12th Annual “Debunking the 4th”: Top 10 Unsightly Facts about the American Revolution

Preface.1

W.R. Inge once wrote, “A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors.” One need look no further than the American Revolution to see this claim’s merit. This week a lot of American Christians are experiencing a patriotic fervor that’s premised upon historical falsehoods concerning our country’s origin story. Let’s correct some of those misconceptions, shedding light on the Top 10 most unsightly facts that most of these folks haven’t heard, or refuse to acknowledge, about our country’s war for independence:

10. Devout Christians on both sides were killing each other, mutually convinced that they were fighting on behalf of God’s will.

When I reflect on this problem I cannot help but turn to Abraham Lincoln’s perspective during the American Civil War. In his private journal he wrote, “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, but one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party – yet the human instrumentalties, working just as they do, are the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true.”2

9. Patriots often violated clear biblical teaching concerning their relationship as a covenant people.

A biblical theme running from Genesis to Revelation is that of God’s covenant people. There’s great beauty and wonder in the promise made to Abraham finding fulfillment in the Church. For instance, according to 1 Peter 2 Christians are “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession.” There’s a clear sense to which they are to be set apart and unified. During the American Revolution, however, many Christians were known to link their national citizenship with their covenantal citizenship, telling congregations in their same ecclesiastical bodies that they could not have fellowship if they did not support the war effort. This represents a tragic confusion of eternal and temporal identities, and was a gross violation of God’s will for His covenant people.

8. The colonists were demanding a radical degree of democratic representation that didn’t exist anywhere in the world.

For example, the patriotic rallying call of “no taxation without representation” ignores the fact that the vast majority of English citizens didn’t meet the property requirements for voting. Even John Wesley opposed the war on these grounds, pointing out that not even he could vote. If one of the most well-known English preachers in history couldn’t vote, I would suggest that the supposed democratic “injustice” that precipitated the American Revolution was, in fact, no injustice at all. Failure to attain an ideal doesn’t necessarily imply the existence of abuse.3

7. The media’s reporting of events leading up to the war was sensational and inflammatory.

The newspapers were guilty of magnifying events far beyond their true proportions. Take the infamous “Boston Massacre” as an interesting case study. One of our key Founding Fathers and future presidents, John Adams, held that not only wasn’t it a massacre, but it was an act of disciplined self-defense provoked by a drunken and unruly mob. This is evidenced in the legal defense and acquittal he provided for those soldiers despite the personal fear he had over the negative impact it’d have upon his political ambitions.4

6. American colonists had among the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.

Hugles, Jonathan and Louis P. Cain, eds. American Economic History (New York: Addison Wesley, 2003), 49.

The textbook authors write, “…Americans two centuries ago achieved a level of affluence at least as great as their British cousins. If we adjust our calculation for the lower tax rates paid in the colonies, the disposable incomes of Americans were surely among the highest in the world of the early 1770s.” In other words, the commonly held belief that British suppression was crushing the colonists’ economic viability is patently false.

5. The war was primarily about the defense of the unique American culture, not the resistance to English tyranny.

By the time of the Revolution there had developed a uniquely American culture of political and economic independence that was a result of England’s past policy of salutary neglect. In previous generations, when the colonies had been small and were producing great wealth and few headaches for the motherland, this policy made sense. But things changed over time, as they tend to do. Specifically, when the English had to defend the colonies in the French and Indian War, it was thought that the American colonists should help pay off the debt incurred during the war from which they’d so greatly benefited. Yet to the Americans who had become accustomed to hands-off political and economic policies, these were more than mere taxes. They represented a fundamental challenge to the uniquely autonomous cultural assumptions that had developed. The new taxes were nothing if not logical, but the colonists interpreted them as pure tyranny. After that followed the cycle of the crown attempting to enforce its authority and the Americans rebelling, which intensified each time around. Throw in the aforementioned sensational reporting of the newspapers and you’ve got a recipe for war.5

4. There was no clear “Christian position” during the war.

Christians were divided between four basic positions: patriots, loyalists, qualified patriots, and pacifists. Since the Americans won the war we tend to think of the vast majority being patriots, but that simply doesn’t comport with the historical facts.6

3. According to classic Christian articulation of Just War Theory, the America Revolution does not fit the criteria and, therefore, was not a just war.

Noll, Mark A., Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden. The Search for Christian America. (Colorado Springs, CO: Helmers & Howard Publishers, 1989), 95-97.

2. The widespread use of biblical language to justify the revolutionary cause belies a blatant misappropriation and abuse of the sacred biblical text.

There’s no question that patriotic Americans of the day saturated their speech with Scripture. One ought not mistake biblical allusions for sound biblical thinking, though. For example, there were countless sermons preached at the time linking God’s intentions in 1776 with His plans for Israel in the Old Testament. If one actually reads those sermons, however, it becomes clear that they were premised upon an allegorical interpretation, representing a flagrant abuse of the Bible. Exegesis is where the interpreter extracts the meaning from the text in light of its literary and cultural-historical contexts. Eisegesis is where the interpreter imbues the text with a meaning wholly foreign to its original contexts. These Revolutionary-era sermons represent the clear theological sin of eisegesis. I don’t doubt the sincerity of their intentions, but the fact remains that these preachers desecrated the Word of God in an effort to biblically justify their political philosophies.

1. Many if not most of the Founding Fathers weren’t Christians, but deists.

Noll, Mark A., Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden. The Search for Christian America. (Colorado Springs, CO: Helmers & Howard Publishers, 1989), 72-95.

There is no question some of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians and that these men made substantial contributions to the formation of the new nation. John Witherspoon, Patrick Henry, and John Jay are but a few such figures. Yet the historical evidence seems to suggest these were the exceptions to the rule. Indeed, most of the most well-known and influential figures appear to have been deists (e.g. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine) while the private faith of others is anything but clear (e.g. George Washington). For all their differences of perspective, what united them was an understanding that the prevalence of a unifying religious faith could effectively leverage the masses for their cause. Not unlike today, these politicians saw Christianity as a morally and politically pragmatic tool.

Moreover, despite the fact that conservative Christians today would decry deism’s illegitimacy if they ever engaged in a conversation with such a person, many of these folks have found themselves in the awkward position of having to defend the doctrinal beliefs of late 18th century American deists due to their claim that our country started as a “Christian nation.” Their basic argument is that while these deists did not have a complete biblical worldview, they retained enough lingering Judeo-Christian influence that they essentially thought as Christians. That is, the Founding Father’s beliefs were partial and incomplete yet full enough that we can rightly say that their biblical worldview was instrumental in our country’s founding.7 After repeated engagements with these individuals, I’ve developed a concise logical argument that I believe quickly and effectively shows that these deists were not Christians and, while they certainly did quote Scripture a lot, didn’t possess a “biblical worldview.” Here it is:

A: Belief in God as the Creator and the Imago Dei.8
B: Belief in the remainder of the doctrines widely seen as encompassing essential orthodoxy, including the Fall, Trinity, Christ’s bodily death and resurrection, the virgin birth, etc.
C: A biblical worldview.

A + B = C
A ≠ C

A and B together form orthodox Christianity. A alone is not Christianity, but deism.

If you’re one of the folks who sincerely believes that most of our Founding Fathers had a genuine biblical worldview because they were so influenced by and so regularly quoted Scripture, then I hope you’re consistent and would say that contemporary Mormons have a biblical worldview, too. That’s a heck of a quagmire, if you ask me.

If I may be forgiven the use of a double negative, you’ll hear no argument from me that the British weren’t in the wrong in many of their political and economic policies. It seems to me that the key question, however, ought to be whether these wrongs were grave enough to justify revolution. In other words, there’s no question that there was some wrongdoing on the part of the British parliament, but were those infractions great enough to warrant schism and bloodshed? I would argue that they definitively were not at the time of the Revolution, but that sensational reporting of events magnified British errors way out of proportion.9 By any reasonable measure, war wasn’t justified when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

In closing, I defer to those far more knowledgeable than I. Below is an excerpt from The Search for Christian America, the joint work of three acclaimed evangelical historians: George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Nathan Hatch. I think it worth consideration this time of year:

Almost from the first moments of the War for Independence itself, American Christian leaders have publicly claimed the blessing of God upon the United States. Statements about the country’s divine origins… have been common throughout our history. Also, in recent years such assessments have proliferated. Books proclaim that God had a special ‘plan for America’ which was visible in Columbus’ voyages, in the Puritan settlements, and especially in the War for Independence when God providentially intervened on behalf of ‘his people.’ Other media proclaim the God-given ideals which inspired the founding fathers of this nation. And countless books, pamphlets, sermons, and public speeches of the Revolutionary War as a blessed event which God used to found a nation on Christian principles… These views are widespread in some Christian circles. But they do not reflect an accurate picture of the actual circumstances of the American Revolution. Such opinions are, therefore, dangerous for Christians simply because they are not truth, or because they are only ambiguous half-truths.

Our society, like so many others, values inspirational myth over historical reality. It’s anything but harmless, though. Not only is it false and deceptive, but it prevents people from developing the tools of critical thinking and discernment they need to deal with the complexities, errors, and grievances of the present. By practicing willful self-deception about the past, we sustain and propagate the same abuses into the future.