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.
