Religion and the American Revolution

July 4, 2026, will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and, therefore, of the United States of America. But the Declaration declared more than our independence. It declared, on behalf of the new nation, a commitment to a set of principles rooted in a set of premises. And first among those premises was the equality of all human beings, understood as a function of our equal relation to a creator. The Declaration does not offer a comprehensive theology, but this seemingly simple premise nonetheless roots our society’s political character deep in the soil of the Judeo-Christian West. It does not commit us to a particular church, but it does entangle us with a religious disposition.

“On my arrival in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, “the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention.”¹ He was not alone. Despite the prevalence of established churches in the Old World, Europeans have historically perceived the United States as a more religious nation than their home countries. America’s civic life has never answered to a specific religious authority, but it has always been marked by a general religious tenor.

The American political project, like the American character, is ultimately indecipherable without recourse to its religious roots. But its relation to those roots has never been a simple matter. There were certainly religious arguments for independence in the age of the founding, but there were also religious arguments against it. Many different religious denominations composed British North America, and they each contributed distinct elements to the amalgam of the new nation, though the tensions between them became internal fissures even among revolutionary brothers-in-arms. The political personality of the newly independent nation, then, could not help but shape the landscape of American religion in turn.

Our nation cannot be understood without a sense of the part that religion played in its founding. And understanding our nation is precisely the purpose of the American Enterprise Institute’s “We Hold These Truths: America at 250” initiative, an ambitious birthday celebration of which this volume forms a part. Over several years leading up to the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are inviting scholars both within AEI and from other institutions to take up a series of themes important to understanding the American Revolution. These scholars represent a variety of fields and viewpoints, so they will approach each of these themes from various angles. The papers they produce will be published in a series of edited volumes intended to help Americans think more deeply and clearly about our nation’s origins, character, and prospects.

Religion and the American Revolution is the third of those books. Its chapters began as papers presented at an AEI conference held in Washington, DC, on September 18, 2024. Other volumes in the series consider the American Revolution in relation to other themes, such as democracy, natural rights, the legacy of slavery, and the Constitution. In each case, our goal is to help reintroduce readers to their nation’s history, thereby enabling them to maturely appreciate the reasons for celebrating the extraordinary milestone of its 250th birthday.

In the chapters that follow, five eminent scholars of history, theology, law, and political philosophy consider how we ought to understand the place of religion in the American Revolution—and the influence of the Revolution on American religion.

Michael W. McConnell surveys the breadth of American religious communities in the founding era and the influence of their distinct theologies and institutional forms on the character of American republicanism.

Thomas S. Kidd considers several forms of the religious case for the Revolution and reflects on the ways Americans sought divine sanction and biblical warrant for their political leap of faith.

Jane E. Calvert traces the infamous tension between John Adams and John Dickinson, noting the connections between their respective roots in Quaker and Puritan communities and their approaches to freedom and political authority.

Meir Y. Soloveichik contrasts Adams’s religious disposition with that of another rival, Thomas Jefferson. Combining this analysis with a meditation on John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence, he insists on the Judeo-Christian vision’s centrality for the self-understanding of the early American republic.

And Vincent Phillip Muñoz views the founding not just as a product of the interplay of reason and revelation but as launching a new understanding of the foundations of political authority, rooted in a recognition of the existence of religious truth and the legitimacy of religious authority.

The breadth of the arguments advanced in these chapters offers a sense of just how broad the influence of religious ideas was on the founding—and just how profoundly those ideas have shaped the nation that declared its independence on that July day a quarter millennium ago.

It was a puzzle to the British, and even to some extent many modern  historians, why the North American colonists were willing to risk so much—their lives, their fortunes, and their “sacred honor”—for the cause of independence, when their grievances seemed so trifling. The Americans, after all, were probably the freest people on the planet: Their taxes were lower than those of Englishmen in the motherland, they were governed in most respects by legislatures of their own choosing, and they enjoyed greater freedom of speech and religion than their compatriots at home. The most famous answer to this puzzle came from the British statesman Edmund Burke in his 1775 Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies. Burke identified four sociocultural characteristics of the American people that made them unusually zealous for liberty, and hence unusually resistant to heavy-handed monarchical rule. The most striking of these was religion.

According to Burke, the colonists’ religion was a “main cause of this free spirit.” By this he did not mean that religion in general, whatever its content, promotes a free spirit. He instead meant that the variant of religion most common in America, and especially the Northern colonies where the Tea Party rebellion broke out, was particularly conducive to resistance to authority. “The people are Protestants,” he pointed out, “and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” He explained that

all Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.¹

This may sound strange to modern ears. We are accustomed to keeping religious beliefs separate and distinct from philosophies of government and reluctant to ascribe special importance to any particular religious sect. But Burke was not alone in thinking that there is a profound connection between the two. As Alexis de Tocqueville was to write some 50 years later, “Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.”² This is partly because of religious teachings about the relations of man to man and partly because of habits formed by church organization.

Americans today may forget just how difficult it was for Patriots to justify independence in 1775 and 1776. Popular resistance against taxes was one thing. Destruction of British property, as in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, took matters to another level. Military conflict, beginning at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, amplified the stakes even more. But finally rejecting monarchical authority and declaring legal separation from the British was an audacious step for which Americans could point to few historical parallels. Complaints about unfair tax and judicial policies were suitable rationales for framing petitions, but shedding British and American blood demanded more. A cause of the American Revolution’s magnitude required divine sanction.

War typically draws out appeals to divine backing, especially in nations with deep roots in the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition, such as the United States and Britain. Sometimes these appeals can seem manipulative or insincere; sometimes they seem entirely earnest. Few Americans, for example, would quibble with Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s D-Day message in 1944 when he called the effort to liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny a “Great Crusade” and asked all Americans to pray for God’s blessing on this “great and noble undertaking.”¹ Between 1775 and 1776, appeals to divine sanction similarly emerged when Americans made key decisions about resistance, war, and independence. Written during the most critical 16 months of the Patriot journey from resistance to independence, Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and the Declaration of Independence all contained notable appeals to God’s blessing and biblical warrant.

These three texts illustrate essential points about the way Americans justified resistance and independence, reflecting the prominent role religion played in American colonial culture. The first point is the most straightforward: Appeals to divine sanction were omnipresent in 1775 and 1776. The frequency of these appeals to God’s blessing reminds us of a second point: that the Bible—or at least theological language—was central to the rhetorical repertoire of American revolutionaries, including Patriot leaders who did not hold devout Christian beliefs. Of the primary authors considered here, only Henry was a traditional Christian. Finally, theological and natural law justifications for liberty gave some Americans resources to make reformist arguments on questions such as religious liberty and slavery.²

On July 1, 1776, John Dickinson and John Adams gave speeches on whether to declare independence from Great Britain. Dickinson, who had led the resistance for over a decade, was opposed; Adams, in only his third year of active participation, was in favor. After Adams prevailed, both went on to have illustrious careers building the American nation. Dickinson, more than Adams, continued to be celebrated as an icon of American liberty. But for centuries, historians of the Revolution have unintentionally overlooked, actively neglected, or enthusiastically denigrated Dickinson due in large part to an uncritical acceptance of Adams’s version of events leading to that debate. Beginning with George Bancroft’s history in the 1840s through David McCullough’s 2001 John Adams and beyond, Dickinson has been portrayed as an effeminate, disloyal foil to Adams’s manly patriot.¹ A clear view of the historical record, however, shows that Dickinson, much more than Adams, made the Revolution—and indeed the founding—not only possible but successful.

The root of the profound differences between the two founders—usually overlooked by scholars—was their respective religious traditions. As a Massachusetts Congregationalist, Adams was a descendant of the Puritans who had settled there in 1630. By contrast, Dickinson’s family was Quaker, and he himself was a “fellow traveler” with the Religious Society of Friends, as Quakers were formally known. These two religious traditions had conflicted in both old England and New England since Quakerism arose in the 1650s. Considering that the bulk of the political theory of the early modern era derived from theology of one stripe or another, that two men whose thinking derived from these opposing faiths would clash with one another is unsurprising.

This chapter will reassess Adams’s and Dickinson’s respective roles in the founding. Beginning with brief biographies and a primer on their theological traditions, it will focus on particularly the clash between Adams and Dickinson in the year before independence was declared and on the religious foundations of the tensions between them.

It is a famous story of a conversation that changed the world. As part of preparations for a July 2, 1776, vote on Richard Henry Lee’s resolution declaring the American states “absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown,” the Continental Congress created a committee consisting of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman to produce a document making the case for independence.¹ According to Adams’s autobiography, Jefferson had urged Adams to write the first draft of the document. But Adams refused and urged Jefferson to take up his pen instead:

This I declined and gave several reasons for declining. 1. That he was a Virginian and I a Massachusettensian. 2. that he was a southern Man and I a northern one. 3. That I had been so obnoxious for my early and constant Zeal in promoting the Measure, that any draught of mine, would undergo a more severe Scrutiny and Criticism in Congress, than one of his composition. 4thly and lastly and that would be reason enough if there were no other, I had a great Opinion of the Elegance of his pen and none at all of my own.²

This aspect of the tale is well-known, and Adams’s faith in the elegance of Jefferson’s pen has certainly been vindicated. Anyone else charged with a defense of the Lee Resolution might have made the Declaration of Independence entirely about the misdeeds of the British government. But Jefferson included in the Declaration not only an airing of grievances but also, and much more enduringly, a statement of the American creed, which asserts, “All men are created equal.” Abraham Lincoln would powerfully capture how Jefferson had fulfilled the task with which Adams had charged him:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.³

Today, not everyone is eager to celebrate the Declaration of Independence and the political revolution it sparked. The political left has long been skeptical of 1776. Their critique is familiar: “All men are created equal” did not really mean all individuals, because the Constitution did not include African Americans or women, and the founders’ alleged commitment to the rights of man was really a cover to advance their own economic interests.

While most, if not all, of these arguments have been addressed, a different criticism has emerged in recent years from the “post-liberal” right. Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded, the political theorist Patrick Deneen alleges.¹ About natural rights, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre writes, “The truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns.”² The political philosophy of the American founding, some on the right now claim, is untrue, erodes traditional morality, and undermines sound religious belief.

This chapter articulates an alternative interpretation of the Declaration of Independence, one that rejects the claims of both the progressive left and the post-liberal right. The American founding was indeed animated by a revolution in political thinking, but it was hostile to neither human equality nor religion. Moreover, the American founding’s political philosophy of natural rights places limits on political authority in recognition of, and out of deference to, legitimate religious authority.

America’s separation from Great Britain in 1776 set in motion three interrelated revolutions. In the Declaration of Independence and their writings on religious liberty, the Founding Fathers instituted a new understanding of the foundations of political authority, advanced a new conception of government’s purpose, and recognized the existence of religious truth and the legitimacy of religious authority. America’s founding was animated by both the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion—a philosophical and practical achievement worth understanding and attempting to recover today.

In the third symposium of the “We Hold These Truths: America at 250” initiative held at AEI on September 18, 2024, scholars of American history, law, and theology considered how religion influenced the American Revolution. Jane E. Calvert of the John Dickinson Writings Project opened the conversation by noting how Dickinson’s Quaker upbringing shaped his views on religious diversity and led him to champion religious liberty at the founding. Thomas S. Kidd analyzed the many biblical appeals to divine sanction in the works of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine to demonstrate how the Bible shaped the rhetorical repertoire of the revolution. During his remarks, Yeshiva University’s Meir Y. Soloveichik derived several lessons from John Adams’s letters to highlight how the Hebrew Bible and covenantal politics informed the politics of the founding era. In the second panel, Notre Dame Law School’s Vincent Philip Muñoz made a case for why there were actually three revolutions in 1776, and Stanford Law School’s Michael W. McConnell demonstrated how specific church doctrines on covenant theology, God’s sovereignty, and scriptural authority enabled revolutionaries to justify independence.

By Peter Berger

In his 1974 Bicentennial Lecture, the sociologist Peter Berger surveys the state of religion in a rapidly changing society. To underscore religion’s decline, Berger compares the mid-1970s to the mid-1950s, which marked a symbiotic flourishing for civil and denominational religion. He contends that the weakening of social forces responsible for the religious spirit of the 1950s created a religious recession exemplified by the eroded link between middle-class status and church membership. He also argues that militant secularism, which denies churches moral influence over public policy, threatens the foundational values and assumptions of the American political order.

Berger warns that the continued decay of civil and denominational religion will result in either a period of general social decline or a reimposition of “traditional virtues” through state power – neither which are good for the survival of American democracy and freedom. He predicts that the limits of secularism and the “boredom of a world without gods” can revitalize denominational religion. Berger concludes with a hopeful challenge for America to preserve its civil religion through political will, moral certitude, and a renewed commitment to the American creed.