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Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,722

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This is the church that holds the grave of George Whitefield.

Born in 1714 in Gloucester, England, Whitefield lost his father at the age of two. His parents owned an inn and he helped out as he grew. He also started acting and realized pretty quickly that he was both good at it and liked it and so spent a lot of time at the theater. At first, he had enough money to get a really good education, ending up at Pembroke College at Oxford. But the inn business started to decline and so he had to be a servant to his fellow students to pay his tuition. This included bathing them.

While at Oxford, Whitefield had a religious conversion experience, based mostly on his readings, and he was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England in 1736. But the thing about Protestantism is that once you take off the authority of the ancient church, for any reason, then it opens a Pandora’s Box and anyone can challenge the new establishment. The Church of England most certainly tried to control that, but the country had already undergone a revolution based on its failure and by the eighteenth century, there were a variety of Protestants practicing there. Whitefield began preaching in parks. He didn’t get a church when he was ordained, but he found pretty quickly that public preaching was a good thing for him. His acting skills came in real useful here.

In 1738, Whitefield decided to visit the American colonies, landing in Savannah. He visited the church founded there by John Wesley and discovered that there sure were a lot of orphans in Georgia. That was incredibly common in the South during the colonial period; the English were very much not prepared for the tropical diseases of southern lowlands and their lifestyles did not exactly help, so you had very high rates of mortality, especially for recent arrivals. So orphans were common. Whitefield returned to England with a new mission–raise money to build a nice orphanage for those Savannah kids.

When Whitefield returned to the colonies in 1740, he was a different man. Now committed to Wesley’s method, he started leading religious revivals. He traveled through the colonies and was quite the sensation. He had a great speaking voice and again, that acting training helped define his life. He spoke and preached and soon led giant revivals that could bring out thousands of people. He started the Great Awakening, that moment when pretty secular colonists (at least compared to their ancestors) woke up to the fact that they were sinners and not nearly as committed to Christ as their parents. Whitefield was hardly alone here. John Wesley frequently toured the colonies as well. In Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards took the lead. What they and others did was bring a new spirit of public religiosity to the colonies, breaking down denominational barriers for giant public spectacles of religion that would and continue in many ways to define American evangelicalism.

One thing Whitefield did, as well as Wesley, was create the Methodist Church. Wesley of course was largely responsible for this in England, but Whitefield was absolutely critical for this in the colonies, with the circuit riders that defined this denomination for a long time inspired by Whitefield’s personal travels. Now, a lot of people did not like Whitefield. Many churches refused to open their pulpits to him. He seemed overly emotional and dangerous to many ministers. Whitefield was largely unconcerned. First he could just preach publicly. Second, he did not believe they were truly religious. As he wrote, “I am fully convinced there is a fundamental difference between us and them. They believe only an outward Christ, we further believe that He must be inwardly formed in our hearts also.”

Whitefield became a superstar. Some have suggested he was the first celebrity in America, and maybe by some measures you could make that argument. He was a tiny little man with a big ol’voice. He knew dramatics. He was also cross-eyed, which in this very superstitious age, was seen by many as a mark of God’s blessing. His revivalism was old school Calvinism in many ways, but with less of a edge. Rather than go all in with predestination, he combined the rejection of works as the way to salvation with the Gospel as a path forward for anyone who accepted it. It helped a lot that literacy was so high in American colonies. That was more so in New England than elsewhere, but still, literacy was pretty high throughout the colonies compared to England. So he could spread his message in different ways. He traveled enough that most people in the colonies would have a chance to see him live (and considering he was kind of a big rock and roll act, using the same terminology as seeing the Stones makes a certain kind of sense). One of the reasons we remember Whitefield today is because Benjamin Franklin and he became friends and Franklin famously tried to figure out how many people could hear Whitefield due to that giant voice. The estimate was 30,000. Quite a voice!

Not surprisingly, Whitefield was, uh, complicated on the issue of slavery. First, he absolutely believed in slavery. Since was mostly based in Georgia, he argued that the colony had to legalize slavery in order to compete economically. He owned slaves himself. However, he also urged the conversion of slaves to Christianity, which very few slaveowners had bothered with. One way to think about him is as introducing the kind of supposedly good master slavery that defenders of the Confederacy would later romanticize. But he really did believe that Africans had souls too and urged slaveholders to treat their slaves with a certain level of respect. He opened orphanages for Black people too and when he died, Phyllis Wheatley wrote a poem for him that refers to him as a happy saint. Later, the University of Pennsylvania put up a statue to him. It was taken down in 2020 due to his support of slavery.

Toward the end of his life, Whitefield settled down. After the mid-1750s, he stopped doing revivals and while he continued preaching, he seems to have more or less tired of the life. Plus, in many ways he had accomplished his mission. The colonies were different because of him. But the religious controversies he engendered had mostly settled in his favor. He died in 1770, at the age of 55. By this time, he was living in Newburyport, Massachusetts. There was a lot of emotionalism at his funeral, which for his enemies was everything they hated about him. But he had won the day.

There is a lot more to say on doctrinal points and the Great Awakening, but this post in long enough.

George Whitefield is buried in Old South Presbyterian Church, Newburyport, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other American ministers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Billy Graham is in Charlotte, North Carolina and Charles Fox Parham is in Baxter Springs, Kansas. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

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