George Whitefield: America's Spiritual Founding Father

by Thomas S. Kidd

Yale University Press, 2014

Thomas Kidd opens his highly readable new biography of eighteenth-century evangelist George Whitefield with an account of what it was like to hear the man preach; Kidd's opening scene takes place on a jam-packed Boston Common, but the setting could be anywhere. From his young years as a student at Oxford in the 1730s to his first evangelical mission to the colony of Georgia, Whitefield first discovered and then sharpened to perfection a style of revival-tent public preaching that could hold immense crowds spellbound for hours. Whitefield himself was an unlikely vessel for such charisma, being portly, disheveled, and badly wall-eyed (he was, needless to say, thoroughly mocked at school), but he had the inner fire of somebody who's gone through a deeply personal conversion experience – the high stakes of which Kidd does a very sharp job of conveying:

In Whitefield's world, conversion to faith in Christ was no polite, simple affair. You did not just walk an aisle and ask Jesus to come into your heart. It was a titanic spiritual struggle – the defining struggle of one's life – to find out whether or God or the devil would ultimately command your soul's allegiance. Not that the devil had as much power as God: the dark enemy was infinitely weaker than the eternal Father. But for a lost, blinded sinner like Whitefield, the devil was the heart's default option. God had to rescue you from the enemy's clutches. God had to change your desires; he had to make you want to be rescued.

Whitefield wanted desperately to be rescued, but of course he wanted more than that as well; his Savior had commanded him to go and make disciples of all nations. He took the young colonies of the New World by storm, exhorting in houses and churches and (his speciality) open fields, using a virtuoso combination of theater and pathos to spark the religious movement that would become known as “the Great Awakening.” Like all American revivalists who came after him, he put on a hypnotic show:

With a style polished by decades of practice, Whitefield almost never stumbled upon a word, and he exhibited deep emotion, often lifting his hands high, stamping his feet, and weeping. Critics saw the tears as stagecraft, but [his assistant] Winter thought this unfair. Sometimes he wept so bitterly that the audience wondered whether he could regain his composure, but he always did. Winter also noted the disturbing toll that preaching took on Whitefield in his later years; he routinely vomited “a vast discharge from the stomach, usually with a considerable quantity of blood,” after stepping down from the pulpit.

The main goal of his spiritual mission in the New World was to establish the Bethesda Academy home for orphans in Savannah, for which he was constantly and industriously canvasing and raising funds, traveling back and forth to England over the decades, quarreling with the Bethesda's board of overseers, quarreling with his fellow revivalists; the more worldly editors of the Boston Evening-Post and the Boston Gazette, to name but two American broadsheets, had great fun retailing these squabbles among the god-botherers, but Whitefield's beetling sincerity remained utterly unclouded.

One of his most famous friends, Benjamin Franklin, occasionally joined in the mildest of joshings; Kidd paints a nice picture of the strange, mutually-respectful friendship these two diametrically different men shared, agnostic Franklin regularly consulting the firebrand preacher and then keeping at arm's length the dutifully lecturing advice he got:

Franklin sent Whitefield a copy of his Proposal Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania (17490. Whitefield liked it very much, except for one problem: “There wants aliquid Christi [something of Christ] in it, to make it so useful as I would desire.” Franklin had briefly noted that students would learn the value of public and private religion, and the “excellency of the Christian religion above all others.” But Whitefield thought this was only a perfunctory reference. He pushed Franklin to make the academy fully Christian: “The grand end of every Christian institution for forming tender minds, should be to convince them of their natural depravity, of the means of recovering out of it, and the necessity of preparing for the enjoyment of the supreme Being in a future state … Arts and sciences may be built on this, and serve to embellish and set off this superstructure, but without this, I think there cannot be any good foundation.”

“As you have made pretty considerable progress in the mysteries of electricity,” Whitefield wrote to him, in a typically insufferable letter, “I would now humbly recommend to your diligent unprejudiced pursuit and study the mystery of the new-birth … One at whose bar we are shortly to appear, hath solemnly declared, that without it, 'we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.'“

Whitefield was no saint (his stance on slavery – he was as fully in favor of it as any fundamentalist Christian must be – was one shortcoming among many), and Kidd doesn't shy away from his grubbier and less salutary aspects; this is a remarkably thorough and even-handed biography, beautifully structured from a wealth of primary sources to form the best, most insightful biography of Whitefield ever written. It very likely won't make believers out of any grinning old agnostics like Franklin, but its subject, though always strainingly hopeful, probably wouldn't have expected anything else.