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George Whitefield was one of the greatest preachers in the whole history of Christianity, also one of America’s spiritual fathers (although I think that’s a strange way to put it).

He was also complex, a sinner, imperfect, and blind to some of the greatest evils of his day, participating in those evils (he purchased human beings and kept them as slaves, for instance); human, no doubt, he’s a complicated figure, not a saint or hero. He was just a minister who happened to set the world of his day afire with his preaching. Christianity in America would look very different without Whitefield.

I’ve always been struck by the man, by his oratory, for one; it was said he could make men weep merely by the way he pronounced “Mesopotamia.”[1] In 1740, at the age of 25, he was said to have preached to 20,000 people on Boston Common.[2] As I said, without Whitefield, the spiritual course of our country (both the good and the bad of it) would look quite different. Yet, what really challenges me about Whitefield was his experience of conversion, his obsession with the reality and necessity of conversion.

As a conventional Anglican of the time, he practiced religion well enough; it was a religion thoroughly Protestant, of course, but honestly closer in practice to Catholicism than to much Protestantism today. As an early Methodist—a spiritual son of both John and Charles Wesley—his experiences would look to us today something like monasticism.[3] However, he learned early that the mere practice of religion, no matter how rigorous, wasn’t all there was; one could never do away with religion, yet one still needed more—the grace of union, the presence of Christ. Whitfield was no lover of Catholicism, yet he was deeply formed by Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and Castaniza’s The Spiritual Combat.[4] And he learned from these texts and others of the need for deeper change, deeper union of the soul in love with God.

He wrestled with God, with his own sins, sins he couldn’t really ever get rid of. His body heaved in prayer; some thought him mentally ill. But he was in crisis; he wasn’t happy with his faith, with what passed as his conventional practice of the faith. And it was in this crisis he prayed, “Lord, if I am not a Christian, if I am not a real one, God, for Jesus Christ’s sake, show me what Christianity is, that I may not be damned at last.”[5] That was his prayer for deeper conversion—“show me what Christianity is.” Now, conversion is classically a mark of Evangelical Christianity; those of you from that background know this. One’s conversion experience is vitally important to an Evangelical Christian’s spiritual sense of self. But here’s the thing, it’s also—or should be—a mark of Catholic Christianity too. And it’s something we must recover as Catholics, an openness to conversion in this powerful sense, not shying away from it just because we think it’s Protestant.

Because it may be exactly what we need in our day. There is among Catholics at present—rightly so—a strong felt sense, a spiritual sense, for a better Catholicism, a renewed Church. There is a desperate sense for the need of it, for a top-to-bottom review of the whole thing, a tearing down and rebuilding of it. Crimes and scandals, bad bureaucracy, insular thinking: we Catholics desire something better. And, of course, I think it all good, holy even. This is a righteous desire! I think God is in it—even often in the anger and the destruction. We need to pray for a better Church. We need to work for a better Church. But I’ll be honest with you: all this stuff makes me think about things like conversion. It makes me think that we first must rediscover our need for conversion before we dare to talk about fixing anything in the Church. It makes me think that without conversion, nothing will come of it but the rearrangement of cruel, foolish human power.

Friends, what’s got me going is that I’m meditating on these whispered promises of newness we find in the Scripture today. Like this promise from the Lord in Isaiah: “Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”[6] This is what we want in our own time, what we long for in tears and joy, anger and confusion. But how do we find it? Is it something we achieve on our own? Can we vote our way into this newness? Will we be able to manage ourselves into newness? Can we strategically plan our renewal? Are we foolish enough to think that?

Or, must we listen to Paul, taking him seriously? For him, the first thing was to “gain Christ,” which meant to “be found by him.” But that wasn’t something that would just happen. He first had to desire Christ genuinely—letting that desire change him, change all his other desires, his actions, his social life and social standing, his morality. He knew—what we try so hard not to know—that in order to follow Christ truly, we must “consider everything a loss.” “For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ,” he said.[7]

But this is exactly what we do not do! We keep the practice of our religion, but we let the world dictate our morality; let’s be honest. We give our corporations (really, the advertisers hired by them), and also for some strange reason, celebrities, more authority and influence than the word of God—because, of course, you don’t want to stand alone as the oddly biblical person do you? Christ stood alone, but we don’t want to anymore! We also give our children screened poison day after day, and we wonder why they grow up depressed haters of Christ and the faith, why they can’t even think of God in the silence wherein he seeks them, for we’ve turned their brains into noise. We give over our weekends (again, let’s be honest) to a deeply problematic cult of youth sports, and then we wonder how our kids grow up without the foggiest idea of Christ. We also talk a good game about the poor, and we indeed do some amazing things, but we also overspend so much on ourselves. I preach to myself! And too long we’ve practiced and given into clericalism, idolizing clergy, clergy idolizing themselves, too many of us idolizing Catholic cultures and microcultures—and so much wickedness the result! In so many ways, so much we live in a manner in no way different than the way the world tells us to live; and we sentimentalize our Catholicism so we don’t have to admit to ourselves that we’re basically pagans in everything we think and do. Which means, of course, that none of us should be surprised by the squalid, pathetic tragedies witnessed everywhere among us, among people who call themselves Christians. Because we’re sinners, obviously, but also because our preachers have for so long preached a bad gospel, talking you into a sentimental sham version of Christianity and Catholicism, for which they will be frightfully judged; and now you’re upset, now you see; some now even doubt the whole thing—and it all makes sense.

Which brings me back to Whitefield, to his conversion. Obviously, his conversion did not make him perfect, far from it. So much of his life was contradiction and disappointment. None of this is magic. But his conversion experience did make him a Christian he hadn’t been before—a preacher, useful in some way for the kingdom. Because conversion was something real to him, because he had the guts to say, “Lord, if I’m not a Christian, if I am not a real one…show me what Christianity is.”

What is real Christianity? What is real Catholicism? Is it this cultural form, this cozy selection of devotions and opinions we’ve curated for our emotional comfort? Is it the history of this parish, our schools, our neighborhoods? Or is it something more? Is it something that convicts us first, something that shows us our sin, our depravity, our blindness, our idols? These are the questions, brutal questions, we should ask ourselves. If conversion is real, we must break ourselves on these questions. I often think here about what James Baldwin wrote once, that we’re good at changing our attitudes but not so good at learning.[8] We need to learn, not just change our attitudes. That belongs to real conversion. But again, to be clear, we won’t be perfect after we wrestle with these questions—far, far from it. But we’ll at least be in a place where we might be able finally to take truth seriously—the pain and the power of it, the new life of it. Otherwise, friends, we’re just playing a game; which, of course, we’ll be able to keep playing probably for a very long time—until the game is up. And then that will be a different matter.

And again, friends, this is a necessary thing—the experience we call conversion, in some form or fashion. As Newman preached once, “the end of the whole matter is this, we must be changed.”[9] I think it’s necessary—such change—before we can even make sense of this beautiful passage from John, this story of Jesus liberating the woman caught in adultery. The whole thing was a set-up, if you ask me, a wicked deed intended as a two-for-one to destroy that poor woman and Jesus at the same time. Jesus seems to be stuck: does he deny the reality of sin and show himself to be some libertine false prophet, or does he condemn this poor woman to death, tempting the wrath of the Romans? Jews couldn’t legally stone anyone to death, you see.

So, what does he do? Jesus is creative. He doesn’t say sin is not sin (contemporary false prophets, take note!) nor does he condemn her to death. Instead, he practices the Godlike creativity of mercy. “Let the one among you without sin be the first to throw a stone,” he says. He shows us something entirely new, a new beautiful way no one else thought possible. And it’s freedom: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin anymore,” he says.[10] We misunderstand this story so much, usually because we’re just as trapped by the world as those guys with rocks in their hands. What Jesus shows us is real Christianity—not conservative Christianity, not liberal Christianity, not the way you think it is, not the way I think it is. He shows us something beautiful, something different, something sadly so rarely seen among we followers of Jesus, but something not meant to be so rare at all.

But we can get there; we can be Catholics just like that if we open ourselves to conversion, to letting go of the nonsense of the past, even the nonsense dearest to us, which we’ve cherished so long and probably too much. That’s what I pray for—that we finally find this faith we keep saying is ours but which has yet to change us completely. Which is the whole reason Jesus died for us, so such genuine spiritual beauty could be possible with us—change, salvation, and the freedom and joy we desperately want, and—I’ll be frighteningly truthful with you—which we desperately need.

Friends: look at Jesus, keep your eyes on him. He’s here in this Catholic Church—believe it or not—in the most sure way you can encounter him. The devil knows this, which is why we’re attacked so; which is why letting our guard down has been such a disaster. Which is why—for both clergy and laity alike—not taking our Catholic life as seriously as we should have has been so devastating. But never mind that. Jesus is here, the only Christ that can save us, the real one. So, fight to see him—fight! And good luck. I pray for you. Pray for me. Amen.

[1] Thomas S. Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father, 15

[2] Ibid., 1

[3] Ibid., 27

[4] Ibid., 16, 30

[5] Ibid., 29

[6] Isaiah 43:18-19

[7] Philippian 3:8-9

[8] James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 61

[9] John Henry Newman, “To the Natural Man,” Parochial and Plain Sermons, 1434

[10] John 8:7-11

© 2022 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield