The political sermons preached from the pulpit in the decades leading up to and during the American Revolution provide an excellent lens to understand how the revolutionaries reconciled Enlightenment faith, reason, and politics. Their belief in natural law allowed them to see God dictating the laws of morality, natural rights, and the weather.

The revolutionaries believed that there were certain unalienable right in nature from God, particularly life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These “self-evident” truths could be discovered in nature by human reason. When the British violated these rights and ruled their colonies tyrannically, the ministers preached that the Americans had a duty to defend their sacred liberties.

The Americans were thus on the side of right in the eyes of the ministers, while they starkly maintained that the British enemy was acting on the side of wrong, of the Devil. Concomitant with these ideas was the widespread belief that Americans were God’s chosen people and a “city upon a hill” with covenantal duties and divine protection. They believed they had a heavenly responsibility to defend their freedoms, and their ministers told them so.

Thus, the ministers routinely entered the political fray of the 1760s and 1770s, and urged the men in their congregations to pick up their muskets and march off to war. Not many Americans read John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, but their ministers had already been preaching Lockean ideas of liberty and the Enlightenment ideals of the Declaration of Independence. As a result, the populace throughout the colonies became infused with commonplace republican ideals from the pulpits.

The revolutionaries believed that God acted providentially in the world, governing the affairs of nature and humans. They pled for divine mercy during disasters such as the Hurricane of Independence and thanked God for sparing them worse destruction. Letters, diaries, and public proceedings from the war are filled with thanks for the fortuitous circumstances that led the Continental Army to victory or allowed them to narrowly escape the clutches of defeat. The storm that prevented Howe’s attack on Dorchester Heights in Boston, the fog that allowed Washington to cross with his men after the disastrous Battle of Long Island, the miraculous victories at Trenton and Princeton in the midst of a Christmas nor’easter, the stunning victory at Yorktown after a gale trapped General Cornwallis – all were attributed to divine intervention in favor of America. On the other hand, defeat was an opportunity to examine one’s faith and conscience.

Americans, no less than other peoples throughout history (including their British adversary), had a widespread belief that God was on their side. We may not know whether they are correct, but their faith contributed to their courage and perseverance through eight long years of war to defend their liberty and gain their independence.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in American history or those looking for a new way to think about why things happen the way they do.

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c023.html

Man may surmise and presume about God’s intentions when so called “natural disasters” strike. We may know with far greater certainty what God declares to be sinful…and that while God loves sinners, he is Divinely hateful of sin.

Interesting premise for a book, which I look forward to reading.