First Freedom: The Fight for Religious Liberty Page #2

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a fevered crowd

of tens of thousands

gathered before the steps

of the Philadelphia courthouse.

They'd come not in rebellion

but in ecstasy

to hear the passionate,

energetic,

and theatrical

George whitefield.

The son of an innkeeper,

whitefield had worked

his way through Oxford

as a servant.

By 1740, he was already

the most famous religious

figure of the day.

He toured America,

preaching nearly every day

to huge crowds.

Bonomi:
He preached

out in the open,

he didn't have to be

inside a church.

He preached in the fields.

He preached

in Philadelphia

in the center

of the street apparently.

Whitefield was a radical

in certain ways

in denouncing

conventional faith.

Holmes:
His message

was that God cared

even for the poor,

for the Indians,

for the blacks,

as well as for the wealthy.

Narrator at the end

of his sermons,

whitefield would boom out his

universal invitation,

"come poor, lost,

undone sinner,

come just as you are to Christ."

If religion didn't

cut deeply,

if it didn't move

people powerfully,

then it was no good,

and so he would thumb

his nose at the clergy,

say they were

too conventional,

they were too dry,

they were dead.

Mitchell:
In the Philadelphia

crowd that day

was Benjamin Franklin,

already a well-known printer,

the author

of the hugely successful

"poor Richard's almanack."

Ben Franklin was

a compendium of American

intellectual interests,

an autodidact who would

go on to chart the Gulf stream

and invent the lightning rod,

bifocals,

and the Franklin stove.

He was a deeply

unconventional man.

He believed in God

but rejected organized religion.

Man as Benjamin Franklin:

I never was without some

religious principles.

I never doubted,

for instance,

the existence of the deity,

that he made the world

and governed it

by his Providence

and that the most

acceptable service of God

was the doing good to man.

Benjamin Franklin.

Church:
He believed

in the practicality of religion,

that religion was a useful tool

to organize society

and keep people loving

their neighbor as themselves.

Brethren and fathers

and all ye whom I am

about to preach

the kingdom of God,

I suppose you need not be...

Mitchell:

Franklin didn't proselytize.

He didn't discuss

his religious beliefs at all

unless he was pressed.

He gave donations

to a wide variety of churches,

yet he'd decided

beforehand that he would be

impervious

to whitefield's message.

Man as Franklin:

I silently resolved he

should get nothing from me.

I had in my pocket

a handful of copper money,

3 or 4 silver dollars,

and 5 pistoles in gold.

As he proceeded,

I began to soften

and concluded to give

the coppers.

Another stroke of his

oratory made me ashamed of that,

and determined me

to give the silver,

and he finished

so admirably that I emptied

my pockets wholly into

the collection plate,

gold and all.

Mitchell:
In the end,

Franklin would publish many

of whitefield's tracts.

The preacher's eloquence

kick-started what was known

as the great awakening,

a wave of Evangelical fervor

that lasted a decade.

The awakening went

beyond the spiritual.

It instilled the vital idea

that these 13 separate

and very different colonies

were connected,

that their people could share

not only language but beliefs.

Suddenly, these colonists saw

themselves as large actors

upon the biggest stage of all.

Americans began to realize

that they were one people.

Meacham:
They were

founding a new world,

there was

a great deal of imagery,

a great deal of conversation

about America being

the new Israel,

the new promised land.

There was an intense

religious feeling shaping

the generation that became

the revolutionary generation.

Mitchell:
When

the great awakening ebbed

in the 1750s,

it left more churches

but not more church-goers.

So somewhat surprisingly

in America

in the mid-18th century,

somewhere around

20% to 30%, at the most,

of European American colonists

had any kind

of significant relationship

with a Christian congregation.

Mitchell:

It was in this era,

a time when evangelism had

ripped through America,

uniting it but then departing,

that a very different kind

of passion began

to take hold of the colonies.

This time

the fervor was political.

It would lead,

in the end, to revolution,

and that revolution,

in turn, would lead

to an unprecedented freedom

of religious faith.

Mitchell:
The founding fathers

would try to unite

13 colonies into a country,

yet unity was,

in a sense, unnatural.

Religion mattered,

and in terms of religion,

America was strikingly diverse.

Butler:
On the Eve

of the revolution,

no single denomination

held a majority.

In fact, the numbers

were very tiny.

Congregationalists were the

largest single denomination.

They comprised only 22%

of all religiously

affiliated colonists.

Next were the presbyterians,

less than that.

Next was the church of england.

Meacham:
There were baptists,

there were quakers,

there were christians

of every kind of denomination,

there were hugely patriotic

Jewish Americans.

You also have a number

of slave religions

that have disappeared.

Bonomi:
Lutherans,

German reform, the Dutch reform.

Robert p. George:

That makes us really unique.

It certainly made us unique

in the 18th century,

where peoplehood

was the result of having

a common ethnic bond

or tribal bond

or national bond or something

along those lines.

No European society looked

like this at all.

In every European society,

there was a dominant group

that by law could claim

the membership

of virtually everyone,

and then there were some

very small minorities.

America turned that topsy-turvy.

Mitchell:
But diversity was

not a recipe for tranquility.

Religious clashes among

the sects were common

and occasionally violent.

The prosperous

and powerful colony

of Virginia was

in a sense typical.

Before the revolution,

the preeminent political voice

was the radical Patrick Henry.

Henry pushed a series

of anti-British resolves

through the house of burgesses

with inflammatory rhetoric,

but Henry's own wife was

not given a Christian burial

because her mental illness

was thought to be

the work of the devil.

True toleration

and religious freedom

were not even up for debate.

Butler:
The church of england

sought through local authorities

to ban the activities of both

presbyterians and baptists.

[Bang bang bang]

Mitchell:
Edmund Pendleton,

a respected Virginia judge,

was just one

of the Virginia judges

who sentenced

baptists preachers to jail

for what an observer called

"the heinous charge

"of worshiping God according

to the dictates

of their own consciences."

A local sheriff

brutally horsewhipped

one baptist clergyman.

A "gang of well-dressed men"

nearly drowned

two other baptists

by holding their heads

underwater in a nearby river.

Persecution was public practice

in orange, Virginia,

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