By Thomas S. Kidd
In God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution Thomas Kidd delivers a thorough, fair, and enlightening one-volume treatment of the role of religion in the American Revolution. If anything, Kidd demonstrates that in contrast to those who contend for a monolithic American foundation . . . "it's much more complicated than that!"
Evangelicals and deists, church and state, establishment and disestablishment, slavery and abolitionists are all given their due. Those who desire a single theme to dominate this narrative will be disappointed. McCullough's 1776 gives us the triumph of the Revolutionary American spirit; Gary Wills, Under God provides helpful treatment of religion as a historical foil to a 20th century presidential race; but here, Thomas Kidd delivers religion in early America with all it's complexity, beauty, animosity, and sometimes appalling details.
I think his treatment provides a necessary corrective to both the trend toward a secular America and the slippery slope of Christian nationalism. Careful scholarship, writing void of prejudice, the uncovering of opaque but important actors in our historical drama, thorough treatment, and 300 pages of exceptional education are why I give this book five stars. Thank you, Dr. Kidd for this wonderful volume.
Let's see if I can keep my observations to ten:
1. Unlikely bedfellows: Thomas Jefferson and John Leland. On New Year's Day, 1802, John Leland, a Baptist evangelist delivered a 1,235 pound block of cheese to Jefferson. What would bind the heart of a an evangelical devoted to Christ to the politics of one who denied the Savior? "They shared the view that the state should assure religious liberty for all its citizens" (5). At that point in history, America was still tethered to the British practice of a state church. Actually, according to Kidd, deists and evangelicals share five tenets: 1. Disestablishment of state churches, 2. A creator God as the guarantor of fundamental human rights, 3. The threat to polity posed by human sinfulness, 4. A republic needed to be sustained by virtue, 5. God--or Providence--moved in and through the nations (7-9).
2. John Adams and Liberty: To Adams, human liberty was a theological outworking: "Liberty must at all hazards be supported," because all people had "a right to it, derived from our Maker" (12). Although Adams had abandoned his Puritan heritage, he "still lived in the essentially conservative political and religious milieu from by New England's Puritan fathers" (13). This accounts for the way he and others framed the struggle with Britain in moral terms. This theological vantage point was complicated by the Protestant/Catholic struggles in the monarchy in the 16th and 17th centuries. As a result of Catholic persecution, "English Protestants came to identify their faith with liberty, while associating the forces of Catholicism with slavery and the loss of religious freedom" (19). Liberty and religion were joined at the historical hip. Consequently, two religious issues impacted the American Revolution: (1) the possibility of an American Anglican Bishop, and Britain's welcoming policy toward Catholics reflected in the Quebec Act of 1774. (59).
3. The incongruity, inconsistency, and erroneous beliefs of some religious "heroes." Kidd demonstrates that everyone has clay feet. While not out to demonize the "greats" of the faith, his historical detail reveals errors that are often ignored in appreciation for achievements of Preachers (), chaplains (Israel Evans/"sanctifying the American Revolution, including savagery toward Native American [see 122f]), hymn writers (Isaac Watts/eschatology, 25), evangelists (George Whitefield/slavery), and statesmen (Patrick Henry/who condemned it while practicing it).
4. The roots of cultural Christianity. Despite many forefathers fleeing Great Britain for "religious liberty" in America, that "freedom" only extended so far. In Massachusetts, non-Puritans were free to remain, but expected to attend church and conform to Puritan standards of public morality" (40). In Pennsylvania, officeholders had to declare faith in God and the Christian Bible by swearing, "I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration" (170). In Vermont, officeholders had to be Protestants and profess belief in the authority of Old and New Testaments (170). Kidd notes, "Some Patriots (e.g. Benjamin Rush) posited an almost unbreakable link between Christianity and republican government. . . . By the 1780s Rush had come to believe that Christianity and republicanism served essentially the identical aim: To bring about the happiness and liberty of people" (110).
5. Disestablishment and the "Separation of Church and State. I think Kidd shines brightest here and on matters of slavery. He writes (and demonstrates throughout the book)
In the years leading up to the American Revolution, Enlightenment liberals and dissenters were clamoring for full religious liberty--which means the elimination of official state churches, religious taxes, and religious test for service in public office. But the dissenting evangelicals, and most of the liberal allies, hardly imagined that separation of church and state meant that religion should be only private, personal, and apolitical. That concept would only appear more recently, in the twentieth century (40).
Jefferson's "wall of separation" was designed top protect the religious liberties of all, not enforce secularism (52, 55). Prior to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, non-Anglican preachers could be fined for preaching the gospel. "Jefferson and Madison helped end legal penalties against dissenters and temporarily stop state funding for the Church of England (which would be called the Episcopal Church after independence was achieved), (54). See also pages 180ff for the route taken by many states.
6. The evangelical roots of revolution.
When it came to Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, Edmund Burke, the British parliamentarian, said "their brand of Protestantism not only favored liberty, it was 'built upon it'" (75).
7. Yes, it is a little more complicated than that."
The use of "unalienable right" (roots in John Locke's philosophy and John Cleaveland's preaching (1763), according to Kidd, demonstrates "the folly of trying to separate the sources of revolutionary ideology into 'secular' or 'religious' categories: Patriots drew on religious sources as well as Enlightenment philosophers like Locke and saw no contradiction between them" (81).
8. America and Virtue.
"Adams feared that the extravagance of the American people would steal their attention from their most precious jewel: liberty" (98). Adams had Sparta in mind, a republic where citizens subjugated their individual rights for the common good. More than that, he envisioned a Christian Sparta -- "a republic with both the ideals and the spiritual motivation to maintain the common good" (99). This is interesting in that he abandoned his Puritan heritage in favor of Unitarianism.
9. The Danger of Providentialism.
Kidd does not hold back from describing the great atrocities committed "in the name of God."
By the war's end, Occom's dire predictions had come true. He believed that the American Revolution had damaged Native American communities more than any other force in his lifetime. Occom bitterly wrote that his former friend, the Presbyterian missionary Samuel Kirkland, 'went with an army against the poor Indians, and he has prejudiced the minds of Indians against all missionaries, especially against white missionaries, seven times more than anything, that ever was done by the white people (129).
Kidd concludes chapter 6, "A Time of War" with these words: "Using God's might and right to justify one's cause can easily obscure the complexity or injustice of war. Providentialism was the most morally problematic religious principle of the Revolution (130).
10. America and the Evil of Slavery.
In Chapter 7, "God Has Made Of One Blood All Nations Of Men," Kidd shows that despite the actions of many Revolutionary leaders (Washington and Jefferson for instance), the American Revolution "severely undermined slavery's ideological foundation" (133). Kidd does not offer this as an excuse for the atrocity of slavery, but to demonstrate that "Jefferson recognized that the wording of the Declaration of Independence would root his case for the equality in the widely assumed common creation of mankind by God--and thus provide a more transcendent basis for equality than merely referring to the rights of Englishmen or to simple reason (142).
The consequences of the Revolution for African Americans reveal the era's greatest moral failing. The moral struggle for independence implied a promise to end American slavery--a promise the Revolution did not fulfill. . . .The Revolution unleashed an unprecedented flood of antislavery thought, much of which came from Evangelical Christian sources" (148).
While the challenge to slavery did not come from those notable champions of "freedom," it did from "northern evangelical Calvinists, the tradition that transformed Lemuel Haynes and many others into antislavery polemicist" (152). See also pages 165.
Key Legislative Acts and Individual Publications:
1774 - The Tea Act: Granted the East India Company a monopoly to sell tea in the colonies (66).
1774 - The Intolerable Acts of 1774: Closed Boston to commercial ships, reorganized the Massachusetts government under British Authority, forcibly housed British troops in American homes (66).
1774 - The Quebec Act of 1774: Granted French Canadian Catholics the freedom to practice their religion openly and extended Quebec's border down the Ohio River (67) Kidd notes that the Quebec Act fanned the flames of "anti-popery," i.e. tyrannical abuse of power and so tied a knot between religious liberty and "liberty" as we often think of it (73). Americans feared their loss of religious liberty and so some spiritualized the political conflict. In Common Sense Thomas Paine asserted that "Monarch in every instance is the Popery of government" (73).
1775 - "His Excellency General Washington" poem by Phillis Wheatley
1776 - Common Sense: Kidd declares: "The most influential political pamphlet in American history." Note, Paine (though secular) appropriated biblical arguments and evangelical rhetoric throughout his pamphlet (88).
1794 - The Age Of Reason: Thomas Paine's attack on traditional Christian faith.
1776 - Thoughts on Government To Adams, the role of government was the happiness of society and that lay in possessing and demonstrating virtue (109).
Quotes worth quoting:
1. James Madison (The Federalist): "If men were angels, no government would be necessary" (219).
2. George Washington (1776): "A new government requires infinite care and unbounded attention, for if the new foundation is badly laid, the superstructure must be bad" (p. 109).
3. George Washington (1785): "We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the share of mortals" (209).
4. George Washington (1786): With respect to unselfishness needed to maintain the Republic, "Virtue, I fear, has, in a great degree, taken its departure from our land" (211).
5. William Linn (former Continental Army chaplain in reference to Jefferson's quote on his neighbor being an atheist): "Let my neighbor once persuade himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket, and break not only my leg but my neck" (237).
Recommendation:
I highly recommend God of Liberty for the education and for the corrective it provides against national secularism without promoting a notion of Christian nationalism. God of Liberty helps one shine the historical flashlight on proposed legislation, e.g. "The Equality Act, with a more careful light when it comes to liberty and justice for all.
Returning to Jefferson, the Baptists, and disestablishment, Kidd notes "The experience of both Jefferson and evangelicals during the revolutionary era taught them that the great danger to liberty arose when governments created or sponsored religious establishment or prevented the free exercise of religion. But they hardly envisioned a secular republic; such a concept was almost incomprehensible in the mental world of the followers" (243). Kidd helps us see that such a concept should be incomprehensible to us as well.
