Epilogue
Three hundred years after Whitefield’s birth, his legacy remains largely ambiguous. He has long stood in uneasy company with towering figures like Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley, a sort of third wheel among undisputed leaders of the evangelical awakening. A case might be made that Whitefield serves as an awkward accessory for the sake of completing a triune symmetry. Edwards was the indubitable intellectual leader of the early evangelicals and Wesley the sophisticated organizer who laid the groundwork for worldwide Methodism.1 Whitefield’s significance is harder to define. For some he was a belligerent preacher who peaked early and just as quickly faded away from the limelight, though not soon enough. For others he was a rousing performer the likes of whom the world has not seen since. For young evangelical preachers today, he is the embodiment of everything they aspire toward—converts and critics and all. While Edwards and Wesley enjoy security in the evangelical triumvirate for the foreseeable future, Whitefield’s place is more tenuous. He slips easily, perhaps too easily, into mention with extremist preachers of questionable repute such as Gilbert Tennent and James Davenport.2 In addition, there are other early evangelicals vying for attention, perhaps even edging Whitefield aside. Sarah Osborn, a revival leader in her own right who has recently been dubbed “A Protestant Saint,” deserves at least a place in the conversation.3 Even if she is unlikely to take the place of Whitefield, new scholarship may raise further questions about how, and to what extent, Whitefield fits into the larger history of evangelicalism.
The concern of this book, however, has not been so much to secure Whitefield’s legacy as to more fully understand the reciprocal influence between the person and his world. Its aim has been to bring clarity to a crowded interpretive field teeming with caricatures by turning once more to the context in which he lived. The iconic preacher may be a fascinating subject, but the world in which he lived proves even more so. Over the course of the eighteenth century, England’s population grew at a rate of 72 percent. In North America, that pace was even more brisk at 3 percent per year. Starting at 250,000 in 1700, the European population in the colonies had increased to 2,150,000 by 1770, the year Whitefield died.4 The traveling priest had an uncanny ability to locate himself at the center of action as the era of proto-industrialization witnessed soaring incomes with corresponding increases in trade, commerce, and communication. Growth can be measured not only in population and currency but also in physical distance. With the discovery of “the Bering Straits in 1728; Alaska and the Aleutian Islands in 1741; Tahiti, the Solomon Islands, and New Guinea in the late 1760s; Botany Bay in 1770; and Hawaii in 1778,” the known world was constantly expanding.5 It has been my contention that placing Whitefield and the grand scale of his ambitions in this context of starthng cultural change is essential to understanding what happened during the Great Awakening, its aftermath, and more broadly across the British Empire.
This effort to reinsert the religious Whitefield into his secular world faces formidable challenges. More to the point, assumptions underlying hagiography (the most common genre in studies about Whitefield) pose the greatest difficulties. With false confidence in the deceptive clarity of hindsight, the temptation is ever present to impose artificial boundaries between matters of religion, economics, and politics. In fact, the vexed historiography of eighteenth-century religious revivals, with its many divergent interpretations, is the result of compartmentalizing various spheres of life that were experienced in vital, synergistic tension by contemporaries. Historians have created a needless conundrum since, in the lived experience of eighteenth-century people, these realities were inseparable. Attempting to view the period as a whole allows for the recognition that as evangelicals preached, converted, traded goods, bought slaves, took up arms, built institutions, and prayed for revival, they were responding to a complex web of life ceaselessly emerging and intertwining in their transatlantic, imperial context.
Building on this perspective of life and society as a unified whole, my study of the Great Awakening has taken seriously the British Empire as its cultural setting. The grandiose spirit of an empire-building people not only provided a critical backdrop for the revivals but also supplied the very air in which they erupted. Imperial hubris also provided the long arc along which revival religion lost its way. Paying attention to empire leads to a wider perspective that may still locate the core impulse of the Great Awakening in spiritual concerns but recognizes that a host of nonreligious factors were also important. Consideration of the religious emphases at the center of the awakenings, therefore, should not detract from the broader contextual realities that also shaped the evangelical revivals. By approaching our study in this way, we have explored how acquisitive forces, both economic and political, embedded in imperial culture impacted the course of religious revivals. From the resulting long view, we have also come to appreciate the vital part that religious awakenings played in the larger process of British state formation. Evangelicals, as proponents of cultural as well as religious renewal, contributed to a principled rhetoric of empire. They accomplished this feat by participating in religious activities that depended upon state and commercial infrastructure stretching across the Atlantic world.
As a way to bring evangelical religion and the imperial dimension together, this study has focused on George Whitefield, the most famous preacher of the British Empire during the era of the Great Awakening. While students of history have assumed that we already know everything worth knowing about him, the foregoing chapters have been an effort to dispel that unwarranted conclusion. In point of fact, the imperial Whitefield reveals complex entanglements in the cultural streams of his lifetime. A subject of the British Empire, the celebrity preacher was as much a cultural and political emissary as he was a religious missionary. He so accommodated to the emerging transatlantic world that he also became one of its most creative entrepreneurs in the cultural marketplace, where his religious message competed with a wide array of other consumer goods. In the twilight of his life, he became more weary but also more enamored with institution building. Though he did not succeed in the effort, he concluded his life trying to establish a college that would continue to expound his evangelical message. In this movement from conventicle to college, Whitefield sought to make sense of his world by combining the forces of religion and empire in ways that were distinctly Protestant, maritime, commercial, and free. There is no assailing the familiar trope that he was an unstoppable preacher of heart religion. This view of the ubiquitous preacher is etched in our textbooks and rightly so. That he approached all of his life as a product of the empire, however, has the potential to change—or at least enrich—how we think and write about this religious figure. Along these lines, a new focus on his later years reminds us that more than the account of a great historical figure, what we have before us is the story of an ordinary human being. For we have learned that Whitefield the honey-tongued preacher was a person subject to the vagaries of economic and political fortunes, like most people then and now.
Sobriety about George Whitefield brings greater clarity to the imperial world he inhabited. It was not merely Matthew Tindal’s encroaching deism and William Hogarth’s prints of moral laxity that the evangelical revivals were meant to counteract.6 Whitefield lived in a bewilderingly expansive world that was only growing larger by the day, amid a “superheated atmosphere of geographical, scientific, and technological discovery.”7 And so it may be most fitting to conclude in the way we began, by picturing the young Whitefield in early Georgia and appreciating the extent to which he was reimagining his world. For some, it was the far edge of the world. For others with eyes to see, it was the future center of a new Protestant empire. To recall the central place that Georgia occupied on maps of the eighteenth century may be the best stimulus for trying, as this book has, to also view this extraordinary preacher as an ordinary Englishman who lived much of his life as an imperial itinerant, a presbyter at large who saw the world as his parish.
1. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards; David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
2. See for instance a recent study that juxtaposes Whitefield, Tennent, and Davenport as “newsmakers of the Awakening”: Smith, The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers.
3. Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World, 337–44.
4. Much of the information in this paragraph is drawn from David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 25–33.
5. Hancock, Citizens of the World, 31.
6. Hempton, The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century, 145–46.
7. Hancock, Citizens of the World, 32.