no conception of the effect of Mr. Whitefield’s death upon the inhabitants of the province of Georgia,” noting that “all the black cloth in the stores was bought” to drape the churches for mourning. The news reached London on Guy Fawkes Day, and Whitefield’s associates, acting on a previous agreement, asked John Wesley to give a funeral sermon at the Tottenham Court Road chapel. “An immense multitude” gathered there, Wesley wrote. “All were still as night.”11
Given the occasion, one might have expected Wesley to give an admiring sermon about Whitefield’s public ministry, and he did so, but Wesley also expressed gratitude for Whitefield as his friend. Indeed, Wesley identified Whitefield’s generous friendship as “the distinguishing part of his character.” Given the bitter lows their relationship had seen, this was a surprising and revealing assertion. Although Whitefield substantially contributed to his difficulties with the Wesleys, it is notable that he did not precipitate the first public split over Calvinism (John did), and that he remained committed to staying in contact with John and Charles over the years, even when misunderstandings kept buffeting their relationship. According to Methodist historian Gareth Lloyd, “the fact that their friendship managed to survive in the long term was due in large measure to Whitefield’s willingness to forgive and forget.” Wesley alluded to their past disagreements over “doctrines of a less essential nature,” but said that he and Whitefield finally agreed on fundamental doctrines, which he summed up as “the new birth, and justification by faith.” Whitefield’s life—and now his death—reminded Wesley that Christians united by those essential beliefs should love one another and promote the common cause of the gospel.12
Charles Wesley likewise penned an elegy to Whitefield, recalling their first meeting at Oxford and how he walked with Whitefield through the itinerant’s conversion ordeal until assurance of forgiveness came, by a work of the Holy Spirit.
In the last extreme of hopeless grief,
Jesus appear'd! and help'd his unbelief,
Infus'd the faith which did his sins remove,
Assur'd his heart of God’s forgiving love,
And fill'd with glorious joy, the joy of saints above.
Who but the souls that savingly believe,
The raptures of a faithful soul conceive?
The joy unspeakable, the love unknown,
The peace he felt is understood by none,
By none but those who know their sins forgiven
Thro’ God the Holy Ghost come down from heaven.13
Other remembrances came from all over Britain and America, and none was more striking than that of Phillis Wheatley, a slave girl owned by an evangelical family in Boston, whose first published poem, appearing within two weeks of the itinerant’s death, was an elegy to Whitefield (see figure 13.1). Wheatley would publicly criticize American slavery in a future editorial addressed to Samson Occom, but here she only praised Whitefield and his Savior.
Thou didst, in strains of eloquence refin'd,
Inflame the soul, and captivate the mind.
Unhappy we, the setting sun deplore!
Which once was splendid, but it shines no more.
Wheatley’s Whitefield was unquestionably an American patriot:
When his AMERICANS were burden'd sore,
When streets were crimson'd with their guiltless gore!
Unrival'd friendship in his breast now strove:
The fruit thereof was charity and love.
Whitefield’s Jesus succored both white and black Americans:
Ye thirsty, come to this life giving stream:
Ye preachers, take him for your joyful theme
Take him, “my dear Americans,” he said,
Be your complaints in his kind bosom laid:
Take him ye Africans, he longs for you;
Impartial Savior, is his title due;
If you will choose to walk in grace’s road,
You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God.
A variant edition put that last line more pointedly: “He'll make you free, and kings, and priests to God.” Wheatley’s poem became a runaway success as broadside and booklet editions were sold in five American cities and in London.14
Writing from London, Benjamin Franklin said of his departed friend, “I knew him intimately upwards of 30 years: his integrity, disinterestedness, and indefatigable zeal in prosecuting every good work, I have never seen equaled, I shall never see exceeded.” Whitefield worried about Franklin’s salvation to the end, reminding him in a 1768 letter that “you and I shall soon go out of [the world]—Ere long we shall see it burnt—Angels shall summon us to attend on the funeral of time—And (oh transporting thought!) we shall see eternity rising out of its ashes. That you and I may be in the happy number of those who in the midst of the tremendous final blaze shall cry Amen—Hallelujah—is [my] hearty prayer.”15
The work of remembering Whitefield began immediately, starting with the decision to bury him in Newburyport. The most significant publication immediately following Whitefield’s death was the six-volume Works of the Reverend George Whitefield, which the itinerant had prepared with the Reverend John Gillies of Glasgow, a longtime correspondent who had already begun systematically preserving the history of the revivals in the 1750s. The Works remains the most comprehensive collection of Whitefield’s letters, sermons, and tracts; no complete scholarly edition of Whitefield’s papers has yet appeared. Gillies meant for the documents to edify Christian readers rather than to establish a technically rigorous historical record. Unfortunately, he eliminated many names of letter writers and recipients, and he deleted phrases deemed embarrassing or of lesser interest. Many of the original manuscripts that Gillies worked from are now lost, so Whitefield scholars must largely rely on the Works in spite of its deficiencies. Accompanying Gillies’s volumes was his Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend George Whitefield, an admiring biography compiled from the Works and other manuscripts in his possession.16
Pictures and engravings of Whitefield had been popular since the 1740s, and they remained popular after his passing. A collection of wax figures in New York City (a sort of precursor to Madame Tussauds) contained a life-size likeness of Whitefield. The proprietor of the museum, Patience Wright, took the image to London for display after the revivalist’s death, along with statues of Benjamin Franklin and David Garrick. Wright’s sister, also a wax artist, created an image of Whitefield that she donated to Bethesda. The likeness was “said to be so striking, that it astonishes all who have seen it.”17
Just as there were visual representations of the itinerant, there were also postmortem political representations of him. Patriot leaders had begun casting Whitefield as an ally even before his death, even though Whitefield kept his sympathies for the colonists’ cause fairly quiet and consistently affirmed that his followers should remain loyal to the king. (To be fair, exceedingly few Americans publicly supported independence or rejected George III until Tom Paine’s Common Sense appeared in early 1776.) Still, publications such as Wheatley’s elegy portrayed Whitefield as an advocate for America. One newspaper poem lamented that his devotees were “left behind to mourn the heavy loss, / Both to ourselves, and all america— / No Whitefield now with tears to plead our cause!” Another elegy envisioned the “bright Goddess” Freedom holding vigil around his tomb while “patriot torrents swirled around it” and New Englanders wept for their lost champion.18
Pastor Nathaniel Whitaker of Salem, Massachusetts, who would become one of the most militant patriot pastors in America, similarly eulogized Whitefield as a “patriot, not in show, but reality, and an enemy to tyranny.” Whitefield opposed the imposition of an Anglican bishop in America and, more broadly, was “concerned for the liberties of America,” Whitaker asserted. Most dramatically, Whitaker claimed that “under God it was in no small measure owing to him [Whitefield], that the Stamp Act, that first attack upon our liberties in these colonies, was repealed.” Although Whitaker noted that Whitefield exerted influence on America’s behalf during that time, he did not explain precisely how. Whitaker’s testimony may indirectly corroborate Whitefield’s 1764 conversations with northern New England pastors about the “deep laid plot” against America’s liberties. It also suggests that Whitefield may have done more as an advocate for America than simply attending Franklin’s parliamentary testimony against the Stamp Act and privately applauding the act’s repeal. But exactly how much credit Whitefield deserved for opposing the Stamp Act remains a mystery.19
Perhaps these patriot claims on Whitefield were overstated, but they were hardly surprising. Whitefield was the best-known person to have traveled extensively in America. Overwhelmingly popular at his death, he had certainly left traces of his patriot sympathies after his turn toward politics, which began with the Louisbourg campaign and peaked during the Seven Years’ War. American devotees may have simply assumed that Whitefield had strong patriot credentials: he was America’s champion, and spiritual and temporal liberty were deeply connected. Upon the itinerant’s death, the little-known poet Jane Dunlap produced a pamphlet of verses on Whitefield’s sermons. (Among those she referenced was “Thy Maker is Thy Husband,” which she held more dear because she had become a widow in the years since first hearing that sermon.) Dunlap’s verses contained little overtly political content, mostly focusing on the itinerant’s spiritual themes and the new birth: “Conversion’s not an easy thing, / Though some may think it so; / From sovereign grace along it springs, / When God does it bestow,” she wrote. Yet on the pamphlet’s title page, below a drawing of Whitefield preaching above his casket, the publisher described Dunlap as a “Daughter of Liberty and Lover of Truth.” No further political commentary was needed; poetry on Whitefield’ sermons was appropriate for a true Daughter of Liberty.20
The most remarkable instance of Americans claiming Whitefield as a patriot came five years after the itinerant’s death as Continental Army forces, led by the future turncoat Benedict Arnold, proceeded north on an expedition against Quebec in September 1775. They stopped at Newburyport on the Sabbath. After a sermon by their chaplain, Samuel Spring, Arnold and some of his officers went into the crypt and opened Whitefield’s tomb. They found that the body had almost disintegrated (others who visited later reported that the body was almost perfectly preserved, however). The clothes remained, including his clerical collar and wristbands. These they took, cut into small pieces, and distributed among the men. The relics notwithstanding, the Quebec campaign went badly; perhaps this gave Spring and others pause about their “un-Protestant” act at the tomb.21
For evangelicals—and especially for Methodists—Whitefield’s grave became a place of pilgrimage for thousands of admirers in the centuries after his death. The prominent Methodist itinerant Jesse Lee visited the tomb in 1790, and like Benedict Arnold, Lee opened the coffin, offering a clinical account of the body’s condition: “They discovered his ears, hair, and a part of his nose had fallen off. His face was nearly in the common shape, though much contracted, and appeared quite destitute of moisture, and very hard. His teeth were white, and fast in their sockets. His breast bone had parted, and his bowels disrobed. His wig and clothes, in which he was buried, still remained; and were quite hard to tear. His flesh was black; and, as might be supposed, destitute of comeliness.” Lee took “a small relic of the gown in which he was buried; and prayed that he might be endued with the same zeal which once inspired the breast of its wearer.” Principled Protestants did not believe that spiritual power inhered in relics, yet just to be near the body, to gaze upon it, and perhaps to take a bit of the clothing inspired visitors like Lee. It gave them hope of acquiring some of Whitefield’s passion and spirit.22
A surprising number of visitors to the tomb handled the remains of Whitefield’s body, and, Hamlet-like, mused upon the itinerant’s skull. A few, like Arnold’s officers and Lee, went further and took bits of his clothing. Some even took pieces of the skeleton. In 1829, an English visitor bribed the sexton’s son and stole Whitefield’s right arm bone, mailing it to England. (The episode subsequently “caused the remains to be guarded with the strictest vigilance.”) But in 1849, a guilty English correspondent, having come into possession of the bone, mailed it back to the Presbyterian pastor at Newburyport, who put Whitefield’s arm back where it belonged. By the 1920s, Harvard Medical School had come into possession of a bone that was supposedly one of Whitefield’s ribs. Similarly, in the Methodist Archives at Drew University there is a finger bone that may be Whitefield’s, but no one seems to know how it came into the donor’s possession. In 1933, the Newburyport church covered the tomb with slate tiles, making it much more difficult to purloin relics. Pilgrims today continue to visit the tomb by the hundreds every year. More visitors come now than a half century ago, longtime Newburyport church members say.23
Whitefield’s death also produced religious collectibles and popular art, such as coins minted to commemorate him. Most depicted Whitefield in his wig and clerical gown on the front, but they had a variety of inscriptions and images on the back, including one with a cherub sitting next to a skull on top of an urn. Another was inscribed to the memory of Whitefield, “Who, with unreluctant grandeur, gave, not yielded up, his soul sublime, at Newbury P., N. America S. 30 1770, in the 56 year of his age, his conduct is a legacy for all.” Another from London recalled Wesley’s funeral sermon, and the text of that sermon from the Book of Numbers (see figure 13.2).24
Some continued to produce portraits and busts of Whitefield for sale well into the nineteenth century. One artist advertised to the “nobility, gentry, and others” in 1774 that he produced miniature portraits for bracelets, and particularly noted that “a fine miniature of the late Rev. Mr. Whitefield [is] to be disposed of.” The prominent Staffordshire potter and Methodist Enoch Wood produced many busts of both John Wesley and George Whitefield in the first half of the nineteenth century. These busts’ frequent presence in American and British art collections and at auctions testifies to their popularity (see figure 13.3).25
Whitefield’s memory was a fixture of nineteenth-century evangelical culture, but journalistic and literary voices increasingly regarded him as an intellectually lackluster figure. An 1877 article from the London Quarterly Review, which the New York Times reprinted, asked “what was the secret of Whitefield’s success?” The publication of the two-volume Whitefield biography by the English Methodist minister Luke Tyerman prompted the question. The review offered no definitive key to Whitefield’s achievements, aside from his obvious preaching talent. Regarding Whitefield’s publications, the writer sniffed, “We must agree with the opinion pretty generally passed on them by critics, and endorsed by the oblivion into which they have sunk, that they add nothing to the reputation of their author.” Some thought that it would have been better if these publications had not survived, but in that case, the reviewer reckoned that Whitefield’s devotees would have credited him with a “majestic intellect” that he clearly had not possessed.26
Even within evangelical and Methodist circles, Whitefield had fallen into relative obscurity by the time of his two-hundredth birthday, in 1914, just after the start of World War I. In London, a celebration of his birth held on Kennington Common saw only “small” attendance because of bad weather. One pastor recalled Whitefield’s “magical power of speech” and David Garrick’s story of Whitefield’s command of the word “Mesopotamia.” Others commended Whitefield’s flexibility and open-air preaching. One noted that “with war in the air, people were thinking more deeply of spiritual things than in more peaceful times,” and that like Whitefield, pastors should seize the opportunity. In America, the bicentennial generated relatively little comment. The El Paso Herald printed an editorial on the occasion, focusing on Whitefield’s eloquence. “His sermons when printed out are meager and scanty. It was the man and his belief, soaring away into the infinite, that lifted people out of themselves,” the writer noted.27
Although evidence is fleeting, a number of churches must have mentioned Whitefield’s birthday during Sunday services on December 13, 1914. America’s Federal Council of Churches recommended that member churches do so on that day. The pastor of Washington D.C.’s New York Avenue Presbyterian Church devoted his Sunday sermon to the evangelist, although the newspaper notice spelled his name “Whitfield” and explained that it was the “second anniversary” of his death. In Lordsburg, New Mexico, W. S. Huggett, the “Preacher in Charge” at the Lordsburg Methodist Church, put an ad in the paper for a Sunday-evening sermon titled “Bicentenary of George Whitfield [sic]: The Greatest Preacher of the Eighteenth Century.” The Kingston Gleaner of Jamaica noted that Kingston’s East Queen Street Baptist Church would observe the Whitefield bicentennial. East Queen Street was a congregation whose ministry dated back to the 1780s and the preaching of George Liele, a freed slave who had started a Baptist congregation in Savannah too five years after Whitefield’s death.28
Perhaps the most enduring commemoration of the Whitefield bicentennial came at Franklin’s University of Pennsylvania, where in 1914 the provost addressed students about the largely forgotten evangelist. Conversations began about erecting a statue to Whitefield, to complement the recently unveiled “Young Franklin” statue on campus. When Penn dedicated the Whitefield statue five years later, the provost gave special thanks to Penn’s Methodist alumni and donors “for this reminder of the one who never failed to tell Dr. Franklin that his educational plan wanted aliquid Christi to make it as useful as was desirable.” A choir performed a hymn titled “For Famous Men,” which includes the lines: “For Whitefield, burning flame of God, / With golden tongue and vision clear, / Whose tender heart and charity / Inspired our first beginnings here.” The statue remains a central feature on Penn’s campus, though one wonders what current students might know about Franklin’s preacher friend. A 2013 Penn Current article about the statue explained that “as Methodism was beginning, [Whitefield] held revivals in Philadelphia to introduce the Protestant denomination to America.”29
In 1938, the two-hundredth anniversary of Whitefield’s first arrival in America got more media attention than the bicentenary of his birth, primarily because of a remarkable joint commemoration by Princeton president Harold Dodds and former British prime minister David Lloyd George. Lloyd George had long cited Whitefield and Wesley as exemplars of the deep historical ties between Britain and America, ties that morally obligated America to assist Britain in times of need. In October 1922, Lloyd George had spoken at the Moorfields Tabernacle, commending Whitefield as “the greatest popular orator produced by the English race.” No man did more for Anglo-American relations than Whitefield, claimed Lloyd George, and because of Whitefield, Wesley, and the Puritan fathers, “the moral training of America . . . is identical with ours.” Lloyd George acknowledged Britain’s heavy debt to America because of World War I, but those millions of dollars were “nothing to the debt which America owes” Britain, he told a cheering audience. In his view, the ledger showed the two parties even: “I should like to write the balance sheet: Debit, one thousand millions; credit, John Wesley and George Whitefield.” Unlike patriot advocates of the eighteenth century, the former prime minister employed Whitefield in the cause of Anglo-American unity, remarkably claiming that “Whitefield and Wesley brought America into” World War I: “Their preaching moved America to come to our aid.” He thought their moral legacy would bring the United States into the League of Nations too. Sixteen years later, Lloyd George and Dodds, hoping to rekindle Anglo-American unity in the face of a renewed German threat, held a joint broadcast. Dodds lauded Whitefield’s commitment to Christianity and education, as illustrated by his early assistance to Princeton. These values would help defeat the greatest “heresies of the day,” Dodds proclaimed, including communism and Nazism, or “the gospel that economic materialism dictates man’s highest aspirations, and the pagan religion which commands us to worship the might and blood of the race.”30
The most common way to capture the memory of someone like Whitefield, of course, is through writing history and biography. The scholarly and Christian pastoral study of Whitefield did not starkly diverge until the 1970s, with the publication of Arnold Dallimore’s thoroughly researched and openly Christian biography. Academics who mentioned it at all (outside footnote references) tended to dismiss Dallimore’s work. The Yale historian Jon Butler, writing before the release of his colleague Harry Stout’s 1991 biography, said that a new treatment of Whitefield was needed and that Dallimore’s was not it. The book was “thoroughly out of touch with modern scholarship and very much too long,” according to Butler. In his biography, Stout spoke of Tyerman and Dallimore as “filiopietistic biographers” who portrayed Whitefield as a “timeless man,” but he nonetheless commended their works as “indispensable” resources for research on the itinerant. Dallimore, for his part, excoriated Stout’s biography as “false” and “painfully garbled.” The prominent evangelical pastor John Piper similarly described Stout’s book as “the most sustained piece of historical cynicism I have ever read.”31
The tension between academic and confessional Christian approaches to Whitefield reflected some reawakening of interest in the itinerant, especially in Christian and conservative political circles. As of this writing, there are seven Twitter accounts representing Whitefield (not all actively tweeting, however). Jonathan Edwards has twelve. Two Facebook “Public Figure” accounts represent Whitefield, with thousands of followers each. As some readers may recall, I appeared, along with the Whitefield scholar Jerome Mahaffey, on an hour-long episode of Glenn Beck’s Fox News television program in 2010 to discuss Whitefield, as part of Beck’s “Founders’ Friday” series. These cultural indicators all seem to point to an interest in Whitefield, tied to Americans’ broader fascination with their national founding era and with American religious history and its political implications.32
With all these efforts to frame his image and legacy over the centuries since Whitefield’s birth, what are we to make of him now? What was his significance? First, Whitefield was the most influential Anglo-American evangelical leader of the eighteenth century. His colleague and frequent rival John Wesley left a greater organizational legacy, and his ally Jonathan Edwards made a more significant theological contribution. But Whitefield was the key figure in the first generation of evangelical Christianity; of the three, he linked, by far, the most pastors and leaders through his relentless travels, preaching, publishing, and letter-writing networks. Without him, Anglo-American evangelicalism would have hardly represented a coherent movement. From his first remarkable meetings at Moorfields to his last tour of the colonies, he saw and met more people in Britain, Ireland, and America than any other person of the era. His labors, above any other factor, virtually invented a sense of common transatlantic evangelical identity.
He also indelibly marked the character of evangelical Christianity, even through the present day. Whitefield pioneered evangelicals’ masterful use of media, the premium they place on preaching, and their devotion to the Bible and doctrine. He revolutionized the use of print media to promote his ministry and eagerly enlisted partners such as Benjamin Franklin in the effort. Some might think that because Whitefield cleverly used media, he was insincere about his message, but just the opposite was true. To him, the gospel message was so critically important that he felt compelled to use all earthly means to get the word out.
Likewise, Whitefield was the first internationally famous itinerant preacher and the first modern transatlantic celebrity of any kind. With apologies to the Beatles, George Whitefield was the first “British sensation.” But again, his celebrity need not suggest vacuity or shallowness. His mastery of media combined with an innate rhetorical genius to make him a remarkably recognized figure. Sometimes people become famous because they are extremely good at what they do.33
Indeed, Whitefield’s reputation for shallowness has been exaggerated for a long time, beginning with critics in his own lifetime and continuing with what became the conventional view of critics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many have commented that there was a substantial gap between his ostensibly dull, confused printed works—which one biographer called a “mingle-mangle”—and the evident power of his sermons as delivered. To the contrary, Whitefield’s sermons and other writings generally reflected the fruit of his Oxford education and comprehensive knowledge of the King James Bible. He knew scripture so well that he often reflexively spoke in its idioms. His sermons also routinely alluded to ancient Greek and Roman history as well as to the history of the church, both Catholic and Protestant, and a wide range of Christian authors. He did not match the soaring brilliance of Jonathan Edwards, and has many companions in failing to do so. But Whitefield was not shallow, even for his time. Instead, he was a learned and theologically precise gospel preacher.34
Part of the evidence for his theological substance was the fact that he held closely to his doctrinal convictions throughout his career, often to the point of provoking schism. Denominational boundaries mattered little to him, but he marked out well-defined convictions on key points of Protestant theology. In particular, as a principled Calvinist, he had robust, practical theologies of conversion, the Lord’s Supper, and the Holy Spirit’s role in the believer’s and the church’s life. If he had not had strong views on these subjects, he could have saved himself the time and emotional energy spent on repeated fallouts with the Wesleys, Moravians, Anglican adversaries, Scottish seceders, and others. But he felt that he was defending the best of the Reformed theological tradition in taking his positions, so he would accept doctrinal conflict if necessary.
More problematically, Whitefield contributed to evangelical Christians’ troubling record on race relations and ethnic inequality. Whitefield was one of the earliest Anglo-Americans to make serious efforts to reach African Americans like John Marrant with the gospel, yet he did not see all that his gospel required of him in the temporal realm, especially with regard to slavery. (In this failure, one could compare Whitefield to America’s other Founders—Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and others—who preached liberty and human equality but did not liberate their own slaves.) Whitefield not only agitated for the introduction of slavery, but also permitted the presence of slaves at Bethesda before they were legal. He did not even liberate Bethesda’s slaves at his death. Instead, he deeded the “buildings, lands, Negroes, books, furniture,” and all other possessions there to the Countess of Huntingdon, who, following Whitefield’s intentions, increased the number of slaves at the orphanage, even acquiring one “woman-slave” they named Selina. The orphanage would continue to struggle—the expanded building was struck by lightning and burned in 1773. Georgia officials, convinced that the countess and her successors could not manage the property from afar, took custody of Bethesda not long after the countess died.35
Whitefield was criticized for many things during his lifetime, but slavery was not prominent among them. Perhaps if he had lived a generation later, or had come under more public attacks, he might have scrutinized his use of slave labor more closely. During his career, white antislavery sentiment was rare, and organized activism against the institution was even rarer. The American Revolution was the engine that produced widespread—even if still regionally limited and disorganized—white hostility toward slavery. In America, many black and white evangelicals appropriated the rhetoric of universal liberty to criticize slavery. In England, many (including John Wesley) highlighted the colonists’ hypocrisy in agitating for liberty even as they denied the most fundamental rights to their slaves. Whitefield died just before these new indictments of slave owning began to emerge.36
In early 1770, a Boston newspaper editorial did revile Whitefield for owning slaves, but it was one of the first such attacks he ever received, and it heralded the beginnings of more active American antislavery agitation. The writer rued how Whitefield intended to buy more slaves in order to build Bethesda and the prospective college there. “As the slave trade is evidently founded on murder and manstealing; this is only doing evil that good may come of it,” the essayist declared. “Can we think the blessing of God will follow this college, if it must owe its existence to a trade that is accursed?” Memory of this piece lingered in 1832 when William Lloyd Garrison’s radical abolitionist newspaper the Liberator quoted it with regret. (Garrison was born in Newburyport, yards away from Whitefield’s tomb.) “Our surprise is great that he who thus eloquently denounced the system of slavery in 1740, should so far lose sight of the principles of justice in 1770 as to advocate a speculation in the bodies of the blacks for the benefit of a literary institution,” the Liberator lamented.37
Whitefield also typified the evangelical blending of politics, war, and religion, especially during the Louisbourg expedition and Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, and the Seven Years’ War. This move toward politics was a stark departure from Whitefield’s exclusive message of the new birth, which had guided his preaching in the late 1730s and early 1740s. The politics of British Protestantism and anti-Catholicism offered a point of unity for Whitefield and many potential critics once the furor aroused by the early revivals had subsided. Whitefield also sincerely believed that Catholic imperial power represented a dire threat to the religious and political liberty upon which his preaching depended.
Although he showed signs of privately supporting the early patriot movement, it is difficult to say how Whitefield would have handled America’s independence. One imagines that while he sympathized with the colonists’ grievances, he would have worried about the consequences of losing a large piece of the British Empire. Whatever the case, Whitefield knew that there was a risk that focusing on politics and war could displace or corrupt the gospel witness—a danger that evangelicals continue to grapple with today.
On a stormy spring night in April 1786, the Reverend Samson Occom dreamed about his deceased friend, George Whitefield. “I thought he was preaching as he used to, when he was alive,” Occom wrote. “I thought he was preaching at a certain place where there was a great number of Indians and some White People.” Whitefield came to him and clasped his right hand. “He put his face to my face, and rubbed his face to mine and said ‘I am glad that you preach the excellency of Jesus Christ yet.”’ He exhorted Occom to go on in strength, and prayed, “The Lord be with thee, we shall now soon done.” Whitefield was now done, but his memory, and the movement he inspired, lived on in Britain and America and even in the dreams of those who looked to him as a spiritual father. A man of his time, Whitefield had serious faults, which contemporaries pointed out and which are even easier to see from the vantage of three centuries. And yet he was a gospel minister of substantial integrity, spiritual sincerity, phenomenal ability, and indefatigable energy. Whitefield was the first great preacher in a modern evangelical movement that has seen many. Perhaps he was the greatest evangelical preacher the world has ever seen.38