24. Special Effects
George Whitefield was never Ben Franklin’s constant companion. When Ben was living in London and he wanted to while away an afternoon playing chess, he did so with John Pringle, an eminent physician. He met at coffee houses with friends from his scientific circles. He played brainteaser games with young Polly Stevenson. George didn’t really believe in “whiling away” anything anyway.
Yet George was one of Ben’s longest-lasting friends. It was more than thirty years from their first meeting in Philadelphia to George’s last breath in Massachusetts. While there were surely ups and downs between them, there were no clear breaks. Ben kept outgrowing other friendships, and friends kept turning away. But there was George Whitefield, sticking with him, growing alongside him, learning to be a better friend with each new letter. Somewhere along the line, they both stopped using each other and constructed a genuine relationship that was, as Ben put it years later, “sincere on both sides.”1
There were many other friends in Whitefield’s world as well. With most of these he could pray, worship, and share good Christian fellowship. Ben was a special case, consistently refusing George’s sales pitch about Jesus, though supporting his push for moral improvement. There was really no one else outside of the evangelical camp with whom the preacher maintained such an enduring friendship.
“Franklin became Whitefield’s best American friend,” wrote Stout, “and, reciprocally, Whitefield was Franklin’s only evangelical friend.”2 Each filled an important niche in the other’s life. How did they affect each other?
The practical effects are indisputable. While both were very gifted men in very different fields, they helped each other to enormous success. Without Franklin’s printing network, Whitefield would still have been a dynamic preacher, but he wouldn’t have captivated America to the same degree. Franklin would have found other ways to make money, no doubt, but without the windfall of Whitefield’s contracts, he might have had to wait another decade to retire from the printing business, and then his scientific and diplomatic pursuits would have been delayed. They supported each other in tough times as well. In 1746, Franklin’s editorial support helped Whitefield shore up his crumbling relationship with America. And how important was Whitefield’s letter-writing network in support of Franklin’s Stamp Act testimony? Ben would never have become the diplomatic hero of the new nation if the folks back home suspected he had sold them out.
Yet, apart from the practical matters, how did the friendship itself affect these two men?
This would be easy to answer if their letters told us. It would be great to read, “Thank you for teaching me compassion.” Or, “Because of you, I have a brighter outlook on life.” But the only inspirational hint we get from their letters is the comment from Franklin after Whitefield’s death, praising his “integrity, disinterestedness, and indefatigable zeal.”3 (In that era, a “disinterested” person was fair and selfless, lacking self-serving motives.) Ben also applied these qualities to George in his autobiography. Clearly the preacher modeled these traits for the printer. Ben had a cynical side that must have been challenged by the very existence of this preacher with impeccable integrity, who had the world at his fingertips but still gave everything to serve God.
And George must have grown through his repeated interactions with a man outside his evangelical orbit, a friend who offered rational objections to George’s ideas without personal attacks. Despite his fame on two continents, George’s world was rather small. He zeroed in on the task at hand, traveling to the next site and preaching the gospel there. Nothing would deter him—not the lure of money, not the love of women, not even his own failing health. He had tunnel vision, focused fully on his calling. Ben, on the other hand, was a man of the world, with a curiosity that could not be contained. Philosophy, science, human behavior, and even religion—it all fascinated him. We see this seeping through in some of his letters to George—dreams of a colony in Ohio, plans for a school of higher learning—so it must have been part of their personal conversations as well. George’s vision would have been broadened every time they talked.
Inventing America
Whitefield and Franklin were not just the two most famous people in America in their time—they were also the most significant. The effects of their lives and their work are still being felt today.
After George’s death, Ben had two more decades in which he exerted enormous influence on the American nation that came to be. With the Continental Congress, Ben got to see a variation on his Albany Plan at work. He was a force behind, and a signer of, the Declaration of Independence. His shrewd diplomacy in France during the American Revolution probably turned the tide. Washington won the battles, but the French bought the guns, and their fleet scared the British into laying down their swords. That was largely a result of Franklin’s careful wooing in the French court. Then, back in America, there was Franklin again, helping to craft the Constitution, doing what he always did best—creating society. He died in 1790, after dominating a century of mind-boggling change.
But let’s not overlook the impact of his early years as a printer, especially as he partnered with Whitefield. Ben was perhaps the first media mogul. His Pennsylvania Gazette wasn’t the first newspaper in the colonies, but with his writing it was surely the best. With his printing network, his yearly almanacs, and his later work as postmaster, he managed the conduits of communication in this developing nation.
Whitefield gave him material to work with. Before George showed up, the Gazette ran lost-and-found notices, the daily schedule of ships pulling up to the Market Street wharf, and whatever clever editorials Ben could think up. But suddenly there were people screaming and fainting in church! There were meetings in fields and sermons from balconies. The newspaper had news. Ben had more content than he knew what to do with—except he knew exactly what to do with it. Books, pamphlets, newspapers—he fueled his mass-media enterprise with the doings of his friend Whitefield. In the process, he changed the field of communications forever.
The philosopher David Hume once criticized Franklin for making up new words, such as colonize. But that’s what Franklin did—he created new forms of communication. And that’s what the colonies needed—new ways of talking about a new kind of life. They weren’t just going to be England West. Ben understood that. There were uniquely American attitudes and cadences in Poor Richard’s homespun language. The practical wisdom, the self-deprecation, and the wry humor all became part of the American personality. Maybe he wasn’t trying to set a tone for a new nation; he just made sure every colonist had access to his writing. And nearly everyone did.
The media empire was just one of the building blocks of society that Ben hoisted into place, along with the library, the fire company, the militia, the hospital, and the college. These social organizations weren’t always the first of their kind, but Ben custom-made them for Philadelphia—and in some cases they became models for other cities to follow. Long before he ever met with Congress or signed a Declaration, he was making America ready to become a nation.
Whitefield was having a similar effect on the religious side of colonial life. His approach was decidedly personal, not ecclesiastical. You, yourself, needed a relationship with God. You needed to feel his presence within you. It was irrelevant which church you attended.
In this way, though he was an Anglican minister, George broke the power of the Anglican Church in America. Or any church authority, really. No church could determine one’s spiritual status. You had to take ownership of that, and then give it up to God.
Powerful churches in England and America recognized this threat and denied access to Whitefield, forcing him out to the markets and fields. Yet that made the Whitefield revival all the more independent of church power. These were democratic spaces, with no reserved pews, no privileged positions, no price of admission, just a preacher with a message and all the people who wanted to hear it. Harry Stout referred to Whitefield challenging the “old history—the history of a traditional, aristocratic, and hierarchical culture. A new religious history, fit for a new consumer age, would have to be voluntary, and this meant popular and entertaining. Whitefield’s revivals were just that. In them, churches were not supplanted so much as sidestepped to create larger, trans-local associations.”4
Some historians have suggested that the Methodist revival helped England avoid a violent rebellion such as France had in 1789, since it gave the common folk some spiritual satisfaction. It didn’t quite work out that way in America, though. The Great Awakening, driven largely by Whitefield, empowered Americans to break free of their old “traditional, aristocratic, and hierarchical” history. They were already “independent” at a deeply personal level, long before they took up arms against Britain. John Adams looked back in 1818 and said, “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; and change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.”5
Just as Franklin knit the colonies together through his communications network, Whitefield did the same through his constant travel. “Religious evangelism was the first continental force,” wrote historian Paul Johnson, “an all-American phenomenon which transcended colonial differences, introduced national figures and made state boundaries seem unimportant. Whitefield was the first ‘American’ public figure to be known from New Hampshire to Georgia.”6
Not only did George cross state lines, but he also challenged denominational borders. The colonial hodgepodge already included Anglicans, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Baptists. Whitefield welcomed all and challenged all. Not that theology was unimportant to him, but the most crucial question was not a matter of church polity but have you received new birth in Jesus? The rebirth issue cut across all church groups, and George found allies from a variety of church backgrounds. The same situation has been seen in the centuries since, as evangelists such as Finney, Moody, McPherson, Sunday, and Graham have carried on transdenominational ministries. The “evangelical movement” has had different characteristics in different eras, but it has never been confined to one church organization. We can trace this breadth back to Whitefield, another effect of his extraordinary work.
For all the political and societal ramifications of George’s work, we must not miss the most obvious one, and the most important. Because of this Great Awakening, a huge number of Americans were, well, awakened. They were jolted out of the religious same-old and into an authentic relationship with God through Jesus. Some would have been merely curiosity seekers, looking for some ecstatic experience before going back to the way things were. But that’s where George’s longevity—and his itinerary—became important. Over thirty years, he kept coming back, to Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, Boston, and many points in between. He was no one-hit wonder, and he would not let the call of God be heard and forgotten. If “awakened” Americans hit the snooze button, he would just sound the alarm again. (By the way, one of George’s favorite terms for the excited response to his sermons was alarm.)
If America was born as a Christian nation, it’s because many of its people were genuinely, powerfully Christians. It had less to do with the language in any founding documents and more to do with the fact that George Whitefield had been tromping from town to town, inviting people to hear the call of God. It had even less to do with church membership. God was grabbing lives. People’s hearts were flying open. No one was imposing Christianity on society. The power came from within. As Ben Franklin reported, shortly after George had left town:
The alteration in the face of religion here is altogether surprising. Never did the people show so great a willingness to attend sermons, nor the preachers greater zeal and diligence in performing the duties of their function. Religion is become the subject of most conversations. No books are in request but those of piety and devotion; and instead of idle songs and ballads, the people are everywhere entertaining themselves with Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. All which, under God, is owing to the successful labours of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield.7
This report could be repeated for hundreds of towns and cities in America over the next thirty years.
Forefathers of Our Country
Ben Franklin is duly recognized as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, thanks to his work with the Declaration and the Constitution. But if we examine the previous three or four decades, before Washington, Adams, or Jefferson staked their claims, there are just a few candidates for the role of forefather of the nation. The list quickly narrows to two men: George and Ben.
If these are our fathers, we carry their DNA.
Like George, we are, as a nation, very religious. Like Ben, we like to make up our own beliefs. About half of Americans call themselves evangelical, children of the Great Awakening. Many even use George’s favorite term: born again. But others do not share this faith. Many, like Ben, are scientific in their outlook. They take an “enlightened” approach to life, focusing on the natural world, not the supernatural.
We are George and Ben.
Thanks to Ben and others, we have religious liberty carved into our Constitution. We have freedom to be religious or not to be. We can be Methodist, Calvinist, Catholic, deist, Pietist, or all of the above. No authority can coerce us to believe anything or force us to say we do. Spiritual life is a personal matter, a transaction between us and God. George and Ben both taught us this.
We’re still figuring out how religious freedom works. As a nation, we seem to vacillate between Ben and George, skeptic and zealot, the right to doubt and the right to believe. The question in our deeply divided country is how to preserve the freedom to live out a vibrant Christian faith as well as the freedom to choose something different. The relationship between these two forefathers points to an answer.
Through the decades, George and Ben kept talking and listening. The pair didn’t just coexist; they were friends. George kept urging Ben to trust in Jesus, and, amazingly, Ben kept writing back, sometimes even thanking George for his concern. Why didn’t Ben just walk away? Apparently George was more than just an evangelistic spiel. He had integrity, a selfless spirit, and a driving passion. Ben appreciated these qualities in his friend. As they continued to trade letters, they spoke honestly about their beliefs and civilly about their disagreements.
Character was a key issue for both George and Ben. Qualities such as diligence, discipline, trustworthiness, and humility were upheld in George’s sermons and in Ben’s more secular writings. Perhaps the religious and nonreligious of today can find common cause in promoting such character qualities.
Ben and George also had a commitment to creativity. Ben’s fertile mind was always seeking new ways to get things done, and George was also a trailblazer in his communication methods. Neither seemed satisfied with the status quo. Both were pushing forward into more effective systems. It’s appropriate that they’re considered cofounders of one of America’s leading educational institutions, the University of Pennsylvania. Both men sought to train new generations to face the challenges ahead with intelligence and creativity. This devotion to creative pursuits resulted in an openness of mind that sought engagement with new ideas, even ones with which they disagreed.
Finally, these forefathers believed in the importance of loving actions. Ben was impressed that George’s religious commitment involved far more than just church activities—he worked hard to help the poor, the orphans, and the outcasts. Even when Ben rejected the gospel of Christ, he loved the love of Christ.
Shortly before his own death, Ben Franklin was asked to clarify his religious beliefs. He reiterated the theistic ideas he had always shared with George, that the Creator was benevolent and just, worthy of worship. “As for Jesus of Nazareth . . .,” Ben wrote, “I think the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see.” Still, he admitted “some doubts as to his divinity, though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon.” There he goes, creating new words again. Though he harbored doubts, he would not make his skepticism a matter of dogma. Maybe he still had George’s voice in his head: “Apply to God; be willing to do the divine will, and you shall know it.” As Ben approached his death, he noted that he would soon have an “opportunity of knowing the truth.”8
George built his career on Jesus’ teaching that “unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). He kept inviting his ultra-creative friend to experience that recreative power of God. Yet there’s another New Testament verse that might apply more closely to Ben’s religious journey. “But without faith it is impossible to please [God]; for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him” (Hebrews 11:6).