George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and the First Great Awakening: How America Got Crazy for Jesus
Americans are loud. From our politicians to our celebrities, from sea to screaming sea, we have a tendency to be more than a little enthusiastic when talking. Sure, a good portion of the brash American stereotype is really just stereotype, but there are few people in the world more exuberantly open about their thoughts and opinions than the Yankee.
In fact, Americans have a deep, spiritual connection to being dramatic, dating all the way back to before the United States even became a country. Americans have always gravitated towards confidently boisterous men who could drown out the boring drones of other, less charismatic leaders. Today, politicians and media figures carry on that tradition, but the phenonmenon started in the church.
Some time in the early eighteen century, mobs of people formed around charismatic preachers who proclaimed that each person in their congregation had a unique connection with God. This paradox between groupthink and a heavy emphasis on individual experience was what made early American religion truly unique.
The deeply personal spiritual reawakening that came as a result of participating in a mass quasi-mystical performance meant that being “born again,” in Christian terms, was the ultimate goal of salvation. This model formed the basis of what is now called evangelical Christianity, but the evangelical tradition eventually travelled far outside the realm of Protestant thought to serve as the basis for every type of American spiritual movement years later. A direct line appears between early American Christianity and modern megachurches, between quirky New Age groups and ominous doomsday cults, and, of course, between the politicians, entertainers, and influencers that lie in between.
And a man named George Whitefield started it all when he figured out that being a really loud and dramatic guy could make him a hit with American audiences.
Part 1: An Awakening!
History textbooks usually credit the Puritans as the group who at least laid the groundwork for the nation that would become the United States of America. A group of Protestant dissenters who might have otherwise faded into obscurity in their British homeland, the Puritans famously sought to build a utopian society across the pond, “a city upon a hill,” as the famous saying goes. Despite this seemingly glowy outlook, they were actually quite gloomy, since, according to their Calvinist doctrine, only a select number of people were predestined to go to heaven. The Puritans’ quest to promise themselves their own Promised Land was just a little more proof that they were, in fact, one of God’s chosen elect, and their hard work and service to the Lord would hopefully raise the odds for them. Probably. Maybe.
It’s almost a historical cliche at this point to say that these characteristics evolved into America’s culture of unbridled capitalism and merciless work schedule, but the Puritans weren’t some monolithic group that dominated early America.
The Colony of Virginia, settled in 1607 before the Puritans arrived in modern-day Massachusetts in 1630, was made up of Anglicans (who eventually transformed into Episcopalians) more concerned with making some of that sweet colonial cash than starting a new society. Most of these individuals didn’t even plan on staying forever, just long enough to pay back enough debts (unfortunately, most of them died of malaria before they got to go home). The more well-to-do Virginians were perfectly happy living on a royally fancy estate of their own, dukes of a new domain.
There were also Quakers in Pennsylvania, Roman Catholics in Maryland, and Presbyterians scattered everywhere. The latter group was mostly of Scots-Irish descent, buttressing the pure English heritage of their co-settlers, while New York presented an even stranger ingredient in this stew of religious diversity: Dutch Reformed! (And yeah, I know that it seems like a stretch to call a bunch of white Christians “diverse,” but this is during an era when religion defined state institutions and drove conflict during the English Civil War, so it was kind of a big deal that these groups all managed to get along without murdering each other).
All this hubbub under one British empire eventually gave way to a push towards religious toleration. Not necessarily celebrating differences, but you know, tolerating them. This wasn’t an American invention, either. British Parliament passed the Toleration Act in 1688 in response to a coalition of Protestants who weren’t totally on board with the hierarchy of the Church of England, but who were at least united in their shared hatred of the Catholic James II. Groups of these “Dissenters” or “Non-Conformists,” as they were called, now fully established groups of their own, would go on to shape the future of American religion as many of them set off and formed church communities of their own in the New World.
There are a myriad of splintering factions that made up colonial America, but the general idea is that all these groups were actively pushing away from the more hierarchical and centralized Church of England to a more self-governing form of religion.
Ironically, these Dissenters eventually got pretty rigid on their own, and thus a natural pattern of Protestant Reformations repeated itself: a church gets too centralized, someone gets pissed off, Christianity becomes more individualized, individuals form a new sect, which then gets too centralized, which then pisses some other people off, rinse and repeat.
But the First Great Awakening was when these Reformation movements became truly American. Sure, historians love to cite Max Weber and say that the Calvinist Puritans established the modern capitalist grindset mindset, or that Enlightenment reformers created the separation of church and state, or that all these different Protestant factions settling around the same time helped force freedom of religion, but these were all reflections and continuations of movements that were simultaneously happening in Britain. Even the Salem Witch Trials, that infamous bump on the road toward modernity and rationalism, was but a minor (albeit still cruel) version of an even bigger and bloodier European trend.
On the other hand, there was something so distinctly good ol’ U. S. of A. about the Great Awakenings, of which there were officially two. The first one laid the groundwork for the way Americans started to conceptualize individual rights and freedoms, thereby greatly influencing the Revolutionary War. The sequel likewise got Americans thinking about the identity of their new country, especially when it came to slavery and other questions that addressed the moral culture. Some historians even argue that there was a third one that, in true movie franchise fashion, popped up towards the turn of the century when it became evident that America was a blockbuster moneymaker and a rising world power, addressing the role of big business and institutional capitalism. It’s also entirely plausible that at the beginning of the Cold War, America went through a fourth Great Awakening to reconcile its new role as not just a world power, but genuinely the most terrifyingly powerful country on the planet.
Despite the forward momentum, there was a raw, primal aspect to these movements. As loud, dramatic preachers traveled from town to town, yelling at gathering crowds of people about hellfire and brimstone and the awesome grace of God, their audience members exploded into fits of emotion. They screamed, convulsed, and erupted into frenzies as if the very spirit of God had possessed their bodies. There was an otherwordly quality to these phenomena, not unlike the altered states of consciousness commonly derived from deep breathing meditation, music rituals, or, of course, psychedelic drugs. That isn’t to say that everyone was literally tripping, but there’s a certain mystical aspect strewn throughout populist religious revivals.
The concept of mysticism in religion is incredibly complex, but suffice it to say that a mystical experience is often intensely personal. Paradoxically, participating in group rituals or ritual-like events can act as a sort of bonding experience, which is why so many of the preachers in the Great Awakening movements developed a sort of cult following and, in some cases, established entire religious communities.
Ironically, their sermons encouraged groupthink in the way they brought congregants to a state of shared ecstasy. Even if these revivals didn’t transform into full-on new sects, there was always a shuffling of the previous order. Every time American religion seemed like it was getting too hierarchical, cliquey, and boring, revivals would pop up to challenge that existing structure. The already de-centralized nature of American religious society made this process even easier, and it was arguably the Great Awakenings that transformed the dominant strain of Protestantism from a bunch of strictly defined sub-groups to an amorphous blob of loosely defined “non-denominational” Christians.
Part 2: The Righteous Fury of Jonathan Edwards
To understand all this, let’s go back to Northampton, Massachusetts in 1734. Today, Northampton is a lovely town now famous for being the lesbian capital of America. Back in pre-Revolutionary times, however, it was not so chill. That’s because of local celebrity Jonathan Edwards, who took over his father’s Congregational ministry with more than a few minor changes to the curriculum.
Edwards was fond of reminding his congregants that God was holding them above the flames of hell and could drop them in at any point. His most famous sermon has the very metal title of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and mentions that just as “we can crush a worm that we see crawling on the earth… thus easy is it for God to cast his enemies down to hell.” The only thing stopping the “Sword of justice” from chopping our heads off is “nothing but the hand of arbitrary mercy, and God’s mere will…” To Edwards, we all deserve to go to hell and we should all count ourselves lucky that we’re even getting a chance to ask for forgiveness. That bleak outlook fell right in line with his Calvinist background, but it was the way that Edwards emphasized personal grace that made him so popular with people.
The inevitability of damnation meant that salvation wasn’t just necessary for living a pure life. It was a downright miracle able to shake people to their core. Once Edwards’ congregants repented, they were thrown into an ecstasy of grace, as their “shrieks and cries” became “piercing and amazing,” in the words of one witness. This was a far cry away from the droning lectures of the typical Puritan clergy and the quiet, subdued sanctity of the New England church pews. To be a member of Edwards’ congregation was to feel the power of God directly, to participate in an orgiastic frenzy of no-holds-barred worship. “Fun” probably isn’t the right word to describe one of these sermons, but to writhe and scream and to truly let loose must have been liberating. It felt free.
As more of Edwards’ followers sought the rapturous experience of this New Birth, those who couldn’t quite find the light met tragic ends. Edwards’ own uncle, Joseph Hawley, slit his own throat in 1735 due to the anxiety and despair of failing to feel God’s forgiveness. Poor Joe probably just had a bad case of eighteenth-century depression, and even Edwards identified that his uncle was “exceedingly prone to the disease of melancholy,” in his report on the Northampton revivals called A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. The minister explained that Hawley had “been exceedingly concerned about the state of his soul,” and “towards the latter part of his time, he grew much discouraged, and melancholy grew again upon him, till he was wholly overpowered by it, and was in a great measure past a capacity of receiving advice, or being reasoned with to any purpose.”
Realizing that he was caught in a moment of bad PR, Edwards blamed Hawley’s mental state and subsequent suicide on the devil, who “took the advantage, and drove him into despairing thoughts.” Even more tragically, a wave of suicides followed, even from, according to Edwards, people who were “under no melancholy, some pious persons who had no special darkness or doubts about the goodness of their state…” Surely, if people who seemed fine on the surface could kill themselves, there must be a Satanic influence at work. Edwards thus spelled the end of his revival, declaring that “the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us, and after this time Satan seemed to be more let loose, and raged in a dreadful manner.”
Hawley’s suicide didn’t quite end Edwards’ Northampton revival, but it certainly marked the end of its golden years. He spent the 1740s trying to establish a sort of law by covenant, but when he freaked out about a bunch of teenaged bros snickering about the female anatomy in medical textbooks and jeering at women about their periods, the townsfolk thought that he overreacted. Fed up with his congregation slipping back into immorality, he deemed everyone who didn’t fit his rules as “unsaved.” Since greater spiritual equality was what attracted his followers to his church in the first place, they weren’t too fond of Edwards’ theological backsliding. The preacher was on his way out of Northampton by the turn of the decade.
Edwards was full of contradictions. His Yale education planted him firmly in the elite class, but he believed that anyone could experience the grace of God. He studied philosophy and was as familiar with scientists like Isaac Newton and other Renaissance men as he was with religious thinkers like John Calvin, approaching theology with the careful finesse of a rationalist. Edwards had a personal spiritual awakening, however, when he looked up at the sky and realized the majesty of nature. No books or studying involved.
Edwards was a central figure in spreading what would be called “evangelical” Christianity to the rest of the American colonies, as more ministers caught on to his decidedly more people-friendly attitude. Ironically, his upper-class background and Ivy League education, alongside his gravitation toward a well-oiled social order, would also make him a staunch critic of the evangelical movement. That’s because, contrary to popular belief, Edwards wasn’t all that dramatic when preaching. It’s just that his congregants reacted so intensely to his message. That was not the case with the other OG of the Great Awakening: George Whitefield.
Part 3: America’s First Celebrity Preacher
While Jonathan Edwards was studying the works of Enlightenment philosophers, Whitefield was acting. Growing up helping his parents run an inn, he must have been exposed to the sort of revelry and rambunctiousness that was part of the eighteenth-century English tavern scene. Obsessed with dramatically reciting stageplays, Whitefield was a theater kid, through and through. The theater was Whitefield’s first love, a fixation that he developed before he had any inkling of significant religiosity. Though later in life he may have called the stage “the devil’s workshop,” he never truly renounced his passion. In fact, it wasn’t theology or scripture that initially drew Whitefield to religion; it was the way preachers preached.
Harry S. Stout frames his entire biography of George Whitefield, The Divine Dramatist, around the preacher’s commitment to the craft of acting. “While other inspiring clerics in the eighteenth century were reading their Bibles and studying doctrine, young Whitefield was studying the passions,” he writes. By “the passions,” Stout is referring to the way that drama schools taught the more technical aspects of acting during this period. Whitefield learned how to reflect a list of emotions using individual parts of his face and body, conveying something like “grief” with his eyebrows with a hint of “anger” found somewhere in his arm positioning. It was a complex technique to master, “a theory of self-presentation in public settings that was every bit as comprehensive and self-contained as a preacher’s manual or rhetorician’s text,” Stout explains. It also helped that Whitefield famously had crossed eyes, lending him a natural way to grab people’s attention on stage.
Whitefield’s theater education was arguably more influential to the future of American religion (and perhaps even Christianity as a whole) than anybody studying the finer details of theology. The raw emotion that the pastor conveyed connected to people in a way that was more intense than the complex philosophical points of interpreting scripture. They were genuine performances, gripping their audiences with intrigue, excitement, and thrills. Whitefield himself was like a rock star and a movie star in one person, and he gave himself the leading role in his performances. His techniques would profoundly shape American culture in ways far beyond evangelical Christianity. Every American politician, charismatic grifter, and cult leader would seek to replicate his ability to make every person in a group of like-minded followers feel like they were having a personally unique individual experience.
Whitefield wouldn’t have been able to accomplish this, however, without drawing on his own experiences. It was good for him, then, that his childhood was remarkably different than the sort of aristocratic upbringing that was common to clergymen at the time. Being a busboy at an inn didn’t prime him for leading, and he entered Oxford University as a “servitor,” essentially a servant to a rich student. He was never necessarily impious (although his later preachings, in true modern evangelical fashion, would suggest that he converted to Christianity after living a rather scoundrelly life), and he felt that he had a connection with God ever since he told his sister that acting was his God-given gift and duty. His true moment of personal revelation, however, came when he had dreamt himself on top of Mount Sinai. To Whitefield, this was a clear sign that God was telling him to spread a message to the world. This sort of mystical vision is another element that would inevitably appear again and again in the annals of American religious history.
Whitefield took his “New Birth,” as he would soon call it, to the next level and, admittedly in contrast to (read: most of) modern-day celebrity pastors did live a life of humbleness instead of immediately using his talents to get rich. He left Oxford to preach to and help the less fortunate, taking more than 24-hour fasts at least twice a week and subsisting only on “the worst sort of food” when he did eat. Due to his restrictive lifestyle, he came down with physical and mental health issues, which only strengthened his resolve to continue his pious lifestyle and spread the Word of God. Whitefield was an outsider at Oxford, no doubt due to his lower-class status and his tendency to walk around campus in raggedy clothes, and his fellow students laughed at berated him. He almost certainly felt more at home amongst the downtrodden, where he discovered that, despite his ailments, he found a purpose. Living a life of poverty was also a supreme form of method acting, and Whitefield would use his physical experiences as a metaphor to explain the transformation of the soul in his future sermons.
He eventually returned to Oxford and graduated in 1736, quickly taking his show to London where a new entertainment industry was booming. The Industrial Revolution was right around the corner, and an emerging commercial sector was bringing the arts to a paying middle- and working-class audience. People outside the educated elite could listen to music, read literature, and watch theater on a scale like never before, and marketing and advertising became central to profits. Whitefield seized on these shifting seas and essentially commercialized religion. As Stout puts it, the preacher framed religion “as another leisure-time activity that could attract customers in the marketplace and promote itself through a full spectrum of advertising and media coverage.”
Herein lies a strange paradox in Whitefield, a man with deeply personal mystical experiences who then brought this spirituality to the cold, hard world of free-market capitalism. It was a strategy that worked fine in the cities of England, but that would find enormously more lasting success in the American colonies.
That isn’t to say that Whitefield wasn’t popular in his home country. Word spread about his performances before he even arrived, and a crowd would often start to gather before he even showed up. But there were a few aspects within the American scene that made it more fertile ground for Whitefield’s revivalism. While Whitefield was a curious oddity in England, his approach to religion as a performative act was revolutionary in the colonies, where theater was much harder to find. The decentralized nature of American religion and government also meant that its people were a lot easier to convert to a less hierarchical message.
Whitefield may have traditionally been a Calvinist and his work may have helped create a branching sect called Methodism, but his revivals effectively established what would come to be the dominant strain of Protestant Christianity in America. More of a movement than a formally established church, evangelicalism would grow to prove itself as the perfect American religion, a strain of Christianity defined precisely by its inability to be defined precisely except for a heavy emphasis on personal divine experience. The idea of being “born again” fit neatly into an emerging national philosophy of individual rights and freedoms, and evangelical doctrine would often be at the center of the battleground between these rights and freedoms.
Part 4:
The British Invasion didn’t start with the Beatles. It turns out that three centuries earlier, George Whitefield made Americans scream and faint with his electric performances. Although his tour started in Georgia, he found his most success in Pennsylvania and New England. 15,000 people showed up to his Philadelphia show on his 1738–1740 tour, while 20,000 people showed up to Boston Common on the last show. To give you a perspective on how insane this was, that’s roughly more than 4,000 people than the population of the city at the time, about half of the average attendance of today’s Boston Calling music festival, or a completely sold-out Celtics or Bruins game at TD Garden.
These sermons could also be much more brutal than the mosh pits of today. In one sermon inside of a Boston meetinghouse, for example, five people were crushed to death during the fervor. Whitefield stirred up intense feelings of mercy over being humbled by God, but he also directed anger toward the established Anglican church in the colonies. “The reason why congregations have been dead is because they have dead men preaching to them,” he brashly announced about the decline of church attendance.
Whitefield’s popularity was because he placed his audience at the center of their play, creating a sort of interactive theater that put the minister in the role of a spiritual guide and the congregant as an active participant in the narrative. Whitefield often told about his New Birth as a way of climbing out of the sinful destitute he was raised in, an aspect of the evangelical message that pastors still repeat to this day. He told his audience to imagine themselves being birthed anew, a symbol of their spiritual rebirth into a new person, reminding his congregants that they could physically feel this sensation right down to the core of the soul:
“…there is a spiritual, as well as a corporeal feeling; and though this is not communicated to us in a sensible manner, as outward objects affect our senses, yet it is as real as any sensible or visible sensation, and may be as truly felt and discerned by the soul, as any impression from without can be felt by the body. All who are born again of God, know that I lie not.”
Stout makes a fascinating observation about how Whitefield, the emotional weirdo back in Oxford, was able to turn what many saw as a weakness into his greatest strength in the pulpit.
Whitefield also took the marketing skills he learned in his home country and unceasingly advertised his sermons in the press. His media presence owed its success to a decidedly unreligious person who nevertheless became fascinated with the talents of this strange, magnetic man. Benjamin Franklin, a firm denier of miracles and divine intervention, became one of Whitefield’s biggest fans and his de facto publicist. Franklin’s paper The Pennsylvania Gazette ran incredulous reports on Whitefield’s sermons, creating a story around the preacher that readers could follow and steeping him in a sort of mythical lore. When Whitefield proved to be an excellent selling subject, rival papers gave him even more media exposure to compete with the Gazette’s coverage.
Like starry-eyed teens watching The Beatles play on The Ed Sullivan Show, aspiring ministers looked to Whitefield as a source of inspiration for their future careers. Some of these people took Whitefield’s schtick even further, drawing the ire of colonial governments when they caused too much of a disturbance.
James Davenport was banned from Connecticut in 1742 for disturbing the peace with burnings of books and other material objects, and in one sermon a year later even his congregants thought he went a little too far when he stripped off his clothes and tossed them into the blaze.
Others, like Samuel Davies, the reserved fourth president of the Presbyterian-founded seminary Princeton University, were much more successful in their pursuits. Davies started to break through the southern colonies’ strict Anglican heritage to establish the first Baptist community in Hanover County, Virginia, just north of present-day Richmond. He spoke with words that anyone outside of the Princeton sphere could understand and connected Biblical references with contemporary literature that his congregants probably would have been more familiar with. Davies’ mastery of public speaking would go on to influence Patrick Henry and his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech.
Although religious communities and communes wouldn’t start popping up en masse until the Second Great Awakening, the first of its kind did appear under the auspices of one of the least spoken about but most fascinating figures of this period, the Public Universal Friend. Born with the name Jemima Wilkinson, the Friend saw a vision of God during a near-death illness and claimed that they had died and been reincarnated as a genderless messenger of the Lord. The Friend preached around Philadelphia in the 1780s before growing animosity convinced them and their followers to move to upstate New York near Seneca Lake, establishing the first of many more religious communities in what would soon be called “the Burned-Over District.” The Friend promoted their women congregates into positions of leadership and convinced their members to free their slaves and invite them into the community.
The Public Universal Friend was unsurprisingly derided for their radically nonconforming views on gender roles and was mostly forgotten about until very recently, but their profile is one of the earliest and clearest examples of how American revivals evolved. The revivalists, called “New Lights” in the press, were ostensibly the enemies of the “Old Lights, who “expected common people to defer to the learned and authoritative men at the top of social hierarchy,” in the words of Alan Taylor. However, the religious historian also notes that, ironically, “attempting to erase the difference between leaders and followers, Americans opened the door to religious demagogues.”
Herein lies the paradox of American religious revivals, the anti-establishment, egalitarian message that their leaders preached gave way to a new cult of personality that was an even stricter form of rule than the older power structure they were criticizing as being too authoritarian. As historian of religion Nathan Hatch points out, “an egalitarian culture has given rise to a diverse array of popular religious leaders, whose humble origins and common touch seem strangely at odds with the authoritarian mantle that people allow them to assume.”
The Founding Fathers may have laid the groundwork for the political nation of America, but George Whitefield may have been the first person to discover what it means to culturally be American. In this way, he’s like this great country’s first drunk uncle, imprinting his alluringly loud rants onto a nation of fans, followers, and true believers.
Sources:
Nathan O. Hatch originally published The Democratization of Christianity in 1989, but his thesis on how and why Americans are drawn to charismatic, cult-like leaders might be more relevant today than ever.
The two main biographies I used were Soul on Fire, by George M. Marsden, and The Divine Dramatist, by Harry S. Stout. Both of them are indispensable sources for learning about the lives of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield respectively.
My research on early colonial America’s religious makeup was taken from a bit of bunch of different historical surveys that I hope to use in the future for how much ground they cover:
The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, by Frances Fitzgerald, is my current favorite guide for modern evangelicalism and does an excellent job at laying the historical groundwork. I will be revisiting it a lot.
Hellfire Nation, by James A. Monroe, is a deep dive into America’s weird views on morality and was vital in explaining the social and political issues that revivalists addressed.
Inventing the “Great Awakening,” by Frank Lambert, paints an extremely detailed portrait of early America’s religious denominations before and during the First Great Awakening so I didn’t get confused between all the different groups.
Awash in a Sea of Faith, by Jon Butler, makes a fun connection between Puritanism and the occult. I mostly referred to Butler’s discussions on how American religion embraced the supernatural and miraculous, but I’m dying to read more of it for further projects.
And here are some journal articles!:
Frantz, John B. “The Awakening of Religion among the German Settlers in the Middle Colonies.” The William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1976): 266–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/1922165.
O’Brien, Susan. “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755.” The American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (1986): 811–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/1873323.
William Howland Kenney, 3d. “George Whitefield, Dissenter Priest of the Great Awakening, 1739–1741.” The William and Mary Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1969): 75–93. https://doi.org/10.2307/1922294.
Lambert, Frank. “Subscribing for Profits and Piety: The Friendship of Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield.” The William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 3 (1993): 529–54. https://doi.org/10.2307/2947365.
