Whitefield in the Open Field

Philadelphia, 1739. Benjamin Franklin is standing in Market Street with a crowd that has filled the square to hear an English preacher who has come to the colonies for the first time.

Franklin is a skeptic. He has not come to be converted. He has come to measure.

The preacher’s name is George Whitefield. He is twenty-four years old. He has been refused by most of the established Anglican pulpits in America, so he is preaching from the steps of the Philadelphia Court House to whoever will gather. The crowd is so large it spills down Market Street in both directions. Whitefield’s voice carries across all of it.

Franklin begins walking. He walks away from the pulpit until he reaches a point where he can just barely still hear the preacher’s voice clearly. Then he stops. He measures the distance from where he is standing back to where Whitefield is preaching. He calculates the semicircular area within that radius. He estimates the density of the crowd at roughly two square feet per person. He works the arithmetic and writes the result in his autobiography years later. By his measurement, Whitefield could be clearly heard by more than thirty thousand people.

Franklin had gone out to confirm his suspicion that the newspaper accounts of Whitefield’s crowds were exaggerated. He went home convinced the newspapers had been telling the truth.

This is the story of the preacher who made the colonies one people.

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The Man and the Voice

George Whitefield was born in Gloucester, England, in 1714. He was the son of an innkeeper and a Pembroke College man, ordained an Anglican priest at twenty-one. At Oxford he had fallen in with John and Charles Wesley in a religious society other students mocked as the Holy Club. He had also, before his ordination, trained briefly as an actor. The voice that would carry across thirty thousand listeners in Philadelphia had been disciplined on the stage before it was consecrated in the pulpit.

In 1738 he made his first crossing to Georgia. In 1739 he returned to England and began preaching in the open fields outside Bristol because the established parishes would not have him. The collieries around Kingswood gathered to hear him in numbers no church could contain. He was thrown out of the buildings and discovered a wider pulpit than any building could hold.

In late 1739 he crossed to America for the second time and began the first of seven preaching tours that would consume the rest of his life. He preached in Philadelphia, in New York, in Boston, in Charleston, in every colony between, in towns no famous preacher had ever visited, in fields where there were not enough buildings to hold the crowds even if a building had been willing to host him. He returned again and again across the next three decades. He died in 1770 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he had preached the night before, and he was buried beneath the pulpit of the Old South Presbyterian Church there.

Across those seven tours, historians estimate that something approaching eighty percent of all American colonists heard him preach in person at least once.

That number is the argument. Nothing else in colonial American history is comparable. No politician was heard by four-fifths of the population. No newspaper reached four-fifths of the population. No institution connected four-fifths of the population. Whitefield did, on foot, by voice, in open fields, across thirty years.

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What He Preached

Whitefield preached one message in countless variations: the New Birth. The argument was that a man’s standing before God did not come from his standing inside an institutional church. It did not come from baptism in the parish, communion at the rail, confirmation by the bishop, or the prayers of the priest. It came from a personal encounter with the risen Christ, in which the man’s heart was made new and his life set in a new direction. Until that encounter, the man was outside the kingdom no matter how regular his church attendance. After it, he was inside the kingdom regardless of what any earthly church recorded.

This was not new theology. Calvin had preached the substance of it. The Puritan covenant tradition assumed it. Anglican evangelicals had argued for it. What was new about Whitefield was the medium. He carried the argument out of pulpits and into fields, out of established parishes and into open squares, out of educated audiences and into crowds of farmers and tradesmen and indentured servants and slaves. He preached it to the man who had no education and no patron and no standing in any religious establishment, and he told that man that the question of his eternal life was answerable directly, without intermediary, between him and the Lord who had died for him.

The reception was not uniform. Established clergy across the colonies attacked Whitefield. Some Congregational ministers in New England warmed to him and welcomed him into their pulpits. Others denounced him as an enthusiast who undermined the settled order of the churches. Charles Chauncy of First Church in Boston wrote a book against him. Old Light and New Light became party labels in New England Congregationalism for decades because of the controversy Whitefield stirred.

The controversy was a measure of what the preaching had done. Whitefield’s argument was structurally incompatible with the established religious order in a way the established order recognized immediately. If a man’s standing before God could be established directly in his own heart, then the institutional apparatus that had claimed to mediate that standing was reduced. The bishop was reduced. The parish was reduced. The state church was reduced. They were not abolished. Whitefield did not preach the abolition of churches. He stayed an Anglican priest his entire life. But the relative weight of the institution against the relative weight of the personal encounter had been shifted, and once shifted it could not be moved back.

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The Audience That Did Not Exist Before

Here is what the standard histories miss. The thirteen American colonies were not a single people in 1739. They were thirteen distinct societies, with different charters, different governments, different established churches, different economies, different demographics, different relationships with the crown.

A Virginia planter in 1739 had little in common with a Boston merchant or a Pennsylvania farmer or a Charleston factor. They read different newspapers, attended different churches, lived under different laws, and traded with different markets. Nothing connected them as Americans because the category of American as a shared identity did not yet exist. They were Virginians and Massachusetts men and Pennsylvanians.

Whitefield changed this. Not by preaching politics. By preaching the New Birth to all of them.

Across his seven tours, the same man with the same voice preached the same message to crowds in every colony. The Virginia planter heard him. So did the Boston merchant. So did the Pennsylvania farmer and the Charleston factor and the Connecticut yeoman and the New Jersey blacksmith. They had no shared political experience. They now had a shared religious experience. They had stood in fields and squares together, in their own colonies and sometimes in others, and heard the same preacher tell them the same news about the same Christ.

The newspapers reported on his tours from colony to colony. A man in Boston could read in his local paper about the crowds Whitefield was drawing in Philadelphia or Charleston. The reporting created the first sense that what was happening in one colony was happening in all of them, that something was moving across the colonies as a single event. Before Whitefield, news from another colony was foreign news. With Whitefield, news from another colony was news about the same revival a man had been part of in his own town.

The colonies were becoming a single audience. The political institutions that would express their unity in the 1770s did not yet exist. The unity that would later be expressed had to exist before the institutions could express it. Whitefield is where it began existing.

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What the Bypass Made Possible

The political consequence is the argument the platform makes, and it follows from the theology, not from anything Whitefield ever said about politics.

A man who has settled the largest question of his life directly with God, without ecclesiastical mediation, has learned a lesson about authority that does not stay confined to the religious sphere. He has discovered, on the basis of his own experience, that the ultimate court is not located inside an institution. The institution does not stand between him and the throne of heaven. He stands directly before the throne.

A man who has learned this about his soul does not unlearn it about his loyalty. The same conscience that has refused to let a bishop stand between him and Christ is not going to let a king stand between him and the moral law. The bypass that worked for the religious question will work for the political one. It is the same conscience operating in two registers.

This is not the argument Whitefield preached. Whitefield preached the New Birth and remained an Anglican priest under the king’s church until he died. The political consequence followed because of what the New Birth implied about the structure of authority, not because Whitefield drew the implication out. He did not have to. The implication did its own work in the minds of the men who received it.

Thirty years after Franklin measured the Philadelphia crowd, the men who had been formed in Whitefield’s audiences would be the men who served in the Continental Congress. The men they led had been formed in the same audiences. The unity that allowed those men to act as one people had been built in fields and squares across thirty years of preaching that no political institution could have produced. The Continental Congress did not create the unity. It expressed a unity Whitefield had built.

The line is not a Franklin quote, but it is the consequence Franklin’s calculation pointed toward. A man who could settle his soul without a bishop could settle his loyalties without a king. The bishop was bypassed first. The king was next.

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What This Means Now

The Whitefield phenomenon cannot be reproduced as an institution. There will not be another twenty-four-year-old preacher with an unamplified voice carrying across thirty thousand people in an open square. The medium is gone. The cultural conditions that made it possible are gone. The world that received it is gone.

The function is recoverable in fragments. Any preaching that puts a man into direct personal encounter with the Word, without softening institutional mediation, is doing something Whitefield-shaped. Any platform that places Scripture in front of a man without an interpreter between him and the text is doing something Whitefield-shaped. Any household that opens the Bible together and lets it speak is doing something Whitefield-shaped.

The point of Whitefield was never the size of the crowd. It was the structure of the encounter. The encounter is still available. The Word is still on the page. The Christ Whitefield preached is the same Christ. The Spirit that gave the preaching its power is the same Spirit.

What Whitefield produced was an American mind capable of acting as one people because it had encountered the one Word as individuals. What recovery looks like now is the same encounter, in smaller settings, repeated until the encounter is no longer rare.

The mountains are still there. The Word is still speaking. The bypass is still available.

Lift your head.

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Value for Value

Two hundred and eighty-seven years ago, a young English preacher started walking across the American colonies, and the people he preached to became, for the first time, one people.

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~ Brett Hahn, AmRev Resurrected 🇺🇸

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Brett Hahn is the founder of AmRev Resurrected and the author of Forge the Son: A Father’s Manual for Raising Sons by the Spirit That Built America.

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