5. Whitefield and War
A product of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, evangelicalism came of age in an era of conversion, commerce, and conquest.1 If this is true, then it follows that any accounting of Whitefield’s contributions to the birth of evangelical Protestantism would benefit by incorporating all three of these features. And yet, while we are familiar with the revival origins of evangelicalism as a religion of heart conversion, and there is broad appreciation for the commercial savvy with which evangelicals have always approached their labors, far fewer works have examined evangelicalism as a religion of conquest.2 Examining the relationship between Whitefield and war presents an opportunity to address this lacuna in the historical record and demonstrate the influence of British imperial attitudes of theological, cultural, and racial superiority on the development of evangelical religion.3
Table 2. A Chronology of Whitefield and War
July 9, 1755
Battle of the Monongahela, General Braddock’s defeat
1756–1763
Seven Years’ War (also called the French and Indian War in America, 1756–1763)
February–April 1756
Persecution of Whitefield at Long Acre Chapel
1756
A Short Address to Persons of All Denominations
February 10, 1763
Treaty of Paris
The Seven Years’ War was nothing less than an international conflagration that nearly bankrupted the British Empire and set its course toward dissolution in North America. During a period in his life when he published remarkably little, Whitefield put pen to paper in order to write an important imperial tract entitled A Short Address to Persons of All Denominations.4 He used the pamphlet to warn against the dangers of French victory and champion the British cause. His involvement as an Anglican cleric in the politics of imperial conflict helps explain why the colonies were so significant for British interests in this period. It also shows how the entanglement of war and religion created deeper cavities in what one historian has called a “hollow victory” that paved the way for further disappointments.5 In addition to the precarious balance of geopolitical power and the high stakes involved in transoceanic commercial networks, the contentious battles for religious renewal and freedom that raged during and after the war provides another angle for understanding the perilous course of British expansion in the mid-eighteenth century.6
Whitefield the Imperial Propagandist
Even as Whitefield was sorting out the implications of slave labor for his Georgia project, Britain once again entered into war with France. Whitefield placed himself at the center of the religious commentary on this epic imperial struggle as he sounded the alarm for the British-American front. The speed with which the itinerant trumpeted his country’s role in the Seven Years’ War and the ease with which he identified British victory as a matter of international Protestant interest reveal the power of imperial culture in the theological imagination of this evangelical minister.7 British nationalism and biblical spirituality became hardly distinguishable in Whitefield’s message, which freely mixed the affairs of empire and faith. In the aftermath of the Great Awakening as war raged all around him, he retooled his message and reconciled the religious and political goals of the kingdom of God and the Hanoverian empire. Paying attention to Whitefield’s developing war rhetoric brings into sharper focus the relationship between revival religion and imperial politics. Indeed, the process of British state formation and the building of a Protestant empire aligned closely against the threat of French Catholic invasion. That Britain’s hard-won victory proved fleeting and hollow in the end is also an essential part of the story as we trace Whitefield’s steps in plotting yet another course for revival consolidation.
To appreciate Whitefield’s alignment of religion and war on the imperial landscape, it will be helpful to see the development of his anti-Catholic sentiments during the decade of the 1750s. An examination of Whitefield’s visit to Lisbon, Portugal, and the reaction of his Protestant sensibilities to the Catholic festivities there will help set the stage for his more forceful rhetoric against the French Catholic threat to British power in the Atlantic world. The Four Letters of Whitefield written from Portugal to a friend in England provide insight into Whitefield’s view of Catholicism in 1754.8 In those letters, he criticized Catholics for their theological errors but also revealed admiration for their devotional rigor, going as far as to lament Protestant laxity in comparison. Two years later, when he published A Short Address to Persons of All Denominations, Whitefield had undergone a noticeable shift in his tactical response to Catholicism as he sought to mobilize a broad Protestant audience against the gathering Catholic threat. Ranging from liturgical and ecclesiastical critique to social and political commentary, these two documents show development in the ways Whitefield used suspicion of papist conspiracies to support his Protestant cause. The changes we detect in Whitefield’s deployment of anti-Catholic rhetoric help us to see this revival preacher adjusting to his post-revival world.
Whitefield in Catholic Portugal
In March 1754, on the way to America for his fifth visit, Whitefield welcomed the opportunity to make a stop in Lisbon. He wrote his friend that he believed “it might be serviceable to me, as a Preacher and Protestant, to see something of the superstitions of the Church of Rome.” Being the season of Lent as well as drought, Whitefield witnessed intense displays of Catholic piety, including public processions and petitions for rain accompanied by elaborate rituals and relics. All was not abhorrent to Whitefield, however, and on several different occasions, he expressed admiration for the “great earnestness” and “extempore prayer” of the people. In the final analysis, Whitefield lamented the perversion of the gospel he detected in “such a mixture of human artifice and blind superstition.” There is also, however, an undeniable tension in the tone of Whitefield’s letters. He could not help admiring their sincerity and fervency. God even appeared to answer the people’s prayer for rain, with impeccable timing no less, for as Whitefield reports, “The third Day in the Forenoon it rained.”9
We might sense Whitefield’s discomfort as he was “received and entertained with great Gentility, Hospitality, and Friendliness” while being bombarded to the point of sensory overload by the sight of such direct affronts to his Protestant sensibilities.10 To put it another way, his doctrinal and theoretical biases ran up against the reality of flesh-and-bone people. After some disorientation, Whitefield managed to cling to dogmatic certitudes in the face of these novel encounters. Before rushing with Whitefield to those standard conclusions, however, we can learn a great deal more about the state of evangelical and imperial flux in the mid-eighteenth century if we linger over his initial shock and tension in the face of Catholic devotion in Lisbon.
In a second letter to the same friend in the same month, Whitefield expressed “disgust” and “horror” at the sight of numerous processions and physical, superstitious displays of penitence. He concluded his letter with a litany of praise for the Reformation and by noting his tears of grief at the sights he had witnessed. But embedded within this text of intense disapproval is a notable interjection that beckons deeper consideration. Expressing joy that Portugal was not his nation, nor Catholicism his religion, Whitefield declared, “But, blessed be God, the snare is broken, and we are deliver’d—Oh for Protestant Practices to be added to Protestant Principles!—Oh for an obediential Acknowledgment to the ever blessed God for our repeated Deliverances!”11 The middle statement is the curious one, for he enjoined practices to be added to principles, and urged the acting out of faith in addition to the cognitive assent to faith. If one did not know better, one might suspect Whitefield of envying the Catholics for their impassioned devotional living. It is as if Whitefield were saying: Catholics may have it wrong, but to their credit they are passionately wrong. Protestants, on the other hand, were guilty of lacking sufficient visible fruits and outward demonstrations of their faith.
At this juncture it is helpful to remember that the Great Awakening was a distant memory by the 1750s, even if occasional bursts of revival persisted. In fact, as converts backslid and the fire of renewal fizzled, Whitefield recalibrated expectations. He confided to a friend in March 1753, a year before he sailed into the port of Lisbon, “There are so many stony-ground hearers that receive the word with joy, that I have determined to suspend my judgment, till I know the tree by its fruits.” Numerical growth did not translate into spiritual vitality and Whitefield expressed sorrow that “Scotland is so dead” despite congregations being “larger than ever.”12 Moreover, the transatlantic community of saints and the international network of revival—which appeared unstoppable in the 1740s—was in the process of fragmenting in the 1750s. As an example, when Samuel Davies and Gilbert Tennent traveled to Britain to raise funds for the College of New Jersey, they made delicate evasions of meeting publicly with Whitefield, who had become a lightning rod of division. Faced with the reality of revival on the wane, Whitefield recognized the need to consolidate revival gains. Less than the actual experience of awakenings, we may surmise, it was the efforts at revival making that characterized evangelical faith in the eighteenth century. And if it is true that revivals by their very definition could only enliven that which was dead to begin with, then more closely examining the valleys of spiritual lethargy and plains of ordinary time that preceded and followed the mountaintop experiences is vitally important to understanding the history of revivals.
Acknowledging this climate of post-revival decline as an essential category of historical analysis, we may see that Whitefield’s Lisbon letters reveal ritual envy and a longing for similar vitality in Protestant spirituality. Though far from advocating the “horrific” papal prostrations he had just witnessed, Whitefield made little effort to moderate his plaintive cry—“Oh for Protestant Practices to be added to Protestant Principles!” This slip into lament is especially telling when we remember not only his immediate Catholic context in Lisbon but also a longer view that accounts for Whitefield’s disappointment at the fleeting effects of revival.
In his third letter from Lisbon, Whitefield recorded observations of Maundy Thursday events in that great profligate city. Whitefield was taken by the extravagance of church adornments where “all was so magnificently, so superstitiously grand, that I am persuaded several thousands of pounds would not defray the expenses of this one day.”13 The day must indeed have been strange for Whitefield, who scorned such lavish embellishments but also marveled at the king and queen of Portugal traveling about the city separately, washing the feet of the poor and worshiping alongside their subjects. Whitefield himself was one of the gawkers at one point, straining his neck to get a better look at the queen. Later in the day, Whitefield bumped into the king walking along the streets “with his Brother and two Uncles, attended only with a few Noblemen in black velvet, and a few guards without halberts.”14 Though we cannot say for sure, Whitefield possessed too imaginative a theatrical mind to miss the echoes of the incarnation in his own descriptions of royal figures who condescended to walk amid their people.
The fourth and final letter contains Whitefield’s description of Lisbon’s Good Friday observations as “Tragi-comical, superstitious, idolatrous droll.”15 In the middle of his puritanical condemnations, however, there is a moment when the old theater enthusiast in Whitefield cannot remain silent and offers some stage directions of his own to enhance the dramatic scene unfolding before him—mentioning that the soldier should have pierced the side of Christ and the preacher could have improved “the passions of his auditory” by wiping the head of Christ with a bloodied cloth. Whitefield’s interjections show deep-seated ambivalence about the Catholic ritualization of faith. Theologically deviant in his view, these liturgical devices still reflected life and a passionate living, which in his mind was the primary deficiency of Protestant spirituality. So he opined, “Surely our English preachers would do well to be a little more fervent in their address. They have truth on their side. Why should superstition and falsehood run away with all that is pathetic and affecting?”16 The intensity of Whitefield’s contempt for Catholic idolatry is not what is so noteworthy about Whitefield’s words. Such expressions, especially for someone like him, would have flowed freely without much thought or effort. Whitefield’s admiration for the spiritual affections of the Catholic priests, on the other hand, stands out in stark relief. To be sure, Whitefield did not relent one inch to Catholic doctrine. But his admiration of Catholic devotion contrasted sharply with his criticisms of Protestant backsliding.
Whitefield’s letters from Portugal provide a window into his developing anti-Catholicism from abstract and inchoate theory to a hardening conviction based on his personal experience of the broader Atlantic world. It was very much a contested landscape filled with religious differences that could easily morph into geo-political dangers. One biographer, Luke Tyerman, put it this way: “He was learning lessons which could not be learned in England or America, and which, he hoped, would make him a better man and a better preacher, to the end of life. He became a stauncher Protestant, and felt more than ever how invaluable were the privileges enjoyed by the inhabitants of Great Britain.”17 His anti-Catholic sentiments were not merely reified or inherited beliefs he held onto in unchanging form, but rather dynamic forces that grew in intensity as he traveled the Atlantic world. Observing the distinct shift of an incipient notion articulated in 1754 amid the Lenten festivities of Lisbon toward a more strident point of view in 1756 against the specter of war helps us to see the influence of the imperial world on Whitefield’s worldview.
Whitefield and the French Catholic Threat
Historians have long puzzled over how the heightened patriotism inspired by the Seven Years’ War gave way so soon after military triumph to the dismanthng of Britain’s imperial holdings in North America. While an in-depth exploration of that question lies outside the scope of this study, Whitefield’s contributions are a significant part of the broader narrative of the process of Anglicization that influenced British state formation in the mid-eighteenth century. His activism, both religious and political, during this period shows the ways in which the ideals of British liberty were held alongside of, even if distinct from, imperial patriotism. The former was a matter of indissoluble principle whereas the latter was inspired by an ephemeral polity that could be traded in for another. In other words, peeling away the outward paradox reveals an inner consistency at work. This apparent tension is present in Whitefield’s activities during a period of life when he authored his most political and patriotic writings even as he engaged in his fiercest battles over civil and religious freedom. Whitefield’s fight for ecclesial and political freedom put enormous pressure on him to show loyalty to the British imperial cause in order to allay widespread charges of methodist disloyalty to the crown—an easy association considering Whitefield’s own activism against the establishment clergy and churches. This contorted alliance between the progress of religious liberty and a war of imperial conquest, as we will see, had the incongruous effect of ratcheting up the tension between ideals of British liberty and loyalty to Britain itself so much that a rupture was all but inevitable.
Despite Whitefield’s narrative of providential necessity throughout the Seven Years’ War, the acquisitive spirit of British imperial activity in North America was fraught with problems for the Christian conscience of evangelical Protestants. A reflexive tendency demanded that the war be portrayed as a just cause. The reality was more complex and many of the underlying motivations for war—far from noble or holy—flowed from economic protectionism, political corruption, and cultural imperialism. British politics in general after the Glorious Revolution had come to more and more justify, in the words of one historian, “an absolutist parliamentary regime.”18 Say what they might, many religious leaders beheld the specter of political coercion and worried about the intrusive power of the state. For instance, Samuel Davies, fourth president of the college in Princeton, took the opportunity while eulogizing George II to emphasize political restraint as one of the virtues of the late monarch: “George the Great but Un-ambitious, consulted The Rights of the People, as well as of the Crown; and claimed no Powers but such as were granted to Him by the Constitution and celebrated political freedom.”19
Seemingly impervious to such concerns, however, Whitefield threw himself into the political fray and tried to rally as much popular support as possible. In the same way that the goal of economic solvency swayed Whitefield’s attitudes toward slavery, his quest for influence forced him to overlook the dispossession of Native Americans during the Seven Years’ War. Practically speaking, Whitefield lent his name to the task of recasting an aggressive war of expansion into a defensive war of necessity. Critics of imperial propaganda demurred, showing Whitefield’s position was not the only option.20 For example, Samuel Johnson expressed his discomfort with the war’s effects on native peoples by writing in the voice of an Indian chief, condemning both English and French claims:
The sons of rapacity have now drawn their swords upon each other, and referred their claims to the decision of war; let us look unconcerned upon the slaughter, and remember that the death of every European delivers the country from a tyrant and a robber; for what is the claim of either nation, but the claim of the vulture to the leveret, of the tiger to the fawn? Let them then continue to dispute their title to regions which they cannot people, to purchase by danger and blood the empty dignity of dominion over mountains which they will never climb, and rivers which they will never pass.21
Such a scathing view of the Seven Years’ War provides helpful context for understanding Whitefield’s own words endorsing war and expressing support for the crown in its expansionist schemes as a matter of Christian duty. Johnson’s words were not those of a lonely prophet in the wilderness; in fact, there was a chorus of viewpoints that balked at the corrosive effects of a war of conquest.22 Even the hawkish Daphnis and Menalcas, a work appearing after the British victory in Canada that extolled the virtues of the late General Wolfe, could not help referring repeatedly to Britain’s triumph as a “conquest” (up to ten times) and proclaimed relief at the war’s conclusion, since: “Now murder, fraud, and impious warfare cease.”23 For many Britons, the celebration of conquest also included frank acknowledgment of the inherent “impious” horrors of war.
Other artists used a variety of means to illuminate the moral dilemma of a so-called war for liberty that led to rape, indiscriminate massacre, and other appalling atrocities. When William Whitehead, future poet laureate, warned against the “Pride of War” in 1764, he had already seen enough to worry that military victory did not guarantee an easy or enduring civil peace. He rightly fretted about the consequences of a hard-fought victory that too easily sacrificed the moral high ground. It is telling that Whitefield’s writings about the war, in contrast, displayed none of the careful ethical parsing that marked the commentary of many of his contemporaries. Rather, his words more closely resembled a painting by Edward Penny, The Marquis of Granby Giving Alms to a Sick Soldier and His Family, which depicted a scene of charity from the hand of a military leader. By eliminating any hint of death and destruction from battle, the painting offered a sterilized picture of war excised of any unpleasant details. Instead, it presented economic squalor as one of the threats that war would ameliorate. It was an example of how some patriotic Britons attempted to portray the war in a way that comported to their ideals of heroism and providential destiny. (Even in this painting, however, there is a lone image of dissent—a toddler with her back toward the gallant Granby, shoulder raised in defensive posture and eyes askance with suspicion, instinctually sensing danger.) By offering a perspective on the war that celebrated the religious virtues of the British Empire, Whitefield allied himself with a particular view of the conflict that competed with other perspectives. In this light, his enthusiastic embrace of a narrative of British and Protestant triumphalism requires explanation.
Nearly twenty years after the outbreak of evangelical revivals, Whitefield had made some gains in respectability, but he and other evangelicals remained an embarrassment to many Anglican colleagues and a laughingstock to most elites. There were breakthroughs and victories but also setbacks and disappointments—not only in a military sense but also culturally and religiously. As a person who embodied this tension, Whitefield’s body of work during this period illuminates the fragile, and increasingly conflicted, process of empire building. In fact, Whitefield had been down this road of managing heightened fervor and fighting apostasy before, in the aftermath of the Great Awakening.
Tracing links between the post-revival years and the onset of imperial war, the remainder of this chapter will examine two contrasting types of Whitefieldian rhetoric: his celebration of British Protestant liberty and his condemnation of French Catholic tyranny. Whitefield spoke ardently for the British cause, yet he unabashedly criticized the abuses of power that threatened the already embattled revival religion of evangelicals, both at home and abroad. With respect to the latter, he rallied Christians of all denominations to support the British imperial project by trumpeting its virtues. But with respect to the former, he faced conflict at home: riots in England, controversy in Scotland, and stoning in Ireland. In each of these cases, opposition came from those Whitefield and his coreligionists viewed as insufficiently reformed Protestants or their longstanding rivals, the Catholics. Such a story of evangelical chastening represents the dark side of British imperial triumphs and can further illuminate the paradoxical gains of imperial victory as well as evangelical revivalism. For revivalists and imperialists alike contended with dramatic victory that then had to be preserved.
Stewarding victory was not as easy as the exuberant British thought. Some English leaders viewed the colonists as inferior, while others apprehended the need to tread more gently. Whether in Braddock’s and Loudoun’s arrogance toward provincials that translated into policies of coercion, or in Pitt’s more tactful approach of cooperation, we can see the troubled waters of intercultural interaction that not only political and military leaders but also religious figures had to navigate.24 This alliance between the cause of religion and that of empire in the mid-eighteenth-century British Atlantic world was tenuous at best, as Whitefield painfully came to learn.
Whitefield’s Appeal to All Protestants
Before we turn to a close reading of Whitefield’s A Short Address to Persons of All Denominations, published in the early part of 1756, a survey of the imperial landscape will help set the context. The year 1755 witnessed military disasters for Britain as well as natural catastrophes in numerous parts of the world. In July, General Braddock was fumbling one task after another in an ill-fated march on Fort Duquesne in the Ohio territory of North America, which was aimed at dislodging the French from their southernmost fortress.25 Later in the same month, likely before news of Braddock’s defeat reached him, Whitefield weighed in on Britain’s imperial battles. “God only knows what a trying season lies before us. It is to be feared, that we are upon the eve of a bloody war,” he wrote to a friend. Nevertheless he welcomed the fight, framing it as a war against the evils of Catholicism: “O that the war between Michael and the Dragon may go on! The prospect is promising. Several ministers preach Christ boldly; and as for my own poor feeble labours, the blessed Jesus vouchsafes to crown them with success.”26 In his stark and binary view of the world, Britain was the angel entrusted with the heroic task of slaying France. With the battleground so clearly laid out, he could move seamlessly from hoping for victory in war with France to declaring success in gospel preaching because he saw continuity between these purposes. Even when setbacks on the battleground piled on, Whitefield continued to express hope in Britain’s providential destiny, oddly mixing military and soteriological metaphors by praying for “the late defeat” to “be sanctified.”27 When projecting confidence in eventual military victory, he used the biblical language of triumph in salvation, proclaiming, “I doubt not but we shall be more than conquerors through the love of Christ.”28 To defeat France was to overcome the forces of darkness and evil, and everything else—including lesser evils—paled in comparison.
Not surprisingly, as he found himself blocked from travel to the colonies, Whitefield was hungry for any word he could get of the war’s progress, telling a friend on August 30 that he “was looking out for more news from dear America” and to a colonel in September, “O for good news from dear New England!”29 For Whitefield there was little daylight between the cause of Christ and the fight for empire.
In fact, his numerous references to the American theater of war show that Whitefield acted not only as a servant of Christ but also as a foot soldier for the empire. In this role, he consoled the wife of a soldier, going as far as to tell her that Jesus was her husband’s captain: “He is gone upon a good cause, and under the conduct of the best general, even the Captain of our salvation.”30 He likewise prayed for a colonel, “May your head, and the heads of all engaged, be covered in every day of battle; and may our troops be made in the end more than conquerors through the love of God!”31 That his words were not mere patriotic bluster can be seen in his wish for friends to participate in the war effort as much as they could. “I am glad to hear, that the Ladies are employed in making the soldiers cloaths; I trust my female friends are some of the most active,” he wrote to an official in Boston.32 Busy as he was in so many affairs, he also stressed the importance of broad social engagement in supporting Britain’s cause.
Most significant for our purposes, Whitefield frequently noted a direct correlation between the progress of war and growth in piety: “O that this time of outward danger, may be sanctified to the exciting of greater zeal against our inward spiritual enemies!”33 Whitefield held out hope that the spiritual lethargy that had followed revival fervor might be reversed by the imperial battles engulfing the British world. War with Catholic France, he thought, could lead to the return of evangelical zeal, indeed sanctification, in spiritual matters. It is no wonder that he preached about the importance of war with France even as he encouraged his hearers to fight against sin and evil. He boasted to a friend in November of that same year, “I seldom preach, without mentioning dear New England.”34 In his view, British imperial victory was tantamount to the triumph of Protestant Christianity.
Far from deflating Whitefield, news of military defeats served to heighten spiritual expectations. When the situation did not change for the better after the disaster of Braddock’s failed attack on Fort Duquesne in July 1755, Whitefield remained indefatigable as he doubled down on his own efforts to rally a pan-Atlantic community of Protestant saints. August was filled with the mishaps of William Shirley, royal governor of Massachusetts who assumed the role of commander in chief after Braddock’s death. This former hero of King George’s War saw little of his old successes in the new war. Instead, he bent his energies toward expelling the Acadians, natives who were loyal to France, from Acadia in what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Anderson describes this religious persecution of the Catholic Acadians as “perhaps the first time in modern history a civilian population was forcibly removed as a security risk” and “so chillingly reminiscent of modern ‘ethnic cleansing’ operations.”35 It was in such a climate of heightened anti-Catholic sentiment and sheer human tragedy that Whitefield issued his address to Protestants of all denominations.
A Short Address showcases a vehement, militant polemic that sought to mobilize an army of like-minded Protestants who happened to share a national bond. Noted for its widespread appeal, the pamphlet sailed through seven popular editions and became the number two bestseller of the period.36 Showing the geographical breadth of Whitefield’s influence, only the first edition was published in London, with subsequent editions printed in places as far afield as Edinburgh, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. All seven editions appeared in 1756. From England (as he would be unable to return to America for the duration of the war), he sounded an alarm to “persons of all denominations,” repositioning himself as a leader who transcended denominational identity for the sake not only of gospel ministry but also of national and imperial security. With concern for “British borders,” the piece resounded with Old Testament allusions to the holiness of Israel in contrast to their gentile neighbors, drawing on a cast of well-known Hebrew characters such as Esther, Mordecai, and Jonah. Casting the French as pagan enemies menacing the chosen people of Yahweh made it possible for Whitefield to assume the role of a new Moses whose vision of postmillennial peace represented movement toward a new promised land.
Whitefield did not merely fill his polemic with biblical references; he engaged in military and political exposition as well. His references to the six nations of Indians allied against the colonies, his discussion of the breach of the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle that had concluded King George’s War in America, and his eloquent appeal to just war rationale all worked in concert to demonstrate that more than religious motivations animated his call for vigilance and action. Reminding readers of devastating natural disasters in Africa, Spain, and Portugal, he fixed France in the crosshairs of divine judgment. The catastrophic effects of an earthquake in Lisbon in November 1755, a year and a half after his own visit there, must have made a profound impression on Whitefield. He described that devastation experienced by Portugal, another Catholic state, as being “beyond conception, beyond the power of the most masterly pen to describe. It is to be questioned, whether the like hath ever been heard of since the deluge.”37 These were, in other words, events of biblical proportions that demanded the attention of faithful Protestants everywhere.
The stakes could not be higher, as Whitefield saw it. For the great disaster that befell Portugal would pale “in Comparison of our hearing that a French Army, accompanied with a Popish Pretender, and Thousands of Romish Priests, was suffered to invade, subdue, and destroy” the Protestant land of freedom and righteousness, which Britain represented.38 The tyranny of evil France must be avoided at all costs, and it was his responsibility to sound the alarm at the prospect of such a ruthless invasion of “this happy isle.” In this way, Whitefield stoked xenophobic alarm against the French even as he fanned the flames of British religious exceptionalism.
Just over four thousand words in length, the letter’s pace is brisk, moving from a brief sketch of the historical circumstances for the war to biblical justifications for war to finally a rallying cry for all Protestants to unite in common cause under the banner of British freedom. In the latter half of A Short Address, Whitefield focused especially on an appeal to reason and common sense: “But how any serious and judicious, much less religious and devout person, can be so stupid to all principles of self-interest, and so dead even to all maxims of common sense, as to prefer a French to an English government . . . must be imputed to nothing else but an awful infatuation.”39 Ever the orator, Whitefield was not one to mince words. Against such folly, he called for a sensible rejection of French aggression and Roman Catholicism. As one example of French brutality in contrast to British liberty, Whitefield quoted a French decree dating back to July 1686, which called for the death of any non-Catholic ministers daring to preach in French territory: “we do command that all preachers, who shall call assemblies, preach in them, or discharge any other function, be put to death.”40 Rising to the challenge, Whitefield sang the praises of martyrdom for so worthy a cause as the British and Protestant interest. He concluded the letter by declaring his confidence in the God of universal monarchy under whose reign Britain held a central place.
Not only the fresh experience of his American trip, which would have highlighted the need for a reassessment of his American strategy, but also increasing French hostility, indeed the very real prospect of war on the homeland, influenced Whitefield’s thinking about the need for an expanded role for himself in the context of a British Empire under strain. In reconfiguring the war as one of defense rather than conquest, Whitefield matched the audacity of addressing persons of all denominations with an anti-Catholic rhetoric that soared with as much militant triumphalism as religious passion and conviction.
Viewed against the larger backdrop of his life, Whitefield’s war rhetoric in the mid-1750s displays a marked shift in his philosophy and strategy. Gone is the reticence of young Whitefield who had balked at helping his friend Colonel Pepperell raise troops for the Cape Breton expedition in 1746. Only after his good friend’s persistent persuasion had he relented on that earlier occasion. Ten years later in 1756, however, it appears Whitefield needed no coaxing or encouragement. In fact, it speaks volumes about the changes wrought in Whitefield that this British-born Anglican priest described his years away from America during the Seven Years’ War as a period of exile and mounting anxiety for his cause in America. Far from sitting idly by, he used this time away to reevaluate his transatlantic ministry.
This reassessment came in the context of Whitefield’s growing engagement with imperial military campaigns. Britons during this time, including Whitefield, spoke of a “critical juncture” to describe the times in which they lived. The term may apply also to Whitefield’s vocational life, for it was a personal juncture that increasingly combined the interests of revival religion and British Empire into one common cause. When we ignore these developments in his thinking during the 1750s, we also miss out on significant shifts taking place in evangelical Protestant engagement with British imperial culture. By the end of this period, Whitefield would make up his mind to turn his Georgia orphanage into a college in the American South to rival schools like Harvard and Yale to the north. Something else happened as well. Whitefield turned from an amateur critic who dabbled in touristic observations of Catholicism into a full-fledged anti-Catholic spokesperson. Indeed, imperial battles raged on many fronts. But that was not all. Coming to grips with post-revival disappointments, and the work of sorting through Awakening remains after the dust had settled, also lay heavy on Whitefield’s heart.
With the blazing fires of revival now banked and incendiary war all around, evangelical Protestants faced the daunting challenge of keeping their religious movement alive in the face of an increasingly hostile world. Anti-Catholicism provided one way of addressing both the religious setbacks and political perils rampant in this period. By identifying a clearly discernible enemy in French Catholics, evangelicals like Whitefield attempted not only to rally a fractious coalition but also carve out a more credible and respectable space for themselves in the national imagination. It was a path filled with danger, moreover, not only from non-Protestant forces outside the nation but from what these evangelicals viewed as quasi-Catholic forces within.
Contending for British Liberties
After arriving back in England in the middle of 1755, Whitefield did not return to America again until the summer of 1763. In the intervening eight years, he traveled around Britain and Ireland, attempting to spark ongoing fires of revival. He also spent much of his time during these years in London, working to bring together scattered Calvinistic methodists who had long endured schisms and lacked (unlike Wesley’s methodists) strong, stable leadership. As an institutional base, he already had his Tabernacle at Moorfields, built in 1741 and rebuilt in 1753. By the end of 1756, he would build another Tabernacle, this time on Tottenham Court Road in London. It was a building project he likely did not have in mind when he began the year with commitments to preach several times a week at Long Acre Chapel in London.
When Whitefield accepted the invitation to Long Acre he had little idea what a litigious affair his ministry there would prove to be. With the London theaters on one side of the chapel and Wesley’s West Street chapel on the other, the revivalist threw himself into this busy commercial area of London.41 It was not long before this controversial preacher, who had weathered many attacks, was taken aback by the force of violent opposition he faced there. The great irony is that the Long Acre episode occurred at just the time Whitefield was preparing his Short Address for publication. In other words, at the very moment when he was extolling the freedoms enjoyed by British subjects he was undergoing one of the severest tests of his own liberties.
His time of trial began with a letter from the new Dean of Westminster, Zachary Pearce, freshly arrived in London after serving eight years as Bishop of Bangor in the northern edge of Wales. He wrote to forbid Whitefield from preaching at Long Acre. Perhaps out of deference, but more likely in an effort to highlight the bishop’s recent arrival in London, Whitefield addressed his letter “To the Bishop of Bangor” (and not to the “Dean of Westminster,” which would have been more accurate). The Grand Itinerant who had traveled the breadth of the empire and made London his British base of operations might have wondered what a bishop from Bangor knew of ecclesiastical business in the capital city. Whitefield was, moreover, by this time well practiced at fielding such prohibitions and delved into particulars by appealing immediately to his civil liberties:
For I looked upon the place as a particular person’s property, and being, as I was informed, not only unconsecrated, but also licensed according to law, I thought I might innocently preach the love of a crucified Redeemer, and for his great name’s sake, loyalty to the best of princes our dear sovereign King George, without giving any just offence to Jew or Gentile, much less to any bishop or overseer of the church of God.42
In his carefully crafted rejoinder, Whitefield made two tangential issues central. First he pointed out that the chapel belonged to an individual and as private property lay outside the jurisdiction of the bishop. Not content to rest his case on legal technicalities, Whitefield went on to spell out in some detail the matter in which the bishop was meddling. The second part of Whitefield’s defense then was his preaching “loyalty to the best of princes our dear sovereign King George.” How could any British subject, let alone the Bishop of Bangor, be opposed to such an important task, particularly in a time of war? In this way, Whitefield hoped that his bellicose imperial message would provide cover for his religious work. Lest there be any doubt about the matter, Whitefield went on to state: “I trust the irregularity I am charged with, will appear justifiable to every true lover of English liberty.” He was not merely determined but confident that the law was on his side and that his English rights would prevail in the end. It is not clear if Whitefield himself noticed the irony, but at the very same time he found himself in conflict with the bishop, the congregation at Long Acre raised £80 for “the poor persecuted French protestants.”43 Though beset by ecclesiastical bullying, the worshipers at Long Acre saw a difference between their lot and the suffering of the French. Apparently, there was reason to hope that the bishop’s opposition was merely a passing storm.
Two weeks later, on February 16, 1756, it became clear that the struggle was to be a protracted one. While we do not have the text of the bishop’s letter, the fact that Whitefield sat down the same evening he received the letter to write a nearly 2,500-word response gives some indication that neither side was anywhere near backing down. The preacher again tied his struggle to the larger British fight for liberty by declaring the slightest acquiescence to the bishop unthinkable, especially “at this juncture, when all our civil and religious liberties are as it were at stake.” Such surrender, he opined, “would to me be worse than death itself.”44
Connecting his cause at Long Acre with the British war against the French, Whitefield sent a copy of his pamphlet, A Short Address to Persons of All Denominations, to the bishop a week later. “I can only entreat the continuance of your Lordship’s blessing, and begging your Lordship’s acceptance of a short address I am now publishing,” Whitefield wrote even as he supplied further evidence for the legality of his preaching ministry at the meeting house. Far from endorsing his letter, the bishop in the middle of March 1756 again sent disturbers to the chapel who threw large stones through the windows, badly injuring several worshipers. Once again appealing to his rights as “a subject of King George, and a minister of Jesus Christ,” Whitefield threatened to “lay a plain and fair narration of the whole affair, together with what hath passed between your Lordship and myself, before the world.”45 In turn, the bishop invoked his authority to prevent the publication of such letters and threatened grave legal consequences. Though Whitefield complained that the persecution he faced was “not to be met with in English history,” the intensity of the attacks only grew. Using instruments such as a copper furnace, bells, drums, clappers, marrow bones, and cleavers, various kinds of “the baser sort” who had been “hired by subscription” assaulted the chapel, timing the most intense part of their attack to coincide with the sermon. These attacks continued throughout the month.46
The appearance of a threatening letter from another hand further escalated an already tense situation. This anonymous note warning of “a certain, sudden, and unavoidable stroke” was left for Whitefield on a chair near the pulpit. It perturbed Whitefield enough that he forwarded a copy of the letter to a magistrate friend, describing the situation at Long Acre as “an affair that hath reference to the welfare of civil government.”47 In other words, it was a matter not merely of personal but national safety. He also sent a copy of the letter to his friend and patroness, the Countess of Huntingdon, telling her “indeed the noise hath been infernal.”48 Eight days later he wrote her again, perhaps concerned that he had sounded too craven in his last letter. Framing his situation in the context of broader geo-political struggles, he declared his willingness to serve as a martyr: “Glad should I be to die by the hands of an assassin, if popery is to get footing here.”49
What may have begun as merely an intramural ecclesiastical conflict, Whitefield managed to turn into an urgent contest for civil liberty with the hallmark feature of the British Empire at risk. “Such an infernal continued noise, on such an occasion, at such a juncture, under such a government, I believe was never heard of before.”50 It was a particular source of consternation for Whitefield that such civil injustices should be occurring at what he and many others called this “critical juncture” in British history. After receiving a third ominous letter portending bodily harm, Whitefield’s rhetoric reached a fevered pitch. Beyond a matter of national security, the battle at Long Acre became for him a matter of divine justice: “Our cause, in my opinion, is the cause of God, and the cause of civil and religious liberty.”51 More than an alignment of interests, this was a conflation of two distinct matters into one. So much did Whitefield immerse himself into the mindset of imperial war that he began to describe his own preaching tours as “expeditions,” as if they were acts of reconnaissance and incursion into enemy territory. And so as he planned a trip to Scotland, he described it as his “northern expedition.”52 Extending the metaphor, he explained his inability to travel to America in this way: “The attraction towards America is as strong as ever, but at present I am stationed here.”53 Each and every Briton had a role to play in the struggle against France and Whitefield had found his own. Under this kind of religio-political rhetoric, the fight for British imperial expansion, a geopolitical campaign, became also a divine and spiritual struggle. It was a conflict, above all, where fractures threatened to undermine British and Protestant liberty.
On May 2, 1756, Whitefield preached his final sermon at Long Acre before setting out for Wales on a preaching tour. In a letter to the Countess of Huntingdon on that day, he made a special announcement: “and this brings you the further news of my having taken a piece of ground, very commodious to build on.”54 Not to be deterred by the likes of Bishop Pearce, he thus commenced plans to build the Tabernacle at Tottenham Court Road, his second chapel after the Moorfields Tabernacle. Located near the theater district in London’s West End, the chapel provided an ideal location for extending Whitefield’s influence in England, a strategy that had long been on his mind.55 After spending the summer months in the west of England and completing an expedition through Scotland, he was back in London to build and open his new chapel. Whitefield would be detained from America a good deal longer.
Conclusion
One summer day in 1757, a mob of Irish Catholics stoned George Whitefield nearly to death. Earlier in the day he had exhorted his audience “not only to fear God, but to honour the best of kings.”56 On his way home after preaching this political homily, Whitefield ran into Christian ruffians of the worst kind—they were disgruntled by his sermon and determined to do something about it. “Vollies of hard stones came from all quarters, and every step I took, a fresh stone struck, and made me reel backwards and forwards, till I was almost breathless, and all over a gore of blood,” he later recounted.57 Whitefield barely survived. In a March 1758 letter to Professor Francke in Germany, he disclosed further information about the events that led to his near stoning: “Last year, while I was preaching in the fields in Ireland, a popish mob was so incensed at my proclaiming the Lord our Righteousness, and at my praying for our good old King, and the King of Prussia, that they surrounded, stoned, and almost killed me. But we are immortal till our work is done.”58 From this letter, it is evident that Whitefield practiced what he preached in his Short Address. He measured Christian faithfulness by devotion to the British Protestant cause against the French Catholic threat and mingled gospel sermons with political prayers. Unlike the aggressors at Long Acre, however, the popish mob did almost murder him. Whatever anxieties he may have harbored about assaults on English liberties, the belligerence of that Irish mob gave him further education about eighteenth-century realities. A corrupt British Protestant government that threatened with the letter of the law was preferable to a mob of papists that actually hurled stones.
There were subtler lessons as well. For coercion was as much a temptation in the religious struggle for renewal as it was in the great war for empire. Inasmuch as Whitefield stood for liberty, he also wielded power and privilege in a way that reinforced the imperial attitudes of his time. In a time when Britons embraced with little nuance or hesitation their responsibility to “reduce” Native Americans to civility and enslave African Americans for productivity, evangelical leaders echoed similar attitudes of cultural chauvinism in the exercise of their religious duties.59 In the case of Whitefield, he applied force with his belief that the evangelical message of new birth was the greatest hope for an ascendant British culture. If it was a straightforward thesis, the path to turning this dream into reality was a more convoluted undertaking. In the face of opposition to such a lofty enterprise, he may have been more inclined to use excessive force. Alongside the spiritual goal of repentance, therefore, Whitefield had to consider economic necessities as well as military and political realities. The resulting admixture tells the story of religion as a culturally embedded force that is as much acted upon as it is an agent unto itself. In an era of conversion, commerce, and conquest, evangelical leaders like Whitefield embraced an ideology of empire. More than a religion of dramatic conversion, and not merely a commodity peddled for common consumption, evangelicalism came to ascendancy as a means of establishing British cultural superiority and rationalizing imperial expansion. It must not be forgotten that from the beginning an army of evangelicals who tried to convert the world also sought to conquer the world. In an environment where British Protestants held deep convictions about their theological, spiritual, and cultural superiority, revivalistic evangelicals were quick to jump on the bandwagon of such imperial hubris.
A study of Whitefield’s evolving views on slavery and war touches on two of the preeminent issues facing the British Empire in the eighteenth century. Both were the result of imperial expansion and both complicate our understanding of the long trajectory of the Great Awakening and its relationship to the complex process of British state formation. What one historian has called the “prodigal victory” of the Seven Years’ War also applies to our view of the ongoing struggle of evangelical revivalism to reinvent and reassert itself in the face of persistent challenges.60 In trying to articulate a way forward through these cultural floodwaters, Whitefield found himself awash in a sea of imperial developments.
1. For this triptych as a way of charactering the eighteenth century, I am indebted to David Hempton, The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 55.
2. For a study of evangelicalism as heart religion, see Dallimore, George Whitefield. For studies that highlight Whitefield’s propensity for leveraging commercial opportunities, see Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits and Piety”; Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity.”
3. For seventeenth-century precedents in establishing British cultural superiority, see Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). In addition, what Calloway has said about European invaders of America can apply to Whitefield as well: “European colonists intended not only to take over the land; they also were determined to change it, to remake it into something more closely resembling the world they had left.” Calloway, New Worlds for All, 13. Richter identified “the hard racial underside of the American mosaic” as an eighteenth-century phenomenon. In illuminating fashion, he also provides a rich description of the early eighteenth-century British colonies as occupying the “foreign historical terrain” of a distinctly imperial era. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 152–53. For a theological account of race that begins with the age of discovery and conquest and traces the development of racialized thought, see Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Jennings has pointed out an important theological quandary by asking how a Christian religion of love could have given rise to racial segregation. One way to solve this theological as well as historical puzzle is to show, as my work does, that between the European age of exploration and the American era of segregation there was a host of deleterious developments like the evangelical articulation of theological and cultural superiority based on British Protestant hegemony.
4. George Whitefield, A Short Address to Persons of All Denominations, Occasioned By the Alarm of an Intended Invasion (London, 1756).
5. For the image of a hollow empire that emerged after the Seven Years’ War, see Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), xix–xxi.
6. For an analysis of Britain’s economic transition from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation, see Paul Mapp, “British Culture and the Changing Character of the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Empire,” in Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years’ War in North America, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
7. Thomas Kidd noted the development of Whitefield’s patriotism in this way: “[Whitefield] 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.” Kidd, George Whitefield, 255.
8. George Whitefield, A Brief Account of Some Lent and Other Extraordinary Processions and Ecclesiastical Entertainments Seen Last Year at Lisbon: In Four Letters to An English Friend (London: W. Strahan, 1755). Referenced as Four Letters for brevity.
9. Whitefield, Four Letters, 6.
10. Whitefield, Four Letters, 3.
11. Whitefield, Four Letters, 15.
12. Works, 3:8, 27.
13. Whitefield, Four Letters, 11, 18.
14. Whitefield, Four Letters, 20.
15. Whitefield, Four Letters, 27.
16. Whitefield, Life, 2:332.
17. Tyerman, Life, 2:331.
18. Jack P. Greene, Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 50; Helmut Georg Koenigsberger, “Composite States, Representative Institutions and the American Revolution,” Historical Research 62, no. 148 (1989): 135–53.
19. Although Davies articulated suspicions of encroaching arbitrary power against liberty for Britons, he also celebrated the defeat of French and Native American forces. This kind of double standard was common among evangelical leaders. Samuel Davies, A Sermon Delivered At Nassau-Hall, January 14, 1761. On the Death of His Late Majesty King (Boston, 1761), 7–9.
20. For many of the examples in the next two paragraphs of literature and art, I am indebted to John Richardson, “Imagining Military Conflict during the Seven Years’ War,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 48, no. 3 (2008): 585–611. Though alienating in its caustic tone, a work that thoroughly critiqued Francis Parkman’s (and, inadvertently, George Whitefield’s) interpretation of the Seven Years’ War as the triumph of good over evil is Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). To offer a sample, characteristic quote: “The war was brought on and directed by some very ugly, powerful men motivated by greed, self-aggrandizement, and the desire for yet more power. It was conducted in the usual bloody, dirty way of war by officers who relied on the strategy of massacre and terror over troops and civilians alike, by methods that had become integral to European culture.” Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 172. While Jennings has been accused of superimposing presentist values on a past event, Richardson’s article shows a cast of eighteenth-century writers and artists who had similar qualms about the cruelty of war.
21. Samuel Johnson, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson: The Idler and the Adventurer, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 254.
22. For more examples, see Richardson, “Imagining Military Conflict.”
23. Daphnis and Menalcas: A Pastoral. Sacred to the Memory of the Late General Wolfe (London, 1759), 10.
24. For more on military leaders, coercion, and cooperation, see chapter 46, “The Fruits of Victory and the Seeds of Disintegration,” in Anderson, Crucible of War.
25. Anderson, Crucible of War, 109.
26. Whitefield to the Rev. Mr. H—, July 25, 1755, in Works, 3:130.
27. Whitefield to Mr. V—, Aug. 30, 1755, in Works, 3:136.
28. Whitefield to Mr. V—, in Works, 3:138.
29. Whitefield to Mr. V—; Whitefield to Colonel P—, September 1, 1755, in Works, 3:138, 141.
30. Whitefield to Lady P—, September 1, 1755, in Works, 3:137.
31. Whitefield to Colonel P—, September 1, 1755, in Works, 3:140.
32. Whitefield to Honourable J— R—, November 7, 1755, in Works, 3:148.
33. Whitefield to A— O—, November 8, 1755, in Works, 3:149.
34. Whitefield to A— O—, in Works, 3:149.
35. Anderson, Crucible of War, 113, 114.
36. Whitefield, A Short Address. Jerome Mahaffey writes of five editions, but there were actually seven. Mahaffey, Preaching Politics, 170.
37. Whitefield, A Short Address, 12.
38. Whitefield, A Short Address, 12.
39. Whitefield, A Short Address, 15.
40. Whitefield, A Short Address, 15.
41. Tyerman, Life, 2:355.
42. Whitefield to the Bishop of Bangor, February 2, 1756, in Works, 3:157; emphases added.
43. Whitefield to the Bishop of Bangor, in Works, 3:158; emphasis in original.
44. Whitefield to the Bishop of Bangor, February 16, 1756, in Works, 3:164.
45. Whitefield to the Bishop of Bangor, in Works, 3:167.
46. Whitefield to the Bishop of Bangor, in Works, 3:168.
47. Whitefield to Honourable Hume C—, April 9, 1756, in Works, 3:171.
48. Whitefield to the Lady Huntingdon, April 10, 1756, in Works, 3:172.
49. Whitefield to the Lady Huntingdon, April 18, 1756, in Works, 3:173.
50. Whitefield to Mr. C—, April 25, 1756, in Works, 3:176.
51. Whitefield to Mr. C—, in Works, 3:177; emphasis added.
52. Whitefield to the Lady Huntingdon, July 17, 1756, in Works, 3:187.
53. Whitefield to Mr. S—, November 17, 1757, in Works, 3:220; emphasis added.
54. Tyerman, Life, 2:372.
55. Jones, Schlenther, and White, The Elect Methodists, 148.
56. Tyerman, Life, 2:395.
57. Whitefield to Mr. —, July 9, 1757, in Works, 3:207. Also a slightly different version is in Tyerman, Life, 2:396.
58. Tyerman, Life, 2:405.
59. David Hempton has insightfully used phrases like “European Christian chauvinism” and “cultural chauvinism” to describe British attitudes in the eighteenth century. Hempton, The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century, 28–30. My argument moves beyond Hempton, however, who said “missionaries were not so much advocates of imperialism as they were genuine religious enthusiasts who could not avoid interacting with agencies of imperial control,” to highlight ways in which Whitefield acted as an imperial agent. Building on the works of Henry Fielding and Sir John Fortescue, Jack Greene has written about the imperial identity of Britons in the eighteenth century that often led to espousal of British “superiority” in relation to other nations and cultures. See especially the chapter “Empire and Identity from the Elizabethan Era to the American Revolution,” in Greene, Creating the British Atlantic, 253–77.
60. Anderson, Crucible of War, xxi.