Transcript
...of the clergy in the revolution, some case studies. And I'd like to get around to some case studies. But before that, I'd like to back up and give what I think, at least in my mind, are some of the important contributions, generally, of religion to the American Revolution, and specifically to the revolution as it's thought of in terms of a revolutionary ideology. I mentioned before that many historians are now looking at the meaning of the revolution
in terms of ideological terms. And the most eloquent statement, I think, and the clearest statement of what this ideology is all about is the Bernard Balin book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. For those of you who haven't had a chance to work through that book, let me just say that Balin sees four sources for the American Revolutionary ideology. The first is the whole classical tradition of Greek and Rome, but especially the Roman period of
the late Roman Republic, when Rome was in decline. And it's interesting that they seized upon writers such as Tacitus and Cicero, rather than some others, to make the parallels between the declining Roman civilization and the situation which they found themselves in within the English empire. The second source for the tradition was the English common law, and particularly after you get into the period of the 1760s and 1770s, there's a great deal of talk about the rights
of Englishmen as citizens of England. And this is, in large part, an appeal to the English common law. The third major tradition was, of course, the English Puritanism, and particularly the English covenant theology that came out of English Puritanism and the English Revolution, and which received a great deal of development in the American colonies. And the fourth was the Whig tradition that comes out of the Glorious Revolution. And Balin particularly emphasizes how the left wing of
the Whig movement was picked up by the American colonists. Yeah, Joel? And if you repeat the fourth one again. The Whig tradition. The Whig tradition. Balin says that these four sources combined together to produce, well, what I would call four main themes in the ideology of the revolution. The first is the most important. The American Revolutionaries saw politics as fundamentally a struggle between power on the one hand and liberty on the other. Power was always seen
as grasping, greedy, tenacious, always on the move, a very aggressive force. It was usually seen, or the images that were used were often an ocean sweeping up onto the shore, sweeping away the sand. And the sand was, of course, liberty. Liberty was always seen on the defensive, against liberty. And quite frequently, some other similes or images that were used was power being a male force and liberty a female force, resisting the advances of the masculine power.
Now, it can't be emphasized too strongly how much a distrust of power, a real fear of power, animated the whole American Revolution, the American Revolutionary ideology. And just in passing, I think this contrasts rather sharply with some of the revolutions of the 20th century in which power is not so much feared as it is desired. And it's out of a framework of powerlessness that many of the revolutions, particularly of the Third World, are fought. Are? Yes.
The second theme is one of corruption. What the American revolutionaries were saying was that the whole social fabric, all of governmental institutions, were being corrupted by evil and malicious men. Usually, this kind of rhetoric and attack was directed almost exclusively toward the king's ministers. I think you saw in some of the sermons yesterday how even after the revolution had started, they continue to think of King George as their king, but corrupted by evil ministers. And the
third theme is that there was a conspiracy afoot to undermine American liberties. This wasn't just a kind of casual happenstance sort of thing, but that there was actually a well-laid plan in England to try to undermine the liberties and freedoms of the American colonists. And to meet these threats of power, corruption, and conspiracy, the American colonists really turned to two resources. One was the study of history and an appeal to the past. And so we
have a great deal of discussion about how the American colonial rights are based on traditions going back to Magna Carta and to the founding of the English nation. And the other one turns in the other direction, a hope for the future. And we've touched on this in connection with The Great Awakening and the way in which The Awakening really looks forward to the future with a kind of millennial hope. Now, in all of these areas, I
think the contribution of religion was important. And in some cases, crucial. And I'd like to try to spell out, in rather ahistorical but somewhat systematic fashion, the role of religion in the revolutionary ideology. Some of the points I'm going to make are rather strongly stated. And in order not to create a misunderstanding, let me say right off the bat that religion was not a cause of the American Revolution. Nobody took up arms in 1775 or at
any other point during the war in defense of a particular doctrine or in the defense of a particular church. The struggle over the establishment of an Anglican bishop, I think, was important, but only because it coincided so nicely with some of the political issues of the period to form a very powerful combination. And I think there's going to be a lot of talk during this bicentennial about the role of religion. And I think we have to
keep in mind that these political issues were really fundamental. And that's in part why we're talking about religion and the American Revolution or religion in the revolution. It's not like the French Revolution, where religion clearly was a fundamental cause of discontent prior to the revolution and a real factor in the way the revolution developed. OK. In talking about the role of religion in the revolutionary ideology, I'd like to try to talk about it under seven different
areas. The first is the simple fact that there was what was known as a black regiment of clergy who became involved in underwriting the cause of the revolution. They gave the sermons that were preached and the sermons that were published provided an important means of communicating some of the ideas that gave justification to the revolution. The pulpit had long been, in colonial America and long before, a way of spreading political ideas to the population. Simply the
fact that you have a significant group of clergymen involved in spreading these ideas is a significant contribution. Now, yes, fine. Did you say black regiment? Yes. Why do they call that? Well, because they were leading the agitation against England. Or the black robes. Black regimen, you said? No, black regiment of clergy. These were white ministers, but as Bob says, they were black robes. And I believe it was Lord North at one point who exclaimed during the
course of the revolution that the whole thing wouldn't have happened if there weren't so many lousy Presbyterians running around creating agitation. Now, these sermons, as I've said, are obviously preached to congregations, but they're also printed in pamphlet form and in newspapers and as tracts. And so they receive a wider circulation than they would to just a single congregation. Now, there's one major problem in talking about these sermons. The best estimates are that approximately 5% to
10% of the American population at the time of the revolution were members of churches. Today, that figure is somewhere around 50% to 60%. The figures are very unreliable. But at the time of the revolution, only about 5% to 10% of the American people were formally members of churches. But that's misleading. OK, exactly. It's misleading because membership in a church then meant something a great deal more than it does today. And so that
you have people attending services fairly regularly, but not holding membership in the local congregation. Furthermore, you had all these itinerants are going around every day of the week. And wherever they found a group of people, they were preaching to them. Exactly. OK, so I think the one way to express the importance of the church as an institution in spreading these ideas is that the church was one institution that was clearly set in a society which really
had very few institutions. Today, it's almost impossible to walk outside the door without bumping into an institution of one sort or another, the government, corporations, one thing or another. This is a highly institutionalized society today. The revolutionary society was not that. And the fact that you have churches, have institutions which are supplying support for the revolution, I think, is significant in that kind of society. Now, the chief contribution, it seems to me, of the church here
is that it's a prominent channel for the communication of ideas and an important institutional support. So simply the fact that you have some churches supporting the revolution means that the ideas get out and you have some institutional support for the revolution. Now, in the second area, the American Revolution has often been described as a kind of videotaped replay of the glorious revolution. But it's certainly not an instant replay because it takes place 100 years later. Now,
this case is argued because what it was involved in the revolution was, in a certain sense, the application of Whig ideas, which were shaped in the English setting at the time of the glorious revolution, to the American setting. So it's a kind of transport 100 years later. Now, if this Whig ideology, which Balen emphasizes, and which is obviously one of the most important ideological supports for the revolution, if this is as important as people have emphasized,
it's important to see, I think, that the Whig opposition basically has religious roots. That is, the formation of the Whigs in England largely comes out of the Puritan opposition to the Church of England and to Roman Catholicism. Now, it'd be impossible to say that the Puritanism was, or the Puritan opposition was purely a religious phenomenon. But it is a basically religious conflict. It would be a vast oversimplification. But there is a sense in which you don't
have the American Revolution without the formation of Whig opposition in England. And you don't have Whigs without Puritans. So if you want to sort of do a genealogy of the American Revolution, you ultimately have to go back to English Puritanism. So when James I was talking about the Puritan position as undermining his own reign, he used the classic phrase, no bishop, no king, he saw in a certain sense the logical conclusion of what produced the English
Revolution, the murder of Charles I, and the American Revolution as well, the abolition of monarchy. The third area, I think, was the importance of religion in shaping this idea that power and liberty are in opposition to each other. The Calvinist political tradition, or Calvinism as a theology, which talks about politics, and even when it doesn't talk about politics, is a tradition, I think, which is preeminently concerned about power. Let me try to explain what I mean
by that. In doing away with an authoritative church and an authoritative tradition, as the Reformation did, Calvinism had to deal with the question of where power was going to reside, both in society and in the church. And what they basically did was to hit upon this covenant form of describing God's relationships to people. And what that covenant is is, in some respects, a contract. And a contract always implies certain conceptions of power. God has so much,
people have so much, and he makes agreements on the basis of his divine grace. But the whole thrust of the theology is a way of dividing up power. People get so much, church gets so much, God gets so much. It's a theology of power, as many theologians and historians have called it exactly that, a theology of power in the most pervasive sense. Now, in addition to the inherent inclination toward questions of power within the theology itself,
there's the historical accident that Calvinism largely flourished in Europe in areas that were either opposed to Calvinism or were at least apathetic to it, particularly in France, the Netherlands, and in England. And so it became necessary, since the Calvinists were a religious minority, it always became necessary for them to think much more clearly about questions of political power than it would have been had they been, say, in Germany, where Lutheranism was able to flourish really as
an establishment or an established church. And it's this historical accident of always being on the defensive, I think, which gives some of the reforming zeal to Calvinism that you don't have in some of the other branches of the Reformation. Another reason, I think, is something contained in Calvin's theology itself. Luther argued that there were only two uses for the law, both the civil law and the religious law, the Ten Commandments. The first was to convict you
of sin. That is, you read the Ten Commandments, you realize that you couldn't live up to them. And stop it and going for a long time. Luther emphasized the way the law convicted you of sin. And then he said that the second use of the law was in preventing you from sinning some more. So it really had two negative functions, one to convict you of your sin and then to keep you from doing more evil. Calvin
added a third use to the law. And many people see that that third use of the law really created an impulse toward politics and toward the social order that's largely absent in Lutheranism. Calvin said that laws properly made can serve as what he called the structure of grace in the world, so that there's a third and more positive function for the law in Calvin, which contributes to the Puritan and the churches that come out of the
Calvinist tradition, to their concern for the political order. In addition, I think that the Calvinist conception of sin, something that all of us, I'm sure, in one way or another have run into, either in Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God or in some way or another. This conception of sin as being all pervasive gradually became applied to the ruler himself. And that's a new development. In medieval thought and even in Calvin, you
have the ruler described as the vice regent of God, his handmaiden, his hands, and all the rest. The ruler is, in a certain sense, seen as an extension of divine power. And what happens in Calvinism is that this concept of sin gradually begins to be applied to the ruler. And he's suspected then for being human and therefore sinful. So his power, rather than being conferred by divine right, now became questionable, the ruler's power, particularly if he
was immoral. And finally, when you get into the 18th century the Calvinist tradition sees the ruler as being necessary. He has a responsibility for taking care of the social welfare. It's not just his personal behavior. So if he doesn't take care of the social order, he's immoral and therefore not fit to rule. So power became a crucial issue and not an incidental one, because power was not neutral, but potentially good, but always susceptible to misuse, to
tyranny, and oppression. The object became to keep watch and eventually to circumscribe power, to keep it within limits, to keep the power diffused, and to keep the potential for corruption down. Listen to what I think is one of the most beautiful expressions of this profound distrust of power and what it can do. This was written during the 18th century. Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and
that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love, and resentment possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party. But this statement didn't have to water again. 200 years before. And it was written not by a Calvinist, but by John Adams, writing to the deist Thomas Jefferson. And what I think that
indicates is the way in which some of these Calvinist ideas about power had begun to seep into the society and being shared by more than the people who were associated with the church. Now, you probably would have the American Revolution without Puritanism, but I think the Puritan and Calvinist tradition gave the ideology of the revolution that particular near hysterical distrust of power that's so characteristic of the revolution. And it's this fundamental rethinking of power that's necessary
in order to carry a revolution off. You don't have a revolution without some very, very deep thinking about the nature of power and what it is all about. Now, the second half of the struggle, namely liberty, is a little bit more difficult to explain. Part of it may be the legacy of the idea that Dr. Vander Heyden talked about, the priesthood of all believers, the kind of leveling effect which that doctrine had in terms of religious
life in Western society. Part of it, I think, is putting the Bible in the hands of the laity with the implicit assumption that they could understand it and interpret it. But I think in saying that, we neglect the important emphasis in the Calvinist tradition on obedience and on the necessity for people to obey in order that there might be liberty in society. And here's where I think the historical context makes the difference. The threat of power
is not necessarily a threat to goodness or morality or the true worship of God in the Whig ideology and in the American tradition. It's a threat to liberty. And this is largely the result of historical experience in England and in the American colonies, the experience of being confronted with what they felt was arbitrary power. The fourth area involves this theme of corruption. Now, when you read Balin, you might think that this theme of corruption might be
overemphasized. But I don't think that Balin has overemphasized it. It runs through practically every sermon, every political pamphlet of the period. The king's ministry was considered hopelessly corrupt and riddled with mercenary and avaricious men. And it seems to me that that kind of revulsion against corruption is impossible to explain without the kind of puritanical attitude toward life that we associate with the name puritanism. Now, obviously, corruption was not a new thing in English political life or,
for that matter, in Western history. And it's a very hard thing to know whether corruption was actually on the increase in late 18th century England. It's sort of like crime waves. How do we know that there's more crime being committed today than 10 years ago? The statistics tell us that there is more crime, but it may be that there's more crime being reported. And it's a very hard thing to measure. But the one consistent characteristic of
puritan political thought and the way it, I think, feeds into the American revolutionary ideology was this emphasis that the rulers had to be people of moral goodness. And they insisted on that with a kind of intensity that really separates them from some their Anglican or deist counterparts. The puritan tradition, in other words, was a lot more fanatical about rulers being moral than other traditions, I think. Joseph Perry, a Congregationalist minister in Connecticut, preached an election day
sermon in 1775. And I think he captures, this is an illustration of this revulsion about corruption that was so characteristic during the revolution. He says, by the best accounts, we are assured that in England at this day prevails a most awful prostration of all public social virtue and the peculiar graces of Christianity and a fearful prevalence of all kinds of immorality, neglect of God, contempt of sacred things, and the vilest abuse of divine mercy and patience.
A growing debauchery, dissipation, and finality. Well, those are strong words. And you might consider them somewhat historical. But the fact of the matter is that that's fairly standard rhetoric for the period. And you don't have to look just at the clergyman to see who's getting excited about that. The classic case of the letters of Jonathan Dickinson from England talking about his revulsion at the seeming corruption of English life, as opposed to the American colonies. Now, closely
related to this was what I referred to this morning Edmund Morgan's essay called The Puritan Ethic. In the midst of a revolutionary situation, in the midst of corruption, the preachers emphasized that the response of the society should be a renewed emphasis on the shunning of worldly goods, which primarily meant those from England and corrupt Europe. And the embracing of those simple but good products of American endeavor and American soil. Now, we've gone through a number of
churches in Philadelphia and seen a number of different homes. And there's no different cultures that produces this picture of the purity of America, the lack of adornment of the homes, and the corruption of England. Now, this Puritan Ethic really moves off in two different directions as far as the specific application of the revolution. Obviously, it contributed to a kind of moral support for these non-importation agreements and the sense of commercial independence from Britain. It also
tends to emphasize manufacturing as opposed to profit by trading. If you can make it with your own hands rather than profiting by the work of other people, that's somehow better. So that the disruption of trade with England during the revolution, which was an inevitable part of any decision to go to war, was in a certain sense undergirded by this feeling that what we could make here would be somehow morally better than what we could import. Now,
I think it has to be said, too, that this corruption wasn't just a matter of seeing that we were pure and the English were corrupt. It was a two-edged sword as far as the preachers were concerned. They turn the theme of corruption back on the American colonists just as they turned it toward the English people. The same Joseph Perry, after he gets done denouncing the English for their banality and corruption and all the rest, turns
around and says, it were to be wished a heavy charge did not lie against this country. But with blushing, we must confess the contrary. As it concerns the continent in general to consider and be greatly affected in this matter, so it becomes us in this highly favored colony to inquire for ourselves. So here he's turning it around and saying, it's not just a matter of God being on our side and our being pure, but we've got
to examine ourselves as well. Now, what this emphasis upon the people's corruption did was to really provide a good deal of the moral discipline that's needed in any kind of revolutionary struggle. One of the constant characteristics of most revolutions and the revolutionaries is how puritanical they are, or how moralistic they are, how they shun consumption of alcohol, or even sexual behavior of any kind. And it's this emphasis upon moral discipline, I think, which is one part
of the revolution where religion played a very important role. I think you saw it also in the sermon by John Hurt yesterday, where he talks about how the soldiers have to avoid corruption. They've got to keep their morals pure in order to be good soldiers. That isn't only a matter of just a lot of moralistic preaching from the pulpit. I think that's an important part of running any kind of revolution. It's also necessary, I think, because
the American people still were beginning to see themselves as a special people covenanted with God. And in order to keep that covenant going, in order to keep God's blessing on the people in the war so that he would bless their side, they had to prove by their activities that they were morally faithful to his law. The fifth area is the concept of conspiracy. And here, I think, religion helped to feed this idea in at least two
important areas. It had been a staple of American colonial life that opposition to the Church of England in most of the colonies and opposition to the Roman Catholic Church went hand in hand. And the colonists, particularly the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, saw the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church as a conspiracy that was going to take over true religion in the colonies and wipe it out. And once you see that conspiracy in a kind
of ecclesiastical area, it's not terribly difficult to switch it over into the political level, particularly when you have French Catholic Canada just to the north and Spanish influence to the south and the feeling of defensiveness of being kind of Puritan island caught in the vice of two Catholic colonizing powers. I also think that in the second area, the theme of conspiracy was fed by a quite different religious view of the world than we have today. Today,
with the exception of people who are attracted by the exorcist and other things like that, it's pretty hard to conceive of a devil operating in the world. But some of the studies that are done of the lower segments of colonial society indicate how deeply the idea of witches and of devils and of demons fed into the entire culture. The Salem witch trials in the 17th century are only the most obvious example of this. But in the
18th century, you continue to see in many people a deep belief in evil forces actually being operative in the world personified by devils and demons. And the transferal of that style of thinking, of devils and God from the kind of cosmic conflict between the devil and God to the political sphere isn't that difficult. And if you recall from what I said about theories of revolution, one of the necessary things is that the middle drops out. You
don't see people in terms of being sort of right and sort of wrong, but they're either all right or all wrong. And I think in this respect, religion played an important role in giving people that kind of attitude. And as an illustration, our friend Joseph Perry again describes the policies of the English throne as an attempt to substitute for English liberties, absolute despotism, and as a certain consequence, cruel tyranny, and the total slavery of all America.
There's no middle ground here. Now, the two resources to which the revolutionaries turned, this concept of history and a hope for the future. Keep in mind that the Calvinist and the Puritan understanding of the Christian life was profoundly historical. Their God intervened in history in very definite ways to elect some to salvation and condemn others to damnation. He wasn't outside of history, but actually involved in it. The kind of second Bible of the whole Puritan movement
is Fox's Book of Martyrs, a gory account of the suffering of early English Puritans for the true faith and how God was intervening in history to bring England into perfect obedience to God's will. And behind the entire English Reformation is an attempt to see England as being evangelized by the seventh century, St. Augustine, and thus originally pure from Romish influence. So you have, in a certain sense, out of the whole English Reformation, a kind of rewriting
of English history so that it appears that England is always going to be pure. It's never corrupted by Rome. And it's this constant turning back to history as a way of understanding the present that's rooted, I think, in the English Protestant and Puritan tradition. And the second area is obviously this millennial hope. Work on this is only really beginning to get started, and we don't understand the exact connections between millennial thinking and political thought. But there's
certainly no question that this orientation toward the future, the fact that God was calling the American nation into existence, was an important part of the American revolutionary ideology and one where the Great Awakening, I think, made a very distinct contribution. Now, just incidentally, I think it's important to see that this turn toward the past, a kind of reconstruction of your history to justify the revolution, and this orientation toward the future are really very antagonistic. And I
think that's part of the reason why the American Revolution appears conservative and radical all at the same time, turning toward the past, and yet radicalism toward the future as well. In the last area, this is probably one of the most obvious but the least appreciated aspect of the interaction of religion and revolutionary ideology. Ideologies are emotional. They aren't something that somebody holds onto with a kind of intellectual detachment. And one of the important influences of religious
sentiment was in aligning the theoretical principles of natural rights and limited government with an emotional, gripping, and fanatical way of looking at the world. Now, obviously, this can have ugly results at times. On April 19, 1776, the Reverend Jonas Clark preached a sermon on the first anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. And you can get a general gist of the subject of his sermon from the title. He called it the fate of bloodthirsty oppressors
and God's tender care of his distressed people. And the text was appropriate. Egypt shall be a desolation because they have shed innocent blood in their land. And he said about the Battle of Lexington and Concord, with a cruelty and barbarity which would have made the most hardened savage blush, they shed innocent blood. But, oh my god, how shall I speak, or how describe the distress, the horror of that awful morn, that gloomy day, yon field can
witness the innocent blood of our brethren slain. And from thence does their blood cry unto God for vengeance from the ground. There the tender father bled. There the beloved son. There the hoary head. There the blooming youth. Sobs are appropriate here. They bleed, they die, not by the sword of an open enemy in the field of battle, but by the hand of those that delight in spoil and lurk privily that they may shed innocent blood. Now,
everybody didn't go off the deep end like Jonas Clark. But the fact remains that revolutions aren't sweetly reasonable affairs. And to some extent, the American Revolution was fought not in the disinterested clockwork universe of the deus, but in the Manichean universe of the Calvinists. There has been a very strong attempt to portray the American Revolution as a reasonable affair, as a rational ideology, particularly during the 1940s and 1950s, when a good deal of American historical writing
was devoted to showing how our revolution was different from that communist revolution in Russia or the communist revolution in China. And I think one of the things that we need to recover today is this unreasonable and almost irrational quality of even our own revolution. Now, so far, I've talked rather generally about religion and the revolution. But as everybody knows, the colonies were hardly uniform in their religious sentiments. And we were confronted by a great variety of
churches. And so the question becomes, which churches supported the revolution? And what difference theology made in the support of the revolution? Last week, I referred to Alice Baldwin's book on the New England clergy in the American Revolution. She emphasizes the role of the rational, enlightened, Armenian ministers in leading the charge for the revolution and in supporting these ideas of natural rights. Alan Heimer, in Religion and the American Mind, takes exactly the opposite point of view and
says, no, it's these Calvinist evangelical types who really led the charge as far as the revolution is concerned. Both of these books, implicitly and explicitly, seem to be arguing a kind of theological determinism. That is, if you have a certain theological stance, you will therefore come out in a certain way as far as the revolution is concerned. And let me try in the remaining minutes to suggest that I don't think that kind of approach is going
to work. First of all, there are a number of religious groups that can be ruled out of the revolution, mainly because they tried to stay out of it. The most prominent group is the Quakers, who tried to remain neutral and adhere to their pacifistic stance. But there are also a number of various German Anabaptist groups who had seen the terrors of war in Germany and Eastern Europe much too acutely to get involved in it again. These
include the Mennonites, the Brethren, and a number of others. These groups, incidentally, suffered very severely during the war because they tended to be concentrated here in the middle colonies. And this is where so much of the fighting was done. And neutrality in a war never sits too well when you have both sides moving through the community so quickly and so often. The British distrusted the Quakers, and so did the revolutionaries. And so they really couldn't win.
There was a great deal of Quaker land seized, a great deal of suffering by the Quakers. Catholics tended to support the American Revolution. The most prominent example of this is Charles Carroll in Maryland, an extremely wealthy Catholic who got involved in the Stamp Act crisis. He wrote a series of pamphlets against the Stamp Act. A fellow by the name of Daniel Delaney tried to answer him. And in the final pamphlet, Delaney said that Carroll, who they
were both writing under pseudonyms, Delaney said of Carroll that he really couldn't be trusted because he was a Catholic. And people immediately rose to the defense of Carroll. And in this case, it's an indication that, at least on that issue, politics really cut thicker than religion. Carroll and his cousin John, who eventually becomes the first Catholic bishop in the colonies, also undertook an unsuccessful mission to Canada to get support from Canada during the revolution. The Anglicans
were probably the most significant Tory or loyalist group. It's a very difficult thing to generalize about. But as far as ecclesiastical groupings is concerned, I think that it's fairly accurate to say that Anglicans were more Tory and more loyalist than any other religious group. Now, there are several reasons for this. Obviously, the union of the Church of England with the Crown is important. These people were still part of the Church of England. And it was very
difficult for them to think in terms of being a separate Anglican or Protestant Episcopal Church as they came. The idea of the independence for them was associated with all the kind of social and political radicalism that they saw in the English Revolution. And they also had a very different understanding of authority, the kind of conception that I tried to indicate this morning that was still very patriarchal in many respects. There are a number of problems connected
with saying that the Anglicans, though, are primarily or predominantly Tory. 2 thirds of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Anglican. And there are significant exceptions. William Smith in Philadelphia, Thomas Coombe, C-O-O-M-B-E, who lay important support for the war. And probably the most fascinating is John Peter Gabriel Meilenberg. Starts off in Pennsylvania as a Lutheran pastor. He migrates to Virginia, and he decides to become an Anglican priest in order to
minister within the established church in Virginia. So he goes to London, and he's ordained. And he comes back, and he starts ministering to a largely German Lutheran congregation in Woodstock, Virginia, which is a part of the established Church of England. He's elected to the House of Burgesses in 1774. He becomes the head of the Committee on Public Safety in Dunmore County. And in January 1776, he preaches one of the classic sermons of the revolution. His text
was Ecclesiastes 3, verse 1. For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. And after outlining the gravity of the military situation, Meilenberg reportedly concluded his sermons with the words, there is a time to pray and a time to fight. And he ripped off his gown, and underneath he put his uniform on. He left his parish and raised a regiment of soldiers and distinguished himself as an officer, finally becoming a major
general. And after the war, he's elected to the first Congress of the United States and serves in various political positions. Now, the other side of the Anglican story is Jacob Duché, also in Philadelphia during the revolution, preached two famous patriotic sermons in 1775, which are reprinted in some of these collections that I've mentioned to you in connection with the service. After the Declaration of Independence, and especially after General Howe seized Philadelphia in 1776 and threw him
in prison, he had a change of heart. And in 1777, he wrote a letter to Washington urging him to abandon the American cause and calling the Continental Congress a body of weak, obscure men. He ridiculed the New England delegates and said that the officers in the army were destitute of principles and courage, unfit to occupy a seat at his excellency's table. Well, that didn't win him any friends. And when the British vacated Philadelphia, he had to
leave for England, where he spent the rest of his life pining for America and trying to get Washington to let him back in. Eventually, he converted to Swedenborgian religious views. Now, the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists tended to be for the revolution, in part because of a long legacy of dissent against the English crown and the English government. Presbyterians, especially because they were Scotch and the Scotch Irish made the revolution their own with considerable ease because this
was just another chapter in their struggle to be free from Anglican domination and, for that matter, from English domination. The Congregationalists, as another dissenting church, also tended to be strongly for the revolution. So in this sense, the kind of connection that you see between some of the ancient conflicts of England and the revolution seem to be fairly strong. Now, there are significant exceptions to this idea that Congregationalists and Presbyterians tended to be for the revolution. There
were several Congregationalists and Presbyterian churches which split right down the middle during the revolution, one group remaining Tory and the other group remaining for the revolution. And there is a sense, finally, in which the Presbyterian and Congregationalist equation of support with the revolution fails to take into account the way in which circumstance, personality, and things of that sort have a tremendous role to play in determining how a particular clergyman reacts to the revolution. And to illustrate
this, I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about Andrew Eliot, a Congregationalist pastor in the New North Church of Boston from 1742 to 1786. Eliot, I think, is a very interesting example of how a person's personality affects the way he's going to react to a revolutionary situation. Eliot was a thorough wig. He was moderately Calvinist in his theology, but he was a waffler. He could never make up his mind about any important issue. Eventually,
he became known to the public as Andrew Sly. Thomas Hutchinson, the colonial governor of Massachusetts, said of him that he had a disposition to temporize. And it's illustrated by his ordination in 1742, where he preached a sermon called The Faithful Shepherd. Now, this is in the middle of The Great Awakening, and the hottest issue of the day is whether you have to be converted in order to be a minister. And Eliot declares in one sentence in
the sermon that an unconverted minister cannot be faithful, nor would he be likely to lead souls to Christ. On the other hand, he declared it was possible for God to make use of unregenerate ministers to convince or even to convert sinners. The sovereign God may make use of what instruments he pleases. So he's on both sides of the fence at the same time. After Jonathan Mayhew dies in the 1760s, Eliot takes over as the chief American
colonist, or chief connection between the English wigs and the American colonists. And he really becomes an important link in corresponding with this group in England. But his heart really was never in it. As late as 1774, as he saw the war coming, he was in near despair. He wrote, my heart recoils. My flesh trembles at the thought. I have ever wished for moderate counsels and temperate measures on both sides. But I can have very little influence
on men or measures anywhere. Pride and passion, avarice and a lust of dominion have an uncontrolled sway. He says in the letter that his chief joy is his study, and he wants to remove himself from the world. I am distressed for my country, he writes, in which I include Great Britain. I should fear a disconnection with it as one of the greatest evils. Then comes Lexington and Concord. My heart is wounded, deeply wounded, almost to death.
And then the carnage of Bunker Hill. Men carried through the streets groaning, bleeding and dying, Englishmen destroying one another, a town with which we have so intimately connected, all in flames. I cannot stand it long. And he writes to his chief correspondent, Thomas Hollis in England, must millions be sacrificed to a mere punctilio, a mere point of honor? Finally, when Boston is seized by the British, he stays behind and sends his family from the city. The
British distrusted him, the Americans hated him, and John Adams remembered him as Thomas Hutchison's parish priest and his devoted idolater. In 1786, he died, one of the most prominent, holding one of the most prominent pulpits in Boston, and his death is virtually ignored in the Boston press. In 1774, he wrote what I think is probably his theological and political testament. He said, it is possible we may be mistaken. Things may appear very differently to others, as
upright as ourselves, and the same desirable effect may be produced by sentiment not in every respect consonant with ours. It is possible we may be mistaken. That's not the kind of personality that gets involved in revolutions. And I think it's interesting to see how a man who can have the same kind of theological views as his contemporaries can still, when it comes to the actual revolutionary situation, simply pull back and not get involved. Well, I've run
on too long. Any questions, or we can hammer things out of you? There's one group that I think has been very much overlooked by historians in all this, and that's the seceders and the commoners, the associate social reformers, who really were extremists, and I think their extremism helped to convince some of the walkers and bravers as to what side of the fence they ought to be on. Yeah. They really felt that many of the Presbyterians were
Erastian in as much as they came from a state-supported church in Scotland, whereas they felt that the church should be completely free, and they were convinced of that, not when they got here, but back in Scotland. Yeah. I suppose they were extremists, and their views have not been presented at all, but I think that in time that they will, I hope to do something about it. Okay. I hope you do.