A Great Awakening

There is a scene near the beginning of A Great Awakening that tells you exactly what kind of film you are watching. Benjamin Franklin stands in his Philadelphia print shop, watching through the window as a crowd of thousands goes silent under the voice of the Reverend George Whitefield. When Whitefield finishes, the crowd erupts into a spontaneous hymn. Franklin does not join them. He calculates. "What did you make of Mr. Whitefield's message today?" a man asks. "I plan to make a lot from it," Franklin replies.

That exchange is the film in miniature: the tension between a man who understands the power of the gospel without yet yielding to it, and the man whose voice is setting a continent on fire. Director Joshua Enck has made the rare faith film that is genuinely cinematic, not just spiritually sincere. It earns its runtime of two hours and nine minutes by treating its subjects as fully dimensional human beings rather than cardboard saints.

The historical grounding is impressive. The First Great Awakening really did reshape colonial America in the 1730s and 1740s, and Whitefield really was its central engine. His voice, by multiple contemporary accounts, could carry to 30,000 people in an open field. Benjamin Franklin really did print and distribute Whitefield's sermons, and really was a lifelong skeptic who never publicly converted to Christianity despite a friendship with Whitefield that lasted decades. The film's central dramatic question, whether Franklin's intellectual respect for the gospel ever crossed into genuine faith, is one that historians have debated for two hundred years.

John Paul Sneed plays Franklin with intelligence and humor. He is not the villain, and the film does not set him up to be. Franklin is portrayed as a man of genuine virtue who has simply decided that virtue does not require God. His debates with Whitefield are honest, not staged for easy evangelical triumph. When Whitefield argues for salvation by grace, Franklin responds with his thirteen virtues chart and his belief that disciplined self-improvement is the path to a good life. The film takes Franklin's objections seriously, which makes Whitefield's responses more meaningful.

Jonathan Blair's performance as George Whitefield is the film's beating heart. Whitefield was not a simple man. He had a lazy eye he was mercilessly mocked for at Oxford. He came from poverty, attending university as a servitor, a semi-servant status below the regular students. His early faith was agonized and nearly killed him through obsessive fasting and self-mortification. The film shows all of this without flinching. The scene where John Wesley pulls Whitefield back from the edge of spiritual collapse, reminding him that God loved Jesus before Jesus did a single mighty work, is theologically sophisticated in a way that most faith films simply do not attempt.

The most arresting visual in the film is a baptism sequence in a coal mining village. Whitefield has drawn workers out of the mines to hear the gospel, and as he baptizes them, the soot-blackened water runs gray and then clear. It is a simple image, but it lands like a physical blow. This is what faith filmmaking can be when it trusts its material.

The film's treatment of Whitefield's complicated position on slavery is honest without being anachronistically self-flagellating. Whitefield did hold enslaved people and did advocate for the legalization of slavery in Georgia, while simultaneously condemning the cruelty of slaveholders and insisting on the spiritual equality of all people before God. The film presents this contradiction as a genuine historical reality, not as proof that his faith was fraudulent. This is the right call. Asking an 18th-century evangelical preacher to have 21st-century racial politics is not history, it is performance. The film does not excuse Whitefield; it contextualizes him.

The political implications of Whitefield's preaching are handled with subtlety. The film makes the case, consistent with serious historical scholarship, that the First Great Awakening planted the intellectual and spiritual seeds of the American Revolution. By calling all people, regardless of class or status, to the same God and the same gospel, Whitefield was implicitly undermining the hierarchies on which British colonial authority rested. Benjamin Franklin understood this before most people did. That is why he printed the sermons.

For conservative viewers, this is close to a dream film. It takes Christianity seriously as an intellectual tradition, not just a feeling. It presents faith as the foundation of American liberty rather than an obstacle to it. It depicts evangelical preaching not as fanaticism but as genuine power. It shows friendship between a believer and an unbeliever that respects both without pretending the difference does not matter.

The production values are modest but appropriate. Enck is working with a lower budget than the subject deserves, and there are moments when the limitations show, particularly in crowd scenes. But he has the judgment to know when to let a performance do the work that spectacle cannot afford to do. Blair and Sneed carry the film, and they are more than equal to the task.

A Great Awakening opens April 3, 2026. It is the most unambiguously traditional film VirtueVigil has reviewed in years. Conservative audiences should go opening weekend. Churches should organize group screenings. This is exactly the kind of film that needs box office support to signal to studios that there is a market for serious faith-based historical drama.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Historical Complexity: Whitefield and Slavery	3	0.7	0.5	1.05
Class Critique: Oxford Servitor System	2	0.7	0.5	0.7
TOTAL WOKE				1.8

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Christian Faith as Transformative Social Force	5	0.7	1.8	6.3
Scripture as the Foundation of Liberty	4	0.7	1.8	5.04
Christian Founding Identity of America	4	0.7	1	2.8
Friendship Across Worldview Divides Without Moral Relativism	3	0.7	1	2.1
Repentance, Grace, and the New Birth	4	0.7	1	2.8
Courage to Preach to the Poor and Marginalized	3	0.7	0.5	1.05
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				20.1

Score Margin: +18 TRAD