The Role of Religion in the American Revolution

Abstract It was a puzzle to the British and has been a puzzle to historians ever since, why the American colonists, who enjoyed a degree of liberty, political autonomy, and even low taxation that was the envy of subjects in the home country, would join in a risky revolution to sever ties with the nation of their origin. The answer, according to Edmund Burke, was in large part religion. “Religion,” he explained to fellow members of Parliament in his “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,” always a “principle of energy,” was “no way worn out or impaired” in North America—and that religion was of a particular kind. Burke wrote: “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.” Of all faiths, this hyper-Protestantism, wrote Burke, is “the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” This article sets out the ecclesiological, experiential, and theological differences among the largest Protestant denominations in Revolutionary America and the ways in which these differences contributed not just to the revolutionary spirit, but to the democratic and republican strands of revolutionary and constitutional thought in the new United States. The biggest contrast was between members and clergy of the Church of England, who were most involved to remain Loyalists, Reformed Protestants (Congregationalists and Presbyterians), who inclined toward republicanism, and Baptists, who were the most democratic and individualistic.