The Holy Book in a Holy War

Abstract

The Holy Book in a Holy War Mark A. Noll (bio) James P. Byrd. Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xii + 243 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $27.95. When Charles Inglis, rector of Trinity Church, New York, delivered a sermon in September 1777 before a troop of Americans who had shortly before enlisted to fight for the British, his biblical text came from Luke chapter 3, verse 14: “And the Soldiers likewise demanded of him—And what shall we do? And he said to them, Do violence to no Man, neither accuse any falsly [sic], but be content with your Wages.” Inglis used this account of the early ministry of John the Baptist to encourage the recruits who were mobilizing for the King, but he also closed his sermon with a prayer that God “would remove the Delusion of our misguided [patriot] Brethren . . . that they may see the Evil and Error of their Ways, and know the Things which belong to their Peace, before it is too late.”1 This sermon is one of the few such utterances that James Byrd does not analyze, or at least record, in his marvelously researched and historically compelling Sacred Scripture, Sacred War. If Inglis’ message to the Loyalists was atypical, Byrd demonstrates convincingly that his turn to Scripture was entirely representative of the age. Many other historians have noted the importance of biblical rhetoric during America’s Revolutionary period, most notably Donald Lutz, whose careful empirical studies were carried out a generation ago, and Ellis Sandoz with his superb collection of Revolutionary-era sermons.2 Yet no one before Byrd has done such exhaustive research with such impressive results. Using a data base that he constructed of over 17,000 biblical citations from 543 individual sources—mostly published, but some also in manuscript—Byrd provides an extraordinary array of valuable information concerning the biblical content that informed the mental worlds of a large and influential portion of the American populace during the decades of Revolutionary crisis. If some of what Byrd has documented remains under-interpreted, the book still represents an achievement of the first order. Four significant findings are most significant. [End Page 611] The first confirms the strongly Protestant ethos of the Revolutionary era. After the Boston Tea Party, a New England separatist, Israel Holly, joined the chorus defending this action, but with a difference. As someone who had broken from New England’s established Congregational church, Holly was campaigning for the expansion of religious liberty at home even as he supported efforts to secure political liberty from Parliament. His word of warning to New England reflected the deeply engrained anti-Catholic biblicism that had become standard in the British Empire over the course of previous decades. If New England did not repent of its own tyrannies, Holly warned, the expansion of British despotism could soon lead to more “arbitrary government” and even “popery.” If that dreadful result eventuated, “away must go our bibles” only to be replaced by “the superstitions and damnable heresies and idolatries of the church of Rome” (quoted on p. 38). Throughout the colonies, but especially in New England, the political crisis encouraged such hyperbolic outcries, including an instinctive defense of Scripture as a bedrock of the colonies’ Christian civilization. Byrd, second, is entirely convincing that the main effect of widespread Bible usage was “to forge militant patriotism” (p. 164). He does record efforts by Loyalists to defend the British connection with scriptural injunctions, as when Charles Inglis, in a different sermon from 1780, demanded fidelity to George III on the basis of I Peter 2:17 (“Fear God. Honor the king”) and Romans 13:1–7 (including “”Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers”) (quotation on pp. 121–22). Byrd also discovered a few efforts by African Americans and their supporters to attack slavery as a violation of biblical norms. When, for example, in May 1775, a slave in Savannah preached that “God would send Deliverance to the Negroes, from the power of their Masters, as he freed the children of Israel from Egyptian bondage,” most of his white hearers were so incensed...