The Accidental Revolutionary: George Whitefield and the Creation of America

X. Church and State

117 CHAPTER Church and State X Jonathan Edwards, and most of the other leaders in the colonies believed that Christ would one day return from heaven and destroy those who do evil. Then, Christ would reign on earth over a kingdom of saints for a thousand years until the final judgment and the creation of a “new earth.” In light of this belief, colonial religious leaders interpreted the Great Awakening as a final outpouring of God’s grace onto society to prepare for Christ’s impending return. As Whitefield wrote recalling the revivals of 1741: The awakening greatly increased in various places, till, at length, the work so advanced every where, that many thought the latterday glory was indeed come, and that a nation was to be born in a day. The Puritan vision for America of a “city upon a hill” was still alive for the Americans. But Christ had not returned, creating a delay that pressured ministers to rethink their doctrine. To resolve the problem, the ministers wondered whether “perhaps Christ is already at work, setting up his kingdom and making war on evil by more visible means. Perhaps Christ and the devil are already at war with one another through existing governments.” If they were right about the delay, the spread of Whitefield’s religious/political ideas could further shape the New Light community of believers and persuade them to trust the traditional colonial governments. Thus began a blending of religion and politics into what Nathan Hatch has called “civil millennialism,” an “amalgam of traditional Puritan apocalyptic rhetoric and eighteenth-century political discourse.” This blending The Accidental Revolutionary 118 X of ideas forged a stubborn link between religious virtue and liberty.1 As Hatch explains: In picturing the struggle of liberty versus tyranny as nothing less than the conflict between heaven and hell, the clergy found their political commitments energized with the force of a divine imperative and their political goals translated into the very principles which would initiate the kingdom of God on earth.2 The expectations of the New Light theologians had to be changed when the Awakening failed to usher in the millennial reign of Christ. Hatch placed the full development of civil millennialism between 1744 and 1754, setting it in place just in time to empower the French and Indian War rhetoric. Yet Hatch sheds little light on the intellectual origins of civil millennialism, merely pointing out that it could not have directly evolved from post-Awakening theology, and that it first appeared in sermons by New Light ministers after the Louisbourg expedition. By the mid-1750s, ministers, including the Old Lights, were preaching that “an extensive French-Catholic conspiracy” was “linked directly to an apocalyptic interpretation of history in which the French were accomplices in Satan’s plot to subjugate God’s elect in New England.”3 According to Hatch, this initial form of civil millennialism was developed and expressed by Jonathan Mayhew and other ministers. But Mayhew’s sermon in 1750 was a publishing flop and did not become popular until the 1770s when people began to reapply his ideas to George III. Prior to Mayhew’s publication, Whitefield’s sermon “Britain’s Mercies” explicitly connected the French, Roman Catholicism, and the antichrist in the “horrid plot, first hatched in hell, and afterwards nursed at Rome” that he believed inspired Charles Edward’s attempted coup. His connection of virtue with liberty predates Hatch’s first examples of the apocalyptic plot by eight years. Again we find Whitefield resurrecting and modifying arguments from Britain’s political past, inserting them into the leading edge of an intellectual transformation and spreading the ideas throughout the colonies. Whitefield was the person most able to publicize the concept of civil millennialism. Few ministers of the period had sufficient popularity to sell their published sermons beyond their immediate locale in the same way that Whitefield could. Whitefield provided an eloquent rhetoric and a network of 119 X Church and State dissemination that helped the spread of civil millennialism throughout the colonies. In practical terms, civil millennialism resulted from taking a logic template from the New versus Old Lights in religion and reapplying it to British Christians and French Roman Catholics. This shift was perfectly timed to help Whitefield rebuild his influence, which had been reduced during the post-Awakening conflict. Having distanced himself from the radical enthusiasm of other Protestants, Whitefield ’s emphasis upon substantial...