Chapter III: A New Birth of Freedom
III
A New Birth of Freedom
Imagine yourself living on a farm outside of Philadelphia, working from dawn to dusk clearing trees, tending crops, and doing whatever you are told as an “indentured servant” to a wealthy landowner. You sold seven years of your life for your ticket out of England, a place on this farm, and the promise of your own land on the frontier. While life is tough, it beats the poverty and despair of London, where other family members are still struggling to survive.
The words “America” and “freedom” are so completely intertwined today that it is difficult to imagine a time when freedom was limited. Many early settlers came to America to escape religious persecution. Others came for adventure or career opportunities. For each of these, America offered freedom and opportunity. On the other hand, about half of the colonial immigrants were indentured servants—Europeans who sold themselves into seven years of slavery to pay for their passage. With some luck, these people would serve their time without being convicted of a petty crime for which they would be punished with another seven years. And of course there were African slaves with little hope of freedom. For these two groups, America could be an oppressive place. Somewhere in the middle were fifty thousand convicted criminals deported from the British Isles to America. Benjamin Franklin called the practice “the most cruel insult that perhaps was ever offered by one people to another.” As the revolutionary period approached, the colonies increasingly took on the character of England with its class distinctions and unequal distribution of wealth.
While the American colonies provided religious freedom, everyone living there was subject to the British government. Many settlers understood themselves as English, yet many did not. Colonists, whether they were free or not, had no sense of national community beyond their town, and there was nothing that had imposed an English identity on settlers from other nations. The thirteen colonies were physically distant and politically separate from one another. Frontier challenges dissolved European ways and offered “American” ways.
As this chapter moves forward, we will examine America, to which Whitefield brought his message, in terms of identity, life challenges, and religion. From this vantage point, we can then look into how Whitefield’s message reinforced the idea of religious freedom and began to extend the concept of freedom beyond religion and into the sphere of politics.
Welcome to America!
Everyone in America was forced to reconsider who they were after their arrival, creating a continuous pressure that would regularly remind them that they were foreigners. Historian Michael Warner explains that American colonists were trying to negotiate two national identities: being English and being something else; living far from England and the concerns of London, yet trying to retain their English self-understandings. For example, Benjamin Franklin would shift back and forth between wearing a powdered wig to wearing long unruly locks, as in his most popular depictions—the image he settled upon later in his life. Warner describes it this way:
Many lived in local worlds of less moment, relatively indifferent to markets, wars, printing, and other venues of the English Atlantic … as soon as we stop looking for Americanness we see that none is aptly described as American. Most have conflicted transitional identities.1
The usual sources of identity were overturned. Farming traditions were at odds with a strange land that required different techniques and crops; communities and farms were separated by wilderness; prosperity provided new experiences for many poor immigrants; churches were threatened by the indifference of youth. But in the midst of these challenges, financial prosperity told the colonists that they really were somebody and they now had the “goods” to prove it. Whitefield’s message provided the needed element for a new identity for the settlers who had found a prosperous and good life and now desired to figure out who they were.
In addition to being “foreign,” several other things that hindered American identity are obvious upon a close reading of history. On one hand, America lacked a single shared experience that would set an American apart from other cultures and nationalities. On the other hand, obstacles to identity emerged from six sources: ethnic diversity, new farming methods, physical isolation, an expanding frontier, financial prosperity, and diversity in religion. Each of these aspects of life conspired against European identity. Americans were also committed to education, which made them open to Whitefield and his message. The early Awakening revivals that flared intermittently from 1728 until 1736 provide striking evidence that America was ripe for something—a place where colonists’ personal and group identities were up in the air and open to influence.
The international flavor of the colonies remained a leading feature of America well into the late eighteenth century. Not only did colonists live and work with “foreigners,” but foreigners became part of one’s family. The early historian Crèvecoeur wrote:
He is either an European or the descendant of an European; hence that strange mixture of blood which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations.2
American-born children, torn between dual backgrounds, continued to fuel the sense of unsettled identity through the “normal” search for one’s place in life that is common in youth.
The New Birth and Protestant Currents
As noted, religious diversity was a major feature of colonial life. While a historical emphasis has traditionally been placed on the Puritans (called the “Congregationalists” in America), and not without reason, there existed other reformed groups that came to America from all over Europe. These were Protestants who were escaping the oppression of the Roman Catholics in continental Europe as well as the Church of England. The central issue of debate between these denominations was “what does it mean to be a genuine Christian?” Although there were several theological schools of thought that guided the reformed churches, perhaps the most influential was the theology of John Calvin.
Calvinism’s defining feature, as many understood it, was “predestination.” Generally speaking, “predestination meant that God is in charge of salvation from start to finish, that God chooses who gets saved, appoints the time of their conversion, and holds their salvation secure. For churches, such as those of the Puritans, salvation typically required a lengthy time period and did not occur until one was on the threshold of adulthood. Charles Cohen summarized, “Those whom God elected to salvation passed through a protracted experience of desperation and relief.” A person could do nothing to affect the outcome, a depressing situation for someone desiring conversion. Although each of the major colonial churches had their own beliefs about salvation, the Calvinist idea of predestination as an expression of God’s sovereignty was a well-understood doctrine and widely accepted.3
Calvinism had a competitor in the theological marketplace: Arminianism, which was based on the writings of Jacob Arminius. This competing theology rejected the pessimistic predestination beliefs of Calvinism that had been growing in popularity. Its central difference was that God’s grace was available to all who would believe, that predestination meant that God simply “knew” beforehand who the believers would be. In the Arminian system, people had some control through their response of faith to God’s offer of salvation. In the Calvinist world, faith to believe was God’s gift to the believer. But in the Arminian world, faith was a response from the believer to God’s offer. While both theological systems taught that conversion was essential, it was achieved by different means.
In churches where the conversion experience was not taught (typically the traditional large denominations run by older, well-educated ministers), one’s Christianity was assured by rejecting sin, devoting oneself to religious activities, and partaking of the sacraments. In essence, you were a Christian because it was the family religion and you were born into it. There was not a conversion experience. If you were a church member there were certain obligations, including taking the sacraments, maintaining private morality, practicing public virtue, giving to the poor, and generally being a good person.
To understand how Whitefield shook up American religion in ways that could lead to thoughts of independence, we must delve a bit deeper into the theologies of the day. Calvinism and Arminianism formed the bedrock of England’s two main political parties. Remember, that there was no separation of church and state in British society.4 While colonial theologians debated their views about Calvinism, ministers perhaps had the more exasperating task. Working with people in their parish, they were forced to grapple with an impractical system in their churches. What is the point in preaching the gospel if the preaching doesn’t call people to conversion? For the preacher, Calvinism was counterproductive. Norman Pettit sums up their problem: “As spiritual preachers, physicians of the soul, and builders of faith, how could they urge on all men the biblical question, What must I do to be saved? (emphasis in original) without violating this rigid discipline?”5 Even if a person desired conversion, in a Calvinist church where predestination was taught, salvation was up to God. As a result, church memberships declined from the setthng of America in the 1620s up through 1735.
The Puritan’s best solution was what they called “preparation of the heart” for salvation. Although one could not pressure God in the process, Puritans prepared their members to receive salvation, even though there was no guarantee that it would come. Preparation of the heart became a widespread doctrine in Puritan churches, allowing a degree of human effort to sneak into the salvation process, yet conversion itself was still up to God with the prepared sinner anxiously awaiting God’s action. As might be expected, controversy erupted over these changes between frustrated ministers and armchair theologians who demanded pure Calvinism. Yet the ministers of churches continued this move toward “preparation” and away from pure predestination. The point is that rigid Calvinism just did not work that well and faced challenges from ministers who wanted to see more people converted. One such minister was Jonathan Edwards, who believed the heart held the key to salvation.
Edwards taught that preparation of the heart aided in conversion. But after leading parishioners through preparation, Edwards could say little more due to his Calvinist belief about God’s control of the process. In his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which he skillfully wove a view of sinners as being on the brink of hell with nothing but God’s grace withholding destruction—like a spider dangling by a thread over a fire—Edwards found himself dangling by the same thread, as he could move his audience to the heights of emotional preparedness but could not swoop down and capture their hearts. Ernest Bormann wrote, “When the time came to speak of hope and outhne the plan for salvation, Edward’s artistry stumbled and he could not reach the rhetorical peak that he had scaled minutes before.”6 The challenge was that salvation, for Calvinists, was still God’s choice to give to a person, not the person’s choice to reach out and take. God’s “grace” was an unearned benefit that you hoped he would extend to you. A person could prepare all they wanted and stand before God, but it did not mean that God predestined them for salvation, only that if he did, the salvation might come a bit sooner. But Edwards brought in a critical shift in the religious conversion process. He had extended a degree of control for the preconvert without crossing the predestination line. There was something that people could do now rather than just wait and see. And if you felt remorse for your sin and terror that you might be damned, then it was a pretty good indicator that maybe, just maybe, God would grant salvation to you.
Inspired by the philosopher John Locke and his belief that one’s feelings can be a reasonable way of knowing truth, Edwards taught that the emotions provided a legitimate way to verify that God was close to you. As Edwards vividly portrayed the terror of damnation, he relied on the imaginings of his audience to summon within themselves emotions such as fear, anxiety, and guilt. For these individuals, experiencing such strong reactions was proof that God was drawing near. But Edwards did not take it further at this point. The actual moment of conversion remained cloaked. Once it did happen, whatever it was, a person could be sure they had it. The “sweetness” of salvation counted as evidence for the successful conversion experience (as Edwards described in his own life). But for most preachers of that time, the problem remained. The emotional nature of conversion resisted the preacher’s attempts to portray it in a compelling manner, prompting those without the experience to question its existence.
Edwards described conversion in his book entitled A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, one of the best attempts to explain and characterize it. Edwards used various terms throughout his writings to characterize conversion, including “conversion,” “a new nature,” “a state of acceptance,” “justification,” “redemption,” and “holiness of heart.” Yet Edwards also complained about the difficulties of conveying the concept to others accurately.
And indeed it appears very plainly in some of them, that before their conversion they had very imperfect ideas what conversion was. It is all new and strange … the expressions used to describe conversion … such as a spiritual sight of Christ, faith in Christ, poverty of spirit, trust in God, &c.—did not convey those distinct ideas to their minds which they were intended to signify. Perhaps to some of them it was but little more than the names of colours are to convey the ideas to one that is blind from birth.
Of Edwards, and others like him, John Corrigan writes, “Conversion remained for them, as it did for other New Englanders, somewhat mysterious.”7 The abstract message, as they taught it, required consistent teaching to cultivate understanding. Consequently, the revivals in the decade before Whitefield were limited to areas where people had the benefit of repeated explanations from a patient minister like Edwards.
Edwards’ rigorous theology eventually settled into a friendlier version of Calvinism known as “evangelicalism,” a moderate Calvinism that prized a warm heart, valued reason as a way to know God, and required obedience to God’s moral law. Edwards and a number of other ministers, including Gilbert Tennent and Theodorus Frelinghuysen had been leading revivals in their congregations and neighboring locales. Their focus was on the heart and a person’s personal relationship with God. They insisted upon a conversion experience for every believer and sought public virtue and private morality rooted in a genuine inward change of heart, not just following the rules for the sake of appearance. The conversion experience reached into a person’s very core, altering his or her identity. This combination of feelings, reason, and morals gave the revival theology a staying power that was missing in the traditional Calvinistic theological system.
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Congregations that embraced the revivals and their evangelical teachings became known as New Lights. These revivalists almost always were from the lower classes, emphasized personal equality, and had ministers who were less educated but excelled in oral public discourse. But many people did not accept the revivals. The antirevival faction, known as Old Lights, generally represented the rich who supported the class structure of British society, had ministers who were well educated, and relied primarily on writing to promote their ideas and agenda. New Lights outnumbered Old Lights by four to one as the youth and lower-class masses attended and affirmed the prorevival churches.
While Edwards may have extended the believer’s control through the practice of preparation, Whitefield took matters a step further by implying that the prepared heart had a choice, and this choice gave more control to the believer over the conversion process. Yet Whitefield dodged charges of a drift into Arminianism by constantly citing the Calvinist Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England as his bedrock of theology. Nevertheless, Whitefield introduced a subtle grammatical shift in his message that resolved the challenge that Edwards faced. Ernest Bormann has highlighted the choice as a critical feature of Whitefield’s preaching:
Whitefield often spoke in such a way that his listeners could easily assume that, by an act of faith on their part, they would be saved. Such phrases as “come poor, lost, undone sinner, come just as you are to Christ … ” easily suggest that the listener can make a decision and receive the “new birth.”8
In fact, nearly every surviving sermon of Whitefield’s includes a section addressed to sinners encouraging them to take action. Notice the verbs in these quotes: “Fly to him then by faith; say unto him, as the poor leper did, ‘Lord, if thou wilt,’ thou canst make me willing.” This example from “Marriage of Cana” shows Whitefield’s addition of human control alongside God’s. Whitefield rearranges his sentence structure in order to make the listener the subject—the one taking action instead of being the object—the one being acted upon. Normally in Calvinism, God would be the one enacting the salvation. But in Whitefield’s version, the audience takes center stage and becomes the one who must enact its own salvation. Whitefield tells the audience to do something, and in so doing, it gains some control over its own salvation. In the example above, Whitefield cleverly uses the story of the leper who wanted to believe but was having trouble. He is told that as a sinner he must fly after God, and that this action will make him a willing subject worthy of being saved in God’s eyes.
Moreover, Whitefield described the conversion experience, not with big theological words like Edwards and others, but with a simple metaphor: the new birth. Within months, this metaphor ignited the Awakening vocabulary, providing an exciting and memorable descriptor that captured the essence of revival theology. New birth was a term vague enough to avoid theological debates, yet precise enough to convey both the trials and joys of the experience. But most importantly, the new birth operated as a noun, a “thing” you could take action toward, rather than some indescribable, abstract experience that descends upon you like in Edward’s descriptions. Whitefield’s preaching stimulated the child-like impulse of “I want one too!” as he encouraged the sinners in his audience to take action, instead of waiting to see, and get the same new birth that others were already enjoying. In addition, this approach to evangelism was rather easy to copy, and numerous preachers began following suit after hearing Whitefield.
In choosing the new birth, his audiences were choosing a personal identity. Up to this point, it had been a Calvinist God’s choice whether or not one was converted. The people had no choice in the matter, prepare as they might. The religious aspect of their identity was chosen for them despite their hopes. And as Whitefield traveled and saturated the colonies with his message, he confronted everybody with the necessity of making a personal choice about the new birth—a choice of a new identity that was a perfect fit with the new American land. As will be argued below, introducing choices in religion paved the road for republican politics, a political system of self-government through representatives chosen by the people. If one had a choice in matters as weighty as salvation, where could personal choice be denied? As historian Mark Noll stated, “Republican instincts prized human self-sufficiency more highly than dependence upon God.”9 In a later chapter we will discuss how Calvinism and Arminianism were connected to the two major political parties in the British Empire, the Tories and the Whigs.
In addition to establishing an identity, the new birth encouraged people to have a personal relationship with God, to pray without an official prayer book, to even converse with God. Roman Catholicism had provided priestly mediators, and after the Church of England broke away during the Reformation period, their priests continued to mediate the relationship between God and a community. The new birth had a profound influence on the development of colonial culture. As Fukuyama concludes, “In the long run, the individual’s ability to have a direct relationship with God had extremely subversive consequences for all social relationships, because it gave individuals a moral ground to rebel against even the most broadly established traditions and social conventions.”10 Eventually, the new birth came to embody the “pursuit of happiness,” a republican theme that would play an expanded role in coming decades.11
Whitefield simplified the theology of the conversion into this metaphor of the new birth. The term was clear, precise, and easily grasped by anyone. Whitefield understood revival theology and was able to explain it to uneducated people whom he respected and valued. In addition, Whitefield had a reputation for being “divinely anointed,” causing people to take him seriously (remember the squint). The term new birth was the critical factor in the spread of revival.
Whitefield employed other terms that simplified previously difficult ideas. He promoted terms like “regeneration” and “common privilege,” as well as the means to tell who was converted and who was not by traveling everywhere and preaching consistent messages. Unlike people’s experience with Edwards and other revivalists, Whitefield’s audiences did not need multiple sermons to hear and recall the salvation message. He effectively communicated everything in the few sermons he would deliver in a town before moving on.
But Whitefield supplied a far more dynamic and powerful tool than simply a vocabulary and grammar that launched the revival. The fundamental beliefs from the Awakening set up logical templates—models of belief and behavior—that would be applied to tough political issues of the Revolutionary generation. As we will see, Whitefield promoted several templates that paved the way for the advancement of republican thought in the colonies. These templates helped the founders find the logic to support their objections to rising British oppression.
If the new birth stood as a central revival belief, the template from which it was drawn held the greater significance. This model suggested that there was a community that a person could choose to enter while the rest remained outside. The Puritans divided life into matters of spirit and of flesh, into worlds of light and of darkness, of the host of God and the hosts of the devil, of the elect and of the damned, of saints and of sinners. From here, we find categories of “us or them,” with ideas of “in/out,” “good/evil,” and “liberty/slavery.” These categories found expression in spheres other than religion through the template that simplified one’s choices, whether applied to religion, social problems, or political questions.