This Is Not Our Fight: The Countess of Huntingdon and and Transatlantic Evangelicalism during the American Revolution

The American Revolution ruptured many transatlantic ties.   Among those severed relationships were many of the communication networks that early modern Protestant leaders, clergy and lay, had built to sustain a vision of a transatlantic, even universal, Christian world.  Yet though the war divided Anglicans, Dissenters, and Presbyterians, leaders of the emerging evangelical movement resisted the trend.  They not only sustained their ties, but even built new connections during an era of momentous change and considerable logistical dislocation.  

Evangelicals succeeded where other religious leaders failed because they framed the political aspects of the war differently than their peers did, and they were consequently able to view their religious efforts as a matter set apart from the revolutionary movements around them.  This paper thus explores how historical actors understood and attempted to contain revolution.  Specifically, it looks at transatlantic network maintained by the Countess of Huntingdon between 1775 and 1781, when the war’s disruptions posed the greatest practical and theological challenges to transatlantic religion.  The Countess had inherited the Georgia estates of George Whitefield in 1771, and she saw them as a base from which to spread the gospel, even amidst the frustrations and depredations of war.  By tracing how she built these projects, this paper argues that evangelical understandings of a limited relationship between worldly and spiritual matters buffered evangelicals from the war during its course, and facilitated a realignment of the ties between the religious and the political after the war’s conclusion.

Interrogating these countervailing trends allows investigation of an issue that is key for understanding the Age of Revolutions both in its American iteration and also more broadly: how, in the midst of intense political and social disruption, did historical actors put boundaries around change?