Introduction
The longing for revival has long marked evangelicalism, a movement forged in the fires of the Great Awakening. While fragments of the story of its dramatic origins abound, a great deal about the long trajectory of evangelical revivals remains obscure. Historians have generally acknowledged that a movement of Protestant renewal erupted across the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.1 Eyewitness accounts corroborate the claim that a period of sustained religious fervor turned the British Empire upside down.2 But then the narrative turns murky and historical consensus proves evasive beyond the basic story: after a period of heightened religious activity during the early 1740s, the revivals fizzled out or ebbed only to flow again later.3 Step past this limited area of agreement and divergent narratives abound. The chorus of confusion around interpretations of the Great Awakening ranges from its dismissal as historical fiction to its revision into socioeconomic protest to the valorization of its leading figures as saints and heroes.4 Put one way, we do not have the whole picture of the Great Awakening due to a woeful lack of attention to the aftermath of revival. Despite the profusion of studies on the beginning and middle years of the awakenings, there have been few corresponding efforts to examine its later stages.5 It is a question few think to ask, but one which opens up a crucial avenue of inquiry, a strategy for understanding the whole by careful examination of all its parts: what happened after revival?
My book pursues this question in the form of a character study as I argue that a view of empire shaped the Awakening in its early phases and absorbed the revivals in their later stages. By examining the beginning, middle, and especially the later years of George Whitefield’s itinerant life, this study reconceptualizes the Great Awakening in its relationship to a fast-growing British Empire. Viewing the whole of Whitefield’s public career, and not only the early stage of revival success, reminds us that he lived and ministered in the context of an expansive imperial culture. As a culturally embedded religious message, his revival agenda could not resist imbibing the values of British state formation in the middle of the eighteenth century. The relationship between George Whitefield’s religious and imperial agendas represents the central focus of this study.
Though best known as the Grand Itinerant who traveled far and wide proclaiming a religion of new birth, Whitefield was more than a famous revival preacher. He was an agent of British culture who used his potent mix of political savvy and theological creativity to champion the cause of imperial expansion. This book seeks to show that the significance of George Whitefield’s evangelistic ministry lies not only with his traditional reputation as the single most important preacher of the eighteenth-century Protestant awakenings. More specifically, his life from 1714 to 1770 offers a case study in the transition that occurred over the course of the eighteenth century from centripetal British expansionism to an increasingly diffuse culture. That this dynamic movement in the culture of empire coincided with the rise and decline of revival serves to highlight the essential relationship between evangelicalism and imperialism.
When Whitefield set foot in America for the first time in 1738, both religion and politics were unsettled in the colonies. Religious life was in disarray because of the great variety in colonial religious successes and failures. The political direction of the colonies was subject to forces that were pulling the colonies closer to the mother country but were also setting up the path to revolution. Over the course of the next thirty-three years, Whitefield became a dominant fixture on this shifting American landscape, making a total of seven trips to the colonies, preaching over twenty thousand sermons, befriending social elites and government officials, and winning the hearts of commoners everywhere. Declaring the world to be his parish, moreover, he journeyed fourteen times to Scotland, three times to Ireland, with stopovers in places as far afield as Holland, Portugal, and Bermuda. By the middle of the eighteenth century, he had become a household name on both sides of the ocean and one of the first international celebrities, recognized not only by evangelical peers but by admirers as diverse as Benjamin Franklin and David Hume. His outsized personality left an indelible imprint on his world. Though Whitefield stepped onto a troubled and crumbling stage in the mid 1730s, by the time of his death in 1770, a new world was emerging, one he had contributed much to remaking.6 In short, to understand the British Atlantic world of the eighteenth century, it is necessary to contend with the profound cultural force that was George Whitefield.
And contend we must, for the Grand Itinerant was as enigmatic as he was ubiquitous. Whitefield possessed a chameleon-like adaptability resulting in an elusive and evolving ecclesiastical identity with empire-wide influence. He was at once an establishment priest in England, a radical itinerant in America, and a moderate Calvinist in Scotland. By day he preached to tens of thousands in large open fields and when the sun went down he gave evening lectures in the parlor rooms of London’s gentry. If a study of Whitefield must work out the complex puzzles presented by his peripatetic life, there is also the prospect of rich insights to be gleaned from a globetrotting celebrity who held the attention of British subjects everywhere captive. In fact, his ability to constantly reinvent himself had roots in his theological convictions about the new birth but also bore social and political implications for reimagining British imperial as well as American colonial identity.
This gift for refashioning himself can shed light on the overall trajectory of his life in the evolving context of imperial state formation throughout the eighteenth century. In the beginning of his American career, Whitefield was a British tourist and emissary who soon learned the limits of revivalistic, evangelical religion in a rapidly expanding British Atlantic world. Interpreting the Great Awakening as a social and political event, and not merely a religious one, this study will follow the long trajectory of the Grand Itinerant’s life beyond the height of revival in order to trace the turn from a process of Anglicization to Americanization in the eighteenth century.7 Whitefield started his ministry as a proponent of the virtues he believed British Protestantism had to offer colonists in their setthng of North America. Toward that end, he relished his role as an exporter of English metropolitan culture. By the end of his career, however, his political activism went beyond his earlier religious dissent. He became an ardent advocate for America and embraced the merits of provincial culture and activism in the context of an expanding empire.
Because the religious and imperial dimensions of Whitefield’s Atlantic itinerancy illuminate each other, recognizing his religious innovations is as important as understanding his geo-political context. As Whitefield charged into the public sphere, reluctantly at first but more enthusiastically with time, his orientation bore a distinct neo-Puritan stamp. Historians have noted the paradoxical tension inherent in a Puritan worldview that is torn between impulses toward both engagement and alientation—on the one hand grasping the world by its horns and on the other hand seeking to get as far away from its polluting influences as possible.8 Whitefield’s mediation of this tension, based on his updating of Puritan theology for a changing world, represents an essential development of the eighteenth century. Although Whitefield “unleashed the sectarian impulse” in Puritanism, it is also true that, later in life, he tried to contain that very impulse. And so Whitefield continued the “long argument” of the seventeenth century by attempting to find a middle way within the Puritan solution for being in but not of the world.9
Although Whitefield represents continuity with the Puritans, his innovations provoked ruptures as well. It is a mistake to think that he merely course-corrected Anglican deviations and tilted the church back toward bedrock Reformation values. In fact, Whitefield might have had more in common with Anne Hutchinson than John Winthrop. His theology of regeneration, moreover, which undergirded his preaching of the new birth, benefited from the received wisdom of Lockean principles of government and the changed dynamics of the British world after the Revolution of 1688. In other words, Whitefield’s theology represented not merely a repackaging of Puritan content but emerged from the crucible of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophy. His contribution to this debate consisted of much more than simplification, or doctrine “newly condensed in content and tricked out in images unusual in sermons,” as one historian put it.10 Whitefield represented the vanguard of transition from Puritan to evangelical religion in a time of numerous other British cultural transformations.
In a period so characterized by upheaval, the Great Awakening came and went but Whitefield lingered long after the revivals’ climactic period in the British Empire. While many prominent New Light leaders either died or faded from the limelight by mid-century, Whitefield continued to crisscross the Atlantic world into the early period of revolutionary rumblings. In his later years, he focused much of his attention on expanding the already extensive web of connections he had built during the awakenings. By dint of personality as well as an ambitious travel itinerary that gave him an air of omnipresence, Whitefield provided one of the most enduring connective sinews for what one historian has called “the transatlantic community of saints” into the latter half of the eighteenth century.11 Aristocratic sponsors welcomed him into elite, cosmopolitan circles and a long list of evangelical ministers kept up active correspondence from the London metropole and its nearby boroughs. His reach stretched further still as Whitefield also sought out far-flung outposts of the British Empire as fertile soil for his gospel labors, overseeing an orphanage in the hinterlands of Georgia and field-and-street preaching in Edinburgh into the final years of his life. Whitefield seemed to be everywhere in the British world, and until his death in 1770 he wielded enough influence to intimidate Anglican archbishops and draw out rapt crowds numbering in the thousands.12
By examining a world in which Whitefield continued to exert considerable (even if significantly tamed) influence, this study will point to the significance of not only the Great Awakening’s initial disruptions but also its long-term trajectory as contributing to an increasingly diffuse British imperial culture.13 Specifically, the work of consolidating Awakening gains entailed for Whitefield the development of associational life and the establishment of educational institutions. Though he never eschewed the central thrust of revival religion, the activist preacher also saw the need for broader engagement with culture. The radical revival-monger turned reflective and conciliatory in his later years. More than pious humility, however, lay behind his efforts to bury the hatchet with past rivals. Increasingly prone to sickness and unable to maintain his physical stamina and the superhuman schedule of preaching three or four times a day on the revival circuit, Whitefield innovated in the face of numerous obstacles to his ministry in the last two decades of his life.
The missionary who began his American career as the founder of an orphanage ended his life campaigning to turn that institution into a college. The publicist-preacher, always thinking about the next big event, was prescient enough to know that while New England retained its cultural significance for a season, new centers were developing along other peripheral regions of the empire. His appreciation of Puritan history would have reminded him that Massachusetts had once been a dot on the periphery too. The hinterlands of Georgia proved an alluring location to a strategist like Whitefield because his early life had taught him the possibility of greatness rising from humble origins. His theology gave him a millennial perspective that looked forward to a climactic eschaton. And his imperial outlook helped him to see Georgia not as marginal nowhere but as strategic outpost. On this fertile soil of possibilities, Whitefield landed as an audacious religious, social, and political entrepreneur unafraid to experiment. For these reasons, the thirteenth colony, as the site of British expansionist schemes, plays a larger role in this study than in any previous work on Whitefield. Placing the history of the Great Awakening into the longer arc of Whitefield’s life illuminates processes of change under way in the British Atlantic world during the eighteenth century. We will see the ways in which the adherents of revival religion, when faced with the peril of reifying revivalism, turned to the appropriation of cultural values. In this story, Whitefield started out a nonconformist religious leader but, despite his best intentions, conformed to the ineluctable power of imperial identity.
When we consider the malleability of Whitefield’s evangelical pragmatism alongside his Puritan roots, colonial sympathies, and British patriotism, a new, more complex picture emerges. A study of the imperial Whitefield will illustrate how the tenets of evangelical revival and British expansion became increasingly entwined over the course of the eighteenth century. This book will outhne that process of cultural change, embodied in the development of Whitefield’s public ministry, in two successive stages that describe a movement from encounters to entanglements. Chapters 1 and 2 treat the initial encounters, which were characterized by the allurement for Whitefield of the promise of British state formation. We will see how the missionary preacher recognized the strategic position of the Georgia colony in the southern frontier of a burgeoning British Empire and ordered his revival strategy around this imperial reality. Chapter 3 describes the longer arc of revival religion, which displayed not only powerful heights but also contained the inevitable decline of religious enthusiasm. We will examine how the relentless ebb and flow of revivalistic religion spurred Whitefield’s transformation from idealistic promoter of British culture to pragmatic entrepreneur in the American colonies. In the second half of the book, the vexed struggle of Whitefield’s imperial cultural engagement surfaces as the key motif. Chapter 4 presents the preacher’s forays into slavery and chapter 5 explores his involvement in war propaganda; both provide evidence of revival religion’s absorption into the cultural vortex of empire. Chapter 6 looks at how Whitefield’s colonial institution building represented belated, and largely unsuccessful, efforts to separate the wheat of evangelical religion from the tares of imperial ambition. In summary, this study traces a movement from the awakening of religious fervor to the accommodation of imperial cultural factors.
Map 1. The Southern frontier during Whitefield’s first visit (courtesy of Rachel Lee)
The story of the Great Awakening cannot be understood apart from the particular context in which the movement for evangelical renewal not only took life but also underwent change. In this process, a constellation of religious, cultural, and political factors contributed to emerging British and American Protestant notions of selfhood and nationhood. If it is true that British imperial culture “was a classic example of an identity that was originally an ideology,” as one historian has observed, then this book seeks to cast the life of Whitefield as an embodiment of that formative process in action.14 Indeed, the best explanation for the long trajectory of the Great Awakening can be found in the dynamic movement from enthusiastic revivals to reified revivalism by way of broader cultural developments that sought to tame a chaotic and sprawhng empire.
1. Even on this fundamental point, however, there is considerable debate. See for example, Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” The Journal of American History 69, no. 2 (1982): 305–25.
2. Evaluations of the revivals’ effects run the gamut. Charles Chauncy, a pastor in Boston, issued vehement denunciations. Charles Chauncy, Enthusiasm Described and Caution’d Against. A Sermon. With a Letter to the Reverend Mr. James Davenport (Boston: S. Eliot & J. Blanchard, 1742). For a more favorable contemporary assessment, see Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Company, 1906), 111–13. For a broader survey, which claims that no other event received as much newspaper coverage, see Lisa Smith, The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers: A Shifting Story (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012).
3. Kidd argues for a long season of revival that stretches into the nineteenth century. Marini traces the continuation of Whitefieldian revival in radical sects. Westerkamp extends the Great Awakening into at least 1765. Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Stephen A Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
4. Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried”; Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). Joseph Tracy’s work, one of the earliest historical studies of the Great Awakening, is a key primary source in the development of the Awakening as a historical concept: Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (Boston: Charles Tappan, 1845).
5. In a telling example, Thomas Kidd’s recent biography of Whitefield provides a thorough study of the preacher’s early and middle life, offers rich primary source engagement, and successfully establishes Whitefield as “the key figure in the first generation of Anglo-American evangelical Christianity,” but it arrives at these achievements by focusing primarily on the first two decades of the itinerant’s public career. In a twelve-chapter book, the narrative does not reach the 1750s in any substantial measure until the middle of the penultimate chapter and therefore provides only cursory treatment of the last twenty years of Whitefield’s life. Thomas S. Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
6. Though Alan Heimert’s thesis connecting the awakenings to revolution has been much disputed, echoes of his argument remain. Recent scholarship has moved away from direct links between the revivals and revolution; for instance, Patricia Bonomi argues for the role of denominational politics in contributing to a more contentious civic discourse. Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966); Philip Goff, “Revivals and Revolution: Historiographic Turns since Alan Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind,” Church History 67, no. 4 (1998): 695–721; Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society and Politics in Colonial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
7. The most helpful works on Anglicization and Briticization include: Joyce E. Chaplin, “The British Atlantic,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450–1850, ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 226–27; Patrick Griffin, America’s Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); John M. Murrin, “A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. Richard R. Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
8. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958); Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
9. In his final chapter, Foster focuses on Whitefield as the culminating personality and force to the long Puritan argument. I am in agreement with Foster that Whitefield, at some level, ruptured the tension that the Puritans laboriously preserved; but I would aver that he also maintained the tension in his own distinctly eighteenth-century fashion. Foster, The Long Argument, 286–318.
10. Foster, The Long Argument, 296.
11. Susan A. O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (1986): 811–32.
12. For studies on Whitefield’s international influence, see David Ceri Jones, A Glorious Work in the World: Welsh Methodism and the International Evangelical Revival, 1735–1750 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004); Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991); D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a study that views Whitefield’s disturbances from the establishment side, see Robert G. Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007).
13. Some general histories that describe eighteenth-century British developments include: Peter J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World: 1450–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Ned Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680–1760 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Works that treat the margins of empire are also significant for my study: James Livesey, Civil Society and Empire: Ireland and Scotland in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); John Clive and Bernard Bailyn, “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1954): 200–213.
14. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 198.