Thomas Kidd's full-length biography of the Great Itinerant is the first since those of Frank Lambert and Harry S. Stout in the early 1990s. Kidd acknowledges the more recent work of Jerome Mahaffey, but this book is less about absorbing recent scholarship than about treating Whitefield, first and foremost, as “the key figure in the first generation of Anglo-American evangelical Christianity” (3). “Until now,” writes Kidd, “we have not had a scholarly biography of Whitefield that places him fully in the dynamic, factious milieu of the early evangelical movement. That is what I seek to do here.” The author of The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Early America, Kidd is well-suited for the task.
Kidd's narrative is well written and briskly paced, and it is drawn overwhelmingly from primary sources. Though respectful of Whitefield's previous biographers, Kidd eschews discoursing on interpretive differences with other scholars in favor of focusing on his subject himself. A self-identifying evangelical, Kidd is a very sympathetic biographer, but he does not avoid the obvious shortcomings in Whitefield's personality, including his “besetting inability to maintain peace with evangelical colleagues, his appalling behavior in relationships with women, including his wife, and his advocacy of slavery and personal ownership of slaves” (4).
Spread over twelve chapters and a conclusion, Kidd's tale follows a well-established path, from Whitefield's humble origins in Gloucester, England, to his conversion and preparation for ministry, his friendship and then falling out with the Wesleys, his trips to Georgia and his tours of New England and of Scotland, his final trips to England and America, and his death in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1770. Kidd offers the reader just enough historical context to move the story along. This Whitefield is capable of insensitivity toward other ministers, but also capable of mending fences. Kidd discusses Whitefield's active endorsement of slavery, while also noting that it was little remarked upon in Whitefield's own time.
At the heart of Whitefield's fame was his ability as a preacher steeped in Calvinism and the central necessity of individual conversion. Kidd regularly invites the reader into Whitefield's sermons, noting the Scriptural texts and providing glimpses into Whitefield's uses of story and argument. Whitefield's preaching was practical and moving rather than analytical, but if the theology was not deeply intellectual, it nonetheless was thought out. The power of Whitefield's ability to communicate is evidenced by the fact that his writings moved readers who never heard his mellifluous voice, and his sermons moved listeners who heard them from the lips of other preachers. If Whitefield touched the emotions, he reached them through the mind.
Like Whitefield, Kidd appreciates the theology but does not dwell on it. He does offer us a thorough and sympathetic account of Whitefield as evangelical, providing numerous deft accounts of Whitefield's impact on individual converts and admirers. Kidd generally takes such stories at face value, avoiding modern, speculative psychological interpretations. While some readers will find that unsatisfactory, Kidd favors an understanding of Whitefield that the preacher and his supporters would recognize.
Whitefield certainly was the most widely known minister of his time and perhaps one of the best known men in America before the American Revolution made others more famous. Whether or not this makes Whitefield “America's spiritual founding father” is a more complicated claim, one Kidd asserts rather than demonstrates. This is a biography with a point of view, rather than a monograph with a sustained argument to defend.
An inherent difficulty within the history of American evangelicalism is the tendency to see it arising in the eighteenth century as something altogether new, instead of as emerging out of rivulets of the Christian experience over preceding centuries. Although names from the history of the church are dropped from time to time, neither Kidd nor Whitefield have much to say about Whitefield's relationship to the broader sweep of Christian history. In Kidd's account, Whitefield's references to major figures like Augustine or Luther are fleeting and in passing. Kidd's two-sentence, parenthetical reference to Augustine and Pelagius on predestination (79) is illustrative. This tendency is due, in part, to the evangelical direct engagement with scripture, unmediated by the work of previous theologians. Kidd himself is quite effective in utilizing the scriptural passages around which Whitefield wove his sermons. Understanding the awakening as an act of the Spirit, both the preacher and the scholar may miss other, more mundane (and human) influences.
But acknowledging such limitations ought not divert our attention from Kidd's accomplishment. While more work needs to be done on Whitefield, Professor Kidd convinces one that Whitefield is worth it. While “Wesley left a greater organizational legacy, and his ally Jonathan Edwards made a more significant theological contribution,” it was Whitefield who knit the evangelical movement together (26). “Without him,” Kidd writes, “evangelicalism would have hardly represented a coherent movement . . . His labors, above any other factor, virtually invented a sense of common evangelical identity.”
