Christianity and the American Revolution

Carl Bridenbaugh, one of the great 20th century scholars of American history, wrote the book Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities and Politics, 1689-1775. It’s a wonderful, scholarly work and is one of the more important books written on early America. Bridenbaugh says it is impossible for modern secular Americans to understand that "in England's American Colonies the most enduring and absorbing question from 1689 to 1776 was religion." What he writes is correct and it therefore is impossible to rightly understand the Colonial or Revolutionary Era's of American history without understanding the religion and theology of the American's of those times.

If you are like me, and almost every other American who attended public schools, then you were taught that the catalyst for the American Revolution was "taxation without representation?" While there is some truth to that statement, it can be misleading if not seen in the proper context of that day. Taxation policy played its part but it was not because taxes in America were oppressive, because they were not. Few Americans today realise that even the tax issue, to be rightly understood, must be seen in light of the particular theological worldview of that day.

The tax burden on the Americans then was, in fact, very low even for that day (compared to today’s taxes they were extremely low). The Americans then were an overwhelmingly Christian people, who tended to take the Christian faith very seriously. Many people would be surprised to learn that during the Revolutionary War, and through much of the 19th century, religion was believed to be a chief cause for the War of Independence.

When I was in school I wasn’t told that religion played any part in the war. Even then religion’s part in the Revolution had been edited (censored?) out of our history books. This wasn’t always the case; at one time it was understood and taught that religion played a (if not the) major role in the war. Past generations believed that Presbyterian Christians were the major antagonists to the English crown in America.

Renowned 19th century historian George Bancroft said it this way "The Revolution of 1776 was a Presbyterian measure. It was the natural outgrowth of the principles which the Presbyterians of the Old World planted in her sons, the English Puritans, the Scotch Covenanters, the French Huguenots, the Dutch Calvinists, and the Presbyterians of Ulster."

During the War For Independence, German mercenaries from the Duchy of Hesse were recruited to fight for the British Empire. One of the Hessian officers, Captain Johann Heinrichs, mentions the religious aspect of the war in a letter he wrote home to a friend in Germany. Capt. Heinrichs said, "Call this war, dearest friend, by whatsoever name you may, only call it not an American Revolution; it is nothing more nor less than an Irish/Scotch Presbyterian Rebellion."

Sir William Jones, who favoured the Americans during the War for Independence, when speaking of the war informed the King, George III, that "This has been a Presbyterian war from the beginning as certainly as that in 1641." (Note: 1641 is the beginning of the English Civil War, in which Parliament and the King went to war with one another. The war ended with the beheading of King Charles I.)

One Tory (an American who favoured the British) in the colonies wrote back to England "I fix all the blame for these extraordinary proceedings upon the Presbyterians. They have been the chief and principal instruments in all these flaming measures. They always do and ever will act against government from that restless and turbulent anti-monarchical spirit which has always distinguished them everywhere."

Historian Edmond Morgan records a complaint from one royal official stationed in colonies where he says the Presbyterians are "as averse to Kings as they were in the days of Cromwell, and some begin to cry out 'No King but King Jesus.'"

Then British Prime Minister, Horace Walpole, said in a speech to Parliament that "Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian Parson." He was speaking of Rev. John Witherspoon, who was president of Princeton College and a signer of Declaration of Independence.

Others were less specific about the religious roots of the war and gave credit to John Calvin and Reformed Theology. The19th century German historian, Leopold Von Ranke wrote "John Calvin was the virtual founder of America." American historian, William Jackman, wrote "He that will not honour the memory and respect the influence of Calvin, knows but little of the origin of American liberty. He bequeathed to the world a republican spirit in religion, with the kindred principles of republican liberty."

Admiral Howe, who was head of British forces in the colonies referred to the Revolution as a "Religious War.” Other contemporaries blamed the war on Reformed (Congregational, Presbyterian and to a lesser extent Baptist) pastors. The anti-independence leaders in Britain and Tories in the colonies blamed the war on these ministers. They believed that it was the preachers who had inspired the people to revolt and they were mostly correct.

To understand the root cause of the war we need to ask ourselves why was rebellion against the king promoted and supported by so many conservative Christian leaders. To find an answer we must to look at the theology of early America. Unlike today, religion was not then considered to be a private thing between ”me and my god.” Religion was to, and did, affect all of life. Men and women saw all things in light of theology, including civil government and their relationship with the King of the British Empire.

In that day civil government was seen as a Covenant or compact between the ruler and the ruled. When the colonies were created it was done so on the bases of compacts between the King and the people of each individual colony. The king of England was also the king of Scotland, Ireland, New York, Virginia, Georgia, etc… Each colony had the same king but they were each self-governing and independent from one another. They were related to one another and to England through the king, but Virginia (for example) had no legal relationship with the British Parliament. Parliament was free to pass all the laws it wanted over Britain, but it could not pass a law for Virginia or any other colony.

Each colony governed itself with its own legislature and its own governor and these powers were under the King and were independent of the British Parliament. The relationship was to the king not to the parliament. Therefore the British Parliament in London had no lawful authority to make laws dealing with internal workings of the colonies.

When the Colonies were being created the King or Queen was the true power and sovereign of the Empire, but this changed during the 17th century. By the end of that century Parliament had become the true sovereign of Britain and the kings and queens had lost a good deal of their ruling authority. This happened because of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. During the Glorious Revolution James II, the last Stuart king, was overthrown and replaced on the throne by his nephew (and son-in-law) William of Orange. William agreed to relinquish much of the monarch’s governing authority in order to gain the throne.

In this way Parliament gained lasting supremacy because of Glorious Revolution. John Locke defended this revolt in his famous and influential work 2nd Treatise On Government. Locke had himself been taught many of the ideas in his book by his Puritan (Reformed/Calvinists) professors when he was studying at college.

While sovereignty and authority over Britain had shifted dramatically from the monarch to the parliament, this had not affected the covenants/compacts that the King had with the colonies. The King still ruled them and the parliament did not have a say in their internal matters.

In the 1750’s and 60’s the British government incurred a great debt because of the French and Indian War. (Note: This war was actually fought on a world wide scale between Britain and France. Our French and Indian War was only a part of a much bigger conflict known as the Seven Years War.) After the war Parliament needed to raise revenue to pay off its war debts and it also needed to pay for the troops that were now stationed in the colonies.

It was decided that a direct tax in the colonies was the best way to raise the needed money for maintaining troops in the Americas. The King did not go to the colonial legislatures and ask for more revenues. Instead Parliament passed laws directly taxing the colonists. This brought a strong reaction from the colonies.

The colonists viewed the British Parliament as a foreign body that had no legal right to tax them. They believed the attempt to do so was to be an attempt to usurp their right to self government under the king. There was a ten year war of words between the colonists and the Parliament on the matter and to the shock of the Americans their king sided with the British Parliament against them.

In 1773 Parliament passed another of its many attempts to tax the colonies. This was the Tea Act which led to the Boston Tea Party. Legally imported tea came to the colonies from the East India Company. The legal tea would first go to a port in England where high duties were placed on it, then it was brought to an American port. The duties placed on the tea in England made it expensive, so the Dutch would smuggle tea to America. The Dutch tea was much cheaper.

The Tea Act eliminated the high duty on tea coming to America and replaced it with a small 3 cents per pound tax that was to be paid in the colonies. This act would make the English tea even cheaper than the tea smuggled in by the Dutch. The Americans, up and down the Atlantic seaboard viewed the Tea Act as a diabolical attempt by Parliament to take from them their right to self-government. By making tea so cheap it was believed the Americans would surely not object and a precedent would be set that Parliament could lay taxes in America.

The colonists were already on guard for such actions. The popular Anglican minister, Rev. George Whitefield, had warned them years earlier that something was coming when he wrote "My heart bleeds for America. O poor New England! There is a plot against both your civil and religious liberties and they will be lost. You have nothing but trouble before you. My information comes from the best authority in Great Britain."

The Americans colonists, North and South, would not allow the tea to be offloaded. When it looked like it would be off loaded in Boston anyway, Samuel Adams (Congregationalist and a Calvinist) led the Sons of Liberty to the ships and dumped the tea in Boston Harbour.

King George’s support of Parliament’s attempt to unlawfully tax the colonists was seen a breaking of the covenant/compact he had with his subjects in America. In the American (Puritan/Reformed) view the king by his actions was behaving as a tyrant because he supported the unlawful actions of the British Parliament against his subjects in the Colonies. By acting as a tyrant, over a sustained period of time, he broke the compact that he had with the colonies and forfeited his authority over them.

In the minds of the Americans, when the king called up troops to enforce the unlawful taxes, it was the duty of the lesser magistrates in the colonies to resist him and protect the rights of their fellow citizens. The preachers in America had been proclaiming these “Covenantal” ideas from their pulpits for over a century. The people were jealous of their God given rights, and believed that they were acting legally and justly when they took up arms under the legitimate authority of their colonial leaders, to resist their former king who had forfeited his rule over them by his despotic approval of the unlawful acts of a foreign Parliament.

The background for the covenant/compact understanding of civil government by the Americans was in their Reformed theological roots. The overwhelming majority of Americans who lived in the colonies were of Reformed roots (Note: Those Christians called Reformed in Europe were called Presbyterian in English speaking countries). The great majority of Americans then were descended from English Puritans (Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist and some Anglican), the Scotch Covenanters (Presbyterians), the French Huguenots (Reformed), the Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, and the Presbyterians of Ulster (Northern Ireland).

In the decades before the War for Independence hundreds of thousands of Scotch/Irish Presbyterians migrated to the colonies from Ulster and moved to the backcountry in the colonies. Even in Pennsylvania, which had been established by the Quaker William Penn, the Presbyterians then outnumbered the pacifistic Quakers.

Books like Lex Rex and Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos were popular in the colonies. These books were written by Reformed Christians in previous centuries to defend the idea of Christian resistance to the tyranny of despotic rulers. John Locke borrowed these ideas and published them in his 2nd Treatise On Governmentand the Americans repeated these concepts in their own Declaration of Independence.

The views expressed in these works are easily traced back to the reformation (and beyond). They are found in seed form in the writings of Protestant Reformer John Calvin, who was the theological mentor of most early Americans. In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin’s magnum opus, we read:

"For if there are now any magistrates of the people, appointed to restrain the willfulness of kings..., I am so far from forbidding them to withstand, in accordance with their duty, the fierce licentiousness of Kings that, if they wink at Kings who violently fall upon them and the lowly common folk, I declare that their dissimulation involves nefarious perfidy, because they dishonestly betray the freedom of the people, of which they know that they have been appointed protectors by God's ordinances."

John T. McNeill, editor of Calvin's Institutes said of the passage above "Calvin turns here with startling abruptness to approve, and solemnly urge action by constituted magistracy to protect the liberties of the people."

My favourite quote about the influence of Reformed thought on the foundations of America comes from Erik Von Kuehhalt-Leddihn . The late scholar, Kuenhalt-Leddihn, was an Austrian, Roman Catholic and an Economist. In an important essay titled The Western Dilemma: Calvin or Rousseau? He wrote:

"If we call the American Statesman of the 18th century the Founding Fathers of the United States, Then the Pilgrims and Puritans were the grandfathers and Calvin the great grandfather. In saying this one need not exclude the Virginians because Anglicanism has essentially Calvinistic foundations still recognisable in the 39 articles, and the Pilgrim Fathers, like the Puritans generally, represented a kind of Reformed Anglicanism. Though fashionable 18th century deism may have pervaded some intellectual circles, the prevailing spirit of America before and after the War for Independence was essentially Calvinistic in both its brighter and uglier aspects."

Erik Von Kuehhalt-Leddihn is correct. But such an idea is anathema to the secularist in the universities, media and civil government. Most Christians, though they desire to show that our land has Christian foundations, they arevery uncomfortable with the Reformed/Calvinistic origins of America.

The American War for Independence would not have happened had there been any other Christian theological system animating the people then and you can not understand the war without knowledge of its theological roots.

Dominus Vobiscum,
Kenith