Introduction
INTRODUCTION
On October 12, 1740, in the fading light of a cool autumn evening, the twenty-five-year-old evangelist George Whitefield ascended a platform on Boston Common. Before him stood twenty thousand people. If the crowd estimates were reasonably accurate, this was the largest assembly ever gathered in the history of the American colonies. (Boston’s entire population was only seventeen thousand in 1740.) Whitefield had already seen crowds this massive—even larger—in the great city of London, but the teeming New England throngs, gathered in the region’s small fishing villages and provincial towns, amazed him.
Sometimes the pressing people frightened him, too. There were volcanic outbursts of emotion. He regularly had to cut his preaching short, unable to be heard over the cacophony of weeping and screeching. At the Common, Whitefield implored the people to put their faith in Jesus Christ, the kind of sincere faith their Puritan forefathers had embraced. It did not matter whether their parents were Christians. It did not matter whether they prayed and attended church and read their Bibles. Whitefield wanted to know whether they had experienced the “new birth” of conversion.
Concluding the sermon, his countenance falling, he told them that it was time for him to go; other audiences needed his gospel preaching, too. “Numbers, great numbers, melted into tears, when I talked of leaving them,” Whitefield wrote. He had begun to forge a special bond with the American colonists. “Boston people are dear to my soul,” he confessed.1
Reports about this wondrous boy preacher began to appear in the colonies’ newspapers in 1739. By 1740 he had become the most famous man in America. (In 1740 George Washington was eight years old, John Adams was four, Thomas Jefferson was not even born. Benjamin Franklin’s fame as a printer, which did not extend much beyond Philadelphia, was enhanced considerably by becoming Whitefield’s publisher.) Whitefield was probably the most famous man in Britain, too, or at least the most famous aside from King George II. From his humble beginnings in Gloucester, England, no one would have guessed that Whitefield’s celebrity would reach so far, so high, or so soon.
Three hundred years after his birth, George Whitefield is not entirely forgotten, but his fame now is far dimmer than it was on that fall evening in Boston. Today, Whitefield’s renown is surpassed by that of his friends, including Ben Franklin and Jonathan Edwards, the great pastor-theologian of Northampton, Massachusetts. Most U.S. history survey courses and textbooks still mention Whitefield, thanks to two major academic biographies, Harry Stout’s The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (1991) and Frank Lambert’s “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals (1994). These biographies, as well as a surge of recent studies of the Great Awakening, have established Whitefield as a fixture in the standard story of American history for the foreseeable future. Still, we know too little about him.
I do not come to this new biography of the great evangelist with a historical axe to grind. All the major Whitefield biographies, from confessional Christian approaches such as Luke Tyerman’s The Life of the Rev. George Whitefield (2 vols., 1877) and Arnold Dallimore’s George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival (2 vols., 1970, 1980), to Stout’s, Lambert’s, and Jerome Mahaffey’s more recent books, make essential contributions upon which I gratefully build. Readers familiar with my work know that I am both a university-based historian and an evangelical Christian, so perhaps I can help bridge the academic and Christian perspectives on Whitefield that have clashed in recent decades. (More on this clash later.)
I admire the work of Tyerman and Dallimore, especially because they were not professional historians, but ministers. They painstakingly pieced together comprehensive biographies through archival research, consulting original sources and manuscripts whenever possible. Dallimore, a small-town pastor in Ontario, worked for thirty years on his biography, facing poverty and complaints from his parishioners that he was wasting time. Dallimore ultimately resigned his pastorate in 1973 so he could devote himself full-time to the biography’s second volume. Tyerman and Dallimore appear constantly in scholars’ footnotes because they remain the two most detailed treatments of Whitefield’s own life and ministry.2
Of course, Tyerman and Dallimore did not provide the kind of context for Whitefield’s life that one would expect from academic historians. Stout, Lambert, Mahaffey, and others have helped us interpret Whitefield within the framework of eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Lambert examined Whitefield in light of the “consumer revolution” of the eighteenth century. As a “pedlar in divinity,” Whitefield mastered the use of publicity, newspapers, and inexpensive print to promote his preaching tours and the gospel he expounded. Stout, on a related theme, presented Whitefield as “Anglo-America’s first religious celebrity, the symbol for a dawning modern age.” Even though Whitefield denounced the theater after his conversion, his background as an actor, and familiarity with England’s theater culture, prepared him for a fabulously successful preaching career.3
In two recent books on Whitefield, the communications scholar Jerome Mahaffey has expanded on earlier proposals by Stout and the historian Alan Heimert by considering how Whitefield became an “Accidental Revolutionary,” the man most responsible for priming America for its Revolution. Whitefield was the “central figure” in the process by which disparate colonists became Americans, prone to think in zealous, adversarial terms about religion, rights, and liberties. Whitefield’s Awakening may not have caused the Revolution, Mahaffey argued, but it had a profound conditioning influence on Americans as the Revolution approached. Heimert memorably argued that whether “the enlightened sage of Monticello [Jefferson] knew it or not, he had inherited the mantle of George Whitefield.”4
Whitefield and commerce, Whitefield and religious celebrity, Whitefield and the Revolution: all these arguments have considerable merit, even if I have doubts about certain aspects of them. The main problem with these approaches, however, is that they do not really focus on Whitefield’s primary significance or on the way he viewed himself. The argument of this biography is straightforward: George Whitefield was the key figure in the first generation of Anglo-American evangelical Christianity. Whitefield and legions of other evangelical pastors and laypeople helped establish a new interdenominational religious movement in the eighteenth century, one committed to the gospel of conversion, the new birth, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the preaching of revival across Europe and America. Until now, we have not had a scholarly biography of Whitefield that places him fully in the dynamic, fractious milieu of the early evangelical movement. That is what I seek to do here.
Writing biographies, and writing religious biographies in particular, presents significant challenges. The temptation to write hagiography—the biography of a pristine saint—is ever present. In placing Whitefield within the new evangelical world, I am not offering an unsullied picture of a sanctified man, nor is my primary aim to edify readers spiritually. Yet historians today know that none of us is fully objective—personal perspectives matter. So let me admit it up front: I have a high regard for Whitefield. I identify personally with the religious movement he helped start. Yet I hope that I have also been fair to his critics and transparent about his obvious failings as a man and minister. Included in these failings were his besetting inability to maintain peace with evangelical colleagues, his appalling behavior in relationships with women, including his wife, and his advocacy of slavery and personal ownership of slaves.
In his 1747 autobiography, Whitefield addressed the difficulties of the genre. “In the accounts of good men which I have read,” he said, “I have observed that the writers of them have been partial. They have given us the bright, but not the dark side of their character. This, I think, proceeded from a kind of pious fraud, lest mentioning persons’ faults should encourage others in sin. It cannot, I am sure, proceed from the wisdom which cometh from above.” Although he might not appreciate how I have highlighted some less attractive aspects of his life, Whitefield and I are in full agreement about the danger of fashioning “pious frauds” of historical memory. This seems to be a special temptation for modern American evangelicals, one to which I hope I have not fallen prey.5
A couple of notes on my method of writing: I have silently modernized the spelling and punctuation of many quotations, although I occasionally leave them in their original renderings in order to give some flavor of the time. I have added the chapter and verse in brackets for many scripture references that Whitefield used in his journals and other writings. Without these, readers might miss some of the quotations as coming from the Bible. The references should help readers see how much the Bible framed Whitefield’s rhetoric; he not only spoke about the King James Bible, but also spoke its very language.
On dates: when Britain replaced the Julian calendar with the Gregorian, Parliament rectified the discrepancy between the two by decreeing that the day following September 2, 1752, would jump to September 14, 1752. Before that date, I use “Old Style” dates, and after, “New Style.” Unless one accounts for this, there are some puzzling date references, such as when Whitefield refers to his birthday as December 27 instead of December 16, which he began to do after the switch to New Style.6