Joshua Reynolds, Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784). Wikimedia Commons CC-PD

The final three chapters offer further evidence of the cultural creativity engendered by evangelicalism’s liminal location betwixt and between ancient and modern states. Chapters six and seven take up emergent spirituality in relation to eighteenth-century law, while the final chapter takes the hoariest of chestnuts from intellectual history—the Calvinist-Arminian debate—and delightfully cracks it open. In Hindmarsh’s skillful reading, an episode typically relegated to insider baseball is revealed to carry profound import for matters of lived religion. In pursuit of what he calls “the inner life of doctrine,” Hindmarsh moves past the hairsplitting argumentation by refracting the debate through the prism of a rivalry between two contemporary schools of painting, represented by Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. Hindmarsh writes, “Just as Reynolds and Gainsborough had a principled disagreement about painting as striving for general intellectual truth versus painting as striving for truth to nature, so also the evangelical antagonists [John Wesley and George Whitefield] debated how best to understand the economy of God’s grace” (266).⁴ Hindmarsh convincingly demonstrates how Wesley and Whitefield belonged to a “common school of evangelical devotion,” while representing different styles within it: the arduous struggle of “Wesley Agonistes” versus the contemplative repose of the “Calvinist sublime.”

The new light of evangelical spirituality that flickers throughout Hindmarsh’s work suggests a model of “true religion” very much attuned to the modern world, if not always fully at home in it. Evangelical religion, we learn, is interior, personalized, and experiential, alert to questions of human agency, curious about the natural world, given to voluntary forms of social organization meeting in open, democratic public spaces, and connecting their small, cellular groups to one another by means of emergent globalizing networks of travel and communication. Yet, Hindmarsh invokes evangelicalism’s discontinuity with earlier phases of Christianity mostly in terms of its fluid social context—the medium rather than the message. At the level of the deeper animating seed or “spirit,” he mostly sees continuity with the past. Early evangelicalism, he writes, represents “a form of traditional Christian spirituality expressed under modern social conditions” (48). It’s the same old wine, poured into new wineskins.

Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs. Sarah Siddons (1785). Wikimedia Commons, CC-PD

Historians have always swung between the explanatory models of radical rupture and evolutionary development, and Hindmarsh has wisely sought to avoid either extreme. Whitefield and the Wesley brothers amassed an eclectic set of spiritual riches in their early searches, but then cut and tailored their spolia to fit the trim figure of a newly mobile movement of holy laypeople who were expected to embody the evangelical ideal of half-monk, half-evangelist. More than any other eighteenth-century figure, Whitefield furnished the exemplar for this new mode of spiritual life, and Hindmarsh demonstrates how the ideal was transmitted from educated leadership to rank and file. Yet, a quote from Whitefield used by Hindmarsh to open the first chapter—“I want to be a burning flame”—suggests both the hopeful possibility and destructive potential of “true religion.” The divine flame, the felt sense of the Holy Spirit, could warm the heart and kindle a desire for active service to others. But a burning flame, Hindmarsh writes, “could sometimes get out of hand. . . . There was a dangerously popular fire of devotion among those in Bristol who cried out in 1739 when John Wesley called upon God to confirm his word with signs and wonders; among those who ‘swarfed’ and swooned on the brae at Cambuslang in 1742; among the radical New Light followers of James Davenport who contributed their books to the bonfire on the wharf at New London in Connecticut the following year” (8).

The religious conflagration that Hindmarsh describes was known as “enthusiasm,” the religious fervor arising from divine inspiration. For early modern Protestants, enthusiasm was the shadowy twin of mysticism, the ghostly specter that Luther was thought to have exorcised from the body of Christ. Whitefield himself must have sensed he was playing with fire when he claimed enthusiasm as the common birthright of any true believer: “every Christian, in the proper Sense of the Word, must be an Enthusiast.—that is, must be inspired of God, or have God in him. For who dares say, he is a Christian, till he can say, God is in me?” (35).

While Hindmarsh regards James Davenport as a tragic misapplication of the fires of revival, others see him as a faithful disciple of Whitefield’s new mystical gospel. Douglas L. Winiarski has recently offered a quite different account of the “spirit” of early evangelicalism, a narrative heavy on discontinuity and rupture. The rise of evangelicalism, he argues, is not “a story of resurgent puritan piety but a tale of insurgent religious radicalism.” Mining the church records of eighteenth-century New England, Winiarski describes a religious landscape riven by conflict over two divergent models of the spiritual life: the “godley walkers” of the old Congregational (Puritan) order versus the “perfectionist seekers” of emergent revivalists. In the wake of Whitefield’s preaching tour of 1740, he argues, “a vibrant Congregational establishment was buried under an avalanche of innovative and incendiary religious beliefs.”⁵ Winiarski argues that the people called “New Lights” diverged from their Puritan ancestors in two major ways: in their preoccupation with Whitefield’s novel definition of the new birth and in their fascination with what he calls “biblical impulses,” in which individuals heard biblical voices in their heads command them to break off communion with the established Congregational church in order to found voluntary forms of “true religion.” Winiarski writes: “these critical factors set many Whitefieldarians on a course to embrace increasingly radical beliefs and practices, including the bodily presence of the indwelling Holy Spirit, continued revelation, dramatic visionary phenomena, and a strident desire to break fellowship with their kin and neighbors and worship with like-minded men and women who claimed similar experiences.” Many believers felt compelled by the spirit to perform “dramatic acts of ecclesiastical disobedience,” making Davenport’s New London bonfires a simple outworking of the demands of “true religion.”⁶ The revivalist outbreak spurred by Whitefield’s appeal to direct, personal experience of God rent apart the sturdy social fabric of the New England Way, leaving many churches and towns on the brink of total disintegration.

Winiarski obviously sees a far more troubling legacy of disruption and discontinuity in the modernity of evangelical spirituality than Hindmarsh. Yet, Hindmarsh’s exhaustive account of the eclectic sources of Whitefield’s early spiritual formation—in particular, his retrieval of late medieval mysticism, as mediated by Lutheran Pietism and English Puritanism—suggests deeper lines of continuity with the disruptive force of tradition itself. C. Scott Dixon has argued that the Lutheran Pietists who came over to America and participated in the Great Awakening “generally taught that the Reformation was not yet complete, that there was still need for a reform of life to match the earlier reform of doctrine. . . . As Johann Arndt put it, ‘Our worship in the New Testament is no longer external in figural ceremonies, statues, and obligations, but rather inward in spirit and truth, that is, in faith in Christ.’ ”⁷ In other words, early evangelical spirituality was deeply continuous with seventeenth-century Pietism or even the Radical Reformation, which made disruptive visionary or ecstatic experiences a commonplace. Despite the psychic trauma of the Münster rebellion, down through the eighteenth century, the radical mode worked a persistent tension with the magisterial reformation. The radicals, Dixon writes, “tended to reject traditional social and religious forms (especially when they were at variance with their own ideas of godly order) and gather together, voluntarily, as communities of the religiously qualified at some degree of separation from state and society. Religious order was based on a strict reading of the New Testament, read in the light of the indwelling Spirit, and salvation was sought through personal piety and ethical action rather than the ministrations of the public church.”⁸ Sound familiar? In other words, both Hindmarsh and Winiarski may be right to claim, albeit in different ways, that Whitefield’s fervent desire to become a holy flame represents the persistence of ancient patterns of Christian spirituality as well as their radical eclipse.

Modernity has always had its minority report: the freedom stolen through control and regulation of subaltern bodies, the treasures of interiority—mind and spirit—prized from the dungheap of matter, the authenticity earned by severing ancient ties with the living and the dead. The unifying evangelical emphasis on the new birth, the “one thing needful,” over older traditions emphasizing a gradualist, progressive vision of the spiritual life had the unanticipated consequence of further fracturing an already splintered church. One “true religion” implied a thousand false prophets. One minute you were walking in darkness, the next you’d seen the light. It made for a good song, it’s true. Hank knew. But modern modes of mystical certainty—whether liberal or conservative, it matters little—left little room for doubt. In this battle, you had to choose which side you were on. It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but sooner or later, you were going to have to serve somebody.