Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield were all ordained Anglican priests. Their success was due in part to the fact that they weren’t freelance crackpots but men of the Establishment who challenged that Establishment, like America’s political founders. Their new, ultrademocratic American Christianity incorporated the founding Protestant antagonisms—to official holy men, stable doctrine, and fixed protocols—but went much further. As this mode became the norm among Baptists and other new denominations, it got even more extreme. Anybody could become a preacher. A preacher could preach anywhere, in any
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