“A justified revolution” .. How did religion ignite the American War of Independence?

In the 18th century, a group of British colonies along the western Atlantic coast rebelled because of their lack of representation in the British Parliament and the increase in taxes on them.

The colonists in America fought a war against Britain in what is known as the American Revolutionary War in 1775, and those colonies were able to win, and then adopted the declaration of independence from the British crown on July 4, 1776.

And the American magazine "The National Interest" published an analytical article in which the writer Glenn Motts talked about the book "A Justified Revolution: The American Clergy's Argument for Political Resistance (1750-1776)" by the author Gary Steward, which focused on the role played by the clergy. in the American War of Independence.

Throughout the decades of study, many researchers circulated various rumors about the American Revolution. Historian Charles Beard, for example, believed that the goal of this revolution was to secure economic privileges, but now it turns out that this idea was an argument to justify the exploitation of racial inequalities, that is, the issue of slavery.

Similarly, it was said that orthodoxy could only bring about minor general changes in 1776, and it is known that the 18th century was the era of enlightenment or the age of logic in the words of the American philosopher and Enlightenment activist Thomas Paine (died 1809), and as was common among American evangelicals at the time. The Bible has absolutely nothing to do with politics.

But the facts of early American history suggest otherwise, and Steward's book explores the arguments of the patriotic clergy to legitimize political resistance against the British in the early stages of the American Revolution.

Early Accounts of the American Revolution

The writer pointed out that this thesis (of the irrelevance of the role of religion) might be persuasive if one ignores the first historical accounts of the American Revolution. An important catalyst for the outbreak of the American War of Independence.

Moreover, the revolutionaries themselves attributed the (Protestant) reform movement with the adoption of the ideas of freedom, and the second president of the United States of America, John Adams, attributed the credit to Protestantism and the idea of ​​defending freedom against royal tyranny.

Even after its end, the reasons behind this war continued to draw a lot of ink and the focus of a controversial debate about the role that religion played in the American War of Independence.

Gary Steward's recent book "A Justified Revolution...The American Clergy's Argument for Political Resistance (1750-1776)" from Oxford Press is an essential contribution to this debate, and moreover Steward presents the clergy's ideas without boring elaboration or theological detail.

Steward begins his book with an overview of the history of this war, focusing on its ideological origins, noting that in 1967 the contemporary American historian Bernard Palin became famous for portraying the origins of the war as radical and liberating (not religious).

Ten years later, American historians such as Mark Knoll and later Nathan Hatch and George Mardsen made this argument in evangelical circles.

Their ideas about priests embracing a radical ideology rather than individual piety or honest readings of the Bible have been of great importance as the cultural debate rages on whether the United States is a "Christian country."

In his book, Steward also touched on Reverend Jonathan Mayhew's sermon on "unlimited submission", which is considered the most famous sermon of the American Revolution, although he gave it 25 years before the first bullet of the war was fired.

While Palin was right about the association of Mayhew's ideas with the outbreak of the Revolution, Steward finds that Noll and the rest of the scholars were wrong about seeing them as a complete departure from earlier (negative) Christian ideas about government and politics.

Steward explains that theological orthodoxy and other doctrines were not a decisive factor in the formation of political conservatism or radicalism, and he believes that Mayhew was not only relying on a long hermeneutic tradition of the Bible, but was also responding to Britain over what came to be called "passive obedience and nonresistance." It is a "Christian" idea that angers Americans to the point that it is still condemned in some US state constitutions.

Engraving from 1869 commemorating the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolution (Getty Images)

character law

Steward - in his book - touches on the most important catalyst for the cause of the American patriots in the time of the revolution, which is the Stamp Act of 1765, which was passed by the Parliament of Great Britain in 1765 to raise financial resources in order to support the English army in North America by forcing the purchase of stamps by the residents of America in many transactions Colonial residents protested the law and raised the slogan "No taxes without representation." The American resistance forced the British Parliament to withdraw the law the following year.

Steward pointed out that questions related to taxes have overshadowed the religious debate in the perceptions of the war, but this is not true, as the presence of religion was strong as a catalyst for the revolution from the beginning.

Efforts to establish an evangelical episcopate (a Christian religious movement espoused by groups of conservative Protestants that stresses a literal interpretation of Bible texts) in the United States not only revived old rivalries in New England (a bastion of revolutionary discourse), but threatened to make evangelical notions of " Passive obedience and non-resistance" are more effective in contrast to the revolutionary patriotic tendencies.

Although some evangelical priests supported the revolution, for many Americans, Episcopal evangelism was synonymous with authoritarianism.

While evangelical church courts had authority over family matters (as do Islamic law courts), the religious discourse became a matter of legal jurisdiction, and some even feared stamp tax as a means of financing those courts.

The revolution thus became a means for the rebellious sects to secure a decisive victory against religious fanaticism.

The author's focus is on the patriotic (pro-independence) clergy rather than the pro-British, and does not take into account Protestant arguments against the Revolution or the Declaration of Independence.