George Whitefield - Part 1

As someone who is drawn to study the past, I hold the somewhat heretical notion that attention to the present is more important than to fixate on the past. I do not mean to say that history is a mere amusement – knowledge of the past both can inform us why the present is like it is and can help us avoid repeating prior mistakes. My emphasis on the present is pragmatic: we can do something about the present and the future, but, except in science fiction, the past is fixed and immutable. (I am absolutist in believing that there exists a definitive factual sequence of events to be discovered and reported as history, and the facts are not varied by errors, interpretations and lies – but more on that another day.)

Viewing the past as predicate, in studying the past we need to know something of the more distant past. In 1860 the United States was largely a Protestant Christian nation but reflecting a wide diversity of belief and practice, with and attendant diversity in lifestyles, including disbelief and non-observance.

Prominent among the causes of this diversity was the fact that religious dissenters from the established or dominant churches in their home countries constituted a substantial portion of the European immigrants who came to the American colonies. Although they sought in the new world an escape from the ecclesiastic authoritarianism they experienced in the old, not surprisingly they tended to use their political control in their local communities to support their own religious views. The growing diversity of these colonial communities, however, made the enforcement of religious conformity all the more difficult.

Another prominent factor was the ministry of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield. Born a commoner in Britain in 1714, Rev. Whitefield obtained an education at Oxford University and was ordained as an Anglican minister. Even before his ordination he began to attract attention as a charismatic evangelical orator and as a young man gained what would be described in today's world as rock-star status in the English speaking communities on both sides of the Atlantic. On occasion he spoke out-of doors to crowds that were said to exceed 20,000. This prominence made him a pivotal figure in great awakening of the 1740s, the spread of Christian religious enthusiasm that occurred in England and America. Whereas most ministers serve a community and a congregation, Rev. Whitefield remained an itinerant, traveling through Britain and making several Atlantic crossings to speak extensively throughout the American colonies.

Rev. Whitefield's views were at once controversial and conventional. He preached the necessity of the individual to experience a personal rebirth in Christ – he had experienced such a rebirth that he felt put him into communion with the Holy Spirit – although the Anglican Church frowned upon such teachings as promoting inappropriate religious "enthusiasms". On the other hand, Rev. Whitefield adhered to the Anglican doctrine of predestination – the Calvinist belief, common to most Protestant denominations at the time, that God alone determined who was to be saved and who was to be damned for eternity and that human action was powerless to alter the decision. One can appreciate some of the flavor of predestination in the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" delivered by Jonathan Edwards, an American contemporary and sometimes associate of Rev. Whitefield – the emphasis was on the depravity of mankind; God, being all powerful, was inscrutable, arbitrary and without mercy; and only chance determined whether the sinner fell as a result of his own folly or endured until God delivered the coup de grace.