This paper seeks to explore George Whitefield’s complex entanglements with the institution of slavery. These include his enthusiastic support for its introduction into Georgia during the 1740s along with his extensive personal ownership of slaves during the last two decades of his life. Best known as one of the foremost leaders of transatlantic evangelical revival, these elements of Whitefield’s legacy were suddenly thrust into the spotlight when, in the wake of a wider national reckoning surrounding the place of systemic racism in the United States, in 2020 the University of Pennsylvania announced its intention to immediately remove a statue commemorating Whitefield’s contributions to the University’s establishment.
We shall observe that, in many ways, Whitefield was a product of his eighteenth-century transatlantic time and place. Like all of us, he was unavoidably influenced—without being inevitably determined—by the prevailing attitudes and assumptions of the world he lived in. He embodied these especially vividly when it came to his involvement with slavery, one of the most ubiquitous features of life in the British Empire. As Pestana observes, “He endorsed it and indeed expanded it, while also working to improve it in keeping with his view that it could function as a Christian institution.” Although Whitefield devoted his life to proclaiming the good news of liberation from bondage to sin, death and the devil in the spiritual realm for both black and white, this concern for the liberty of slaves’ souls never translated into advocating for their physical freedom. And so, on the one hand, if Whitefield was prepared to challenge Southern slave masters in his 1740 public letter to “the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, concerning their Negroes,” going so far as to declare that “God has a quarrel with you for your abuse of and cruelty to the poor negroes,” by 1750 and whatever reservations he might have had about the propriety of slavery had evaporated: “As for the lawfulness of keeping slaves I have no doubt,” he wrote.
We shall conclude that while glossing over Whitefield’s sins of commission and omission about slavery runs the risk of presenting him in an unjustifiably flattering light, conversely, recasting his legacy exclusively in terms of a pro-slavery agenda in order to cancel his memory runs the risk of falling victim to an anachronistic rendering of his life and ministry. Whitefield’s specks and blind spots, clearly visible with the benefit of three centuries worth of hindsight, undoubtedly serve as a cautionary tale of the dangers of complicity with a prevailing culture’s fallenness. But lest we be tempted to pass hasty and self-righteous judgement upon him, his example also reminds us of how susceptible we are to harboring planks in our own spiritual eyes that threaten to impair the clarity of our own moral vision.