Justifying Revolution: The American Clergy’s Argument for Political Resistance, 1750–1776, by Gary L. Steward

Abstract

Jonathan Mayhew was not a popular man among the clergy of Boston in the 1750s and 1760s. The British clergyman who most clearly articulated a Protestant justification for political resistance—one heralded by John Adams as of ‘great influence on the commencement of the Revolution’, and ‘read by everyone’—was excluded from the community of Boston pastors for his heterodox views on core Calvinist tenets (p. 9). In truth, both his politics and his theology were controversial in significant circles; why and for whom depends on what is under examination. Mayhew’s complex example is one of many. The uncomfortable fact that clerical political positions on the dispute between the British Parliament and their American colonists did not map neatly onto either theological perspectives or community boundaries has long bedevilled scholars who wish to outline the connections between political theology and the American Revolution. The messiness of the historical record has made it possible, over literally hundreds of years, for historians to argue that the religious spirit of the revolution was animated by Enlightenment thought, by various sub-strains of Enlightenment thought, by the spirit of the awakening movement later associated with evangelicalism, by the thought of transatlantic British religious dissent, or by feuds between dissenters and their Anglican counterparts. The most successful such works place many of these strands in conversation, and thus account for both the divisiveness of the political moment and the choices people and communities made during the conflict.