Against Authority

American colonists took to arms for many different reasons. For some, taxation and restrictions on trade were sufficient reasons for resistance and revolution. Others saw Parliament’s interference in colonial self-government as intolerable. But no account of how we arrived at the Declaration of Independence is complete without engaging with the philosophical and theological ideas that animated so many of the American Revolution’s most influential leaders.

In his Farewell Address, George Washington asserted that without an anchor in deep moral and religious commitments, republican government itself would be in jeopardy:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness–these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

This rigorous assumption about the necessity of high morals and specifically religion in republican government was not a counsel in favor of any particular theological tradition. Indeed, in his 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, Washington observed that one of the young nation’s great achievements was toleration: “For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” 

This is a far more contentious position today than it was in 1796. But we are far from living in some kind of purely secular world. As all our essays this month demonstrate, claims of competing political faith and philosophy have hardly left the public sphere. Competing claims about the types of morality appropriate to public life or the proper bounds of religious justification in law infuse many of our discussions of these matters, and they do so in ways that suggest more than material interests or utilitarian calculations are at stake in these matters. They address who we are and what kind of nation we are and ought to be.

As the imperial crisis heated up, many in England rose to engage the colonists’ theological sensibilities, counseling them to hold fast to their place in the empire. This month’s two pamphlets offer varied defenses of loyalism, and they do so on largely theoretical grounds that are rooted in the Protestant tradition. 

This month’s essays similarly explore the intellectual dimensions of the revolutionary cause, engaging with the colonists’ understanding of how religion and political philosophy relate to our essential liberties.