Inventing George Whitefield

Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon

Jessica M. Parr

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626744950
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Evangelicals and scholars of religious history have long recognized George Whitefield (1714-1770) as a founding father of American evangelicalism. But Jessica M. Parr argues he was much more than that. He was an enormously influential figure in Anglo-American religious culture, and his expansive missionary career can be understood in multiple ways. Whitefield began as an Anglican clergyman. Many in the Church of England perceived him as a radical. In the American South, Whitefield struggled to reconcile his disdain for the planter class with his belief that slavery was an economic necessity. Whitefield was drawn to an idealized Puritan past that was all but gone by the time of his first visit to New England in 1740.

Parr draws from Whitefield's writing and sermons and from newspapers, pamphlets, and other sources to understand Whitefield's career and times. She offers new insights into revivalism, print culture, transatlantic cultural influences, and the relationship between religious thought and slavery. Whitefield became a religious icon shaped in the complexities of revivalism, the contest over religious toleration, and the conflicting role of Christianity for enslaved people. Proslavery Christians used Christianity as a form of social control for slaves, whereas evangelical Christianity's emphasis on "freedom in the eyes of God" suggested a path to political freedom. Parr reveals how Whitefield's death marked the start of a complex legacy that in many ways rendered him more powerful and influential after his death than during his long career.

CHAPTER ONE

Origins of an Icon

Early in the nineteenth century, an English admirer of George Whitefield’s stole Whitefield’s humerus bone from his coffin and sent it in a parcel to England. The gruesome parcel’s recipient, a Mr. Bolton, had expressed a desire to “obtain a small memento of the great preacher,” but he later saw the theft of Whitefield’s bones as paramount to sacrilege and returned it to its resting place in the crypt of the Old South Presbyterian Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts.¹ A procession of two thousand admirers of Whitefield followed the bone through the streets of Newburyport as it was returned to its crypt in 1837.²

The reburial of bones of a religious icon, reclaimed from Britain, can be construed as an exercise in nationalism.³ This incident shows the tension between revivalists who “claimed him” for the providential future United States and those in the country of his birth, who never forget that Whitefield was an Englishman. Just as he had no permanent ties to a specific denomination, he was no longer fully British. Yet in part because he died before the Revolution, he was not quite American either. Instead, he became a religious icon—one with multiple layers of significance—across the Atlantic World.

Whitefield’s transformation to iconic status began in earnest with the start of his missionary career in 1738. It was a journey that he chronicled in his multipart autobiography, beginning approximately ten years after his first travels to the American colonies. Most icons are painted, but Whitefield was an icon created of textual images, many of them created by Whitefield himself. His writings began with a recounting of his birth and early life, from “imprudent” youth into religious life as a young man.

Whitefield’s autobiographical accounts emphasized his journey to religious life, much like the Gospels.⁴ They used a philosophical dialogue that was intended to communicate the details of the subject’s life and used the individual’s life as ethical instruction.⁵ Some theologians argue that the New Testament is not a study of ethics itself, but Jesus is universally viewed by Christians as a moral teacher. As such, the New Testament tends to be used to teach biblical ethics.⁶

Whitefield’s writings should be understood along a similar paradigm, in that they are a philosophical dialogue, centered on an individual (himself), and intended to convey Whitefield and his life as a model for biblical ethics. In fact, he specifically projected himself as Christlike, and the writings of his supporters, even to the twenty-first century, have frequently followed suit. After his death, his devotees’ writings served as a defense of Whitefield and the ideas he represented as well as an effort to preserve his memory.⁷

Whitefield was born in Gloucester, England, on the sixteenth of December 1714, the sixth child and fifth son of innkeepers Thomas and Elizabeth Jenks Whitefield. His father died two years after his birth. Whitefield noted that his mother “was used to say, even when I was an Infant, that she expected more Comfort from me than any of her other Children.”⁸ The lofty expectations placed on Whitefield were related both to his father’s premature death and to chronic ailments that Whitefield claimed his mother endured for a year after his birth.⁹

Later in life, Whitefield tended to emphasize his humble tradesman’s background. While his own actions were not always devoid of boastfulness, Whitefield believed that Christians should humble themselves before God, and themes of humility and also of the potentially corrupting power of wealth frequently appeared in his sermons, and most famously in his sermon “The Pharisee and Publican,” where he discusses the motives of men for prayer and the importance of humbling oneself before God as a necessity for achieving true Grace.¹⁰ Whitefield’s emphasis on his roots as an innkeeper’s son in his widely read autobiography was significant because it allowed him to project a humble and pious public image.

In Whitefield’s accounts of his life, he emphasized his birth in an inn, just as Christ was born in an inn. His was a tradesman’s beginning, just as Christ had been a tradesman—a carpenter. While Whitefield had a number of wealthy patrons, many of his followers had come from humble backgrounds, so identifying with their modest roots allowed Whitefield not only to project himself as a model of true Grace, but also positioned him to build a greater rapport with such would-be converts.

Following her separation from Whitefield’s stepfather, his mother moved from the family’s inn when Whitefield was about sixteen years old. His first conversion experience came at Saint John’s Church when he visited an older brother in Bristol. He later said he felt God speaking through him, describing his experiences in Bristol as a sign that he was intended for a higher purpose than innkeeping.¹¹ Two months later, Whitefield returned to visit his mother in Gloucester. As fate would have it, a former classmate, who was a servitor at Pembroke College, Oxford, came to visit Whitefield and his mother at this time. The classmate described the servitor program, which allowed him to discharge his college expenses and to earn a small wage by performing menial tasks for the wealthy students. Elizabeth Jenks Whitefield immediately seized upon this plan, reportedly crying out, “This will do for my Son! Will you go to Oxford, George?” According to Whitefield, he replied, “With all my Heart.”¹² The former schoolmate immediately prevailed upon those who had helped him to help Whitefield attain a servitor’s position of his own.

When Whitefield entered Pembroke, just shy of eighteen, he was among the most fiscally humble of students. The master of Pembroke had, contrary to expectation, accepted Whitefield’s application to become a servitor on the recommendation of a family friend. Young Whitefield waited on young men from wealthy families, waking them, running errands, serving at parties, polishing their shoes, and even completing their assignments. Being a servitor was a thankless job that meant reporting errant classmates who violated their curfew to the college master. The gentlemen students retaliated by “chasing the servitors though the college halls, clanging pots and candlesticks in imitation of a fox hunt.”¹³ Whitefield described the students he worked for as “being so extravagant in their living that it unfitted them for prosecution of their proper studies.”¹⁴ Whitefield also found that his workload effectively prevented him from joining other students in “excesses of riot,” because he spent so many hours alone at his studies that his limbs were “benumbed.”¹⁵ His criticisms of his wealthy classmates were a part of Whitefield’s careful construction of a public image of piety and humility, in this case playing the Plebian to his wealthy classmates’ Pharisee.¹⁶

It was at Pembroke College that George Whitefield solidified his interest in ecclesiastical life and also became attuned to the extensive religious commercial print network. He could read the religious volumes that shaped his outlook, including Mr. Law’s Call to a Serious Devout Life, of which he had known prior to university, but could ill-afford.¹⁷ He began to pray daily and to receive the weekly sacrament at an Anglican church near the college, as well as at Oxford Castle, where “the despised Methodists” received communion once a month.¹⁸ Whitefield noted that his sympathies for the Methodists pre-dated his days at Pembroke College. He used to regularly defend them to the other Pembroke College students—to the point where he was rumored to be one of them.¹⁹

Methodism, a movement of Protestant Christianity that originated in Great Britain, began as a small movement with an aim of reforming the Church of England. John and Charles Wesley, who were early mentors to Whitefield, were key figures in its founding and particularly in writing its tenets. The name “Methodist” evolved from a derisive nickname by its opponents, who scoffed at the “methodical” approach its followers took to religious life. In its early years, its followers hoped to reform the Church of England, as its early leaders saw schism from the Anglican Church as undesirable.

Whitefield began his acquaintance with the Wesleys shortly after he matriculated at Pembroke. He was at St. Mary de Crypt Church to receive the Holy Eucharist one day, when a young woman from a local workhouse attempted to take her own life by slitting her throat.²⁰ Whitefield notified Charles Wesley of the attempted suicide, believing the Wesleys were “ready to do every Good Work.”²¹ In an effort to remain modest, he asked not be identified, but the Wesleys soon learned his name. Whitefield, before this known to Charles Wesley as a solitary figure whom he had seen walking the town’s streets alone, received an invitation for breakfast the following morning. Whitefield gratefully accepted Wesley’s request, as he was looking for more friends who shared his growing religious devotions.²²

From then on, Whitefield saw Charles Wesley regularly. Wesley lent him an array of important religious tomes, including works by George Byron Koch, William Law, and Henry Scougal. Koch was a seventeenth-century theologian whose 1680 book, What We Believe and Why, served as a personal guide for the Wesleys and their followers. William Law was an eighteenth-century English theologian whose writings, and particularly A Practical Treatise on Christian Perfection (1726) and A Serious Call to a Devote and Holy Life (1728), were incredibly influential to the Wesleys, Whitefield, and other important figures in early revivalism. Henry Scougal was a seventeenth-century Scottish theologian whose writings, including The Life of God in the Soul of Man (1677), were, like Law’s, important influences upon Whitefield, the Wesleys, and other early revivalists. Religion, as Scougal described it, meant church attendance, harming no one, and maintaining regular prayers, as well as performing acts of Christian charity toward less fortunate neighbors.²³

Although he was still an Anglican at this point, Whitefield’s consumption of this body of literature, so influential to the Methodist revivals in Great Britain, serves as an early indicator of the later decline of his reputation within the Anglican Church. The idea of Christ within influenced Whitefield’s belief in the conversion experience, which was one of the ideas that eventually cost him his good standing with the Church of England. Scougal’s writings about Christian charity were another idea that, when Whitefield implemented his own charitable causes, undermined his reputation at Pembroke and beyond.

Whitefield credited Wesley’s friendship, and his generosity with his personal library, for helping him, Whitefield, to understand “what true religion was.”²⁴ As Whitefield was exposed to the ideas of New Birth and Good Works, his religious fervor deepened, although his own New Birth differed from that of his Methodist contemporaries.²⁵ This difference can be attributed to Whitefield’s desire for a public, pious image. In order to sell both his image and the New Birth, he needed his conversion to be a public event. He achieved this by producing public accounts of his conversion experiences in his journal, the two installments of his autobiography, his sermons, and other religious tracts. These publications served as fodder for Whitefield’s detractors, but they also carried considerable weight among his followers, reappearing in multiple editions.

Whitefield’s association with the Wesley family cost him socially and otherwise. His classmates scorned him, even occasionally throwing dirt on him. The projection of Whitefield’s public ridicule, and particularly of having dirt thrown at him, had a biblical significance of which Whitefield would have been entirely aware. There are a number of biblical accounts of Early Christians being subjected to this sort of scorn because of their faith. David, for example, was showered with dirt and pelted by stones as he walked along with his followers.²⁶ These sorts of image...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Origins of an Icon
• Chapter Two: The World Is My Congregation
• Chapter Three: That Province, Under God, Will Flourish
• Chapter Four: In the Footsteps of the Pilgrims
• Chapter Five: Inventing George Whitefield
• Chapter Six: A Transnational Icon
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index