OPINION:
GEORGE WHITEFIELD: AMERICA’S SPIRITUAL FOUNDING FATHER
By Thomas S. Kidd
Yale University Press, $38, 344 pages
In the fall of 1764, George Whitefield, itinerant evangelical preacher, gave a commencement sermon at Princeton University, then a place of evangelical learning which he described as a “blessed nursery, one of the purest in the universe.” Many readers will gawk and chuckle at the idea of an evangelical pastor giving a commencement address at one of today’s elite colleges. So far from being flower beds of spiritual growth, the Ivies are today distinguished by secularism and outright contempt for orthodox, confessional Christianity. Were Whitefield to preach on an elite campus today, he would be regarded as a retrograde bigot.
Such a cultural difference is part of the charm of Thomas Kidd’s fine biography of Whitefield, the indispensable man of the first Great Awakening. Mr. Kidd, an evangelical professor of history at Baylor University, has set out to place Whitefield in the context of the nascent 18th-century American evangelical scene. In this he succeeds, carefully examining Whitefield’s relationships with early Gospel-workers like John and Charles Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent and James Davenport. But this contextualization is a mostly inconsequential point of attraction for most readers. Rather, Mr. Kidd’s work will endure as a popularly accessible biography of a legendary Calvinist preacher, released amid the cresting wave of Calvinism in 21st century evangelicalism.
Whitefield was born in Gloucester, England in 1714. His first love was the theater, which unwittingly provided his earliest training for speaking from the pulpit. Whitefield, one contemporary said, could “make men weep or tremble by his varied utterances of the word “Mesopotamia.” Yet he soon renounced the bawdy world of acting, and at Oxford embraced Christ, crying out “I thirst, I thirst!” on his bed. By 1738, Whitefield had made his way to America to preach in the colony of Georgia, where he also started the Bethesda Orphanage. The orphanage exists today as the Bethesda Home for Boys, the oldest operational charity in North America.
By 1741, Whitefield was traveling the colonies as an open air evangelist, “hunting in the American woods for poor sinners.” At the core of Whitefield’s theology was Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in John 3: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (KJV) Whitefield’s insistence on the new birth made him an enemy of many Anglican clergymen, who often regarded Whitefield as a self-aggrandizing crank who stirred the masses to theatrical displays of emotional hysteria. Whitefield, for his part, countered that many who professed to be Anglican ministers were in reality never truly converted.
In spite of the Anglican Church’s generally frosty reception, Whitefield attracted millions of curious hearers in America and England during the course of his lifetime. Whitefield often claimed to have preached to ten or twenty thousand at a time. There is no doubt he often preached to thousands in a day, but his own claims of double-digit thousands are often probably inflated. Large Whitefield engagements were generally a festival atmosphere, held in town squares and fields containing hundreds, if not thousands of inattentive interlopers, besides those who turned up for the preaching.
Nevertheless, Ben Franklin himself, a lifelong intimate of the itinerant, conducted a scientific experiment which confirmed that Whitefield’s booming voice could cover an amount of space that could encompass tens of thousands. Whitefield’s traveling and preaching was exhaustive; he sometimes took the pulpit four or five times a day, and by the end of this life, we see a man who vomited “a vast discharge from the stomach, usually with a considerable quantity of blood,” after preaching. And he certainly suffered for the Gospel in other ways. In Catholic Dublin, Ireland, Whitefield faced an ambuscade of stones after one sermon, an attack which left him “all over a gore of blood.”
But the best of men are men at best, and there are troublesome parts of Whitefield’s life. First is the quality of Whitefield’s marriage, which Mr. Kidd hedgingly describes as “difficult to judge.” Whitefield and his wife were, by necessity of his ministry, apart for long parts of time, and she simmered at spending long periods of time away from England. The fact that Whitefield describes her as his “dear-yoke fellow” reveals, perhaps, his conception of her as primarily a helpmate for his ministry (which she was), and much less an emotional and physical intimate. Also difficult to reconcile is Whitefield’s attitude toward slavery, which was far from the ethic of William Wilberforce, the most anti-slavery politician of the 18th-century Anglosphere. Mr. Kidd describes Whitefield’s stance as “a biblical defense of slavery that anticipated antebellum proslavery thought in the antebellum south.” Credit Mr. Kidd for delivering a warts and all portrait of the man.
Mr. Kidd’s book is a concise and entertaining read, but it suffers a bit from its subject material. Biographies of famous preachers run toward the tedious: Whitefield mostly preaches, travels, preaches, travels, and … preaches some more. By the middle of the work, the reader is looking for more dramatic developments than what could be found in Whitefield’s theological arguments with the Wesley brothers. Yet Whitefield’s unyielding commitment to preaching is also what makes him such a compelling subject. At his death in 1770, his endless toil from the pulpit had made him probably the most famous man in America. That fame lives on in this kind and fair biography of him.
• David Wilezol is the co-author, with William Bennett, of “Is College Worth It?” (Thomas Nelson, 2013).
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