The convictions of God’s people were an essential cause of American independence
This is an adaptation of a lecture given at Hillsdale College’s Blake Center for Faith and Freedom in March 2026
In this semiquincentennial celebration of American independence, suppose you were asked, “When did secession from Britain begin?” Maybe you’d reply that it was when British soldiers were trying to seize war materiel in 1775. Or was it the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 that forced a deep transatlantic rift over the British constitution? Or do the roots run even to the French and Indian War (1754-63) because it forced colonial unity and built American martial prowess?
According to Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn, the idea of American independence began in 1750, before any of those events. In 1965, Bailyn, the twentieth century’s dean of American Revolution historians, began publishing what was to be four volumes of the war’s most significant justifications: Pamphlets of the American Revolution. Only the first volume was completed, however, and Bailyn revised his lengthy introduction to that volume and published it as The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Bailyn’s Ideological Origins became a landmark study of the American Revolution and earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1967. Bailyn characterized the motivation toward independence as fundamentally radical, an approach to the period carried forward not only by Gordon Wood (of both Pulitzer and “Good Will Hunting” fame) but by many scholars in history or political theory who read Bailyn in a proseminar and could never bring themselves to dissent.
The merits of the radicalism thesis can be questioned, in part, by considering the pamphlet that Bailyn chose to begin his collection: Rev. Jonathan Mayhew’s A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (1750), preached first as a Lord’s Day sermon at Boston’s West Church. Mayhew may seem like an odd choice for a volume on the Revolution, but not because he was a minister. Pulpits were very much engaged with politics, and hundreds of political sermons were preached. The most recent and best collection of American political sermons from that era is Ellis Sandoz’s Sermons of the American Founding Era. Three collections of Revolutionary War sermons were published around the time of the American Civil War as well, and Alice Baldwin revived interest in political sermons a half-century later.
What makes Mayhew a surprising choice for Bailyn, then, is not that he preached a political sermon, but that his sermon was preached 25 years before the first shots were fired. In fact, Mayhew never lived to see the American Revolution, let alone the Declaration of Independence. Mayhew died in 1765, 11 years before Independence. So, what motivated Bailyn’s inclusion of Mayhew?
Was Jonathan Mayhew Progressive?
Part of Mayhew’s selection by Bailyn was undoubtedly owed to what Bailyn presumed to be the progressive character of the 1750 sermon. To understand why Bailyn and his disciples have thought Mayhew progressive, we have to begin with Mayhew’s heterodox theological opinions. Born in 1720, Mayhew’s family was an original grantee of Martha’s Vineyard and had a missionary fervor for the Indians living there. Mayhew attended Harvard, as aspiring ministers did, at a time when Harvard’s president Edward Holyoke was transitioning the curriculum from Reformed scholasticism to Newton, Locke, and other more contemporary authors. This change in curriculum is important for its role in the “radicalism” thesis. In many modern readings of Locke, for example, he is not simply heterodox but a Trojan Horse concealing many progressive Enlightenment ideas that would overthrow the standing order.
Of course, that would make orthodox stalwarts Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards, who read Locke with admiration, unable to discern Locke’s secret motives. But proponents of the radicalism thesis usually don’t concern themselves with historical theology or relevant texts, and this makes it hard for them to connect some important dots. For example, Mayhew became a critic of the Great Awakening and revivalism. For a radical Lockean, that wouldn’t make sense because the Awakening was a very egalitarian movement —- even progressive in some ways. Radical defenses of the Awakening, such as Rev. Elisha Williams’s The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants (1744), should have won Mayhew over because it was explicitly infused with Lockean ideals.
Nevertheless, what first made Mayhew famous, and infamous, was what he called “The right and duty of private judgment” against authorities or majorities. That phrase was at the center of a series of lectures Mayhew gave in 1748. The lectures came to be published on both sides of the Atlantic and earned Mayhew a Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of Aberdeen. The degree did not reflect coursework completed, but recognized substantial scholarship and had political overtones. The Aberdeen doctorate was used by dissenting denominations such as the Congregationalists to counter credentials from Oxford or Cambridge awarded to Anglican clergy.
This duty Mayhew articulated obliges us to examine BOTH sides of a proposition and suspend judgment until the examined evidence merits our assent. Such deliberation, Mayhew argued, is our duty to God and man. Mayhew’s own private judgment took him to some controversial places. He was Arminian rather than Calvinist and believed that an overemphasis on substitutionary atonement made heart and hands cold to good works. He embraced what is called subordinationist Christology rather than traditional co-equal trinitarianism (though he was not Socinian). He was latitudinarian, believing that the church should be more inclusive or lax, rather than exclusive or strict, on matters like the aforementioned ones that he considered adiaphora, but his peers considered obligatory. Such opinions reflected a transatlantic search for what some at the time called “primitive Christianity,” a purer pre-creedal and pre-confessional Christianity free of metaphysical accretions attributed to Rome. Getting rid of metaphysical accretions, Mayhew believed, enabled a truer and purer Gospel. Here he is responding to one of his critics:
That I ever denied, or treated in a bold or ludicrous manner, the divinity of the Son of God, as revealed in Scripture, I absolutely deny. My soul loves and adores him. Of his great salvation I have a good hope thro’ grace; And I have made it my serious endeavor to preach his unsearchable riches according to the Scriptures of truth, (pause) without pretending to be wise above what is written.
It is this last phrase “without pretending to be wise above what is written” that is essential. Those who sought after so-called “primitive Christianity” felt it speculative to conclude beyond what they saw clearly in the text. Speculation, for them, included the Athanasian Trinity, the economy or method of redemption, and Original Sin. Such notions relied, they believed, on an unreliable scaffolding of conjecture and dogmatism and caused unnecessary division and exclusion in the Church. A charitable interpretation of this isn’t skepticism but hyper-Protestantism: an over-reforming of the Reformers.
One can make too much of Mayhew’s radicalism, however. On many issues, he aligned right along with his colleagues, and he did not default to unbelief or skepticism. He believed the scriptures as he understood them, and he was scrupulous to defend all of his opinions from scripture. He was not a rationalist or Deist, for example. One could not imagine him indulging Tom Paine, for example. There is no account of him doubting miracles or the divinity of Christ. He told his congregation that God ordered all things, including tragedies like a huge fire that ravaged Boston, and he believed that God not only ordered such events but directed them to our chastisement and ultimate good. His theology was Christocentric. Like his colleagues, he was anti-episcopal and anti-Catholic. He took a traditional view of public virtue and warned against rising commercialism and materialism in Boston. He also upheld social hierarchy (what ministers called “natural order”), monarchy, and British constitutionalism.
For most of Mayhew’s career, his colleagues thought it best to more-or-less ignore him rather than to stir up controversy, for example. As minister of Boston’s West Church, he was excluded from almost all pulpit exchanges (a practice that saved ministers time by enabling them to give sermons more than once) and Boston’s Thursday Lecture. However, Mayhew could be the subject of wagging tongues in the newspapers that were the social media of their day: loaded with scandal, controversy, and arguments made by pseuds to the benefit of owners who monetized all of it. Thankfully, the newspaper was not reloaded with a swipe but with a press efficient enough to run only once a week.
Mayhew’s Famous 1750 Sermon
Mayhew made himself famous on both sides of the Atlantic (again) in 1750 when the third of three sermons on Romans was preached and published as A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers. Whereas most political sermons in New England marked the election or gathering of magistrates, the deployment or mustering of the militia, days of fasting and prayer, or similar occasions and said anodyne things about rulers and the people fearing God, the January sermon was of the spicier variety. It was preached on the one-hundred-year anniversary of the execution of Charles I, when the Church of England (and there were three Anglican churches in Boston) had established this particular Sunday to commemorate Charles as a martyr. Mayhew called Charles a lawless tyrant instead, though he called his trial a mockery of justice by a wicked, designing, and poor leader (Oliver Cromwell). At King’s Chapel, one of Boston’s three Anglican churches, Rev. Henry Caner called it one of the most seditious sermons ever delivered.
Mayhew’s primary interest was not to reignite a political controversy from generations past. That would be like us debating some combination of the Teapot Dome Scandal, Sacco and Vanzetti, or Prohibition in 2026: we have no skin in those games. Rather, Mayhew was outraged at the threat of civil and ecclesiastical absolutism, including the denigration of dissenters like himself and others in New England as traitorous, rebellious, fanatical murderers. God’s people had a duty to resist what Mayhew called “a spirit of domination” in church or state and to uphold civil and religious liberty.
Mayhew’s argument began with the premise that Paul’s argument for subjection to the civil authorities had a specific context: to combat in new converts from Judaism a belief that they were not subject to heathen princes, just as they had believed they were not subject as Jews to Roman dominion. To support this assertion, Mayhew cited the case of Matthew 7:17 in which Jesus was asked by Jewish leaders whether it is lawful to give tribute to Caesar. But the context was just a preface for Mayhew’s main point: the government’s authority is conditional, even if Paul did not say so explicitly and even if he provides no justifications or cases appropriate for disobedience. Mayhew’s basic argument was Aristotelian and teleological: government has an end, a purpose, a fulfillment, and that end is the good of society. This is true of government at every level and true of every kind of regime. Disobedience to rulers that act faithfully toward this end is a sin, a political offense, and an offense against God. But what if the rulers are not faithful to this end?
The purpose of government implicitly defines the extent to which obedience is required. When government does NOT act toward this end, the people may humbly appeal to the ruler and also to God. Should that fail, however, obedience to a lawless ruler is not godly. For Mayhew, those under a bad government are not to simply hope to be heard by God and delivered. They are to seize the means. Using incendiary rhetoric, he asked whether God’s people should submit to being “robbed and butchered at the pleasure of the Lord’s anointed [the magistrate described in Romans 13]”? This was a bit of a straw man, of course. Even theologians who did not support active resistance allowed Christians to flee, for example, and perhaps even to defend their lives so long as they were not avoiding an appropriate case of martyrdom and were defending themselves in a purely political context. The magisterial Protestants were not pacifists.
Mayhew raises the case of children, wives, and servants to draw lessons for citizens. All are commanded to be obedient, and no mention is made of exceptions. But would any reasonable person conclude that they are to obey in all cases whatsoever, however unreasonable? Again, Mayhew jumps to the most extreme case of murder. Would anyone expect children to submit to being murdered by their father, for example? Mayhew’s over-the-top rhetoric aside, the point is clear. The absence of a conditional command doesn’t make commands to obedience unconditional. Obedience is necessarily conditional on good government and is not owed to the government of a tyrant bent on self-gratification or destruction of the public welfare or the rule of law.
The fact that authority is delegated by God makes no difference to the question, Mayhew argues. If anything, it reinforces his point. Why would God delegate authority for mischief? A mischievous ruler is not the minister of God but the servant of Satan. One could sooner argue that a pirate or robber has more authority than a tyrant: a tyrant acts contrary to the purpose defined by Paul, whereas the former presume no grant of authority. To resist lawlessness, therefore, is not to resist God but to resist the Devil. In fact, not to resist is to tempt damnation. Unlimited submission would make the apostle illogical, force conclusions that do not follow from his premises, and make us culpable in the misery and slavery of our neighbor. We would sin not only against logic, that aforementioned right and responsibility of private judgment, but against God and our fellow man.
It should be noted that Mayhew didn’t believe that the arguments of his opponents were really about unconditional civil obedience per se. They were really advocating obedience to hereditary monarchy and defending the “divine right” of kings. But to believe that God desired His people to submit unconditionally to hereditary divine right kings was, to Mayhew, an argument so profoundly preposterous, so contrary to common sense, that it was on the same level as transubstantiation (which was British Protestant shorthand for the most absurd thing imaginable). And to advance such a view was to upend the Glorious Revolution as well.
If the execution was to be remembered, Mayhew concluded, let it be a warning against all tyrants. Let them all remember that they, like Charles, may face the same reckoning as an outlaw.
Mayhew’s Legacy
Some of the Founders knew this sermon, and it was particularly influential for John Adams who wrote in 1818 that “if the orators on the fourth of July really wish to investigate the principles and feelings which produced the Revolution, they ought to study . . . Dr. Mayhew’s sermon on passive obedience and non-resistance.”1 Adams sent Thomas Jefferson a copy of Mayhew’s sermonthat same year, noting that it had been a kind of “catechism” to him when he was a boy: “This discourse was printed a year before I entered Harvard College and I read it till the Substance of it was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory.”2 Adams assigned Mayhew a place of importance with James Otis, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock, along with Mayhew’s ministerial colleague and friend Samuel Cooper.3 Mayhew, Adams wrote, “had great influence on the commencement of the Revolution” and his famed sermon was “read by everyone.”4
As for the idea of passive obedience and nonresistance, Americans’ hatred of that was enshrined in state constitutions. Article 10 of New Hampshire’s 1784 bill of rights states “The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.” Similar language protecting the right of revolution exists in other state constitutions as well, including Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and later Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and Delaware. The same criticism of the “doctrine of nonresistance” is in George Mason’s master draft of the Bill of Rights and was likewise proposed by Virginia’s ratifying convention in 1788.
Wouldn’t Mayhew be pleased?
So, How Radical Was It?
So why have modern scholars concluded that Mayhew was the first in a line of radicals inspiring a revolution? The problem begins with having no knowledge of hermeneutics or the Protestant tradition, and presuming that Christians are biblicists or fundamentalists who don’t know how to read books. It also helps to know nothing of political theology during prior centuries, including the medieval or classical origins of resistance theory or the humanistic or natural law traditions informing the tradition on which Mayhew relied. One modern historian, for example, asserted that Mayhew’s love of liberty depended on “the religious and political ideas of the British Enlightenment” and “natural religion” or “sacralization of reason.” Mayhew would require none of that to arrive at his interpretation of Romans 13. Protestants in Boston in 1750 needed no Enlightenment philosophers to find arguments for conditional obedience any more than Protestants needed Enlightenment philosophers to resist Charles I, James II, Bloody Mary, Louis XIV, or Mary of Guise.
As for the question being a contest of reason versus revelation, one need not look far to see quite the opposite. John Calvin, for example, two centuries before Mayhew, praised reason in Book 2 of his Institutes, writing that “reason is competent to govern man in temporal things, including political matters.” Similar appeals to reason can be found in other cornerstone Protestant texts and confessions.
As for rights and the rule of law, these were not new either. We need only look to the books of Harold Berman or John Witte, for example, who have done extensive work recovering a rich heritage of liberty in the Protestant Reformation. As to the specific case of conditional obedience, this had been previously taught by John Knox and Samuel Rutherford in Scotland, John Ponet, Christopher Goodman, and John Milton in England, and Huguenots in France, especially in the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos – some of these texts being reprinted in America over and over as colonists faced intransigent royal governors.
Mayhew also acknowledged that a good bit of it was taken from Bishop Benjamin Hoadley’s 1705 sermon on the same text. For Britons like Hoadley, and now Mayhew, the Glorious Revolution was nothing less than an attempt to restore the authority of Parliament and the free, virtuous, and lawful government that they considered unique to Protestant countries. Furthermore, the rhetoric of rights was already a vibrant feature of pulpits at least since the colonial wars fought by Americans beginning in the 1740s. By the 1750s, American pastors were regularly in the habit of defending constitutional government on the British model. These pastors were orthodox and heterodox, Anglican, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, and even Catholic or Quaker.
Mayhew was not at the center of a “cultural change” because nothing Mayhew said politically represented a cultural change. There had been a change in Transatlantic Protestantism such that it now encompassed broader notions of culture, sociability, or toleration. You can see this in the Whig movement, declining religious establishments, and greater religious toleration. But, again, none of that was necessary or sufficient for a conditional reading of obedience in Romans 13.
Modern scholars want the eighteenth century, or what they call the American Enlightenment, to be an either-or: religious or secular, scripture or reason. But those living at the time thought of these as both-and. It was not John Locke or John Calvin. Consider again, for example, Cotton Mather’s regular and fearless use of John Locke in his Biblia Americana – and Mather was orthodox in every way that Mayhew was not. To the Americans of that age, there was not a sacred-secular dichotomy but instead a cooperative defense of law, liberty, and virtue in the Western tradition. The dichotomy is a dramatic invention of twentieth-century scholarship, notably Leo Strauss and others. Too often, modern scholarship follows a script: freedom is ancient (owed to the Greeks or Romans) or modern (owed to the so-called Enlightenment), but it is definitely NOT a Christian idea.
The merits of Bailyn’s radicalism thesis aside, readers of American Reformer should note with great interest the placing of a sermon on Romans 13 at the beginning of a projected four-volume collection on the American Revolution. Bailyn was implicitly confirming what men like John Adams and also the earliest historians of the Revolution, Patriot David Ramsay and Loyalist Joseph Galloway, already said at the time: the convictions of God’s people were an essential cause of American independence. Today, we must honor that legacy, and likewise inquire into the limits of obedience and disobedience to government. That is our duty: as Christians, as persons endowed with reason. And now, thanks to Independence, as Americans.
