George Whitefield: America's Spiritual Founding Father

340 Pages·2014·7.33 MB·English

by  Thomas S. Kidd

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eorGe hitefield
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America’s Spiritual Founding Father
Thomas S. Kidd
New Haven & London
Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2014 by Thomas S. Kidd.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kidd, Thomas S.
George Whitefield : America's spiritual founding father / Thomas S. Kidd.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-18162-3 (hardback)
1. Whitefield, George, 1714–1770. 2. Evangelists—Great Britain—Biography.
3. Evangelists—United States--Biography. 4. United States—Church history.
I. Title.
BX9225.W4K48 2014
269'.2092--dc23
[B]
2014012873
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of
Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
one “The Circumstance of My Being Born in an Inn”:
George Whitefield and Eighteenth- Century England 5
two “The Day Star Arose in My Heart”: Whitefield’s
Conversion 20
three “God is Preparing Me for Something Extraordinary”:
Whitefield the Methodist Missionary 38
four “The Fiery Trial of Popularity”: George Whitefield,
Field Preacher 58
five “A Tour Round America”: The American South and the
Bethesda Orphanage 84
six “To Revive the Flame Again”: Whitefield Comes to
New England 106
seven “Hearing Him Preach, Gave Me a Heart Wound”:
Calvinist Preaching, Calvinist Controversy 130
eight “Thy Maker is Thy Husband”: Whitefield Goes
to Scotland 148
vi Contents
nine “Close Attacks, But Strong Consolations”: The Return
to America 170
ten “Hunting in the American Woods”: Whitefield, Slavery, and
Evangelical Radicalism 188
eleven “As I Grew Moderate”: Whitefield Mends
Rivalries 204
twelve “This Pilgrimage Kind of Life”: The End of
Whitefield’s Travels 225
Conclusion: “Jesus Christ Has Got Thee at Last”:
George Whitefield’s Legacy 248
Notes 265
Acknowledgments 311
Index 313
Illustrations follow p. 138
INTRODUCTION
On October 12, 1740, in the fading light of a cool autumn evening, the twenty-
five-y ear-o ld evangelist George Whitefield ascended a platform on Boston
Common. Before him stood twenty thousand people. If the crowd estimates
were reasonably accurate, this was the largest assembly ever gathered in the his-
tory of the American colonies. (Boston’s entire population was only seventeen
thousand in 1740.) Whitefield had already seen crowds this massive—even
larger—in the great city of London, but the teeming New England throngs,
gathered in the region’s small fishing villages and provincial towns, amazed him.
Sometimes the pressing people frightened him, too. There were volcanic
outbursts of emotion. He regularly had to cut his preaching short, unable to be
heard over the cacophony of weeping and screeching. At the Common,
Whitefield implored the people to put their faith in Jesus Christ, the kind of
sincere faith their Puritan forefathers had embraced. It did not matter whether
their parents were Christians. It did not matter whether they prayed and
attended church and read their Bibles. Whitefield wanted to know whether
they had experienced the “new birth” of conversion.
Concluding the sermon, his countenance falling, he told them that it was
time for him to go; other audiences needed his gospel preaching, too. “Numbers,
great numbers, melted into tears, when I talked of leaving them,” Whitefield
wrote. He had begun to forge a special bond with the American colonists.
“Boston people are dear to my soul,” he confessed.1
Reports about this wondrous boy preacher began to appear in the colonies’
newspapers in 1739. By 1740 he had become the most famous man in America.
(In 1740 George Washington was eight years old, John Adams was four, Thomas
Jefferson was not even born. Benjamin Franklin’s fame as a printer, which
did not extend much beyond Philadelphia, was enhanced considerably by
1
2 Introduction
becoming Whitefield’s publisher.) Whitefield was probably the most famous
man in Britain, too, or at least the most famous aside from King George II.
From his humble beginnings in Gloucester, England, no one would have
guessed that Whitefield’s celebrity would reach so far, so high, or so soon.
Three hundred years after his birth, George Whitefield is not entirely forgotten,
but his fame now is far dimmer than it was on that fall evening in Boston.
Today, Whitefield’s renown is surpassed by that of his friends, including Ben
Franklin and Jonathan Edwards, the great pastor-t heologian of Northampton,
Massachusetts. Most U.S. history survey courses and textbooks still mention
Whitefield, thanks to two major academic biographies, Harry Stout’s The Divine
Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (1991) and
Frank Lambert’s “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic
Revivals (1994). These biographies, as well as a surge of recent studies of
the Great Awakening, have established Whitefield as a fixture in the standard
story of American history for the foreseeable future. Still, we know too little
about him.
I do not come to this new biography of the great evangelist with a historical
axe to grind. All the major Whitefield biographies, from confessional Christian
approaches such as Luke Tyerman’s The Life of the Rev. George Whitefield
(2 vols., 1877) and Arnold Dallimore’s George Whitefield: The Life and Times of
the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-C entury Revival (2 vols., 1970, 1980), to
Stout’s, Lambert’s, and Jerome Mahaffey’s more recent books, make essential
contributions upon which I gratefully build. Readers familiar with my work
know that I am both a university-b ased historian and an evangelical Christian,
so perhaps I can help bridge the academic and Christian perspectives on
Whitefield that have clashed in recent decades. (More on this clash later.)
I admire the work of Tyerman and Dallimore, especially because they were
not professional historians, but ministers. They painstakingly pieced together
comprehensive biographies through archival research, consulting original
sources and manuscripts whenever possible. Dallimore, a small-t own pastor in
Ontario, worked for thirty years on his biography, facing poverty and complaints
from his parishioners that he was wasting time. Dallimore ultimately resigned
his pastorate in 1973 so he could devote himself full- time to the biography’s
second volume. Tyerman and Dallimore appear constantly in scholars’ foot-
notes because they remain the two most detailed treatments of Whitefield’s
own life and ministry.2
Of course, Tyerman and Dallimore did not provide the kind of context for
Whitefield’s life that one would expect from academic historians. Stout,
Introduction 3
Lambert, Mahaffey, and others have helped us interpret Whitefield within the
framework of eighteenth-c entury Anglo-A merican culture. Lambert examined
Whitefield in light of the “consumer revolution” of the eighteenth century. As
a “pedlar in divinity,” Whitefield mastered the use of publicity, newspapers, and
inexpensive print to promote his preaching tours and the gospel he expounded.
Stout, on a related theme, presented Whitefield as “Anglo-A merica’s first reli-
gious celebrity, the symbol for a dawning modern age.” Even though Whitefield
denounced the theater after his conversion, his background as an actor, and
familiarity with England’s theater culture, prepared him for a fabulously
successful preaching career.3
In two recent books on Whitefield, the communications scholar Jerome
Mahaffey has expanded on earlier proposals by Stout and the historian Alan
Heimert by considering how Whitefield became an “Accidental Revolutionary,”
the man most responsible for priming America for its Revolution. Whitefield
was the “central figure” in the process by which disparate colonists became
Americans, prone to think in zealous, adversarial terms about religion, rights,
and liberties. Whitefield’s Awakening may not have caused the Revolution,
Mahaffey argued, but it had a profound conditioning influence on Americans
as the Revolution approached. Heimert memorably argued that whether “the
enlightened sage of Monticello [Jefferson] knew it or not, he had inherited the
mantle of George Whitefield.”4
Whitefield and commerce, Whitefield and religious celebrity, Whitefield
and the Revolution: all these arguments have considerable merit, even if I have
doubts about certain aspects of them. The main problem with these approaches,
however, is that they do not really focus on Whitefield’s primary significance or
on the way he viewed himself. The argument of this biography is straightfor-
ward: George Whitefield was the key figure in the first generation of Anglo-
American evangelical Christianity. Whitefield and legions of other evangelical
pastors and laypeople helped establish a new interdenominational religious
movement in the eighteenth century, one committed to the gospel of conver-
sion, the new birth, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the preaching of revival
across Europe and America. Until now, we have not had a scholarly biography
of Whitefield that places him fully in the dynamic, fractious milieu of the early
evangelical movement. That is what I seek to do here.
Writing biographies, and writing religious biographies in particular, presents
significant challenges. The temptation to write hagiography—the biography of
a pristine saint—is ever present. In placing Whitefield within the new evan-
gelical world, I am not offering an unsullied picture of a sanctified man, nor is