"Pedlar in Divinity": George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737-1770 / Edition 1

by Frank Lambert

Overview

A pioneer in the commercialization of religion, George Whitefield (1714-1770) is seen by many as the most powerful leader of the Great Awakening in America: through his passionate ministry he united local religious revivals into a national movement before there was a nation. An itinerant British preacher who spent much of his adult life in the American colonies, Whitefield was an immensely popular speaker. Crossing national boundaries and ignoring ecclesiastical controls, he preached outdoors or in public houses and guild halls. In London, crowds of more than thirty thousand gathered to hear him, and his audiences exceeded twenty thousand in Philadelphia and Boston. In this fresh interpretation of Whitefield and his age, Frank Lambert focuses not so much on the evangelist's oratorical skills as on the marketing techniques that he borrowed from his contemporaries in the commercial world. What emerges is a fascinating account of the birth of consumer culture in the eighteenth century, especially the new advertising methods available to those selling goods and services—or salvation.


Whitefield faced a problem similar to that of the new Atlantic merchants: how to reach an ever-expanding audience of anonymous strangers, most of whom he would never see face-to-face. To contact this mass "congregation," Whitefield exploited popular print, especially newspapers. In addition, he turned to a technique later imitated by other evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham: the deployment of advance publicity teams to advertise his coming presentations. Immersed in commerce themselves, Whitefield's auditors appropriated him as a well-publicized English import. He preached against the excesses and luxuries of the spreading consumer society, but he drew heavily on the new commercialism to explain his mission to himself and to his transatlantic audience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691096162
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	12/08/2002
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Frank Lambert is Associate Professor of History at Purdue University and the author of Inventing the "Great Awakening" (Princeton).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Ch. 1 Eighteenth-Century Transformations: Whitefield's New Birth and the Consumer Revolution

Ch. 2 Whitefield's Adaptation of Commercial Strategies

Ch. 3 Creating an Intercolonial Revival

Ch. 4 Interpreting the New Birth: Audience Response

Ch. 5 Debating the Great Awakening in a Religious Public Sphere

Ch. 6 The Americanization of Whitefield

Epilogue. Legacies

Index

Editorial Reviews

A scholarly, easily written and felicitously documented account of Whitefeld's use of commercial methods . . . to promote missions to the masses.

Times Literary Supplement - David Martin

A scholarly, easily written and felicitously documented account of Whitefeld's use of commercial methods . . . to promote missions to the masses.
— David Martin

Times Literary Supplement

More than any other work, Lambert's provides the foundation for a new understanding and appreciation of the life and times of Anglo-America's greatest evangelical revivalist.

American Historical Review

"A scholarly, easily written and felicitously documented account of Whitefeld's use of commercial methods . . . to promote missions to the masses."—-David Martin, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher