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.
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