Read “Why Faith Was Central to America’s Founding pt. 1” here.
Plymouth Plantation married freedom and virtue into an early experiment in American self-government. Over the next century and a half, the colonists put those principles to the test, building the civic and religious muscles eventually required to break the chains of British oppression.
As conservatives like British statesman Edmund Burke and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would have us remember, revolution doesn’t always live up to the romantic hype and can easily descend into gratuitous violence. As the French celebrated the 1989 bicentennial of their revolution, Thatcher bluntly dismissed the historical event as “a Utopian attempt to overthrow a traditional order—one with many imperfections certainly—in the name of abstract ideas, formulated by vain intellectuals, which lapsed, not by chance but through weakness and wickedness, into purges, mass murder, and war. In so many ways it anticipated the still more terrible Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.” (For good measure, she gifted French President François Mitterrand a copy of A Tale of Two Cities.)
The American revolutionaries, if they were to wage a just and successful war, would need to rise above those all-too-common crimes and excesses of other less disciplined revolutionaries.
Not that revolution was on their minds. Most colonists between the early 1600s and mid-1700s were more than content to consider themselves British subjects — with a degree of autonomy, of course. But as they forged the skills, ideologies, temperaments, and virtues that would ultimately compel them to challenge Great Britain for independence, they were, unknowingly, installing the guardrails that would keep their revolution from spiraling out of control.
In a recent article, we discussed how the First Great Awakening, a series of mostly Protestant religious revivals from the 1730s to 1770s, conditioned the Americans for revolution, disrupting the outdated hierarchies of the Old World and encouraging the belief that man was accountable chiefly to God for his actions. Here, we will examine how the moral emphasis of this prelude to 1776 equipped the soon-to-be rebels with a compass to conduct a more or less upstanding war.
First Great Awakening
It would be a mistake to consider George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards — “New Light” leaders of the Great Awakening — merely “political preachers.” They were men with a fiery passion for the Gospel and a penchant for equally fiery rhetoric. Their primary concern wasn’t advancing political causes or winning elections, but promoting the gospel — hard doctrines and all. As such, they would probably make even modern “politically active” congregants squirm.
Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” widely regarded as one of the most famous sermons in history, lit the fuse. His thesis — “There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God” — hit his Northampton, Massachusetts, congregation and the Congregational church in Enfield, Connecticut, like a mighty roaring wind.
“The use of this awful subject may be for awakening unconverted persons in this congregation,” Edwards said. “That world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone, is extended abroad under you. There is the dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God; there is hell’s wide gaping mouth open; and you have nothing to stand upon, nor any thing to take hold of; there is nothing between you and hell but the air; it is only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds you up.”
Yes, all souls stood equal before the God of the Awakening, but they also stood guilty and condemned. It was not enough to self-reform, as Benjamin Franklin would have recommended. “[Y]ou have … nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment,” the preacher warned. The only cure for sin, the only hope for sinners, was to accept Jesus Christ as the propitiation for God’s wrath. “Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open,” Edwards assured his hearers.
This was the seminal text of the Great Awakening — a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon if ever there was one — and it persuaded many ungodly men to abandon their sin, turn back to Christ, and recapture the morals of their Puritan ancestors. George Whitefield showed them how they could do that.
Much like Edwards, Whitefield cast a magnifying glass over man’s innate depravity. He forced the Americans to confront their fallen natures. Humble, penitent seekers would not stay the same but would undergo a personal revolution, he taught. True Christianity would bring forth fruit.
Believers should search the Word of God “not only devoutly but daily,” he said. He blasted the “heinous sin of profane cursing and swearing” and called for a “total renunciation of the world.” An amusing entry from Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette noted that in Whitefield’s wake, “the Dancing School, Assembly and Concert Room have been shut up, as inconsistent with the Doctrine of the Gospel.”
Clearly, Edwards and Whitefield had more on their minds than mere platitudes about liberty. They were harbingers of a sweeping transformation of British America’s morals, building up the indispensable supports of political prosperity — a side effect of their impassioned religious crusade. They were the spiritual Paul Revere and William Dawes of their day, warning the Americans that God’s wrath was coming unless they converted. And convert they did.
The Gazette described the cultural effect:
“The Alteration in the Face of Religion here is altogether surprizing. Never did the People show so great a Willingness to attend Sermons, nor the Preachers greater Zeal and Diligence in performing the Duties of their Function. Religion is become the Subject of most Conversations. No Books are in Request but those of Piety and Devotion; and instead of idle Songs and Ballads, the People are every where entertaining themselves with Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs. All which, under God, is owing to the successful Labours of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield.”
Both Edwards and Whitefield died before the American Revolution — Edwards in 1758 and Whitefield in 1770 — but the words of their sermons echoed and spurred the colonists into battle. Indeed, in one memorable example of Whitefield’s lingering influence, Samuel Spring, an American chaplain in the Revolutionary War, preached a sermon to a band of soldiers, including Colonel Benedict Arnold, before they embarked on an expedition to drive the British out of Canada.
“I preached over the grave of Whitfield,” Spring recalled. “After the service the general officers gathered around me. Some one requested a visit to Whitfield’s tomb. The sexton was hunted up, the key procured, and we descended to his coffin. It had lain in the tomb six years, but was in good preservation. The officers induced the sexton to take off the lid of the coffin. The body had nearly all returned to dust. Some portions of his grave-clothes remained. His collar and wristbands, in the best preservation, were taken and carefully cut in little pieces, and divided among them.”
They would carry those pieces of Whitfield’s robes with them into battle; countless others carried his doctrines.
The ringleaders of the Great Awakening may not have been overtly political themselves. But many of their disciples began to apply the message of man’s personal responsibility to God to civic situations. As the vestiges of Old World authorities collapsed, the Americans found themselves suddenly free to toy with independence. More than that, the Awakening’s emphasis on biblical ethics provided the rules of conduct for the conflict to come. Rev. John Cleveland, a New Light minister who worked closely with Whitefield and later championed the patriot cause, described the war as a defense both of “the rights of an Englishman” and a Puritan moral code.
“What shall we do to save ourselves from the distresses brought upon us by an untoward generation?” he asked. “I answer, be not cast down, O America! Be not discouraged, O Boston!… Let all ranks and orders of men reform from every immorality and vicious practice, and pray to the God of Heaven and Earth, the preserver of men… to break every weapon formed and forming against us, to maintain our rights and privileges, civil and religious; and above all things, to make us a holy and truly virtuous people, and to preserve us pure from the growing pollutions in the world.”
Here, once again, just as in Plymouth, freedom and virtue met in a meticulous — sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary — dance. Even the less conventionally religious Founders vigilantly guarded against the dissolute morality of an unrestrained mob. For example, a young Alexander Hamilton, who frequently protested the lawless extremes of his fellow revolutionaries, raised the red flag after a gang of patriots wrecked the printing presses of a Tory newspaper.
“In times of such commotion as the present, while the passions of men are worked up to an uncommon pitch there is great danger of fatal extremes,” he warned John Jay. “The same state of the passions which fits the multitude, who have not a sufficient stock of reason and knowlege [sic] to guide them, for opposition to tyranny and oppression, very naturally leads them to a contempt and disregard of all authority. … When the minds of these are loosened from their attachment to ancient establishments and courses, they seem to grow giddy and are apt more or less to run into anarchy.”
In a show of level-headed self-awareness rare among insurgents, Hamilton called upon the leaders of the Revolution “to keep men steady and within proper bounds.”
“Irregularities I know are to be expected,” he said, “but they are nevertheless dangerous and ought to be checked, by every prudent and moderate mean.”
Even the “small” vices were to be exterminated. Taking a page from Whitefield’s book, General George Washington pressed his soldiers to abstain from “the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing.” “[W]e can have little hope of the blessing of Heaven on our arms,” he feared, “if we insult it by our impiety and folly. Added to this, it is a vice so mean and low … that every man of sense and character detests and despises it.”
By policing what Hamilton called “a spirit of disorder,” the Founders managed to keep the Revolution from sliding into meaningless havoc and unrestricted violence. It was a quest for freedom, guided by virtue — both of which had been encouraged by the Great Awakening, and both of which the Framers would seek to install as the bedrock of their new Republic.
To be continued…