On Which Rock?: Churches, Empires, and the American Revolution

Abstract

On Which Rock?:Churches, Empires, and the American Revolution Adam Jortner (bio) Katherine Carté, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. xix + 394 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $49.95 Andrew Porwancher, The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. xvii + 254 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $27.95 Was the American Revolution an old-time religious revival? Did the urge for political independence and individual rights begin with the yearning to find salvation in Christ? For a number of Americans, these questions are settled matters of fact: yes. Some of those folks have entered the public sphere with a definitive notion that because the Revolution was Christian, the United States is also Christian. Ryan Williams at the far-right Claremont Institute declared in 2021 that "The Founders were pretty unanimous, with Washington leading the way, that the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people."1 Williams has threatened civil war if his visions are not enacted. During the siege of the Capitol on January 6, the QAnon Shaman found his way to the Senate chamber and rededicated it to Jesus Christ. Do I have your attention? Good, because the issue of religion and the American Revolution has become one of the most critical historical questions of our own age. Much of the narrative that pervades sentiment like Williams's derives in part from shoddy or antiquated scholarship; John Fea has shown, for example, that the popular tale of George Washington praying on his knees in the snows at Valley Forge is a myth. David Barton's popular Christian history of Jefferson has been pulled from most bookstores because of its falsifications; it continues to sell online.2 In part, these interpretations hang on because many of the Founders were churchgoing men—Congress really did call for a day of fasting and prayer in 1775—and in part they linger because American historiography has a hard time interpreting religion except as a handmaid to politics. The current scholarly consensus assumes that religion and the Revolution were somehow [End Page 16] related. Indeed, new permutations identify the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s as the real origin point of the Revolution. The Awakening, Katherine Carté writes, is appreciated less for its own sake than as a meadow where "historians have long scavenged for seeds of the coming American Revolution" (p. 83). Connecting the Great Awakening to the American Revolution has been a historiographical standby since the days of Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (1966), and William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (1978). It has been strengthened in recent years by the works of Thomas Kidd, God of Liberty (2012), and James Byrd, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War (2017). According to this thesis, the First Great Awakening of the 1730s "introduced new possibilities of equality into the American landscape."3 By challenging ministers, colonists learned to challenge the government. The work of independence, therefore, primarily occurred in churches. In this way, churches become the maternity wards of the Revolution—or as some would put it, the Revolution becomes Christian. The loose connection between the Awakening and the Revolution has obvious attractions to survey texts and courses, since otherwise the Awakening's importance would be limited to the religious realm, and surveys tend to privilege political history. Such narratives have largely been absorbed by both mainstream and Christian nationalist authors—an assimilation that is problematic if the narrative is untrue. Spoiler alert: it is untrue. The forty-year gap between Awakening and Revolution, the absence of a New Light-Old Light divide in patriot recruitment, and the hammer blows dealt against institutional religion after the Revolution discredit the notion that the Revolution was born in the Awakening as a Christian event. (And by "Christian event," I mean something that had as its goal theological and soteriological concerns.) The war surely received blessing from ministers and churches—what war does not?—but the Revolution was no Thirty Years' War. Yet our macronarrative, Carté writes, is grounded in an a priori notion of American religious difference mapped onto emerging American political differences. Yet Americans were not the...