A Great Awakening, the second feature produced by the independent faith-based production company Sight & Sound, sets for itself an immense challenge: portraying the rousing power of great 18th-century oratory for a 21st-century audience whose world is defined by glowing screens and truncated attention spans. That is one of its greatest virtues. One of its greatest flaws is that it sets itself up—perhaps unwittingly, perhaps purposefully—for a simplistic Christian nationalist reading, which would necessarily flatten out all the complexities and nuances that the film otherwise quite admirably conveys. The great irony, of course, is that the very viewers who are most likely to mistake the film's depiction of the relationship between the fiery evangelical orator John Whitefield and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin as a call to Christian nationalism are also the ones who are most likely to be disinclined to engage in real oratory, preferring instead late-night Truth Social posts, political memes, and conspiratorial TikTok videos.

A Great Awakening doesn't need to be embroiled in contemporary politics, but it is also difficult to disentangle its historical drama from current events, be it Turning Point rallies or the Secretary of Defense using Scripture to defend the invasion of other countries. Sight & Sound, which began in the 1970s as a theatrical performing company and has only produced one other feature, I Heard the Bells (2022) about Henry Wadworth Longfellow (which was also directed by Joshua Enck), has clearly taken note of the Angel Studios model, which merges faith-driven storytelling and history with solid production values. The clear point is to demonstrate through cinematic drama the intertwining of Christian belief and our shared history as Americans; the danger lies in the conflation of the two, rather than the recognition of how they have reflected and fed off each other, creating the very real, very radical idea of an egalitarian democracy.

The screenplay by Jeff Bender, actor Jonathan Blair (who plays Whitefield), and director Joshua Enck uses the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as its frame, with an aging Benjamin Franklin (John Paul Sneed) awakened back to both civic duty and spiritual discernment via the reading of the journals of his deceased friend George Whitefield. Thus, much of the narrative unfolds in flashbacks, intertwining the very different childhoods of Whitefield and Franklin and their individual ascents, Franklin into the realms of business and politics and Whitefield into the realm of theology and evangelism. The irony is that Whitefield, who would come to be one of the greatest Christian orators of his time and helped to bring forth the first "Great Awakening" in America in the late 1730s when he arrived from England, did not grow up surrounded by religion; and Franklin, who would famously reject organized religion in favor of deism (the belief that God's truths can be discerned through nature and reason) was raised by a deeply religious father who hoped his son's interpersonal gifts and rhetorical strengths would compel him to the pulpit.

Whitefield and Franklin became friends when the former, having become a Christian through his experiences with the "Holy Club" at Oxford, began travelling through the American colonies evangelizing in a way that was new and radical at the time. Franklin was impressed with his command of oratory and his ability to enthrall crowds in the thousands (a famous historical incident recreated in the film finds Franklin excitedly measuring how far away people in the crowd could still hear Whitefield's booming voice). Whitefield had originally wanted to be an actor, and all that time on the stage shaped his ability to project his voice and convey Biblical passages with great dramatic flair (it is convenient that the films casts Blair, a conventionally handsome man, as Whitefield and changes his lazy eye into a cloudy one that gives him a kind of David Bowie rockstar look). At the time, Christian oratory was restricted largely to dull ritual and reading of the scripture, absent the kind of energy and flourish we associate with the evangelical movement. Whitefield changed all of that, which threatened the norms and orthodoxies of churches in both England and the American colonies.

He and Franklin connected initially because they needed each other practically: Whitefield needed Franklin's printing press and business acumen to spread his message, and Franklin recognized how Whitefield's popularity could make him money. At one point, Franklin tells him, "Our friendship is a strange one, Mr. Whitefield. You seek to save my soul, and I seek only to print your words." They soon became friends despite their very different backgrounds and belief systems, and some of the film's best moments find them debating, sometimes angrily, their competing worldviews (it is one of these debates that Whitefield's owning of slaves comes up, an uncomfortable historical reality that otherwise goes unmentioned). It is to the film's great benefit that they are presented as intellectual equals, and there are no specious God is Not Dead moments of conservative Christian triumph over liberal secularism.

The film does build to a historical moment during the fifth week of the bitterly contested Constitutional Convention, with Franklin earnestly pleading with his fellow delegates to engage in prayer each day to help them succeed in their endeavors. "If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without [God's] notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?" Franklin asks, which is precisely the kind of rhetoric that fulfills the film's spiritual promise while also risking an oversimplified interpretation that the United States of America is a "Christian nation" and that the separation of church and state is some kind of devious, manufactured liberal fallacy. The irony of Franklin the deist who believed that human morality could be attained entirely through logic and reasoning arguing for daily prayer to the heavens for guidance is powerful indeed, but that is hardly a call to let any one religion dictate the business of a nation. A Great Awakening shows, quite powerfully at times, how religious belief can shape political thinking and action, but it would be a real shame to mistake it for a simplistic Christian nationalist screed.

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