Perhaps no one did more to bring evangelicalism to the United States than the itinerant Methodist preacher George Whitefield (1714–1770). To this point, however, most of the scholarship on Whitefield has focused on what he did, rather than what he said and wrote. Whitefield's accomplishments, of course, were nothing short of remarkable. His sweet, powerful voice and dynamic oratorical style transfixed audiences across England, Scotland, and the United States. Whitefield's extensive publishing network primed audiences to hear him, and sustained the evangelical message even in his absence. The “Grand Itinerant” inspired revivals that shook established faiths and spawned new churches. But what did he actually have to say? And what were the political implications of those words? Focusing on the minister's large corpus of extant published works, Jerome Dean Mahaffey argues that Whitefield's rhetoric shaped the political consciousness of Britain's mainland American colonies, preparing them for a republican revolution, just as they had been prepared for religious conversion before that.
Mahaffey constructs a compelling portrait of Whitefield's ministry in colonial America. He is particularly skillful at explaining how Whitefield managed to negotiate between those with reservations about the mid-century revivals and “radical enthusiasts” (129). As Mahaffey explains, Whitefield's emphasis on the necessity of a “new birth” in Christ was at once inclusive in its cross-denominational application and exclusive in its black-and-white description of true Christianity. The field of Whitefield studies was well tilled by historians during the 1990s, and Mahaffey is careful about acknowledging his substantial debts to the scholarship of Frank Lambert, T. H. Breen, Harry Stout, and Timothy Hall. Mahaffey goes further, however, in emphasizing Whitefield's recurrent “division of people into deictic categories of ‘us’ and ‘them,’” of “saved-damned, saints-sinner, regenerate-unregenerate, sincere-insincere, and almost-altogether Christians” (78).
The most original aspects of Mahaffey's study emphasize the handful of political pamphlets that Whitefield produced, as well as the minister's direct role in fomenting political opposition. It's easy to believe that Whitefield's sermonic literature and his political tracts had a significant political impact given his popularity and trans-Atlantic connections. Whitefield made good listening and good press. In linking the cultural developments of the Great Awakening with the revolutionary political upheaval of the 1760s and 1770s, Mahaffey moves along a historiographical road paved by Alan Heimert, Gordon Wood, and Patricia Bonomi. More precisely, he offers an explanation for how “colonial Americans develop[ed] into an ‘interpretive community’ that allowed republicanism and notions of independence to even occur, let alone proliferate” (1). Mahaffey directs the reader to Whitefield's overlooked political pamphlets of 1746 and 1756 (condemning Jacobite resistance and French Popery, respectively), his diplomatic trip to England (with Benjamin Franklin) to campaign for repeal of the Stamp Act, and his open opposition to Anglican imperialism. He then traces the lines of Whitefield's influence through the republican writings of Jonathan Mayhew, Joseph Galloway, Samuel Adams, Jonathan Dickinson, and Thomas Paine.
Unfortunately, the threads of the argument grow increasingly strained as the book proceeds. Mahaffey is undoubtedly right when he observes that the “Awakening conceptual system provided hermeneutical lenses” (207) through which pre-Revolutionary political rhetoric could be interpreted. But he sells his argument short when he reduces those lenses to a means of “seeing people as in or out of God's family” (208). For instance, Mahaffey repeatedly invokes Whitefield's tendency to make “us” versus “them” distinctions to galvanize different constituencies at different times: religious converts in the face of anti-revivalist opposition during the Great Awakening, Protestants in the face of Catholic aggression during the French and Indian War, and non-Anglicans in the face of Anglican encroachment prior to the Revolution. The very fluidity of these “deictic categories,” however, weighs against the likelihood that they could have served a coherent political function. Moreover, the convention of defining the world in terms of “us” and “them” was hardly peculiar to Whitefield. Dichotomous understandings of religion, ideology, and national identity are probably as old as human civilization itself. Mahaffey's related claim that the metaphor of the new birth both allowed Whitefield to resolve his own “identity struggle” (26) and helped him help to colonies correct their larger “identity deficit” (61) is also un-persuasive. The traditional question of how these mainly European colonials managed to imagine themselves as “Americans” still seems like a better way of formulating the problem.
There were some missed opportunities too. Rather than focusing on the religious content of Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776), for example, Mahaffey might have made a more satisfying case for Whitefield's influence by emphasizing the plain rhetorical style that Whitefield popularized and Paine employed with such epic success. Nonetheless, in his attention to the rhetorical structure of Whitefield's published work, Mahaffey has opened up an essential avenue for understanding the Grand Itinerant and his political significance.
