Chapter XV: Whitefield’s Legacy
XV
Whitefield’s Legacy
As 1770 drew to a close and George Whitefield was laid to rest in Newburyport, Massachusetts, whether colonists had recognized it or not, Whitefield’s influence upon them had been profound. Whitefield offered and persuaded colonists to an American identity birthed in conversion. He prescribed beliefs connecting France, Rome, and hell. Finally, he encouraged people to adopt political beliefs about arbitrary power and civil liberties. Whitefield had established and promoted the ideas that gave them a worldview. In the prior chapters, we traced the evolution of that worldview and observed how it shaped and influenced both religious and legal arguments against arbitrary power.
In large part Whitefield’s influence depended upon his popularity. He was truly the world’s first international pop idol. One could not have lived in colonial America (except perhaps on its furthest frontier) without being exposed to him. Even there, you would have heard about him and had access to his publications. Anyone born and raised in America inherited the worldview of the Awakening to one degree or another. Even people like Jonathan Mayhew or Charles Chauncy, who rejected the revivals, found themselves with no other good choice for a worldview once Britain began oppressing the colonies. They could either adapt themselves to some form of the Awakening view or side with the British. Many did stay with the British and returned to England when war commenced. People who helped the independence cause figured out the Awakening worldview quickly enough.
During the revolutionary era one was not born American, but British, Scottish, German, Dutch or something else and required conversion from a Tory to a Whig. Alan Heimert explains that in the decades leading up to the Revolution, ministers “increasingly confused civic virtue with piety and, finally, political enthusiasm with the joy of conversion,” and colonists were “converted” from Tories to Whigs as they aligned themselves in defense of liberty.1 Ebenezer Cleaveland depicted a good example of such a conversion in 1774, as he preached on the “conversion and call of Matthew the Publican” and gave “application in terms of the delight experienced by a Crown revenue officer who joined the Sons of Liberty.” What an astounding story! So intertwined were the deep structures of religious belief and republican ideas that the tables had completely turned. Here a minister is attempting to explain religious conversion by comparing it to something he felt his audience understood better: a political conversion from Tory to Whig. The man converted from the most hated profession in America to the most radical activist group. Indeed, political conversions had become more commonplace than religious ones.
With conversion from a Tory to Whig came the spirit of liberty to regenerate one into a kingdom of freedom. Americans demanded that public officials be guiltless of corruption, that they be virtuous defenders of liberty, and that they earned their office based on qualifications rather than connections. By 1776 genuine “patriots” were sickened by the sycophants of George III’s court. Instead, they embraced the promise of a free, self-governing society that would preserve “American liberties.” Such patriots viewed reconciliation with Great Britain as a compromise with evil.
With the help of the new identity brought about by the Awakening worldview, Whitefield created a place in the mind where republican political ideas could be easily grasped. Explanations for the colonial conflict that made the most sense to people were those that cast Americans and Britons in a millennial struggle between good and evil, with the stakes being slavery or freedom. From 1770 to 1776, colonists could not have viewed the conflict on any other terms. They simply had no other frame of reference. Deism and science slowly displaced the church as the mother of the intellect among the educated classes, but this transformation did not fully mature among the wider population until long after the Revolutionary War. For persuasion to have any chance of being successful, you must begin with truths that “the people” already accept. Deism did not have that advantage in 1776. Political activists had to construct their arguments upon the foundations of thought that were currently in widespread use and with precast logic templates into which people could place the new problems.
Up through the 1760s, the activists’ writings showed respect for Parliament and the king. For fear of being arrested and tried for rebellion, activists kept their political arguments polite, always implying that British leaders were acting “arbitrarily,” knowing that blunt accusations, like the kind they made about the Church of England, might get them in trouble. Recall that Patrick Henry’s speech before the Virginia legislature in 1765 brought charges of treason. But Parliament continued to pass laws undermining colonial freedoms and by their actions further aggravated the British-American identity question. Who were these Americans now if they were not members of the British family? Their parents, George III and the Parliament, were pushing them out of the family and spending their inheritance. John Adams plainly discusses the family problem between England and the colonies:
The people of America had been educated in an habitual affection for England, as their mother country; and while they thought her a kind and tender parent, (erroneously enough, however, for she never was such a mother,) no affection could be more sincere. But when they found her a cruel beldam, willing like Lady Macbeth, to “dash their brains out,” it is no wonder if their filial affections ceased, and were changed into indignation and horror.
As I noted earlier, the family metaphor forms a common theme in almost every activist discourse of the period. The American identity tension was clearly at the heart of the Revolution in Adams’ mind. The solution to this problem was to reject England and accept American nationalism. This was the best course of action to ensure both civil and religious freedoms. The decision to embrace the rebellion was a personal choice that each person would have to make. That personal choice to adopt an American identity made each convert a member of a new civic community, sometimes demanding their blood through membership in a colonial militia.
Public opposition to the British government was a line Whitefield never crossed, but his friends, followers, and colleagues quickly did. Shortly after his death, the colonists naturally began speaking of “evil” Tory oppression with “good” Whig protection of natural rights. Next, the king himself was cast into the “them” category because of his “evil” failure to protect the rights and privileges of American citizens.
The Papists Are Coming!
With the firm linkage in place between civil and religious liberties in the minds of colonial Americans, to argue that Parliament was guilty of arbitrary power meant that they meddled not just in civil affairs but in religion as well. Even writers like Samuel Adams, in The Rights of the Colonists, blended religion and republican ideas in his discussion of colonial rights. Setting up a foundation for his argument, Adams asserted in 1772:
“Just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty” in matters spiritual and temporal, is a thing that all Men are clearly entitled to, by the eternal and immutable laws of God and nature, as well as by the law of Nations, & all well grounded municipal laws, which must have their foundation in the former.
Samuel Adams continues by arguing that Catholicism cannot be considered a religion that is either tolerant or compatible with liberty. Thus, one of America’s most respected revolutionary activists included central religious themes in his most formal writings.
Whitefield provided a volatile formula that would eventually prompt Americans to react aggressively against England. His messages defined American identity as rooted in a new birth into a community that prized virtue, liberty, and freedom. He warned of the Catholic threat, through France, that would oppress religious liberty. He blew the whistle on arbitrary power, explaining what it was and where it was operating. Finally, he showed how the Church of England could no longer be trusted to preserve religious freedom. The only thing left was to link the British government back to the “horrid plot” that believed the devil was working through the Roman Catholics to subjugate the world. Americans had turned against the French when that plot was revealed. After 1770, such a plot was manifested as colonial activists interpreted Parliamentary actions as an invasion by Roman Catholicism.
After the defeat of the French, colonial fears of papal plots subsided for a time, but the assault led by Samuel Adams was quick to reintroduce these fears. Adams worked to align American churches with staunch American Anglicans against a perceived common threat. Not all Church of England ministers were oppressing other Protestants.
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The Roman Catholic presence in Canada had been strong under French rule, and Britain did not try to oust them after taking over in 1763. But when Parliament passed the Quebec Act in 1774, it stoked colonial fears of Catholic infiltration into the colonies. The Quebec Act provided a civil government for the French Roman Catholics of the Quebec province, and extended their territory to include present day Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It effectively blocked the needed westward expansion of the northern and middle colonies. The Act also granted political privileges to Roman Catholics. Since 1764, colonial papers had published articles warning of the plot that caused Americans to be suspicious of any act by Parliament. The Quebec Act reignited colonial propagandists. They claimed that the highest leaders in Britain were working to steadily undermine American liberties. Allegations abounded that the newest prime minister, Lord North, embraced Catholicism and that the Parliament and the king intended to establish Roman Catholicism over the entire American continent.2 Whitefield’s sermons against the Roman Catholics never linked the Church of England or British leaders to such plots, but the Quebec Act did. Whitefield brought Americans one short step of that link. The fear of Roman Catholic power over the Protestants provided a convenient foundation for arguments of colonial activists. Paul Revere skillfully played on these fears with an engraving entitled The Mitred Minuet. His famous drawing portrayed the devil hovering behind and whispering in the ear of the Quebec Act’s author while four Church of England bishops danced around a copy of the bill wearing mitres (the traditional ceremonial hat worn by the pope and Catholic bishops). In this instance, the mitres upon the bishops’ heads served as a symbol for Roman Catholic supremacy.
The Quebec Act drew public responses just as hostile as those engendered by the Stamp Act. The people feared that it was the first step in establishing Roman Catholicism across all the colonies, but why? The French had been decisively defeated and the military threat of “Papists” ended, so why would any rational colonist fear that the English government would promote the Catholic Church in the colonies? Nathan Hatch explains that it was not because Roman Catholicism was powerful, but because it was weak: “Revolutionary ministers were afraid that … power-hungry ministers would exploit the papal hierarchy for their own designs.”3 What they feared was a power structure that could encourage the rise of sycophants and tyrannous ministers. The Quebec Act and fears of Roman Catholic infiltration, whether they were valid or not, were added to an already combustible America, in a generation that had personally fought or lost immediate family members in the French and Indian Wars. The religious rhetoric that condemned Roman Catholics and the French was aimed at England herself, and America’s civil millennialism perceived its old adversary manifest in Parliament and the king. Now even colonists from the middle and southern colonies joined the cause, as the Catholic threat unified American Anglicans with the American churches. England increasingly became demonized as the adversary as colonial activists called for unity against this supreme enemy. Whether Lord North and the king were actually closet Catholics was irrelevant. American activists claimed that they were and cited the Quebec Act as evidence.
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By 1774 a variety of strong reasons to resist Great Britain motivated Americans: (1) the genuine fear of the Church of England bishop and power structure, (2) Roman Catholic domination, (3) economic oppression through a series of various acts, (4) the insult of increased liberties for Canadian colonies, and (5) an increasing perception that Parliament and the king were initiating the changes illegally. Added to this was outright violence against Americans in Boston. The Boston Massacre, an incident in 1774 where British soldiers shot and killed citizens who were demonstrating, was publicized widely and used to call for resistance to the British everywhere. But while the popular press was disseminating political conspiracy theories—warning of popery and calling citizens to arms against Britain—respectable thinkers were further exploring Parliament’s illegal legislation. Viewing the series of legislation through “republican glasses,” these writers produced American literature remembered by our history books. It’s easy to find evidence of the Awakening worldview in the activist writings we have been examining, but an evaluation of the more formal writings reveals that same worldview at a deep level. Americans, in spite of their religious, educational, and class differences, shared the same mind. (Those who did not share it chose the British side and left for England or Canada immediately after independence was declared.) For the shrewd activist who desired to write a successful message, the Awakening worldview was the best place to start. The effective pamphleteer understood that many Americans held strong, specific religious beliefs and also understood which arguments would be persuasive.
As the crisis continued, Americans were willing take up arms to defend religious and civil liberties. Since violence had already sporadically erupted in various locations, ministers and civil leaders began to mobilize militias to fight the British. The idea of civil millennialism was never healthier. It was nourished by the Protestant belief in the prophesied Armageddon, just as it had been during the wars with the French. One British official complained that the people of rural Connecticut were “all politicians and Scripture learnt.” Explaining the public opinion that led to violence, the British sympathizer Peter Oliver blamed it on “Mr. Otis’s black regiment, the dissenting clergy.”
In Connecticut, the Awakening worldview and civil millennialism flooded the colonial mind to an incredible degree. In 1774 Joseph Bellamy and Israel Putnam received a letter mistakenly declaring that “Admiral Graves had burnt Boston, and that General Gage was murdering old and young.” Putnam and Bellamy hastily called together an army of forty thousand New Lights (excluding Presbyterians) that began marching to Boston the same day. Connecticut’s total male population in 1774 (ages ten through seventy) numbered sixty-three thousand, thus the army must have been composed of every able-bodied man and many from neighboring colonies, especially since no Presbyterians joined them. Even if the person who numbered this “army” was a poor judge of crowd size, it still must have been an astoundingly large group. Bellamy called this huge army to arms with the curse of Meroz. They believed they were going to fight the battle of Armageddon. The next day, on the road to Boston, the marching army received word, of course, that there had been no attack, so they returned home and disbanded. This account evidences the incredible depth and power of the Awakening worldview among the general population—at least in New England. The historian, J. C. D. Clark wrote that such a quick mobilization of colonial forces in a time of crisis proves that “religious imagery” was not just “mere rhetoric.”4 No doubt many of these recruits were not entirely motivated by religious reasons, but Bellamy, knowing his audience, effectively chose this particular biblical text to rouse what he believed to be the majority.
Bellamy’s application of the curse of Meroz shows the depth of belief in the colonial mind. The British became them—the enemies of God—while the colonists represented the new us. In Massachusetts, Nathaniel Whitaker called upon the curse of Meroz in 1777 to rouse Bostonians against the British and attempt to convert American Tories into Whigs. Mark Noll concludes that “in their shared efforts, both political and religious figures were tailoring the project of republican independence to fit the language to traditional Protestant religion.”5 James Darsey notes that “the Whigs were able to present rebellion as an act of virtue, meaning not only that the act was praiseworthy, but that failure to act would constitute moral degeneracy.”6 Whitefield was the first person in a century to apply the curse of Meroz to a military campaign. He had a hand in shaping the thought that permitted its existence, and he first voiced the precise arguments that were used to energize rebellion. The curse’s use against Tories, the British Parliament, and the crown was unavoidable, as was the transformation of the British into God’s enemies.
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The depth of religious belief that determined one’s political views extended well beyond New England, especially into areas further inland. While several of the more famous of America’s founders may have been genuinely motivated to support independence for “secular” reasons, they did not speak for the majority. Numerous historians are beginning to question Jon Butler’s famous claim that “at its heart, the Revolution was a profoundly secular event.”7 Gordon Wood insists that a strictly secular view of the revolution is an “optical illusion” caused by looking for religion in the wrong places. He claims that republican political beliefs did not displace the religious beliefs from which “ordinary people explained the world and made it meaningful,” reasoning that
After all, the period preceding the Revolution experienced such a vast outpouring of religious passion that later commentators could only call it a Great Awakening, and the period following the Revolution outdid even that initial explosion of evangelical religious feeling to become the Second Great Awakening. Could religion during the Revolutionary decades have simply dropped out of sight? Was popular religion like a raging river that suddenly went underground only to reemerge downstream with more force and vigor than ever?8
Wood introduces the idea of “popular Christianity.” It was an expression of faith that evolved out of the Awakening, combining traditional doctrine with popular beliefs. This version of Christianity increasingly met the spiritual needs of many colonists. New Light-inspired groups experienced a phenomenal growth in the decades immediately prior to the Revolution. These communities of believers had been splintered and physically separated from the authority structures of traditional denominations, establishing new congregations led by Yale and Harvard graduates from lower-class backgrounds. They formed casual organizations among the expanding inland populations. Wood concludes that “one kind of American religion may have declined during the revolution, but it was more than replaced by another kind.”9 The simple raising of taxes, even to extremes, has never been the central reason that a population rebels against a leader. Powerful religious ideas are always involved.
Shrewd political leaders of the revolutionary period understood the importance religion held for the people, and they employed it in the most effective ways they could. Likewise, the religious communities clearly saw their best chance at religious liberty in supporting independence from Great Britain. Politics and religion had always been connected in the British Empire. Now the two spheres increasingly merged, for a time, as religious and republican vocabularies—as well as beliefs—came together in a perfect storm. Leaders favoring independence over reconciliation openly worked hand-in-hand with ministers. As the Revolution drew near, colonial leaders called on the likes of William Tennent and William Henry Drayton to travel around the backcountry preaching up republican and Whig ideas in order to “break the hold of the Tories.”10
If one were to follow classical advice regarding the art of persuasion, the best arguments are those the majority of the audience is most likely to believe, not necessarily the most logical ones. From first to last, successful persuasion is “audience centered,” seeking to influence the perceived “majority” to a decision. Departing from what people already believe to be true, the persuader builds a case in a logical direction that those preexisting beliefs will support. Reading the revolutionary era literature shows arguments founded upon religious beliefs, even from the writings of America’s foremost revolutionary activists.
Most colonists were law-abiding by nature, so all that remained for independence to be declared was to justify rebelling against Parliament and the king for moral and legal reasons. Thomas Paine completed the justification with his pamphlet, Common Sense, as he came full circle to religion, revealing an audience highly motivated by biblically based arguments.11 If there is any suspicion that the Awakening’s influence on the colonial mind had faded in the decade before the Revolution, Paine’s demonstration that God would reject an oppressive king and remove him from office shows us that religious motivations saturated American society. Paine wrote:
That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchial government is true, or the scripture is false. And a man hath good reason to believe that there is as much of kingcraft, as priestcraft in withholding the scripture from the public in Popish countries. For monarchy in every instance is the Popery of government.
This is not a conclusion that persuades a deist. But it was precisely what New Lights, their followers, popular Christians, the Sons of Liberty, or any other group that recognizes the church-state connection wants to hear.