Last week at CNN.com, progressive Christian author Matthew Paul Turner wrote a piece about the ways that America has “changed God.” George Whitefield came into the discussion in way #2.
Rather than engaging humanity through communal covenants—holy connections usually reserved for large groups —according to the Anglican evangelist George Whitefield, God was now interested in making personal relationships with individuals.
Though Americans were a century or two away from asking Jesus into their hearts, Whitefield and others began preaching that God was ready and willing to bypass the church and interact with people one on one.
Whitefield became so popular—some historians suggest 80% of America’s population heard him preach—that his core message, one centering around a spiritual relationship that he called “new birth,” became popular, too, especially among Baptists and Presbyterians.
His revivals spearheaded a shift in how Americans would interact with the God of the universe, that the spiritual drama was happening inside us.
Moreover, Whitefield’s evangelical message of liberty—a spiritual liberty that many Americans equated to also mean a national liberty—became a unifying ideal that helped ready a much divided colonial population into becoming “one nation under God.”
This argument distills points from Turner’s new book Our Great Big American God, which I am sure adds more nuance to his analysis of Whitefield and the new birth. But a few points bear mentioning: first, there’s no indication from Turner that Whitefield was English, and that he had as much success in Britain as in America. This seems relevant to a piece that is trying to argue for uniquely American roots of contemporary evangelicalism.
More importantly, Turner implies that Whitefield invented the concept of the new birth. While the revivalist (the subject of my forthcoming biography) put a great deal of emphasis on the new birth, it was a concept rooted in Scripture and discussed in English long before Whitefield. The phrase “new birth” is not used in the King James Bible, but of course it derives most obviously from Jesus’s teachings about being “born again” in John chapter 3. Whatever communal sensibilities are reflected in the gospels, it is hard to see how Jesus’s teachings there did not pertain to Nicodemus as an individual.
One of the earliest references to the “new birth” in English was in William Tyndale’s 1520s translation of the New Testament, which in Titus 3:6 spoke of God saving us by the “fountain of the new birth.” (The KJV renders this “the washing of regeneration.”) The phrase became common in Anglican and Reformed texts long before Whitefield.
Whitefield certainly also preached a message of spiritual liberty in Christ, but he did so before both British and American audiences. Any direct connection between Whitefield and the Revolution is difficult to establish, not least because he died in 1770 and had no chance to offer his opinion of American independence.
I am sure that evangelicalism in America has taken on parochial qualities – such as “asking Jesus into your heart,” as I have discussed before – but I don’t think Whitefield is an especially fruitful source of those distinctly American qualities.
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