Some Founding Fathers have become household names while others, though significant, languish in obscurity. There is, however, one important figure we should consider even though he is generally not thought of as a Founding Father. His name is not unknown to Americans, especially to those who have a working knowledge of the impact of the Christian faith on America’s early years.
Part 1 of this article detailed five reasons George Whitefield should be considered one of America’s Founding Fathers. We have seen how:
- Whitefield’s open-air preaching appealed to an authority higher than the king.
- The new birth was a shared colonial experience that unified.
- Whitefield served as a model of perseverance amid opposition and ostracism.
- The Awakening prepared Americans for division.
- Whitefield’s crowds revealed the power of public gatherings.
This post continues with reasons 6–10, further evidence to support Whitefield’s vital importance to America’s founding.
6. Whitefield United by Advocating for Orphans in Britain’s American Jails
Whitefield united the colonies by elevating the plight of the orphans in the British jails in the colony of Georgia. Using funds he raised from preaching, he built an orphanage and provided for the orphans’ care. His charity sermons enabled their education and support when otherwise they would have been neglected.
In many cases, criminals were sent to the new world as punishment for crimes associated with poverty, such as theft of food or clothing. Prisoners had little ability to provide for their families. Whitefield called his hearers to help him provide for children of these incarcerated parents, especially those whose parents had died in prison. His ministry of compassion was another way in which Whitefield indirectly united the country.
His message in each colony he visited included a call to join in helping desperate children. This common cause served to weaken colonial boundaries, as all were needed to care for the suffering children of a distant colony. Sweet writes, “One of the immediate by-products of the great colonial awakenings was the rise of a new social consciousness and a broad humanitarianism, which manifested itself in a greater concern for the poor and the alleviation of distress and suffering.”
Whitefield’s charity sermons may also have reminded the colonists that English laws were often severe with regard to the poor. This touched not only their compassion, but colonists often remembered that poverty had brought them to the new world. Even thriving colonists often felt impoverished in comparison with Englishmen in the mother country.
7. Whitefield’s Extraordinary Travels Helped to Unite the Colonies
Whitefield’s incessant riding and preaching, covering great distances in a day on horse, modeled the value of communicating with other regions that had previously seemed too distant to be part of one’s sphere of interest. A typical colonist likely never traveled outside his colony and had likely never traveled more than twenty miles from where he was born. The extensive journeys of Whitefield made the American map seem smaller. He crossed the Atlantic seven times to come to the colonies. He traversed the full length of the colonies from New England to Georgia. Whitefield’s preaching became a matter of news that circulated from colony to colony. His sermons were printed—especially by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia—and sparked a sense of common interest throughout the colonies. As people learned of the impact of his preaching, the remarkable distances he traveled, and his numerous preaching stops each week, they began to see the colonies more holistically. All of the colonies needed grace and had a common need for the gospel of Christ.
8. Whitefield Warned of a Plot to Place a Bishop over New England’s Churches
An episode arose wherein Whitefield warned his closest clerical friends in New England of potential danger arising from leaders in England that would diminish their religious liberty. He revealed that he had learned of a clandestine plot emanating from the upper echelons of royal and ecclesiastical authority. Kidd writes,
Whitefield made a northern swing into New Hampshire, where he engaged in the most intriguing conversation of this American visit. He preached before thousands at the Portsmouth meetinghouses of Samuel Haven and Samuel Langdon, but before he left, the three met privately, and Whitefield told them a secret: “My heart bleeds for America. O poor New England! There is a deep laid plot against both your civil and religious liberties, and they will be lost. Your golden days are at an end. You have nothing but trouble before you. My information comes from the best authority in Great Britain. I was allowed to speak of the affair in general, but enjoined not to mention particulars. Your liberties will be lost.” Three days later, across the sea, Parliament passed the Sugar Act, the first major new revenue act following the Seven Years’ War. By August, leading Bostonians, led by Samuel Adams and James Otis, had begun to call for a boycott of British goods…. Whitefield likely had caught wind of British plans to raise new revenue from the colonists. He also realized that some in the Anglican hierarchy were thinking of introducing an American bishop.
Later, tensions arose between the Methodists and leaders in the Anglican Church. They came to a head when six Methodist students were expelled from Oxford due to their view of the visible work of the Holy Spirit as well as their society meetings marked by hymn singing and extemporaneous prayers. Whitefield spoke against the expulsions. In doing so, he mentioned a rising debate in England of establishing an American bishop. Kidd explains that this provoked “a firestorm fueled by fears that Anglicans did not really respect religious liberty. The affair at Oxford would surely ‘increase the prejudices of our colonists… against the establishment of Episcopacy,’ Whitefield predicted. (Indeed, an edition of Whitefield’s letter quickly appeared in Boston, stoking fears about a bishop there.)
Whitefield’s role in calling this concern to his beloved friends in New England helped to establish one of the abiding issues of the American Revolution. In divulging his concerns to the clergy for the liberties of the people of New England and warning of the plan to establish a bishop in America, Whitefield rallied both the clergy and the broader American population that were sympathetic to the Great Awakening. In this way he was serving as a bellwether for the future American concerns that led to the Revolution. The governmental threats and ecclesiastical rumors that Whitefield warned might arise from England served to galvanize the American spirit to be on their guard to preserve their hard-won liberties in the new world.
9. Awakening Preachers Connected with those Supporting Independence
It is no wonder then, that historians have observed that the clergy who joined Whitefield in preaching the gospel of the Great Awakening later became vocal leaders in proclaiming the importance of standing for liberty and eventually independence. A striking example of Whitefield’s impact on a preacher who went on to shape the Declaration of Independence itself is the Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon, the only clergyman who signed the Declaration. Whitefield was a “counsellor” with whom Witherspoon “conferred before leaving Britain” to come to become the President of Princeton. Kidd writes,
The Great Awakening helped prepare the colonies for the American Revolution. Its ethos strengthened the appeal of the ideals of liberty, and its ministers and the members of the new evangelical faiths strongly supported the Revolution. The drive for religious liberty against a tyrannical religious authority fed into the movement for civil liberty against the unjust political authority of the British in the 1770s. Likewise, the evangelical teaching that each individual believer was equal before God made it easier for people to accept the radical implications of democracy and to question authority…. The Great Awakening was the most significant religious and cultural upheaval in colonial American history, and helped forge U.S. civil and religious liberties emerging in the mid-eighteenth century.
Alan Heimert and Perry Miller underscore the relationship of the Awakening and the American Revolution when they write, “A relationship between the Great Awakening and the Revolution is discernible no matter what approach is taken to eighteenth-century American life and thought.”
10. Whitefield’s Public Political Preaching in the British Wars with France
Tensions grew between the French and the English in North America and reached a boiling point in New England in 1744, the year King George’s War broke out. George Whitefield was not silent. The French had built the Louisbourg fortress to the north of New England on Cape Breton Island. Thomas S. Kidd explains,
The outbreak of King George’s War in 1744 prompted the governor of Massachusetts to commission an expedition against the fortress. He raised several thousand men from the northern colonies and put the expedition under the command of Whitefield’s friend William Pepperrell. Pepperell asked for Whitfield’s advice before he accepted the task. Interestingly, twenty of Pepperell’s soldiers came from Jonathan Edwards’ congregation. Whitefield provided the Latin motto for Pepperell’s militia: “Nil desperandum Christo duce” (“No need to fear with Christ as our leader”). At the public fast for the military endeavor, Whitefield’s prayer was that the French fortress would become “a garrison for Protestants.” After forty-seven days of conflict and siege, the New Englanders won the fortress. Whitefield celebrated by preaching on Psalm 41:11: “By this I know that thou favourest me, since thou hast not permitted mine enemies to triumph over me.”
This was not the only occasion for Whitefield to engage in political preaching. When the news came to England during the French and Indian War between England and France that General Braddock had been killed in the massacre at the Monongahela, Whitefield was moved to address the crisis. This was the battle in which George Washington narrowly escaped with his life, having two horses shot out from under him and retreating with four bullet holes in his coat. Upon receiving this news, Whitefield preached on Isaiah 59:19: “When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him.” Kidd writes,
The itinerant was confident that British Protestants would find this principle “true in a temporal and spiritual sense.” Balancing the earthly and heavenly was becoming ever-more imperative. He routinely made temporal applications of such verses as Romans 8:37, praying of Braddock’s death, “May the late defeat be sanctified; and then I doubt not but we shall be more than conquerors through the love of Christ.”
In Whitefield’s mind, the political voice against Roman Catholicism and the voice for the gospel were united. He blended the Protestant Gospel of saving grace and the new birth with the Protestant peoples of England and New England as they were the heirs of the Protestant Reformation. Whitefield’s perspective undoubtedly made a deep impact upon the colonies that continued after his passing in 1770. This can be seen in The Quebec Act of 1774. This Act of Parliament and the British crown expanded Quebec’s territory, restored French civil law, guaranteed Catholic religious freedom, and established Quebec under a governor and council.
Whitefield’s earlier concern with the growth of Roman Catholicism in North America was shared by the colonists, especially those from Massachusetts, and intensified, as can be seen in relationship to the Quebec Act. This concern arose at the first meeting of the Continental Congress in 1774. The Massachusetts government expressed their great worries regarding the royally sanctioned presence of a Catholic state immediately to their north, identifying themselves as “the ancient free Protestant Colonies.”
The political nature of the Protestant and Catholic rivalry in the colonies was overtly asserted by Bostonian Founding Father, Samuel Adams. At the direction of the Second Continental Congress, Sam Adams stepped before the crowds of Philadelphia on August 1, 1776, at what we today call Independence Hall, to explain the rationale for the unanimous vote for Independence by the Congress. He declared,
Our forefathers threw off the yoke of Popery in religion; for you is reserved the honor of leveling the popery of politics. They opened the Bible to all, and maintained the capacity of every man to judge for himself in religion. …
Heaven hath trusted us with the management of things for eternity, and man denies us ability to judge of the present, or to know from our feelings the experience that will make us happy. This day, I trust, the reign of political protestantism will commence. We have explored the temple of royalty, and found that the idol we have bowed down to has eyes which see not, ears that hear not our prayers, and a heart like the nether millstone. We have this day restored the Sovereign to whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in Heaven, and with a propitious eye beholds his subjects assuming that freedom of thought and dignity of self-direction which he bestowed on them. From the rising to the setting sun, may his kingdom come!
The words were the declaration of Sam Adams. Such sentiments, however, had been modeled decades before by George Whitefield.
These Considerations Validate Whitefield as a Founding Father
Perhaps the most astonishing evidence for the consideration of Whitefield as an American Founding Father comes from five years after his death in 1770 in Newburyport, Mass. The sentiments and actions of colonial soldiers at this time make this remarkably clear. The normally anti-relic Congregational Protestants decided to prepare themselves for a battle with Quebec—French Roman Catholic Canada—by a direct appeal to the earthly remains of George Whitefield. They opened the famous itinerant’s crypt in Newburyport, cut pieces of his preaching collar and cuffs and carried them with them like a talisman on their journey north and into battle. History testifies that this act of hagiography did not provide victory, but it does testify to the colonists’ perspective that George Whitefield was one of them and as a father figure, he stood for their cause.
Whitefield was a man of great impact, one who influenced many. It is evident that the work of George Whitefield was an essential preparation for the quest for American independence. Since that is the case, it seems proper to call George Whitefield an American Founding Father—in the hope that he will be forgotten no more. Robert Philip puts it well: “Thus Whitefield was then to the churches and colleges, what Washington was afterwards to the states.”
Kidd observes, “Whitefield … expressed great sympathy for the colonists to an English correspondent: ‘Poor New England is much to be pitied; Boston people most of all. How falsely misrepresented!’”
When Americans see the initials “GW,” they naturally think of America’s “indispensable man,” George Washington. While this is entirely proper, in my mind, at least, one should also pause for a moment and remember that these initials also stand for another towering American Founding Father, namely, “GW”—George Whitefield.
This two-part post is published in its entirety as a white paper, available on this site.
