The Reformed Revolution 

The Road to Revolution Begins in Geneva

In the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to reflect on its history. As the United States of America recently celebrated its 250th birthday, the moment calls for a closer examination of our remarkable founding. What caused the founding generation to risk everything and take on the great military power of the time? Where did the Founders ground the principles that brought forth this new nation and secured for it a place among the powers of the earth? The answer, it turns out, is theological. The American Revolution was, at its roots, a Reformed one.

In recent years, much ink has been spilled answering these questions. Secular myths and twentieth-century revisionist history of the founding needed debunking. The honest conclusion, upon close inspection, is that Christianity played the central role in America’s founding. In his book Did America Have a Christian Founding?, Mark David Hall answers his title’s question with a resounding “Yes!” through an excellent recovery of primary sources. He obliterates the myth that the Founders were mostly Enlightenment deists. For example, Hall uses letters penned by Thomas Jefferson. Although Jefferson most certainly held heretical views, in these letters he refers to himself as a Christian, something no genuine deist would do. Among the founding generation, Thomas Paine was the only notable card-carrying deist, and he was relatively late to the conversation, arriving in the Colonies in 1774 and then departing in 1787 to aid in the French Revolution, a much better fit for his Enlightenment persuasion. It is also well documented that nine out of the thirteen Colonies had state-established churches when the Constitution was ratified in 1789. Massachusetts held out the longest, due to its Congregational roots, disestablishing in 1833.

In the constellation of colonial pan-Protestantism, it was Reformed theology that contributed the most to the thinking behind the American Revolution. The Reformed political tradition, transmitted through the New England Puritan Congregationalists and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian stream, provided the intellectual and moral grammar that made revolution not merely permissible but, in the minds of many colonists, obligatory. Straight lines can be traced through the pages of history from the American Revolution back to the Protestant Reformers.

The Congregationalists in Massachusetts were the original instigators of revolutionary activity. A devout Congregationalist was the leader of the Sons of Liberty, who famously organized the Boston Tea Party. The words “One if by land, and two if by sea” were the plans of a Massachusetts Congregationalist. The same Congregationalist then proclaimed, “The British are coming!” on his midnight ride. The enormous signature on the Declaration of Independence belonged to a Massachusetts Congregationalist. If the words “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” were indeed commanded at Bunker Hill, they are attributed to one of two Congregationalists.

It was the theological and political tradition of the Puritans (Congregationalists in the American context) that drove them in their conviction to resist British tyranny. The Mayflower Compact was a voluntary, solemn agreement made before God to create a civil government. It begins, “In the Name of God, Amen,” and frames the entire enterprise as undertaken “for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith.” Any tyrannical violation of that would be an act of war, or at the very least a reason to appeal to John Calvin’s doctrine of the lesser magistrates.

John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon aboard the Arbella set the terms before the colonists ever set foot on American soil. His “City upon a Hill” was not a boast; it was a warning: “if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken… we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” It is easy to turn “City upon a Hill” into a triumphalist national motto in hindsight, but that misses the Christian courage and conviction required in the moment. The eyes of the world would be watching, and failure to keep covenant with God would bring ruin. Winthrop drew directly from the covenant framework that runs from the Westminster Confession back through Bullinger and Calvin. The Puritans understood themselves as a covenantal people with corporate obligations extending to the political realm. A covenant can be broken—rapidly, by a tyrant. Glenn Moots, professor of political science at Northwood University, has traced this covenantal political tradition from Calvin and Bullinger through the English and American founding in Politics Reformed. His central argument is that covenant theology, not Enlightenment liberalism, was the most important school of politics in early America.

Covenant theology gave the Puritans something Lockean liberalism could not: a theological reason why tyranny is not merely opposed to one’s preferences but an offense against God. The foedus was the grammar of both their church life and their civil life, and it traced directly back to Calvin’s account of God’s covenantal dealings with his people. Thomas Hooker, who led the migration to Connecticut in 1636, argued that the foundation of authority rests in the free consent of the people. His ideas fed directly into the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639), widely regarded as the first written constitution in the Western world. Hooker did not arrive at consent theory from Locke; he arrived at his views from Calvinist ecclesiology and the covenant theology of the Reformation.

John Cotton, Hooker’s contemporary in Massachusetts Bay, inclined toward theocratic consolidation. The tension between them over the proper limits of magisterial authority was not merely academic. It produced governing documents that codified the principle that civil authority is accountable. That principle did not originate in the colonies; it ran through the Puritan tradition back to Calvin’s discussion of the lesser magistrates in the Institutes.

Jonathan Mayhew’s 1750 sermon was the theological shot across the bow, fired a quarter century before Lexington and Concord. Mayhew argued from Romans 13 that Paul’s command to obey the governing authorities cannot be stretched to cover tyranny. John Adams later praised this sermon as one of the most influential pieces of political writing in the pre-Revolutionary period, calling it his personal “catechism” of revolution. It was a thoroughly Reformed sermon, preached from a Congregationalist pulpit, drawing on the same resistance tradition from Calvin.

The British dubbed the dissenting clergy the “Black Robe Regiment” for their role in fomenting rebellion. The clergy were not bystanders to the Revolution; they were combatants in it. The term applied broadly across the Reformed traditions. Peter Muhlenberg, a Lutheran pastor in Woodstock, Virginia, is supposed to have closed a 1776 sermon by throwing off his clerical robe to reveal a Continental Army uniform underneath. He then marched nearly three hundred men out of his congregation and into Washington’s army. Whether or not the story is embellished, Muhlenberg did raise the 8th Virginia Regiment and went on to become a general. The image survived because it captured something true about what the pulpit had become.

If the Congregationalists of New England were the intellectual architects of resistance, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians were its spine. They were a people formed by a theology of resistance that ran back two centuries to John Knox.

Knox sat under Calvin in Geneva from 1554 to 1559 as a Marian exile, and he absorbed not only Calvin’s theological doctrine but his political philosophy. Calvin had opened the door to resistance theory in the Institutes, granting that lesser magistrates bore a duty to restrain tyrannical rulers. Knox walked through that door and widened it considerably. In his Appellation (1558), he argued that the obligation to resist ungodly rule extended beyond magistrates to the common people. Where Calvin was cautious, Knox was bold.

The Presbyterian system Knox established carried inherent political consequences. Elders were elected. The church was governed by assemblies, not bishops. Authority flowed from the congregation upward through presbyteries to the General Assembly, not downward from a crown-appointed hierarchy. Every Scottish Presbyterian who understood his own church government had already internalized a rebuke to the divine right of kings.

Samuel Rutherford drew out the full implications in Lex Rex (1644). Rutherford dismantled the doctrine of royal absolutism, arguing from Scripture that civil authority is covenantal and conditional. When tyrants breach the terms of their office, resistance is not rebellion but fidelity to God’s law. Lex Rex traveled with the Scotch-Irish across the Atlantic, and its argument surfaced in the Colonies decades before Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence. To cite Moots again, he definitively concludes, in his book Justifying Revolution, that American resistance met the standards of law and virtue.

John Witherspoon is the Presbyterian who binds the Scottish and American threads most visibly. He came to Princeton in 1768 and was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. He taught a generation of American leaders, including James Madison. When Witherspoon signed the Declaration, he was not departing from his theology; he was acting on it.

Without the Reformed political tradition, American independence likely would have looked much different; perhaps we would still be a British Commonwealth realm like Canada, New Zealand, or Australia, with the British Crown still technically head of state. The twentieth century’s historical narrative has credited the American founding to the European Continent’s Enlightenment and to Greco-Roman philosophy. That account is woefully incomplete. The men who fired at Redcoats were not acting on abstractions from French salons. They were acting on convictions formed in Congregationalist pulpits and Presbyterian church courts. The Reformed tradition gave the Revolution its spine. A people formed by the sovereignty of God will not long tolerate the unjust laws of earthly kings. That is not a relic of history; it is a resource for the present, and recovering it is long overdue.