“There is not a single instance in history in which civil
liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield
up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage.”—John
Witherspoon, 1776 (54).
This was a short book but littered
with a wealth of primary source citations. Steward takes the reader on a guided
tour of the letters and sermons of the American (and British) clergy in the
years before the war, focusing in on their argument for self-defense and later
independence.
He notes in the opening that the
dominant historical paradigm (including among evangelical scholarship) has been
that the traditional, conservative Christians advocated submission and
non-resistance to the king in Britain. Their independence-minded opponents
countered, not as Christians, but as heterodox Lockean philosophers. In short,
Christians who supported the War for Independence let their Bible be overwhelmed
by flashy new philosophy.
The author pushes back against that view with this new book (2021), noting that self-defense and political resistance had a long (indeed, rather older than Locke) history in Reformed circles. Beginning with works like Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, Steward notes that American (and British) clergymen largely saw themselves as advocating well-known and commonplace self-defense and political resistance theories. In particular, these clergymen connected their resistance with the same philosophy used in the Glorious Revolution and the English Civil War a century before their own time. In their eyes, the submissive clergy with the absolutist view (often High Church Anglicans) were in effect delegitimizing the sovereign they were so anxious to protect, since his forebears had replaced the Catholic House of Stuart in Britain due to just such theology. John Witherspoon is used as a well-known example of the phenomenon.
This was a pretty easy read with an overall academic tone. Due
to its specialized subject, this book is not for everyone; however, it is an
excellent resource for those who wish to push back against the “Political resistance is unChristian” thesis. Certainly, the quoted clergymen did not
consider it so.
