15th Annual Debunking the 4th: Top 10 Unsightly Facts about the American Revolution

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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 weekend a lot of Americans, and especially Christian Americans, 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:

Preface

If I may be forgiven the literary sin of using a double negative, in the points below 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.1 By any reasonable measure, war was not justified when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Moreover, as a Christian who’s writing this piece primarily but not exclusively for an audience who professes faith in Jesus, I will argue that the American Revolution most certainly was not a “Christian cause.” If anything, it was a violation of Christian belief and practices that should be mourned instead of celebrated. It is perfectly fine for Christians to be grateful for the daily freedom we experience that originated with the American Revolution, but it is not OK to buy hook, line, and sinker into the historically erroneous mythos of the American origin story. Let us be people of truth.

In that spirit, let’s also acknowledge and address the underlying cultural divide. Epistemology = “How do you know what you know?” When trying to understanding the history, one group asks about the primary source documents: journals, letters, newspaper reports, military orders, oral testimonies recorded subsequently, etc. That’s the stuff of good historiographical methodology. The other group asks what has been told up to this point that instilled them with their own cultural values that they then want to pass along to their kids. Both are epistemology questions, but one is sound history and the other is faux-thinking mythology.

This is the 14th annual “Debunking the Fourth” post. From the title alone it’s clear that the content is provocative. Mere shock value has never been my intention, though. Rather, my aim is the relentless pursuit of truth as a means of worshiping and honoring God. As a student of history, I’ve heard and read a lot of things that don’t comport with the conservative, pro-America stance to which so many of my fellow Christians hold. I love these people and count many of them as dear friends, family, and mentors. That, and not a desire to be argumentative, is why I’m worried about the widespread misunderstanding of the historical realities surrounding the American Revolution.

Whether willful or ignorant, the propagation of these erroneous claims is not only deceptive, but has real potential to damage our witness. Since we Christians profess to be people of the truth, it follows that there are times in which we need to be confronted by unpleasant facts that will force us to reconsider our beliefs, opinions, perspectives, and ways of thinking. There have been plenty of times I’ve been in this position, and I can definitively say that I’m a better man and Christian for it. My hope is that the content below will positively challenge people’s perceptions of our country’s origins and that we would all worship our God through the cultivation of our minds.

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

Obviously I’m aware of the chronological distance between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but when I reflect on this problem I cannot help but turn to Lincoln’s wise 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

I would suggest that we as Christians should perceive this war not primarily through the secular lens of geo-political history but through the sacred lens of church history. Too often brothers and sisters in Christ have killed one another while mutually presuming they were fighting on God’s side, or at least fighting with God’s blessing. From this perspective, the American Revolution is not an achievement to be glorified but a tragedy to be mourned.

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.

The trouble is that we suffer from adjective-noun confusion. The former is a description. The latter is a source of identity. That distinction is crucial. Too many American Christians, past and present, have thought of themselves Christian Americans. That is a grave theological error. We are to be American Christians–Christians who happen to be from the United States of America. Following the example of Paul with his citizenship in the Roman Empire, our ultimate citizenship as Christians is not to be found in our temporal nation but in Christ’s eternal Kingdom. Again, following the consistent example of the earliest followers of The Way, our allegiance is to King Jesus alone and not to any political nation, party, figure, ideology, or the like.

To those who would say that can be patriotic and follow Jesus, I would offer some civil, good-natured pushback. It seems to me the terms “patriotism” and “nationalism” have way too much baggage. They almost innately suggest a co-mingling of religious and political identity in the form of American civil religion that I find downright idolatrous and dangerous. I understand why others want to try to retain or restore the terms, but I would suggest giving some good, hard thought to the problem of adjective-noun confusion. It is exceedingly evident that this confusion is not something many American Christians have seriously considered.

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

Consider the patriotic rallying call of “no taxation without representation.” For contemporary Western Christians who’ve been enculturated by democratic values from infancy, this makes complete sense. We’re like fish swimming in water. However, we need to be careful not to engage in anachronistic interpretations of history by projecting our cultural and philosophical values upon our interpretations of the past. Keep the cultural-historical context ever in mind.

The United Kingdom had been steadily moving toward democracy since at least the Magna Carta in 1215, but at the time of the American Revolution democracy was just a radical political philosophy. A form of it had been done in ancient Greece, but in the late-18th century there wasn’t a single functioning liberal democracy in the world. There’s no question that in the philosophical era of the Enlightenment most of the American colonists had become convinced of the political ideal of democracy, but failure to attain an ideal doesn’t necessarily imply the existence of abuse. Such are the nuances that are rarely considered because people value simplified, motivational patriotic zeal over complex, self-critical cultural analysis.

Now let’s look at this from a specifically Christian perspective. Our enthusiastic assent to the aforementioned rallying call today utterly ignores the fact that, at the time, even the vast majority of English citizens didn’t meet the property requirements for voting. Even the famous preacher and theologian John Wesley, who was the founder of Methodism and a prominent church leader during the First Great Awakening, 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. Again, the UK was incrementally moving toward the ideal of liberal democracy, but in 1776 that simply was not the reality for most English citizens on either side of the pond. This was not an injustice. This was American impatience.

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.3 Ironically, the people who most rail against the factual inaccuracy and biased reporting of the Mainstream Media today are habitually the most oblivious when they’re interpreting the media’s hyperbole about the events leading up to the American Revolution.

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. Here we’re seeing an early American example of vastly overstating the “oppressive”, “tyrannical”, and “unbearable” yoke of taxation. Ever notice how we Americans sure do love our rhetorical hyperbole about taxes? It’s an American tradition.

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.

So let us be clear: The American patriots were not acting as oppressed Englishmen, but cultural Americans who’d become accustomed to the lack of oversight afforded by the Atlantic Ocean. It has been said the American Revolution was the least revolutionary war in history. Ironically, it was a “revolution” to maintain the status quo. This is where we get an awful lot of our uniquely American cultural perspectives. Whereas conservatives are by disposition usually in favor of incremental change or keeping things as-is, in the United States we have this strange premise of conservatives valuing revolution. Likewise, it is from the American Revolution that we get this uniquely American conception of freedom. Instead of freedom being the protection of individual rights while still being held in a healthy tension with the needs of the community, many in the U.S. hold to this radical notion of freedom meaning near-absolute autonomy. All of these peculiar cultural precedents date right back to the American Revolution.

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. Put another way, it’s historically untenable to argue that the “Christian cause” was the “patriot cause.”4

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.

In case you don’t recognize those names, Noll, Hatch, and Marsden are three of the foremost historians of American religion and they’re also evangelical Christians. I’ve even heard them jokingly referred to as the “trinity of American religious history.” Their scholarly thinking is astute and their faith is devout. It’s not been widely circulated, but I highly recommend that book to understand why the American Revolution wasn’t a just war according to classical articulations of Just War Theory.

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 theological 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 with flagrant hermeneutical abuse of the sacred text.

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. Indeed, there’s quite the legacy of adjective-noun confusion among American Christians.

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 that these men were not the norm. They may have even been the exceptions to the rule. Many 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).5 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 to help birth and unify a nation regardless of whether they themselves affirmed Christian faith.

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.6 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 in any traditional sense of the term. While they certainly did quote Scripture a lot, their theological framework most certainly doesn’t align with the classic definitions of Christian orthodoxy as defined in the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. Here’s the argument:

A: Belief in God as the Creator and the Imago Dei.7

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.

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.