11. Boy, Interrupted
Despite his love of acting, George Whitefield dropped out of school at about the age of fifteen. Apparently he used all his persuasive ability to convince his mother that this was best for the family. After being deserted by her second husband, she was suffering financially, and therefore couldn’t afford to send George to college. In that case, he reasoned, he would just be “spoiled” as a tradesman if he learned too much Latin. As he wrote later in his memoirs, he thought he had made “sufficient progress in the classics” by this time, but in truth he was just “longing to be set at liberty from the confinement of a school.”1
Mom was a hard sell, but George eventually got his way. At first he continued to study only writing, but then he stopped going to school entirely. Instead, he worked at the family inn, washing mops and cleaning rooms. This employment lasted a year and a half.
During this time he read the Bible often and would sometimes compose sermons as he worked. A friend would stop by as he tended the bar, urging him to go to Oxford University. “I wish I could,” George replied.2
Things changed when his brother took over the inn. The brother’s wife did not get along with George, and so George left the inn to live in Bristol with another brother. For the next two months, he experienced a new religious fervor, but then he moved to his mother’s home in Gloucester and “all my fervour went off.” Unemployed, he renewed acquaintances with some old school friends. He resumed reading plays and playing cards. “It was a proper season for Satan to tempt me,” he later wrote.3
This sensitivity sounds strange to modern ears. What’s wrong with some mild diversion? Yet for George it was all connected. A lack of spiritual discipline led to all sorts of bad behavior and bad thoughts. According to his memoirs, his friends in Gloucester were “debauched, abandoned, atheistical youths.”4 It was all too easy for George to try to fit in with them, to participate in their wanton activities. Already, we’ve gained a sense of George’s need for acceptance, even applause. Did these accomplices goad George into shameful behavior? As he wrote about it a few years later, he answered unequivocally, “Yes!” Besides play reading and card playing, he reported getting drunk a few times and indulging in “secret sin.” We can only guess what that might be, but George was deeply remorseful about it.5
Even in these times of sin, he would occasionally have a sense of God’s calling: “One morning, as I was reading a play to my sister, said I, ‘Sister, God intends something for me which we know not of. As I have been diligent in business, I believe many would gladly have me for an apprentice, but every way seems to be barred up, so that I think God will provide for me some way or other that we cannot apprehend.’ ”6
That way became clearer when a family friend, a young man a few years older than George, visited Mrs. Whitefield and told her about the “servitor” program that was paying his way through Oxford. A servitor worked as a servant of wealthier students, but also attended classes and earned a degree. “That will do for my son,” said Mrs. Whitefield. George enthusiastically agreed.7
In short order, George applied for a servitor position at Oxford and returned to St. Mary’s to complete his preparation in the classics. For the next year, he was back with his old classmates, and once again he reported his sinful behavior: “I took pleasure in their lewd conversation. I began to reason as they did. . . . In short, I soon made a great proficiency in the school of the Devil. I affected to look rakish.”8
It was 1731. As Ben Franklin in Philadelphia was setthng down into marriage, fatherhood, and business, in Gloucester the mercurial George Whitefield had another change of attitude. He received Communion on Christmas Day, just past his seventeenth birthday, and this seemed to mark a special moment for him. “I began now to be more and more watchful over my thoughts, words, and actions.” During the following Lenten season he fasted Wednesdays and Fridays. He read devotional books. He went to public worship twice a day.9
Looking back on this extreme religiosity, he noted, “hypocrisy crept into every action. As once I affected to look more rakish, I now strove to appear more grave than I really was. . . . I often used to find fault with the lightness of others.”10 George was not a lot of fun to be around anymore. He even annoyed his mother.
Selling the Truth
Whitefield’s preoccupations in this period—struggling to find his identity, weighing the merits of wildness and discipline, attending to his image—were all those of Ben Franklin in his own adolescence. Ben’s circumstances were very different, his background was different, and his world was different, but parts of this pathway were much the same.
Both Ben and George left us with detailed accounts of their youth, and we would expect them to tag their younger selves with certain labels. But within these stories, we find each young man intentionally constructing and revising his own image. Ben pushes a wheelbarrow down the street to show potential clients he’s a hard worker. George takes on a “rakish” appearance. Ben dandles his pocket watch at his brother’s shop to show he’s now successful. George practices preaching at the inn’s bar. Ben remembers with some mock horror how bedraggled he was when Deborah first saw him on Market Street. George remembers with shame how he wore girls’ clothing on stage.
In the following years, both would become masters of image crafting, each in his own way. On occasion, they would help each other do this. (Franklin’s press coverage gave Whitefield a foothold in America. Later, during the Stamp Act controversy, Whitefield’s support secured Franklin’s image as a diplomat with America’s best interests at heart.) Both understood the power of image to affect others, to find the most efficient use of their own abilities, and to change society. But even more than that, they seemed to understand themselves by these images.
In today’s image-crazy age, savvy observers often try to separate image from reality. We assume that advertisers and politicians are lying to us as they display the pictures we want to see. The true identity of this product or business or person, we think, must be quite different. It would be easy to take the same approach with George and Ben, but what’s at stake for them is a heartfelt question: What kind of person do I want to be?
Young George seemed to change his mind about that every other month. He would toy with a particular self-image and then radically redefine himself. He was not an eighteenth-century Eddie Haskell, smiling at the grownups while raising hell behind their backs. No, he was representing the reality of whoever he decided to be this month. In the same way, Ben Franklin pushed a wheelbarrow down the street to publicize the reality of his industrious nature. This was not a marketing gimmick. Well, it was, but he was backing up the image by actually working day and night. He was “selling” the truth about who he was.
Yes, Ben became a master of the pseudonym, the prank, the fake letter to the editor, but these could be seen as examples of the lie that speaks the truth. In his Busy-Body letters, for instance, he was telling the truth about Keimer’s ineptitude as an editor and a businessman, and about his own vision of what a newspaper could be. What’s more, most readers eventually knew that Ben was Busy-Body—yet the false name enabled people to see the true situation of Philadelphia’s newspaper business. We don’t need to defend Ben’s tactics here, but deceit was not his crime. He brilliantly managed the imagery in this situation, but he was essentially “selling” the truth.
That might also be an apt description of George’s preaching ministry as it developed. He was not playing the part of an emotional preacher. Well, he was, but it wasn’t a false identity he put on. He was deeply dedicated to the truth of what he was preaching. His love for the gospel was stronger than any of Aristotle’s passions, and so George used every stage tactic available to express himself. Surely he understood that his dramatic antics created greater interest in his message, but they sprang from his own dramatic self. He was “selling the truth” about himself—and about God.
Oxford Blues
In 1732, at the age of seventeen, George Whitefield enrolled at Oxford’s Pembroke College. As a servitor, he paid most of his way by serving wealthier students. This was a humiliating position, but his time waiting on guests at the Bell Inn had prepared him well for the laundering, cleaning, and fetching he did there. His people-pleasing instincts were in full flower, and soon George’s services were in high demand. “By my diligent and ready attendance, I ingratiated myself into the gentlemen’s favour,” he recalled.11
By comparison, it’s interesting to note the experience of the great essayist Samuel Johnson, who also attended Pembroke College a year or two earlier. Johnson bucked against the class consciousness at Oxford. “I was miserably poor,” he told his biographer. His feet were sticking out of his worn-out shoes, and he noticed the sneers of the “gentlemen” students. He described his attitude there as “bitterness.” After about a year and a half, he dropped out, unable to pay tuition.12 Such might have been the case with George Whitefield if it hadn’t been for the opportunity to earn his tuition through serving—as well as his own accommodating spirit.
We’ve seen the ups and downs of George’s spiritual life during his adolescence. He entered college at a time of strong commitment, and this helped him resist the peer pressure that might have brought him down. The other servitors who roomed with him were often going out at night, and they invited George to “join in their excess of riot.” He said no, again and again, preferring to stay home by himself. Eventually they stopped asking. “When they perceived they could not prevail, they let me alone as a singular odd fellow.”13
Good news: he was resisting temptation. Bad news: he was very lonely.
In a 1770 poem, Charles Wesley recalled his first impressions of George Whitefield at Oxford:
Can I the memorable day forget,
When first we by divine appointment met?
Where undisturb’d the thoughtful student roves,
In search of truth, through academic groves;
A modest, pensive youth, who mused alone,
Industrious the frequented path to shun.14
George “roved” through the halls of Oxford, “thoughtful” and “pensive.” He wasn’t chatting with friends, wasn’t rolling a game of ninepin on the lawn. He was musing and very much “alone.”
“I went to Oxford without a friend, I had not a servant, I had not one to introduce me,” he said in a sermon years later.15 His roommates were steering clear of him. He lacked the social status of the young gentlemen he was serving. There were no particular professors or tutors he drew close to. Of course, between classwork and servitor duties, he had plenty to do, and he doubled down on religious activities, observing a personal time of prayer and psalm singing five times a day, fasting every Friday, and taking Communion at a church near campus. Increasingly he withdrew from society, living a sort of monastic life in the midst of a busthng university.
A major influence on him at that time was a rather new book, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, put out by English churchman William Law in 1729. This book was also important to John Wesley, Samuel Johnson, and many others.16 The title tells you what you need to know. William Law was calling Christians to get serious about their faith. It wasn’t enough simply to show up at church. Christianity needed to affect one’s whole life.
“Devotion signifies a life given, or devoted, to God,” Law wrote. “He, therefore, is the devout man, who lives no longer to his own will, or the way and spirit of the world, but to the sole will of God, who considers God in everything, who serves God in everything, who makes all the parts of his common life parts of piety, by doing everything in the Name of God.”17
The Church of England had, quite simply, grown cold. Sparks of authentic spiritual reformation had accompanied the political impulses of Henry VIII that birthed that church some two centuries earlier, but these sparks had long since died away. The bloody wrangling of the different politico-religious parties in England had given way to peace, with Anglicans in power and Catholics and Dissenters in a minority position. When any religious group gains power, you can look for other dynamics—an embrace of social rank, political issues, and financial growth; a freezing of spiritual development; the need to preserve the status quo. All of this was happening in England at the time. Also, Anglican leaders were buying heavily into the emerging Enlightenment. The church was all head and no heart.
“At that time, serious and practical Christianity in England was in a very low condition,” wrote John Gillies in a 1772 biography of Whitefield. “Scriptural, experimental religion . . . was become quite unfashionable.”18
It was exactly this “scriptural, experimental religion” that William Law was hawking. Faith needed to be lived out, a new experiment of devotion every day. He summoned Christians away from the empty diversions of entertainment, games, and gossip. Law’s message: get serious about what’s most important.
George had seen this book a year or so earlier, but now he was able to get a copy of his own and devour it. As a result, he wrote later, “God worked powerfully upon my soul.”19 A Serious Call seemed to give George a vocabulary for faith. He had previously felt bursts of passion for God, but now he had a reason. He answered this serious call. He determined to be a serious Christian.
Maybe too serious.