Blame George Whitefield, or Bacchus Comes to the Bumpuses

I know the title of this post sounds like an American movie comedy from the 1940s, set in a small town, probably involving baseball. I’m sorry to disappoint you. Although I hope the portrait above indicates that this post will not be entirely humorless. The cross-eyed man in the picture is George Whitefield (1717-1770), one of the key founders of what we now know as the evangelical movement in Christianity — hence someone who paved the way for the unthinkable predicament America finds itself in at the moment. Before we get to the fruit, though, we must first look at the seed. (Blecch, sorry). It’s a lengthy journey, but there is a definite destination. And the art of theatre plays a role.

George Whitefield was born and raised in Gloucester, England in poor circumstances, but he had the good fortune to have access to a free school, enabling him to later attend Oxford on what we call now call a work study arrangement. From boyhood he was skilled as an orator and at acting in amateur theatricals. At Oxford he became devoutly religious and befriended John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism, the sect with which Whitefield is usually associated, although he was ordained in the Church of England, and operated independently throughout most of his preaching life. For a time, he followed in the self-negating tradition of the Puritans, but quite early on he found himself attracted to quite a different tack. Rather than suppressing his gregarious and flamboyant nature, he opted to harness it. One reads of him making Biblical stories live for his audience. He made them come alive. I picture something like Chaplin’s “David and Goliath” scene in The Pilgrim. In earlier posts, like this one and this one, I talked about how theatre came FROM religion; Whitefield was a man who seemed to be putting theatre BACK INTO religion.

At first church leaders approved of Whitefield’s preaching style. Parishioners actually paid attention! They showed up to hear him! But pretty quickly they reversed their stance. Now he was going too far! The official church began to distrust him as an “enthusiast”, and to decry his emotionalism, sensuality, and “breaches of order.” Hogarth felt the same way. Whitefield was one of his targets in Hogarth’s satirical 1762 print “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism”. Samuel Foote’s 1760 play The Minor is on a very similar theme.

The church’s attitude, if I may sloganeer, was “No Puppets in Pulpits!” (To be clear, Whitefield didn’t literally put on puppet shows, although there were Christians who literally resorted to stuff like that a couple of centuries later.) Deprived of audiences during church services, Whitefield took to open-air preaching, conducting ad hoc sermons outdoors. In short order he began attracting thousands of listeners who customarily never went in churches. He went to where they were, he didn’t make them come in the scary doors of Medieval edifices themselves. He preached to miners on hillsides, tradesmen on sidewalks, farmers in their fields.

And this method was in keeping with Whitefield’s shift in theology, which if I may be so crass, emphasized quantity over quality. It became about saving everyone without being very much concerned with the depth of that salvation. To what degree were the converted changed by their experience? It has been my habit, in my books, and on this blog, to write critically about Puritanism, that is, against its intolerance. But here is a case where I will argue for a partial return to certain virtues the Puritans possessed, or strived for, at any rate, among them intellectual reason, and self-restraint. After all, what is a Christian? Is it just somebody who calls himself one? Or somebody who makes it their business to Turn the Other Cheek, Give to the Poor, and so forth? (BTW, I’m not here to exclude anybody, the distinction applies within all religions, i.e., whether you’re actually honoring the precepts or just paying the whole thing lip service. My dwelling upon Christianity has to do with history).

Whitefield made the first of several trips to America in 1738, speaking to tens of thousands of people, setting off the first of several so-called Great Awakenings, also known as the Revival movement. Methodism spread here, and earlier denominations, especially Baptists and Presbyterians were strongly influenced. There are aspects of this new type of Christianity that seem very much consonant with America’s professed (once flourishing, now languishing) ethic of Democracy. To the evangelical, salvation is for everybody, saint and sinner alike. Everyone is accepted. And I like the ethic that everyone should be accepting. But the obverse of that attitude is that no member of the flock feels compelled to work on themselves. They are ritually born again, yet the next day they’re still the same person. Self-satisfaction is distributed with infinite liberality with no concomitant expectation of self-betterment.

And, as the critics opined above, the illusion of grace is sustained through an appeal to the senses and the passions and belief in the supernatural. Up until now, Protestantism had been about weeding that stuff out of religion, as corrupting, distracting factors. The point was to be good people, not have a good time. Whitefield and his cohorts stressed instead the presence of the Holy Ghost, or the Holy Spirit. It was about excitation, emotion. It was not about reason. In fact, it was claimed that the important parts of the doctrine were unknowable by the calculating brain, only through direct revelation. This is what is meant by a “Leap of Faith”. It is a sort of controlled madness, conjured at camp meetings and street corners. Spiritual knowledge was now something that was entirely FELT, not understood with the mind.

And here we come to where America is RIGHT NOW. So many people on the left seem bewildered about it, but it is surely because they don’t know this history. The bifurcation of America is very old; it goes back to the nation’s founding.

The spiritual center of the North was Puritan New England, which believed above all in self-improvement and the constant betterment of the community. America’s greatest universities were founded in New England almost as soon as the colonies were established. Compulsory public education originated there. While New York City was dominated by the official Dutch and English churches, upstate was mostly settled by those same New Englanders. The Quakers who founded Pennsylvania had a similar ethic. While these regions were touched by the Great Awakenings spawned by Whitefield and others, the fanaticism took the form of devotion to certain causes, notably Abolitionism, Feminism, and Utopian Socialism, as well as less rational but deeply focused movements like Temperance, Spiritualism and Mormonism. Passions were awakened, but channeled. From this tradition comes American progressivism

In the South, everything was different. There was wide disparity in wealth and power between the leadership class and the slaves, indentured servants, and small-scale subsistence farmers whom they ruled. People were much less educated, and they often lived great distances apart from one another. Thus when fantasies reached them, it was far easier for them to gain traction in their minds. So that’s where evangelism truly went off the rails. The rabble-rousing preachers ginning up anger against unbelievers, the charismatic tent show con men, the backwoods extremists with their speaking in tongues, foot washing, and snake handling. From this part of the country comes America’s penchant for the gullible worship of idols, as well as paranoia born of ignorance, and the primitiveness of tribal allegiance. This spread west, and eventually it spread throughout the country.

As I indicated in this post a few days ago I am closely related to generations of folks from both regions, and steeped in both religious traditions. Almost providentially, I was raised in the third way, the mainline Protestant way, which predates both, and in some important ways is more like Catholicism. So I think I can say I bring no particular preconceived bias to the national debate. Please know that I am not here to demonize anyone on account of what religion they follow or were born into. That’s not what this is about. It’s about how human beings conduct themselves. Having read widely over time though, I think I can sign off on a few very simple formulations that I am confident are true: 1) peace is better than violence; 2) knowledge is better than ignorance; 3) order is better than chaos; 4) passion is the making of art, but is the unmaking of religion and governance. And with respect to these precepts, the adherence of both factions are not equal.