Many years ago I read that if George Washington was the father of our country George Whitefield was the grandfather. With a large percentage of adult males having heard him preach at least once before he died, Whitefield was something of the spiritual glue that bonded the colonists to a single identity. That said, I had no idea that he played a greater role than I had imagined until I read what you will find below, filling me with both gratitude to God for Whitefield’s ministry and a question in my mind about a greater willingness to speak to the political implications of the Gospel ministry. Read on my preacher brother, and wonder along with me if we should speak out a bit more directly than we have to date. At the end, you will see the book I lifted the article from, pages 120 and 122.
GEORGE WHITEFIELD (1714-1770). Although the Great Awakening was already in progress when Whitefield made his first journey to America in 1738, it owed more to him than to any other individual. He was truly the Great Awakener. Whitefield was born in Gloucester, England, and grew up in poverty. Two years after graduation from Oxford in 1736, he was ordained an Anglican priest. He made seven trips to America and preached in virtually every important town on the Atlantic seaboard during 1738, 17 39-41, 1744-48, 1751-5 2, 1754-55, 1763-65, and 1769-70. He had begun his work with Charles and John Wesley in the Holy Club at Oxford, where Charles was a tutor at Christ Church, and he participated in their mission in Georgia, which remained his base over the decades. He shared the Wesleys' conviction that a "new birth" and a converted ministry were needed, but by 1740 he had become more strictly Calvinist, while John Wesley had turned to Arminianism.
Undoubtedly, Whitefield was the greatest evangelist of the century, preaching an average of forty hours each week, four times in a day that began at four in the morning and ended punctually at ten in the evening. It is estimated that he preached about 18,000 sermons in his lifetime. His histrionic gifts were the envy of David Garrick. Doubters, like Benjamin Franklin, who joined an audience of perhaps 30,000 Philadelphians in 1740, emptied their pockets, mesmerized, for Whitefield’s Savannah orphanage, Bethesda.
After the Seven Years' (French and Indian) War ended in 1763, Whitefield arrived in America for his sixth tour. On April 2, 1764, he held a private conversation in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with Samuel Langdon and other established ministers that alarmed Americans already worried about their liberty. Whitefield was quoted as saying: "I can't in conscience leave the town without acquainting you with a secret. My heart bleeds for America. O poor New England! There is a deep laid plot against your civil and religious liberties, and they will be lost. Your golden days are at an end. You have nothing but trouble before you . . . . Your liberties will be lost." Whitefield outlined the secret plans (as he said) of the British Ministry to end colonial self-government and to establish the Anglican Church (William Gordon, The History of the Rise, Progress and Establishment of the United States . . . [2d ed., 3 vols. New York: Samuel Campbell, 1794], 1:102). This episode galvanized the clergy in their opposition to British policy, especially when the intelligence proved true and the 1765 Stamp Act was adopted.
Whitefield made one more trip to America, arriving in the fall of 1769. On September 30, 1770, the evangelist suddenly died of an apparent asthma attack in Newburyport, Massachusetts, at the home of the Reverend Jonathan Parsons, in whose church, the First (South) Presbyterian Church, he was scheduled to preach that morning.
The sermon reprinted here communicates little of the power of the spoken words of the great evangelist, a notorious characteristic of Whitefield’s published works. Still, it gives the flavor of his political theology. The events he refers to are those of the War of the Austrian Succession (called King George’s War in North America), in which the French forces’ stronghold at Louisbourg had been captured by a ragtag collection of New England frontiersmen and militia under the command of William Pepperel in June 1745. While this victory is celebrated as pivotal, the specific reason for the day of thanksgiving being observed by Whitefield and his auditors was the recent destruction by a storm at sea of a French fleet sent to recapture Cape Breton and Nova Scotia, an event in which the hand of Providence could be seen. The vigorous Indian warfare along the Pennsylvania and New York frontier also influences the discourse.
The sermon was preached at the New Building in Philadelphia on Sunday, August 24, 1746. Whitefield, writes Michael A. Lofaro, “is central to the understanding of eighteenth century America . . . . The success of his itinerant ministry in the colonies indirectly hastened the break with England by increasing the number of dissenters and, by forming them into loosely affiliated, intercolonial, interdenominational ‘congregations,’ perceptibly encouraged American independence” (American Writers Before 1800, p. 1581).
