Chapter XVI: A Political Man
XVI
A Political Man
During his final days in America, Whitefield could clearly see the writing on the wall—Americans would go to war for their liberties. He sympathized with the colonists. He had been “warring” with his bishops over the right to preach outdoors since his public ministry began in 1738. His war included two assassination attempts, one more averted plot on his life, and countless instances of abuse at the hands of crowds. All of this occurred in England, and each time, Whitefield knew that a bishop was behind the scenes. In America, during the most heated conflicts in 1744, there was never any violence or abuse, and religious leaders who opposed him did it publicly and honorably. Whitefield distanced himself from radicals who had encouraged church splits and defections of members. He aligned himself with moderate New Lights and reaffirmed the value of current colonial leaders and the Old Light denominations. In the end, it was the cooperation of groups within the New Light and Old Light camps that enabled a successful revolution. As Perry Miller observes, the “pure rationalism” of the Liberal [Old Light] clergy contributed to the intellectual notion of American independence, “but it could never have inspired them to fight for it.”1 As we have seen, people holding to the “popular Christianity” enthusiastically stepped forward when called to arms. Inspiring the people to fight was a task taken up by preachers like Israel Putnam and Joseph Bellamy in Connecticut, who traveled the trails blazed by Whitefield, adopting his messages with his promotion of unity, and then preaching themes like the curse of Meroz.
As Americans chose sides in 1776, with many Tories fleeing to England or Canada and most Whigs staying in America, Whitefield was spared from making a difficult choice. He loved all the groups and had spent his life working for unity, trying to reform his own denomination. Perhaps one of his most famous pulpit stories best reveals the spirit of unity he tried to share. While preaching, Whitefield would look toward heaven and call out, beginning a short “play” to make his point:
“Father Abraham, whom have you in heaven? Any Episcopalians?” “No.” “Any Presbyterians?” “No.” “Have you any Independents or Seceders?” “No.” “Have you any Methodists there?” “No, no, no.” “Whom have you there?” “We don’t know those names here. All who are here are Christians—believers in Christ—men who have overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of his testimony.” “O, is this the case?” said Whitefield; “then God help me, God help us all, to forget party names, and to become Christians in deed and in truth!”
If we look past the predictable simplicity of the story we can see the structural principle inside it. Whitefield promoted unity his entire life. It is what made him so loved throughout the British Empire. If unity can be achieved in religion, then where can you not achieve it with some effort? The meaning within this story was not missed by the colonists. The unification of the American colonies against the British oppression would be their only chance to survive a conflict—an idea bluntly pointed out by Ben Franklin in his “join or die” cartoon.
Regarding the “side” of the colonial crisis Whitefield promoted throughout his life, Gledstone, one of his early biographers wrote, “there can be no doubt which side his converts were on and which part they played. One of the men whom [Whitefield] greatly influenced was the Rev. Alexander Craighead, and he again is said to have aroused the Presbyterian patriots who framed the Mecklenburg Declaration, which was copied only one year later by the Philadelphia Declaration of Independence.”2 The company he kept, and especially the ideas he spread throughout the colonies, leave no question as to the practical role that he played in the move to independence.
The similarities between foundational ideas in Whitefield’s sermons of the 1740s and the political arguments of the 1770s are striking. Not all of the revolutionary activists employed specific ideas from New Light theology, as did those who cited the curse of Meroz, but they did draw upon the Awakening worldview to separate Americans from the British and to condemn injustice and tyranny. The arguments of the activists reveal what their audiences found to be persuasive. Those arguments go far beyond a rational defense of civil liberties. They invite the audiences to be something, birthed out of deeply held religious beliefs, extending those beliefs from a new religious identity to a new political identity. With no separation of church and state in 1776, the two identities were the same. Without the Awakening worldview in place enabling colonists to interpret accurately what the activists were trying to say, the activists’ assertions regarding us versus them would not have made sense, and indeed, the activists could not have produced these arguments. They, with a few exceptions, were as enmeshed in the Awakening worldview as their audiences and had to argue within the limits of what they understood as well as what their audiences understood.
The Awakening worldview did not overturn the American churches; it worked from within them for reform, splitting the existing groups into New Light and Old Light factions that, beginning in 1745, made peace and reunited. After the aggressive Whitefield of 1740 pushed ministers into either the New Light or the Old Light camp, the mature peacemaking Whitefield of 1745, through another spirit, reached out, asked for a pardon, and included all in the community of genuine believers.
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This book has examined the multiple communities that existed in the colonies prior to 1740 and has argued that American colonists had an identity problem. You cannot call a people into a new identity unless they are nearly there already.3 So I ask the question: How did American colonists become sufficiently unified so Jefferson’s famous utterance, “We the people …” would resonate? Whitefield’s messages told people exactly who they were and who they ought to be, supplying a religious answer to their identity problem. Upon his arrival into this identity vacuum, Whitefield displayed a spellbinding preaching style and a vigorous deployment of the mass media to spread his messages to everyone. Historians have agreed that the Great Awakening was a key part of the unification process. They have labeled Whitefield as the key figure of the Awakening. In this book, I have sketched out the means by which foreign settlers and colonists were transformed into Americans. George Whitefield was the central figure. He brought the identity messages, earned the respect of people everywhere, and spread those messages throughout the colonies. Whitefield successfully promoted a common worldview among the colonists, establishing their unity within a community of revived religious converts. It was these believers who would most easily take sides against anyone oppressing their liberties.
Whitefield promoted this message with eloquence and passion, arguing within the guidelines of the Enlightenment, backing his claims with Scripture, “natural reason,” and plain old common sense. His message soaked deeply into the colonial culture, allowing his followers and even his enemies (especially after he made peace) to embrace his beliefs about how the world was. Whitefield’s messages simplified the lofty ideas of people like John Locke and Jonathan Edwards, providing a vocabulary everyone could understand.
The Awakening passions cooled off, and political problems displaced revival stories from the newspapers. But the Awakening had already provided a convenient way to understand oppression and liberty. Out of the religious debates emerged a vocabulary about qualified ministers, genuine Christianity, freedom, and war with the devil. By merely changing whom the dialogue of reform was directed at, that vocabulary was fit for duty in the Revolution. Activists debated unqualified leadership, genuine British citizenship, arbitrary power, and war with France and England itself. The worldview and its vocabulary empowered the possibility of republican government, as people supported the Whig politics in the colonies. From the research of Alan Heimert, Perry Miller, Carl Bridenbaugh, Nathan Hatch, Gordon Wood, Patricia Bonomi, Mark Noll, Thomas Kidd, and others, we have learned that religion indeed played an essential role in the development of American nationalism, not a peripheral one. Only after Thomas Jefferson continued to direct the ideological development of Americans did the notion of liberty begin to find additional places to nest. Yet, as Alan Heimert writes, “Whether the enlightened sage of Monticello knew it or not, he had inherited the mantle of George Whitefield.”4
My argument in this book is that one’s identity and the rules about Americanness originated from the Awakening worldview as sowed by George Whitefield. This worldview is the source of John Adams’ infamous observations:
But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was affected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.
The possibility that Whitefield’s messages could impact the colonies so intensely is justified by his patriarchal relationship to the society. One writer has asserted that Whitefield was the “Forgotten Founding Father.”5 But it might be more accurate to say that Whitefield personified an idea and promoted a message. He produced a message that outhved him, as all good ideas should. That message had a life and a reach far beyond any individual. It is this message that helped bridge the gulf between the Awakening generation and the Revolutionary generation. While not possessing the same degree of religious fervor as their forbears, the revolutionaries became the founding fathers of our nation with their religious identities resolved, but showing a political fervor equal to the day. Their sense of mission was similarly profound, but that zeal was directed primarily at the faces of arbitrary power that threatened their society in contrast to the religious apathy that threatened their parents.
Lastly, we have filled some gaps about George Whitefield and his enterprise. The historical record clearly shows his public and private participation in colonial political affairs. He provided assistance and guidance through public controversy from 1744 to his death. Though he may have been reluctant to join a revolution, Whitefield contributed as much to American’s birth on the political front as many of our other founders. But his role went far beyond simply writing public pamphlets that addressed oppression or persuading Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. His ministry and messages shaped American thought. By introducing and promoting central elements of the Awakening worldview, Whitefield’s ideas provided a central force for change. Only an effective, energetic, committed person, able to live with differences, able to survive public criticism, with a willingness to live in the saddle, and possessing the personality to maintain friendships with multiple communities could have succeeded. His was an overwhelming task of shaping the mind of an emerging people. Whitefield, by persistent travel and reinforcement of the Awakening worldview among the colonists, was a father to the American spirit. In time, Whitefield, the public man, was transformed into an icon of the American experience around which developed an intercolonial identity founded in the new birth.
An idea requires circulation, in one form or another, to saturate a culture. Some historians mistakenly divorce the notion of the new birth from Whitefield, as if it possessed and controlled the Awakening ministers without his efforts. Although the term did find its own legs, the new birth required Whitefield’s promotion as much as Whitefield relied upon it for his powerful messages. Moreover, scholars tend to overlook Whitefield’s other contributions: regeneration, indwelling, common privilege, almost and altogether Christians, his prescriptions for judging and responding to leadership, his whistle-blowing about the danger of arbitrary power, the curse of Meroz, and his conflict with Church of England leaders. Without his traveling and popularity, these concepts would have remained local, circulating throughout the colonial society at a much slower rate, if at all. Without his travel, oratorical skill, and marketing savvy, these important ideas could never have coaxed people into the Awakening worldview.
We have also learned something about George Whitefield’s “secret,” which has been ascribed to several different sources by modern scholars, including his uncompromising character, his ability to bring drama into the pulpit, and his unprecedented marketing skills. We must add to these accounts another aspect of Whitefield’s enterprise and personality. Whitefield could see both sides of issues and produce positions that could shift without contradicting himself. He operated chiefly in the oral sphere, where he argued using common sense, making claims and supporting them with reasons he felt would most likely persuade his immediate audience, reasons that would change depending on the nature of the audience, and reasons that they would remember owing to his mastery of rhetoric. Whitefield was flexible enough to alter his views in response to challenges; he could negotiate a fine line between opposing ideas. He could speak in the “market language” of British commoners, or he could battle with bishops in the cultured vocabulary of the upper class. Whitefield was the Anglican who ministered to everyone but Anglicans. He was funded by aristocrats, but struggled for the rights of common people. As a chaplain to the upper classes, he ultimately promoted ideas that loosened the upper-class hold on power. The man had a finesse that was astounding. He attracted the commoners to field sermons by day and spoke to Britain’s elites in Lady Huntingdon’s drawing room by night, with bishops—some of whom he publicly attacked—sneaking in to hear him. It is simply amazing that Whitefield was able to humiliate his own bishop of Gloucester, as well as the archbishop of Canterbury, in print and retain his priesthood. If nothing else, this accomplishment alone is a tribute to his political skill founded in a common sense that emerged from his “common” upbringing and was refined by an Oxford education.
In appreciating Whitefield as a political man, we can add a missing puzzle piece to his story. This view provides a framework for his character, dramatic skills, marketing skills, eloquence, passion-laden sermons, political involvement, and public conflicts—in short, every aspect of his enterprise finds its place to form the larger picture.
When the American founding fathers opened the Constitution of the United States with “We the people,” they were talking about a people who had been in various stages of existence for nearly three decades. To claim that the Revolution was motivated solely by economic interests ignores much in the historical record. Although Whitefield was almost six years dead by the time independence was declared, his ideas awakened a new religious and political spirit and helped unite the colonial world—a unification that proceeded from a transformation in identity through the new birth. Throughout his life, and in every context, the new birth was the center of Whitefield’s message and ministry:
But what shall I write to you about? Why, of our common salvation, of that one thing needful, of that new birth in CHRIST JESUS, that ineffable change which must pass upon our hearts, before we can see GOD, and of which you have heard me discourse so often.
But the concept of the new birth was larger than religious conversion. It came to symbolize a transformation in secular identity—from sinner to saint, European to American. As Whitefield had portrayed, travel across the Atlantic was a metaphor for the birthing process. Ministers and revolutionary orators became the midwives. The reconstruction of American identity, in an American family, was enabled by familiarity with religious conversion. Out of George Whitefield’s ministry was birthed the deep structures of thought that became so entrenched in American culture that Abraham Lincoln would say a hundred years later that “this nation shall have a new birth of freedom.”