In 1851, Herman Melville published his epic novel Moby Dick. It is Homeric and Virgilian, Shakespearean and Miltonic. But most importantly for Melville, it is distinctly American. Shortly before its release, Melville penned a manifesto for American letters, proclaiming the rise of a new literary movement led by himself and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the essay, titled “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” Melville pleads with his readers to stop damning New World authors with the faint praise of describing them as like some Old World model:

Call him an American, and have done, for you can not say a nobler thing of him.— … [N]o American writer should write like an Englishman, or a Frenchman; let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American.

While American letters should acknowledge the “excellence” of ancient and early modern European models, Melville argues, we must now “duly recognize the meritorious writers that are our own,—those writers, who breathe that unshackled, democratic spirit of Christianity in all things, which now takes the practical lead in the world, though at the same time led by ourselves—us Americans.”1. Melville, “Hawthorne & His Mosses” (1850), https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Melville_Hawthorne.pdf, pg. 1164.

“The unshackled, democratic spirit of Christianity in all things.” Melville looked ahead to the turn of the 20th century and saw the rise of a superpower, fueled by a vision of Christian liberty which had its roots in the Reformation. “Bear me out in it,” Melville prayed a year later in Moby Dick, “thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl.”2. Melville, Moby Dick, (1851), Chapter 26. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was the best-selling book in the English language after the King James Version of the Bible for centuries. John Bunyan was a “convict” because he embraced the “priesthood of all believers” and so was imprisoned by the Stuart regime for preaching the gospel without a license. But his Pilgrim’s Progress became a model for those who longed to flee “Vanity Fair” and establish a covenanted Reformed community in a new land. It would be a land where “all men are created equal,” “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” to quote Thomas Jefferson; and where, to continue quoting Melville, they enjoyed “that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!” So Melville called for American writers to celebrate this vision. In light of our mission to resource today’s Christians with the riches of classical Protestant thought, this issue of Ad Fontes seeks to do just that on the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.

Glenn Moots kicks off our issue with an account of Anglo-American republican constitutionalism and its roots in resisting the kind of theo-political tyranny which Reformation-era Protestants almost universally labeled “popery.” But a coherent movement cannot just be against something (in this case, Roman Catholicism); it also has to have a positive vision of the good. This is where the splintering of the English Reformation into the various camps of the English Civil War (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists like Bunyan, and Anglicans like the men who imprisoned Bunyan) complicates Melville’s vision, both in his novel and in his nation. The pieces by Ben Crenshaw, Jeremiah Regan, James Baird, and Matthew Young, however, provide historical examples of those four strands within the Reformational rope (to borrow a metaphor from Melville’s devout Puritan preacher Father Mapple) all contributing to the founding of a new nation committed to preserving the life, liberty, and happiness of its citizens.3. I take the devout Puritan preacher Father Mapple’s sermon early in the novel to be the norming norm for the various other versions of Christianity (some good, some bad, all partial) which Moby Dick presents to the reader.

That founding was 250 years ago. Tyler Bauer asks whether this democratic, Protestant, Christian spirit still shows any vital signs today. On the one hand, he confesses that “a substantial portion of Americans today are either indifferent to the tradition or actively hostile to it.” Bauer here echoes Aaron Renn’s influential argument in his “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” that we have passed from a culture that viewed evangelical religion positively, through one that was indifferent to the Protestant churches, and into an era which is actively hostile to the gospel.4. https://firstthings.com/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism/ But Bauer sees signs of hope as he contemplates the richness that our tradition can provide to a hungry world.

One such glimmer of a return to a “positive world” for the evangelical churches was the surreal spectacle of the nationally televised memorial for Charlie Kirk last summer. One-hundred-million people watched as a succession of the influential and powerful in academia, media, and politics confessed that our endeavours and our deaths find significance in the resurrection of Christ. Even this was complicated, of course. Many of those speakers are active members of a local congregation that is either Reformed Protestant (such as Pete Hegseth) or the Protestantized form of American Catholicism that operates as if “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm” (such as J.D. Vance).5. Article 37 of the Church of England’s 39 Articles of Religion. Others, however, have been public about their unbelief. Does their adoption of evangelical language speak to a revival of the religious spirit of early America, where ‘Enlightened’ skeptics still shared much of the worldview of their Christian neighbors? Or is it a Machiavellian instrumentalizing of theology that will eventually turn such rhetoric into an empty sign?

On the one hand, the Apostle Paul says in similar circumstances that “every way, whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.”6. Philippians 1:18 (KJV). On the other hand, C.S. Lewis’ demon Screwtape charts the path to making such preaching innocuous:

About the general connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more delicate. Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster. On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations”. You see the little rift? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game…7. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (HarperCollins, 1996), 126-127.

To combat the devil, we must always remember that disorder and chaos begin in the human heart. There can be no life, liberty, or happiness while we are dead in our trespasses, enslaved to our passions, and addicted to our misery. Joshua Paladino reminds us that this Christian creed must remain fundamental to our worldview; indeed, it is that which inspires affection and charity for our compatriots. Our Christianity will have nothing to say to the world until it has pierced our own hearts. In fact, it is precisely because of his power to reveal our hearts—“the great Art of Telling the Truth”—that Melville praises his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne as the first master of American letters. And it is certain, Melville continues, that Hawthorne’s power

derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.

This is the theme of the final section of our issue, a collection of original poetry introduced by Joshua Patch, which meditates deeply on the eternal truth, transcending time and place, that we are all equal in being great sinners redeemed by a great savior.

In the spirit of making this issue even more democratically accessible, I am pleased to announce the launch of Ad Fontes’ free and open-access audio edition, produced through a licensing agreement with Canon+, which you can access here.8. https://canonplus.com/adfontes 

From 1685 to 1776

When Thomas Jefferson reflected on the Declaration of Independence fifty years after its composition, he hoped that it would make clear a “palpable truth.” That is, Jefferson wrote, “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”1. Thomas Jefferson to Roger Weightman, June 1826. I use this same use of Rumbold by Jefferson in a recent piece in American Reformer wherein Rumbold as a Reformed revolutionary prompts examination of Reformed resistance theory as a particular application of Protestant constitutionalism. The articulate Jefferson loved a good turn of phrase, but this one was not his own invention. Richard Rumbold said exactly this in 1685 as he was about to be hanged, drawn, and quartered for being a conspirator in the Protestant Rye House plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother and heir James. Both had become deeply unpopular: Charles for persecuting dissenting Protestants with the Act of Uniformity (1662) and the Conventicle Act (1664), and James for converting to Catholicism.

Given what Charles had done against nonconforming Protestants, and what James, a Catholic monarch-to-be might do to all Protestants, it is easy to presume that a plot against Charles and James Stuart was motivated by religious or sectarian rivalries. According to one contemporary view of the past, Protestants and Catholics fought one another as tribes in an unenlightened and intolerant era. Or so another contemporary view might suggest, we hope that Rumbold and his co-conspirators were a vanguard of modern inclusion. By assassinating Charles and James, they hoped to end religious fighting and enable broad religious toleration and liberty. But what Rumbold and the Rye House conspirators were after was neither broad religious toleration nor sectarian score settling. Their goal was legal reform and an end to what they perceived as Stuart abuses of the law.

What Rumbold says on the scaffold is more characteristic of a constitutionalist. He says that he was to die in defense of just “rights and liberties.” “Rights and liberties” is not a phrase that should be discounted today on “postliberal” grounds. Rumbold did not have in mind the nineteenth-century ideology of liberalism, classical liberalism, progressive liberalism, Rawlsian liberalism, or any other liberalism. He would not have had in mind John Locke, Adam Smith, or John Stuart Mill. Neither Smith nor Mill were alive, and Locke had not yet published his famous Two Treatises nor his Epistola de Tolerantia. Rather, preserving rights and liberties was the whole point of British constitutionalism. Rumbold would have had in mind Magna Charta (1215), for example, that placed everyone—even the king—under the rule of law. The Stuarts did not agree with the Whigs on what that meant.

How does constitutionalism diverge from modern liberalism in which rights and liberties now seem to proliferate without end? The condemned Rumbold again serves as a brilliant tutor to help us understand this by implicitly distinguishing novelty from permanence. He says that he is dying in defense of ancient laws and liberties. The ancient character of law is explained in William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769), for example. In common law, rights derive from practices uninterrupted so long as anyone (even accounts of history) can remember. Such practices are said to exist in time “whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary” or as we are more likely to say now, “time immemorial.” In other words, the practices are so old that we do not know their origin, and people should therefore reasonably expect them to continue. The law being conservative and not innovative; such ancient rights are retained. Privileging long practice prevents us from continual invention of new claims about rights, whether asserted by the people or by the rulers.

But if Rumbold’s case is a constitutionalist one, and not merely a sectarian one, what should we make of what he says next? He says that his defense of the ancient laws and liberties stands against popery and slavery.2. The Last Speech of Coll. Richard Rumbold, with several Things that passed at his Tryal, 26 June, 1685. To understand why this wasn’t merely about James’s Roman Catholicism as an ecclesiastical conflict, however, we have to further understand the “Protestant” character of independence in England, and then America. Over almost two centuries, Protestants (like Rumbold), whether in Britain and America, didn’t think of being Protestant merely in terms of theological convictions or dogma. They associated Protestant identity with a conviction that the rule of law must be upheld, and that all political power must be subject to that rule. Likewise, their objection to Roman Catholicism wasn’t confined to theological or doctrinal differences but was thought of in broadly political terms as well. Catholics, also called Romanists, Papists, Jesuits, or popery generally, were treated as enemies to the rule of law. Over time, enemies of the rule of law were assigned these labels regardless of their theological convictions.

However, 250 years ago in America, something happened that put an end to this association of Protestantism with constitutionalism.

Protestant Britons

In 1775 and 1776, a certain idea and conviction prevailed in America just as it prevailed in Britain. In this semiquincentennial year, the idea and conviction is worth considering not only as an historical point, but also for its relevance to arguments about what America is and what an American is. This contemporary debate of whether America is a people or an idea contests whether America is owed to and sustained by a particular ethnic, racial, or cultural group or whether it is owed to and sustained by an idea.

We begin with a big historical fact often overlooked in reflections on the Revolution. American independence was first understood by many at that time to be something Protestant. This is not a claim about America being a people per se. Saying that American independence is owed to Protestant people would be simplistic and obvious. The great majority on both sides of the war in 1775 were Protestant. Until France and Spain allied with America, the War of Independence was a Protestant civil war. If America’s Protestant identity could not be associated with a particular group of people (since Protestants were on both sides of the independence question), was Protestantism then just a set of ideas not necessarily dependent on a particular people?

The answer to this question begins in Britain. As Linda Colley has explained in her seminal Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, the disparate English, Welsh, and Scottish people needed something to join them together as “Britons.” One essential factor (though not the only factor) enabling Britons to cohere, Colley argues, was the creation of a Protestant identity. Was being “Protestant” reflective of a shared theological heritage? Only in the broadest strokes: one could parse theological and denominational differences in Britain until the cows came home, which is saying a lot in a country famous for its cows. In fact, forging a unified Protestant identity based on theological unity became more challenging as denominational and doctrinal variations grew more diverse over two centuries. Protestant identity could not, therefore, be predicated on dogma. Rather, the existence of the Protestant identity was a combination of two factors. First, it was a fiction of sorts born of political expediency. That is, as the different British peoples need to unify against a common enemy, they found ways to overlook their differences for the sake of survival. Second, differences inhibiting unity mattered less as religious establishment weakened in Britain (and America) thanks to the Toleration Act of 1689. Denominational differences remained, of course (as did cultural, geographical, or other differences). But because the various denominations enjoyed a greater degree of equal protection under the law, favored treatment by the state mattered less, and unity became more possible.3. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (Yale University Press, 1993), 11–54. For examples of Protestant unity after 1689 in America, see Puritan ecumenicism led by Cotton Mather.

As for the first point about expediency, the Protestant identity of Britons meant not so much what one was, but rather what one was not. To use the trendy academic lingo of the “Other” as Colley does, the Other for Britons was Roman Catholicism (aka, Papists, Romanists). To be Protestant was to be not Roman Catholic. One can find rejection of transubstantiation and superintending authority in the Bishop of Rome as a trope throughout British writing. However, some of that theological flag-planting was superficial—a kind of eighteenth-century virtue signaling.4. For example, David Hume’s attacks on transubstantiation were a very British thing to do, and validated Hume as a faithful Briton, but he wasn’t defending a different doctrine of communion as a faithful Christian. He was doing a very British thing. So, what did it mean for Britons to be a Protestant if it was not about doctrine or dogma?

Before answering that question, it must be stressed that the American colonists also lacked a unifying identity. The disparate regions and colonies of America possessed different geography, cultures, and experiences.5. Differences among the Americans are traced by David Hackett Fischer’s magisterial Albion’s Seed, for example. Americans’ ongoing debate about our nation as homogenous or as ultimately incompatible tribes (made more complicated by immigration) is not a new one. From George Washington’s vantage point in 1796, the future of America was anything but assured, and he felt the need to address this in his so-called Farewell Address (1796). The outgoing president implored Americans to join in a united national interest.

The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together. The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts—of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.6. The Address of Gen. Washington to the People of America on His Declining the Presidency of the United States

Many Americans would have taken exception to Washington’s claim that their differences in religion, manners, habits or politics were “slight shades of difference.” They were not slight, though their differences did not run as deep as the English, Welsh, and Scots.

Protestant Independence and the Rule of Law

The unifying Protestant identity began when King Henry VIII created the Church of England by severing it from the pope’s control. Pope Paul III responded by excommunicating him in 1538 because the pope presumed to govern not just the church in England, but its civil government as well. Pius V later excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in 1570 after she returned the Church of England to independence after the reign of Bloody Mary. Both excommunications were predicated on the belief in hierocracy wherein the pope presumed to have both supreme civil and supreme ecclesiastical authority.7. Classical Protestant Two Kingdom theology (not to be confused with David Van Drunen’s) corrected this Roman confusion. The pope’s action was therefore not a mere exercise of church discipline declaring Henry or Elizabeth unrepentant: it was overt political subversion. Excommunication freed English Catholics from any political allegiance, including any oaths of loyalty that they had made. In the case of Elizabeth’s excommunication, Pius went even further and made it a sin for Catholics to obey her. The popes launched direct assaults on the political independence, sovereignty, and stability of Britain.

When King Philip II sent the Spanish Armada in 1588, in part to restore a Catholic government there, English independence was threatened by Catholic military powers. The defeat of the Armada and the English celebration of their independence from Rome is illustrated with rich iconography in the famous Armada Portrait of Elizabeth. The painting includes a “Protestant Wind” thwarting the Spanish attack on England—a wind that was believed to return a century later when Protestant William III (William of Orange) successfully landed his fleet and rescued the Protestant throne and James II could not launch his own fleet to stop him. These events, the defeat of the Armada and the Glorious Revolution, were bookends of seventeenth-century Protestant identity in England.

To the north, Scotland had its own reformation alongside the English one. Protestants there sought independence from Rome and French Catholics. John Knox famously appealed to Scottish monarchs and nobles for Protestant reforms, desiring removal (if not regicide) of Mary of Guise. He also appealed to the laity, putting the future blessing or cursing of Scotland in covenantal terms: Scotland must reform or face judgment. England’s national interest, which was cast as a Protestant interest, led to an English invasion forcing the French army there (at the request of the Catholic Mary) to negotiate for terms as Mary lay dying. Scotland was left in the control of the Protestant Scottish Lords.

In the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (including the English Civil War) Protestants of all stripes—whether Puritan, Anglican, Royalist, Congregational, Presbyterian, Scot, or Englishman—accused their opponents of subverting the rule of law and did this by calling them agents of Rome. Each side charged the other with “innovation” that undermined history and precedent in the common law, constitutionalist style (e.g. Rumbold’s ancient liberties). For example, Dissenting and Nonconformist opponents of the Caroline church claimed to defend the common law rights and liberties of subjects. Their opponents claimed to defend the constitutional rights of the Crown and parliament.

These arguments were legal ones couched in religious terms: if you opposed the rule of law and constitutional order, you were a Papist or Jesuit. Of course, there was no reason to think that anyone on either side of the English Civil War was a true follower of Rome, but the insult was more political than ecclesiastical or theological. Religious and ecclesiastical debates in this era became so intertwined that some scholars came to view the English Civil War as the first modern European revolution. Eminent historian of the period, John Morrill, however, retorted that it was instead “the last of the Wars of Religion,” a view toward which the pendulum of scholarship is swinging back.8. John Morrill, “The Religious Context of the English Civil War” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 34 (1984), 155–78. For seventeenth-century Britons, it could be both political and religious. To be British was to be Protestant. To be Protestant was not just to have certain theological convictions but to also believe in constitutionalism.

By the 1670s, in the decade before the Rye House Plot, Protestant paranoia ran very hot. Protestants became so suspicious of Catholic plots against the civil order that they believed fantastical assertions, including the claim of a Catholic assassination plot in 1678 that had very little evidence but led to the death of 15 innocent men anyway. Whig fear of a Catholic monarch at this time motivated the seminal political writing of both John Locke and Algernon Sidney. Even after Protestants breathed sighs of relief when Protestant William took the throne from James, Jacobite Rebellions resurrected fears of Catholic plots against the Protestant order over and over, as did wars against Catholic foes led first by William and Anne and then by the House of Hanover.9. There were exceptions to the “Protestant vs. Catholic” delineation throughout the period, of course. Britons fought the Protestant United Provinces before 1688 and had Catholic allies from time to time: France from 1716 until 1731, and Austria during the Nine Years War and War of the Spanish Succession. But none of this discouraged the rhetoric that Protestant Britain upheld ordered liberty against either Catholic tyranny (within England or abroad) or Catholic anarchy (i.e., subverting English rulers).

American Fear of Popery

From the other side of the Atlantic, Americans cheered what became known as the “Protestant Cause.” Enjoying varying degrees of autonomy, they developed their own interests, of course. When their autonomy was challenged—by the government of Edmund Andros in New England in 1686, for example—Americans grabbed the British playbook: they compared the Dominion of New England with Louis XIV’s persecution of the Huguenots and began to wonder whether Papists were gaining ground across the ocean. Seeing the accession of William as a green light for Protestant glory, they threw off Andros’s “Papist” administration. In a 1689 sermon, Cotton Mather called for unity among Protestants and famously urged “War with none but Hell and Rome.”10. Cotton Mather, The Wonderful Works of God Commemorated: A Thanksgiving Sermon Delivered on December 19, 1689 (Boston).

Nowhere was British fellow feeling and support for Protestant constitutionalism more evident than in American pulpits, particularly during the Seven Years War or French and Indian War (1756–1763). Arguably the first “world war,” it came with rhetoric very much in the British Protestant constitutionalist tradition. Though books have been devoted to the political pulpit of the Revolution, a book could also be devoted to the political pulpit of the decades before the Revolution. Ministers sustained a simultaneous defense of both Protestantism and the British constitution. In a sermon to soldiers in April of 1755, Congregationalist minister Isaac Morrill intertwined fears both civil and ecclesiastical:

Are we willing to be bound to the Stake and burnt? This seems to appear from the best Intelligence we have of the Conduct of the French, that their Design is as soon as possible to change the Government of these Provinces; and if they change the Government of this Land, they will the Religion of it too. And are we willing to give up our civil Rights and Privileges, and become subjected to Tyranny and arbitrary Government?1111. Isaac Morrill, The soldier exhorted to courage in the service of his king and country, from a sense of God and religion: A sermon preached at Wilmington, April 3, 1755 (Boston).

In that same year, Congregationalist Rev. John Lowell in Newbury told soldiers that “the Estates, Laws, Liberties, Lives, and Religion of People are to be defended at the utmost Hazard.” Presbyterian and revivalist minister Gilbert Tennent, in a February, 1756 sermon warned soldiers of the “dismal Consequences of a French, a Popish Government, that in such a Situation you must be deprived of your Estates and civil Liberty.” Tennent concluded his attack on Roman Catholicism and defense of Protestantism by placing Islamic governments above Catholic ones: “It is a Thousand Times better to be under the Government of Turks than Papists, for there we might enjoy some Liberty, but here none at all; there are not such bloody, tyrannical Taskmasters under the whole heaven as the Papists, we have therefore Reason to dread their Government more than Death itself.”11. Gilbert Tennent. The Happiness of Rewarding the Enemies of our Religion and Liberty, 1756 (Philadelphia).

Such rhetoric was not confined to New England. Anglican minister William Smith (later the provost of what became the University of Pennsylvania) charged a gathering of soldiers in Philadelphia in 1757 to “cultivate in yourselves and those under you, a noble, manly, and rational Enthusiasm in the glorious cause wherein you are engaged.” That cause, Smith argued, was the cause of “Justice, the Protestant-cause, the cause of Virtue and Freedom on earth” and “an unconquerable passion for Liberty, and the purity of the Protestant faith.”12. William Smith. The Christian Soldier’s Duty; the Lawfulness and Dignity of his Office; and the Importance of the Protestant Cause in the British Colonies. Preached in Christ-Church, Philadelphia; April 5, 1757 (London).

Such privileging of the British constitution above all others was stark. In a 1759 sermon of Rev. James Lockwood, he told his audience, “There is no Nation in Europe, nor on the Earth whose Civil Government is like that of Great Britain—none that exceeds, perhaps none, that, in all Respects, equals it in Excellency.” Lockwood contrasted rule under the British constitution with what he called “arbitrary rule” in Europe and Asia, which he said is “One of the greatest engines of Misery & Desolation to Mankind—the most dreadful Curse that ever blasted and devour’d the Earth.”

Those who died in service to Britain did not have to die in ways one typically thinks of to become martyrs. General James Wolfe died in battle at the Plains of Abraham in 1759 when the British tried to seize French Quebec. He was not captured and forced to acknowledge the pope or transubstantiation, but he was considered to have died for the true faith in a different way: he was killed leading a British (Protestant) army against French (Catholic) foes. Sermons on the battle treated his death as one would a martyr’s because he died for the cause of Protestant Britain. His death was immortalized by Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe (1770) with a deliberate pose of martyrdom, arguably even an imitation of the pose of the crucified Christ in previous paintings.

After the war, anti-Papist rhetoric continued unabated. In the 1765 Dudleian Lecture at Harvard, a prestigious annual academic event, Rev. Jonathan Mayhew asserted, “We ought in reason and prudence to detest the church of Rome, in the same degree that we prize freedom. Her laws, more arbitrary than those of Draco, are, in effect, like his, all written in blood. Popery and liberty are incompatible; at irreconcilable enmity with each other.” He went on to emphasize that his concern was not ecclesiastical. “Our controversy … is not merely a religious one … but a defense of our laws, liberties and civil rights as men, in opposition to the proud claims and encroachments of ecclesiastical persons, who under the pretext of religion, and saving men’s souls, would engross all power and property to themselves and reduce us to the most abject slavery.” Ten years earlier, in an Election Day sermon, Mayhew cleverly said of Papism that it “transubstantiated liberty, property, religion, and happiness” into “slavery, poverty, superstition, and wretchedness.”13. Jonathan Mayhew, Popish idolatry: a discourse delivered in the chapel of Harvard-College in Cambridge, New-England, May 8, 1765 (Boston). Mayhew, A sermon preached in the audience of His Excellency William Shirley, Esq . . . May 29, 1754 (Boston).

Some scholars have argued that rhetoric about “Papists” and “Romanists” was a rhetorical device for elites—especially ministers—to pander to unenlightened masses, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary in both Britain and America. Such language was often used even by less-than-orthodox elites who happily conflated Protestantism with ordered liberty under law and Roman Catholicism with tyranny. The very popular Cato’s Letters, for example, argued against Catholic influence albeit with some Enlightenment-influenced motivations. The letters, authored by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, were first published in England and then republished in America and read widely by the general public. In America, they were read and cited by influential American leaders like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Trenchard and Gordon argued that “tricks and juggles of heathen and popish priests” made it impossible for people to exercise independent judgment. Furthermore, in a passage less inclusive than Tennent’s, they yoked Popery and Islam together, “When people are taught to reverence butchers, robbers, and tyrants, under the reverend name of rulers, to adore the names and persons of men, though their actions be the actions of devils: Then here is a confirmed and accomplished servitude … secured by the servitude of the mind, oppression fortified by delusion. This is the height of human slavery. By this, the Turk and the Pope reign.”14. For the thesis of elites vs the masses, see Francis Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Greenwood Press, 1995). For statements from Cato’s Letters, see John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters or Essays on Liberty Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects (Liberty Fund, 1995), 2:573, 907. Anti-Catholic rhetoric was not a device confined to the pulpit.

America Abandons the Protestant Cause?

As the split between colonists and England widened, Americans maintained their Catholic conspiracies. One primary concern of Americans leading into the War of Independence was the 1774 Quebec Act passed by Parliament. The Act had many different provisions, including denying land previously promised to American settlers, but it also removed the Protestant faith from the oath of allegiance in Quebec and enabled the imposition of Catholic tithes and free practice of the Roman Catholic faith. Alexander Hamilton criticized it in 1775 in his Remarks on the Quebec Bill and before that in 1774 in The Farmer Refuted. He said that the Act established “arbitrary power” and “the Popish Religion.” The Continental Congress considered the Quebec Act an establishment of the “Roman Catholick Religion,” abolition of the “equitable system of English laws,” and the erecting of tyranny. In their appeal to the people of Great Britain against the Quebec Act, Congress argued that European immigrants to Canada would be “fit instruments . . . to reduce the ancient free Protestant Colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves.” Thomas Jefferson responded to Lord North’s peace proposal in 1777 with a complaint that it did not repeal the 1774 Quebec Act’s changes to the “government & [Catholic] religion of Canada.” In a series of newspaper essays critiquing Britain’s handling of her own constitution in 1775, John Adams contrasted “the Reformation and Protestant religion” with “the worst tyranny that the genius of toryism has ever yet invented; I mean the Roman superstition.” After the war was underway, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) capitalized on the rhetoric, calling monarchy “the popery of governments” and complained of “a low papistical design” against America.15. Alexander Hamilton, Remarks on the Quebec Bill: Part One, [15 June 1775]; David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 55–56; F. J. Zweirlin, “The End of No-Popery in the Continental Congress.” Thought 11:357–77, 364–365; John Adams and Jonathan Sewall, Novanglus, (1819), 13; Thomas Paine, Common Sense.

Loyalists and Patriots used the terms of Protestant and Papist as shorthand legal or political terms, just as opponents in Britain had used it in controversies over the two centuries prior. For example, Boston Loyalist Harrison Gray described Massachusetts delegates to the First Continental Congress as “Jesuitical gentlemen.” Customs Commissioner Henry Hulton called Rev. Samuel Cooper (one of Boston’s most important Patriot leaders) a “smooth, artful, civil, Jesuitical Priest.” Tory Peter Oliver, in his history of the Revolution, said of Cooper that he was “Proficient in Jesuitism.” No one really thought that Cooper was an actual Jesuit. But just as Jesuits had once been the agents of Rome to subvert the Reformation and governments in Protestant lands, and therefore in England, so Cooper was likewise a rebel. Similarly, when Patriots complained of a “creeping Romanism at court” they did not suspect a conspiracy from Rome in London.16. Harrison Gray, A Few Remarks Upon Some of the Votes and Resolutions of the Continental Congress. Boston. (1775), 10; Charles W. Akers, The Divine Politician: Samuel Cooper and the American Revolution in Boston (Northeastern University Press, 1982), 82; Douglas Adair and John A. Schultz (eds.), Peter Oliver’s “Origin & Progress of the American Revolution”: A Tory View (Stanford University Press, 1961) 43–45, 61–62. They were asserting tyranny there.

By the time America won her independence, however, the anti-Catholic rhetoric had largely disappeared from the American pulpit and the American newspaper. The reasons for that disappearance began with one of the Americans’ most effective weapons: diplomacy. Americans wanted to force Britain to ration limited blood and treasure and solicited Spain and Holland to settle scores while Britain was trying to suppress the American Revolution. Neither country made a formal alliance or committed troops or ships to the Patriot government, but they did engage with British forces abroad and sent war matériel to help George Washington. France would enter into a formal alliance. The British would have to open yet another front against the French abroad and fight elements of the French army and navy at the decisive battle of Yorktown.

For the Americans, who had feared Spanish and French settlements for over a century as beachheads for Papists and Jesuits, this should have presented a dilemma to join with Catholic nations. Shrewd diplomacy won out instead, which required rethinking the conflation of constitutionalism with Protestantism. For example, a letter from the Continental Congress to Quebec’s inhabitants in 1774 invited them to join the American cause. In this letter, one can see the old rhetoric about Popery disintegrating—a point that America’s enemies in Britain gleefully exploited as hypocritical and insincere. In the letter, the Americans reminded those in Quebec that they may not be able to trust the British government with their religious liberty (granted in the Quebec Act). And besides, they argued, liberty of conscience was already God-given. Such a statement implied that Quebec would have religious liberty should the Americans have any say in it. Furthermore, the letter approvingly mentions how Swiss cantons, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, came to live “in the utmost concord and peace with one another” in the cause of defeating tyranny. Such a peace seemed increasingly possible to Americans when they encountered sympathetic Catholics in their military campaigns north to Quebec and saw Roman Catholic Patriot leaders at home signing the Declaration (and later the Constitution).17. Continental Congress to the Inhabitants of the Province of Quebec, 26 Oct. 1774. Letters were also sent in 1775 and 1776. A strong bias against and fear of Catholics persisted in America for almost two centuries after the Revolution, especially in the nativist movement, but did not result in a two-tiered approach to rights as existed for British Catholics.

Other vestiges of the campaign against Popery collapsed under the expediency of the war effort. George Washington banned Guy Fawkes Day celebrations as Commander in Chief in 1775 and enjoined Benedict Arnold to protect free exercise of religion in his army’s expedition to Canada. Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland passed acts of religious toleration in 1776. In a subtle reference to the Quebec Act, the Declaration of Independence ignored the religious association of Romanism and tyranny and instead merely indicts “abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province.” Even Protestant Bostonians eventually converted their version of Guy Fawkes Day (“Pope’s Day”) into a celebration of the alliance with France. No one abandoned the Protestant cause as a constitutional cause, however, even if they stopped calling it Protestant.

Lessons for Today: Is America a People or an Idea?

What should we make of all this today? Can we speak coherently of America as a people? If so, who are those people? The conception of a “Briton” was always centered more on conviction than on shared experience or culture. Neither Britons nor Americans had a shared experience or culture to share. Welsh or Scots, for example, were not English. None of the three initially thought of themselves as Britons, except in their outrage against attempts to rob them of independence. The same can be said for Americans: New Englanders did not really understand Virginians, but as Britons they were united in common cause against the enemies of Britain. Later, on the eve of independence, Patriots in both regions shared common cause against British abuses of their rights and liberties. What enabled the creation of the Briton in the seventeenth century, or the American in the eighteenth, was the preservation of a constitutionalism that flattened differences under the rule of law.

At first, Protestantism was an idea holding together disparate people in Britain and in America. It was a political conviction or sensibility. Did that conviction reflect a certain experience unique to a particular people? At first, yes. Britons increasingly marshalled around their independence from Catholic powers and proclaimed a Protestant character. Patriots in America likewise marshalled around their independence. And they called their enemies Papists and Jesuits as the British had done for generations. However, beneath what sounded like religious talk was (as it had been all along) also enduring legal and political talk. The Patriots believed that the colonies could preserve the ideals of the British constitution, including liberty under law and the protection of rights. Constitutionalism had failed in Britain but could be preserved and sharpened in America, they argued. This was the promise of the Declaration of Independence, especially in its list of grievances. The “Protestant” conviction remained, but it revealed itself to be a commitment to constitutionalism.

That commitment to take up what was thought to have failed was not shared by a “people,” however much Americans then might look like a homogenous people to us in hindsight. If the failure of the British constitution was so obvious, as it was to the Patriots, there wouldn’t have been so many Americans with the same experiences opposed to the Patriot cause. There wouldn’t have been many others ambivalent about the fight for independence. The disagreement among Americans in 1776 makes it obvious to us that presuming to be the same “people” provided no guarantee at all of holding the same political conviction.

The same is true today. To presume that a “people” will preserve a particular political conviction or practice is folly—even if they share the same experience, let alone the same race, ethnicity, or culture. Then, as now, Americans are divided. Too many are prepared to discard constitutionalist convictions, the old “Protestantism,” at the first sign of a crisis. The expediency of the moment is used to defend populist autonomy (anarchy) or unaccountable magistrates (tyranny). Outside of America, in the broader Anglosphere of the UK, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, the ancient rights and liberties of the British constitution fare even worse. The Anglosphere inherited a brilliant constitutional patrimony but did not preserve it. This did not happen because Anglo countries ceased to be a homogeneous people. Britons, Canadians, and the rest began abandoning their rights and liberties under law generations ago. In America, even those who would like to think of themselves as real Americans—those who can trace their origins to the pilgrims, founders, or pioneers, or whatever the current bona fides may be (presumed to make a homogeneous “people”)—find excuses to abandon constitutionalism and the rule of law whether from the political Right or the political Left.

It is, therefore, not enough to be a so-called people to be a nation. The ideas that define the nation must survive as a conviction. If the old people cannot hold that conviction, then it will be up to others to take it up. If we are going to preserve the most important part of civic or civil life, our belief in the rule of law and the preservation of ancient rights and liberties, we cannot presume upon the necessity or even sufficiency of a people any more than Patriots or Loyalists could presume that their neighbor had the same political convictions. But neither should we think of constitutionalism as an idea easily transferred—as one might catch a cold or recite a poem without understanding it. Common experience and conviction reinforce one another. As we consider the political promises of the Declaration, particularly its implicit promise that America would preserve rights and liberties thought to be abandoned by the Crown, let us resolve to make the Protestantism—the constitutionalism of 1776—great again.

Buried deep in the third volume of John Adams’ A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787-1788) is a curious but potentially profound statement by one of America’s preeminent founders. In the course of examining the right constitution of a commonwealth, Adams paid homage to the English tradition and inheritance. “Americans too ought for ever to acknowledge their obligations to English writers, or rather have as good a right to indulge a pride in the recollection of them as the inhabitants of the three kingdoms.”1. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: William Young, 1797), 3:209. Adams then identified three periods in English history “in which the principles of government have been anxiously studied, and very valuable productions published.”2. Adams, A Defence, 3:210. Those periods were the Protestant Reformation, the English Interregnum (1640-1660), and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.3. Technically the English Interregnum, the period between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of the Stuart Crown by Charles II in 1660—the dynamic rule of Oliver Cromwell’s republican commonwealth—is usually dated from 1649 to 1660. However, in this case, Adams specifies that he’s talking about “the whole interval between 1640 and 1660” (Adams, A Defence, 3:209–10). Adams is dating the Interregnum roughly from the beginning of the English Civil War. As a prelude to the Protestant Reformation, Adams brazenly includes Machiavelli, “who is called the great restorer of the true politics” (Adams, A Defence, 3:210). On Machiavelli’s reception in England, see Paul A. Rahe, ed., Machiavelli’s Liberal Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Of the first, Adams identified a little-known author, John Ponnet, who wrote The Short Treatise of Political Power in 1556. Of this tract, Adams makes his profound statement: “[it] contains all the essential principles of liberty which were afterwards dilated on by Sidney and Locke.”4. Adams, A Defence, 3:210.

The critical point is not that Ponnet’s tract “contains all the essential principles of liberty,” but that the works of John Locke and Algernon Sidney were downstream of the sixteenth-century English churchman and theologian. This observation has far-reaching implications for how we understand the founding of America, as scholars have long established the central role of Locke and Sidney in providing the ideas that inspired the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution. In this article, I will use Ponnet’s political theory to show his continuity with Locke and Sidney, and to argue that reconceiving Locke and Sidney—and thus the American founding—as transmitters of the Protestant political tradition, and not primarily as Enlightenment thinkers or radical Whig theorists, will help recast the American founding as an essential project of magisterial Protestantism. Importantly, I do not attempt to trace the full chain of transmission through Theodore Beza, the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, and the Huguenot and Scottish political traditions—a project for a longer study. Here, I merely establish the doctrinal continuity at the two endpoints Adams himself identified.

Locke and Sidney: The Traditional Story

It is undeniable that the American founders were greatly influenced by the works of John Locke, especially his Two Treatises of Government (1689), as well as Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government(posthumously published in 1698). Outside of the Bible, Locke was probably the most cited philosopher during the revolutionary period, if, like Adams, we date that period from 1760-1775.5. Steven M. Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 43–45; Donald S. Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” The American Political Science Review 78, no. 1 (Mar. 1984): 189–97. Citations of Locke drop off after 1775/1776. Sermons like Connecticut’s Elisha Williams’ The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants (1744) follow a Lockean sequence from the state of nature, where men are free and equal, to the creation of civil society by compact and the establishment of a majoritarian legislature. Sidney, for his part, was cited far less frequently, yet he is mentioned positively dozens of times by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, James Otis, James Madison, Jonathan Mayhew, and in many anonymous pamphlets during the imperial crisis (1763–1776). Of note, Jefferson, in a famous letter to Henry Lee on May 8, 1825, asserted that the Declaration was “an expression of the American mind” and that its authority “rests … on the harmonizing sentiments of the day” as found in the works of “Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney.”6. “Jefferson to Henry Lee,” in Jefferson: Political Writings, eds. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 148.

Locke and Sidney were not identical in their political thought, even if they are often lumped together. Scholars have often classified Locke as an Enlightenment thinker (i.e., liberal) and Sidney as a classical republican. Bernard Bailyn, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, described Locke as part of the European Enlightenment and an “Enlightenment rationalist” due to his adherence to natural rights, the consent of the governed, and the right to revolution.7. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 27–30. In contrast, Sidney has often been cast as a classical republican, with his emphasis on citizen virtue and public-spiritedness. However, the best scholarly works rightly note that Locke and Sidney both contain elements of ancient republican and modern liberal political thought.8. On Sidney as a bridge between the republican and liberal traditions, see Alan Craig Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). Sidney has also, at times, been classified as a “real Whig” or a “radical Whig” (see the discussion in Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1959], 38–43 and throughout).

For our purposes, John Adams implicitly identified the unity between Locke and Sidney: both of their works dilate upon “the essential principles of liberty.” This is unsurprising, for not only were they contemporaries in the lead-up to the Exclusion Crisis and eventually the Glorious Revolution, but, more importantly, both of their principal works (mentioned above) were responses to Sir Robert Filmer’s divine-right argument. Filmer, in his best-known work, Patriarcha, had argued a series of propositions: that kings were fathers of families, that it is neither natural nor right for the people to choose their rulers or govern through elected representatives, and that human law does not constrain the natural and fatherly power of kings.9. I am indebted to Tom West for this succinct summary (Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West [Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1996], xviii–xix).

Locke’s Two Treatiseswas a direct response to Filmer’s ideas. His First Treatise is a detailed analysis and refutation of Filmer’s patriarchal power and divine right thesis, while the Second Treatiseis Locke’s positive proposition of the origin, form, and purposes of civil government, meant as a competitive account to Filmer’s theories. Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government were likewise a direct response to Filmer in an attempt to rebuff his theories in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis (1679–1681) that pitted Protestant and Country Party Whigs against James, Duke of York (King Charles II’s Catholic brother) and the Court Party Tories.10. Filmer had written Patriarcha in the 1630s, and the manuscript had limited circulation in the ensuing decades. It was not officially published until 1680, in the middle of the Exclusion Crisis, and was distributed as Tory propaganda in defense of hereditary divine right kingship and primogeniture. Together, Locke and Sidney argued the inverse of Filmer: that political power is distinct in kind from patriarchal power; that just government requires government by the consent of men who are equal in their natural liberty; that civil law must adhere to the law of nature and nature’s divine lawgiver; that the best form of government will prioritize the popular or representative element; and that every ruler, no matter his claims to a divine donation or right, is subject to the law that also obligates all other men in the commonwealth as legally passed by the legislature (i.e., Parliament). In addition, critically, both Locke and Sidney advocated a doctrine of the right to revolution as a corollary to these precepts.

If these ideas consist of the essential principles of liberty, then, according to Adams’ assertion, all these ideas should be present in John Ponnet’s works. Neither Locke nor Sidney was inventing new political modes and orders, nor should we think of them essentially as Enlightenment rationalists or radical Whigs. Instead, they carried on and developed a political tradition much older than themselves.

John Ponnet’s A Short Treatise of Political Power: A Brief Guide

John Ponnet (1514/1516–1556) was a churchman and the Anglican Bishop of Winchester. He attended Cambridge, where he earned a BA and MA from Queens’ College before entering the ministry. Ponnet began his adult work in the middle of the intense religious wars following the Reformation, and his life was marked with conflict. He defied the ban on clerical marriage in 1548 and was married; he was arrested in 1549 on accusations of court intrigue; and when Mary I came to the throne in 1553, Ponnet and a few hundred others fled England for Strasbourg. It was from this vantage point, with indignation toward a Catholic despot on the English throne, that Ponnet wrote A Short Treatise of Political Power shortly before his death.

The treatise is divided into seven chapters and a concluding exhortation that treat the origin of civil power, absolute power, obedience and subjection to law, and whether tyrants can be resisted. It begins with Ponnet’s consideration of the origin of civil government—from what right does true political authority come? Ponnet opens with a bold assertion: that man’s reason is weak and corrupted and cannot serve as the basis for civil rule—a position that seems at odds with Locke and Sidney’s exaltation of human reason. Ponnet explains his view that it was “because through the fall of the first man, [that] his reason is radically corrupt, and sensuality has gotten the upper hand, [and] he is not able by himself to rule himself, but must have a more excellent governor.”11. John Ponet, A Short Treatise of Politike Pouuer (Strasbourg, 1556), 2–3 . Ponnet’s name can be spelled “Ponet” or “Poynet,” but I will keep Adams’ spelling with the double “n.” All citations of Ponnet are taken from the 1556 facsimile reproduced at the end of Winthrop S. Hudson’s book, John Ponet (1516?–1556): Advocate of Limited Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 1–183. All spellings of Ponnet’s work have been modernized. For any paragraph that makes extensive use of Ponnet, a single footnote will be used to show the range of pages from which the citations are taken, in the order in which they occur. If all men are equally corrupt, then who among men can serve as “a more excellent governor”? Ponnet answers that God and his law are this governor and men’s civil rule must thereby abide by God’s law.12. “Such were desirous to know the perfect and only governor of all … [and] so at length to confess, that it was one God that ruled all. By Him we live, we move, and we have our being. He made us, and not we ourselves. …He has taken upon Himself the order and government of man, His chief creature, and prescribed a rule to him, how he should behave himself, what he should do, and what he may not do” ( Short Treatise, 4). How is God’s law mediated to men? Primarily by divine revelation: “God set this rule forth in writing in the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments.” Ponnet, like many others, sums up the Ten Commandments by Christ’s two greatest commandments, “You will love the Lord your God above all things, and your neighbor as yourself,” and in the Golden Rule, “Whatever you would want done unto yourself, do that unto others.”13. Ponnet, 4.

At the same time, however, Ponnet explains that divine law and the law of nature align. The rule that God prescribed for man to guide and direct him “is the law of nature, first planted and grafted in the mind of man.” It was only after man’s mind was “defiled by sin, filled with darkness, and encumbered with many doubts” that God also revealed this rule in the Ten Commandments and in Jesus Christ. Elsewhere, Ponnet makes it clear there is no conflict between reason and revelation, for God’s laws are the name “by which … also the laws of nature are comprehended.” For Ponnet, natural law is subsumed under divine law and teaches the same precepts.14. Ponnet, 4, 22–23.

Equality and Political Power

By disparaging man’s reason and by placing all men under God’s revelation, Ponnet not only asserts a type of human equality but tempers the power of both kings and people alike. All are fallen and in need of divine instruction; none can claim a right to absolute or arbitrary power based on magnitude (majority assembly rule) or wisdom (aristocracy) or hereditary purity (monarchy). Ponnet’s understanding of men’s equality, however, was not just in their common corruption, but in their equal liberty. Men are at liberty to dispose of themselves and their possessions, but only within the bounds of God’s law in nature and revelation. In speaking of liberty, Ponnet contrasts the Anabaptists with “Papists.” The first erroneously confuses license with liberty, while the latter confuses despotism with liberty:

For the Anabaptists mistake Christian liberty, thinking that men may live without sin, and forget the fall of man, whereby … he is no more able to rule himself by himself, than one beast is able to rule another: and that therefore God ordained civil power (his minister) to rule him, and to call him back, whenever he should pass the limits of his duty. … And the Papists neither consider the degree of powers, nor over what things civil power has authority, nor how far subjects ought to obey their governors.15. Ponnet, 47–48.

Thus, a commonwealth that has too much or too little obedience to God’s law will destroy liberty. “If obedience is too much or too little in a commonwealth, it causes much evil and disorder. For too much makes the governors forget their vocation, and to usurp upon their subjects; too little breeds a licentious liberty, and makes the people to forget their duty.” Both errors will undermine the commonwealth by reducing it to “havoc and utter destruction,” but if the people are so fortunate as to live in a commonwealth that avoids both pitfalls, they will be blessed by God with peace and prosperity. True liberty, Ponnet claims, is “Christian liberty,” and true commonwealths are “a body of free men, and not of bondmen.”16. Ponnet, 47, 69.

Ponnet’s account of man’s natural liberty and equality is strikingly different from Locke and Sidney’s in that Ponnet does not talk about men being equally free and independent in the state of nature which leads to the creation of civil government by consent. Even so, in substance their understanding of natural equality is the same. All men are equal before God, all are fallen and corrupted, all have God-given reason, but sin has weakened and deformed it, and all need enlightenment and guidance from God (whether from the law of nature or divine revelation). In addition, all men possess a natural liberty that must adhere to God’s law to avoid the bondage of both licentiousness and despotism, but which is successfully exercised with the guidance of a civil law that maintains public order and virtue.17. The counterpart to civil law that trains men in the proper use of their liberty is ecclesiastical law. We do not have space in this article to explore Ponnet’s understanding of the two kingdoms doctrine of the magisterial Reformers, but it is present in his limitation of civil power to temporal matters (Ponnet, 50).

The Origin of Political Power

What does this mean for the origin of government? First and foremost for Ponnet, “all political power and authority comes … from God.”18. Ponnet, 40. However, this power is not given as a divine donation to a particular king or royal family. Ponnet argues that God “instituted political power and gave authority to men to make laws” when he gave the Ten Commandments; and that in so doing, God “gave man authority over the body and life of man, because He would have man live quietly with man, that all might serve him quietly in holiness and righteousness all the days of his life,” and “He gave him [man] authority over goods, lands, possessions, and all such things that might breed controversy and discord.”19. Ponnet, 7–8. Political power devolves from God to men, and they can delegate it to kings, representatives, and officers after the formation of the commonwealth.

For Ponnet, kings or governors will rule, but only as ministers of God—the highest power—accountable to his law and dependent on the consent of the people. “God is the highest power, the power of powers, from him is derived all power. All people are his servants made to serve and glorify Him. All other powers are but his ministers, set to oversee that everyone behaves himself, as he should towards God, and to do those things, that he is justly commanded to do by God.” In speaking of kings, the Anglican bishop asserted that there were only two types. The first are absolute kings “who alone may make positive laws” because “the whole state and body of their country … have resigned to them their authority to do so”; yet this king, Ponnet contends, “is rather to be considered a tyrant than a king.” The other kind of king is limited by the people, who retain sovereignty: “the other be such, unto whom the people have not given such authority, but keep it themselves.” Thus, legitimate kings “cannot make laws but with the consent of the people.”20. Ponnet, 52, 25–26, 28.

Ponnet held to the trusteeship theory of government: the people under God hold political authority collectively, which they then delegate as a trust to representatives and rulers. Ponnet speaks of rulers as those who are “put in trust and authority to make the laws and statutes,” and of the people as those “who have appointed an office upon trust.” Who appointed them? Both God and the people. Rulers, as ministers of God, hold their power and the people’s respect in good faith. When this is abused, however, God will judge them, and the people will lose trust. “How much more will the Almighty God abhor, condemn, and exercise His severe judgment upon them that abuse their authority given to them by Him, and deceive and undo those poor sheep of His, in whom (as His ministers) they put their trust?”21. Ponnet, 10, 107, 16. Thus, for Ponnet, civil power comes from both God and man: from God as the origin and end of political power and from men, who, as divine representatives, exercise a delegated power from God.

The Popular Spring of Political Power

Ponnet believed civil power was maintained as a trust between the people and kings, or between the people and their elected government, like Parliament. Ponnet only briefly mentions Parliament in A Short Treatise. In the first chapter, Ponnet denounces rulers who force the people to lend to them and then never repay the loan. In a possible allusion to Henry VIII’s forced loans in 1522-1523 that went unpaid, Ponnet says, “he [the ruler] causes a Parliament to be assembled as if he had been lent nothing at all, and they [Parliament] dare not displease him. To please him, they remit this general debt. This is a wicked and unjust law.”22. Ponnet, 6. It is wicked and unjust not only because it is a form of theft, but because it perverts the purpose of Parliament, which is to represent the people’s interests. In chapter two, when speaking of the people’s political authority, Ponnet argues that

Now where the people have given their authority to their governor to make such laws, he cannot break or dispense with the positive laws: how much less may such governors, kings, and princes to whom the people have not given their authority (but they with the people, and the people with them make the laws) break them or dispense with them? If this were tolerable, then is it in vain to make solemn assemblies of the whole state and long parliaments? What certainty should there be in anything, where all should depend on one’s will and affection?23. Ponnet, 27.

Note that Ponnet assumes that “solemn assemblies … and long parliaments” are representative of the “whole state.” The people may choose a king to lead them, but they are not obligated to do so. “Kings, princes, and governors have their authority of the people, as all laws, usages, and policies do declare and testify.” Ponnet continues his exposition, explaining that “in some places and countries they have more and greater authority, in some places less. And in some, the people have not given this authority to any other, but retain and exercise it themselves. And is any man so unreasonable as to deny that the whole may do as much as they have permitted one member to do?”24. Ponnet, 106–107. In saying of the people they “retain and exercise it [political power] themselves,” Ponnet may be referring to a direct democracy. Clearly, for Ponnet, the power of kings and governors (and Parliaments) flows from the people: the people may not delegate a power they do not first have from God, and kings cannot exercise a power the people have not granted them.25. This may seem confusing, but Ponnet’s basic view could be reduced to the belief that civil power in its formal and final causes comes from God, but in its material and efficient causes comes from the people. In this way, kings, governors, and representatives have political power both from God and from the people. This means, among other things, that both the people and kings are constrained by a higher law; neither can exempt themselves from God’s laws, pass a law that contravenes a divine command, or turn a moral evil into a moral good.

Forms of Political Power

Ponnet leaves it to the people to decide their form of government, but he prefers a mixed regime for the English people. Adams extolled Ponnet for his advocacy of mixed government: “this writer is clearly for a mixed government, in three equiponderant branches.”26. Adams, A Defence, 3:210. In his discussion of the form of government, Ponnet argues that “whether this authority to make laws, or the power to execute the same, shall be or remain in one person alone, or in many, it is not expressed, but left to the discretion of the people to make so many and so few, as they think necessary for the maintenance of the state.”27. Ponnet, Short Treatise, 8. In other words, neither nature nor divine command obliges or prohibits the many, the few, or the one from ruling. The form of government is prudentially chosen by the people based upon their needs and character, as well as the quality of statesmen among them.

Even so, after naming the three classical forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy), Ponnet goes on to champion a combination of the three as the best regime: “where all [are] together, that is, a king, the nobility, and commoners, [you have] a mixed state: which men by long continuance have judged to be the best sort of all. For where the mixed state was exercised, there did the commonwealth long continue.”28. Ponnet, 9. Did Ponnet think these three elements were to be weighted equally? When read carefully, Ponnet’s prioritization of the consent of the governed—of a popular basis for kings and nobles—shines through. Civil power comes from God to the people collectively, and every king and noble is accountable to the law and its purpose of providing for the general welfare of the people.

The Ends of Political Power and Equal Protection of the Laws

In his Short Treatise, Ponnet argues that every state, no matter the form, “tend[s] to one end, that is, to the maintenance of justice, to the wealth and benefit of the whole multitude, and not for the superior and governors alone.”29. Ponnet, 9; cf. pp. 40, 78. Justice entails, first, following God’s law as specified in the Ten Commandments. For “whatever God commands man to do, he ought not to consider the matter, but be straight to obey the commander. For we are sure, what He commands, is just and right: for from Him, that is, all together just and right, no injustice or wrong can come.”30. Ponnet, 52. Absolute authority in one man too often leads to breaking God’s commandments, resulting in public injustice and ruin.31. Ponnet equates arbitrary political power with the right to break God’s commandments with impunity. Thus, Ponnet concludes, “kings, princes, and governors of commonwealths have not, nor can justly claim, an absolute authority, but the end of their authority is the maintenance of justice, to defend the innocent, and to punish evil.” Ponnet’s understanding of justice was deeply scriptural, as he explicitly turned to Paul’s famous passage in Romans 13 to prove that political power comes from God and is designed to reward good and punish evil.32. Ponnet, 33, 53–54.

Second, justice also requires that all men in the commonwealth be equal under the law. Ponnet spends a significant amount of the Short Treatise proving that even kings are subject to the positive laws of their country. His argument comes in two parts. In the first part, he argues that just civil law adheres to God’s law, and kings (as well as all men) are under God’s law and bound to obey God’s commandments, so kings are not exempt from the civil law. As Ponnet succinctly puts it, “A king may no more commit idolatry than a private man: he may not take the name of God in vain, he may not break the Sabbath, no more than any private man.”33. Ponnet, 35. In short, since all men are equally responsible before God, equal treatment under just laws naturally and necessarily follows; the king cannot arbitrarily exempt himself from following the law for his own self-interest.34. Ponnet does not take up the issue of royal or executive prerogative or states of exception where the ruler might have a good reason to contravene a law or exempt himself (or others) from the law. This may be one area where Locke “dilates” on Ponnet, in Locke’s treatment of prerogative power (see John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], chap. XIV [pp. 374–80]).

In the second part of his argument, Ponnet artfully inverts the traditional aristocratic belief that allowed legal exemptions for nobles in political office due to their high status—not because justice or the public good demanded it. Political leaders are not merely private persons who may use the trust of civil power for their own advantage, but they are public representatives—they are ministers of God and represent the interests of their commonwealth collectively, and thus they should be held to an even higher standard: “he [the king] is bound and charged under great pains to keep them [God’s law] because he is both a private man in respect to his own person, and a public figure in respect to his office.”35. Ponnet, 36. Kings that do make exemptions for themselves, and in so doing cover over egregious evils (such as murder, theft, and persecution), will be dealt with mercilessly by God, for “mercy is granted unto the simple, but those that are in authority shall be punished.”36. Ponnet, 38. This is another form of Ponnet’s argument from equality and difference: all men are equal because they will be equally punished by God for breaking his law, yet each man will also receive his due given his respective station and responsibilities in life. Ponnet concluded his argument with the stirring assertion that “kings and princes ought, both by God’s law, the law of nature, man’s law, and good reason, to be obedient and subject to the positive laws of their country, and may not break them, and are not exempt from them, nor may dispense with them, unless the makers of the laws give them express authority to do so.”37. Ponnet, 46. This sentence hints at prerogative power, but a prerogative granted to a public official by the people.

The Right to Resistance and Revolution

In the final chapters of his treatise, Ponnet turns to the question of resistance to tyranny. Previously, Ponnet had argued that commonwealths must have neither too much obedience and deference toward their leaders (like the Papists), nor too little (like the Anabaptists). In speaking of obedience, Ponnet compared the commonwealth to a human person, which requires every part to function in harmony under submission of the highest, rational part.38. Ponnet prefigures Hobbes in speaking of the “sinews” of the body politic that bind the people together (“as the body of man is knit and kept together in due proportion by the sinews, so every commonwealth is kept and maintained in good order by obedience” [Ponnet, 47]). Likewise, obedience to God’s law and civil law, and thus to those in power, is paramount for the commonwealth—yet this obedience can only go so far. Ponnet was well aware of the doctrines of unlimited submission and passive resistance to the higher powers that had cowed many into submitting to tyrants, but he briskly rebuffed them.39. See Ponnet, 48–49.

Ultimately, men are responsible in their consciences before God, not to other men. Ponnet appeals to the magisterial doctrine of the two kingdoms in denying that civil magistrates have power over the salvation of men’s souls and their consciences:

Civil power is a power and ordinance of God, appointed to certain things, but no general minister over all things. God has not given it power over the one and best part of man, that is, the soul and conscience of man, but only over the other and worst part of man, that is, the body, and those things that belong unto the temporal life of man.40. Ponnet, 50.

If one finds oneself having to choose between obeying God and obeying the king, “he must seek out what God would have him to do, and not what the subtlety and violence of wicked men will force him to do.” He must not do wrong in resisting evil; nor must he submit to evil and fall under God’s judgment. Ponnet’s exhortation was to suffer for God’s sake, or, if that was too much, to flee persecution (as he had done).41. Ponnet, 50, 73–74.

Up to this point, Ponnet has been speaking of the private man and individual acts of resistance. But what should the people collectively do—could they rightfully do—if their king were to oppress the whole commonwealth? Ponnet denied that the people must suffer in silence and so be enslaved: “God does not so severely require of his people, that they should offer themselves to the prince’s slaughterhouse…”42. Ponnet, 74. In speaking of the body of the commonwealth and of the king’s relationship to the people, Ponnet rejected the medieval theory of the king’s two bodies—the belief that the king’s natural, physical body and the body politic were legally fused as one in the king’s person and under his reign. The theory undergirded the continuity of the royal line and the sacredness of the crown, but it had often led kings to treat their people as their personal property.43. This theory is explored most fully by Ernst Kantorowicz , The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). Ponnet drove a wedge between the office of civil magistracy (ordained by God and to be respected) and the person of the king (who merits conditional respect), and he elevated the commonwealth as being prior to and more important than the king.

“Without a commonwealth, there can be no king,” Ponnet declared. Continuing, he asserted that “men ought to have more respect to their country than to their prince: to the commonwealth than to any one person. For the country and commonwealth is a degree above the king.”44. Ponnet, 61. The commonwealth can survive the death of a king because the king’s body and the body politic were not mystically fused into a sacred union. The king is a minister of God, a human like all other men, and thus liable to corruption and sin. One of the king’s main duties is to be a minister of God’s wrath in punishing evil; yet if the king himself became evil and threatened the order and survival of the commonwealth, resistance to him was justified.

Ponnet listed three kinds of evil princes, of whom only the third and most egregious merits collective resistance. That evil king is the kind “that claim all their subjects’ goods for their own.”45. Ponnet, 82–85. Ponnet called this an “untruth” and proceeded to defend the right of private property.46. Ponnet, 91. Ponnet’s defense of private property—“that every man may keep his own, and none may take it from him”—was a consequence of his rejection of the king’s two bodies. If the body politic is not fused with the king’s own body, then the king cannot make an absolute, royal, or sacred claim to other men’s bodies or property. Thus, in his duty to protect his subjects and the commonwealth, the king must protect the private property of others. How should the commonwealth deal with “such a monster and cruel beast covered with the shape of a man”? Ponnet answered that “it is lawful to kill a tyrant” because it is part of the law of nature that “testifies to every man’s conscience” that “it is natural to cut away an incurable member, which would destroy the whole body.”47. Ponnet, 107–108. Ponnet argues that citizens who go along with the unjust laws of an evil king will likewise have the blood of innocent men on their hands (Ponnet, 33). Despite the fact that the king is part of the body politic, he is not the whole of it—nor even the most important part. Kings may be “chief members” of the commonwealth, but “the people [are not] ordained for them, but they are ordained for the people.”48. Ponnet, 108. Just punishment requires that the king answer for his crimes, regardless of his royalty.

Finally, as to who should offer resistance up to the point of regicide, Ponnet claims that it is both the responsibility of all the people of the commonwealth and, more specifically, of lesser magistrates: “the nobility, and those to be called to common Councils … should be the defenders of the people.”49. Ponnet, 117. Ponnet also adds that if lesser magistrates refuse to do this, then it falls to ecclesiastical authorities. In other words, the people collectively act through their other civil representatives to punish a wicked king and remove him when he threatens the commonwealth.

Conclusion: The Tradition of Political Protestantism

Ponnet was neither the first nor the most important Protestant theologian, philosopher, or statesman articulating and defending the core elements of political Protestantism that would be transmitted to Locke and Sidney. He is valuable because, as Adams notes, his treatise is short and clearly elucidates the essential principles of liberty. The tradition of political Protestantism is too long, complex, and variegated to trace in all its detail here. Yet there were hundreds of Protestant theologians, philosophers, and statesmen—if not thousands of clergy and common folk—who adhered in one form or another to Ponnet’s essential principles of liberty: that civil power originates from God and is bound by God’s law; that men possess a natural equality and common liberty; that the consent of the governed is necessary for a just commonwealth; that various forms of government are permissible, though a mixed state is often best; that the end of government is the protection of life and property, the maintenance of justice, and rewarding the virtuous while punishing the guilty; that everyone is subject to the law, including kings; and that resistance and even regicide of tyrannical kings is justifiable in the gravest situations.

John Locke and Algernon Sidney belong squarely in this tradition. As Adams himself asserted, Locke and Sidney do dilate upon—enlarge or expand—Ponnet’s ideas in certain ways.50. One of the clearest examples of this is that Locke and Sidney maintain a more popular, or perhaps individualist, means of revolution, whereas Ponnet relied more upon lesser magistrates. Yet such developments, I am convinced, stay within the Protestant political tradition and do not depart from it. While there are many legitimate differences between Locke, Sidney, and Ponnet, on the “essential principles of liberty” they do not disagree.51. For the sake of simplicity, in this essay I am passing over subversive interpretations of Locke (such as Leo Strauss’) that make him out to be a closeted anti-Christian. This would need to be addressed at length elsewhere. And if the American Revolution and U.S. Constitution owe their success to Locke and Sidney, then without John Ponnet—and all those Protestant Reformers before and after him—American independence and her founding as a new nation two hundred and fifty years ago likewise would not have happened.

Introduction

Simeon Howard’s June 7, 1773 sermon to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston, a volunteer colonial militia unit, exhorts Christians to “stand fast” in their liberty, asserting that they are obliged to resist oppression and defend their rights, especially “the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free,” which they are to employ in the service of their Savior, their families, and their own happiness. It is a bold sermon that calls men to defend vigorously by word and deed the divine gift of liberty. Howard rebukes the apathetic and remiss men who neglect to defend it, and he corrects the erroneous claim that Christians are forbidden to resist injuries and encroachments with force, while praising the courage, prudence, and vigilance of the men who cherish and protect it. Opposing the oppressor, he argues, is an act of faithfulness and benevolence.

He provides evidence from Scripture, natural rights philosophy, and history to support his claims, resulting in an argument that is highly congruent with those made by other American founders such as Jonathan Mayhew, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and George Washington. A Christian reader in pre-revolutionary America would find a strong Christian defense in support of the political theory that animated the American Revolution. Yet the sermon warrants careful consideration by the Christian today, as well, for “it has been found in all ages and places” that “unreasonable and wicked men” attempt to injure the liberties of innocents, “and that same practice is still to be expected, while human nature continues what it is.”1. Simeon Howard, “A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston,” in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805, ed. Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983), 1:186, 190. Howard here quotes Galatians 5:1 (KJV). Quotations of Howard are cited at the end of the relevant paragraph. All other citations are in line.

Howard opens with a quotation of Galatians 5:1, from which he extrapolates that, just as Christ freed Christians from the ceremonial law of the Jews, so “the inference holds good in the case of any other real and valuable liberty which men have a right to.” As men are created with agency, they are free from the arbitrary and illegitimate power of other men, and as Howard will argue later in his sermon, submitting to the power of an oppressor robs men of their ability to do the work Christ has assigned to them.2. Howard, 186.

He constructs his argument in three parts, which he outlines at the opening of his sermon: the definition of the liberty upon which he expounds, the practical conditions necessary for men to defend it, and the obligations men are under to stand fast. For the most part, this essay mirrors that structure. Howard adds a fourth part in which he applies his three-part argument to the circumstances extant in Boston in 1773. The contemporary reader would be wise to consider how it might apply now, 253 years later.3. Howard, 186–87.

Liberty Defined

Howard acknowledges that liberty “is used in various senses,” and so places parameters around his use of the word: “I mean by it here, only that liberty which is opposed to external force and constraint, and to such force and constraint only, as we may suffer from men.” This liberty is the freedom from arbitrary interference upon “all those advantages which are liable to be destroyed by the art or power of men; every thing that is opposed to temporal slavery,” be it freedom of movement or association, the acquiring, owning, and disposing of property, or the wholeness of one’s body, and like things to which men have a right. All these things are gifts from “the benevolent and impartial Father of the human race,” who has granted “to all naturally an equal right to this blessing.”

Howard, citing Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, asserts that God has provided men liberty “to pursue his own happiness in whatever way, and by whatever means he pleases, without asking the consent or consulting the inclination of any other man, provided he keeps within the bounds of the law of nature.” In the state of nature, or the absence of formal government, all men are accountable to God alone, who has provided the faculty of reason through which men are to discern the law of nature and apply its strictures to their conduct. The liberty of man, therefore, “is not a state of licentiousness, for the law of nature which bounds this liberty, forbids all injustice and wickedness, allows no man to injure another in his person or property, or to destroy his own life.” The liberty Howard describes prohibits murder, rape, theft, and, under the broad heading of “all injustice and wickedness,” other crimes and sins, including harming oneself. These prohibitions under the law of nature coincide with commands, or obligations, which Howard explains in the third part.4. Howard, 187.

Scripture and history, however, reveal that not all men observe these prohibitions. Liberty, thus defined, is imperiled by men who either do not know the law of nature or lack the virtue to restrain themselves. Extending his state of nature framework, Howard continues: “experience soon taught that, either thro’ ignorance of this law, or the influence of unruly passions, some were disposed to violate it, by encroaching upon the liberty of others; so that the weak were liable to be greatly injured by the superior power of bad men, without any means of security or redress.” Still following Locke, Howard points out that the risk of injury from wicked men “induced a number of individuals to combine together for mutual defence and security.” This view of the origin and purpose of government as the defender of natural rights accords with the consensus of American political theorists in the founding era, as does the claim that entering civil society requires some degree of liberty to be curtailed, limited to that which men “have expressly given up for the good of the whole society,” most notably in the form of taxes surrendered to fund the government and obedience to laws promulgated to protect the rights of all members of society. In society, then, liberty is bounded by both the law of nature and the civil laws of the commonwealth, which, when justly constituted, aim only at “the good of the whole society.” To summarize, the liberty Howard discussed is the freedom God has given man to pursue happiness on earth within the bounds of the law of nature and the laws of one’s civil society.5. Howard, 187–88. Congress asserts in the Declaration of Independence that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.”

To Stand Fast

To preserve the gift of liberty, Howard exhorts men to resist attempts made against it by “unreasonable and wicked men,” who are “found in all ages and places.” The train of depredations begins with Cain and continues on, such that “if from the great number of historical books that have been written, we should leave out those parts that relate to their encroachments upon one another, their injuries and injustice, most of the huge volumes would shrink to a very small size.” Given this perilous condition, men ought to prepare themselves to resist injuries “in the best and most effectual manner they can.” He offers practical steps men should take to increase their capacity to stand fast, but before preparing men for action, he provides guidance on the proper escalation of resistance. He does not, in other words, let loose the dogs of war before training men’s minds and souls for righteous and judicious action.6. Howard, 188, 190.

Determining “the best and most effectual manner” requires prudence. One must fit the means to the circumstances. As the goal of liberty is the quiet enjoyment of God’s blessings, men are to avoid violence and war as far as possible. Such restraint requires moderation to temper spiritedness, even when it has been stoked by injustice, for “both religion and humanity strongly forbid the bloody deeds of war, unless they are necessary.” Killing and destruction, the inseparable companions of war, are contrary to the highest purposes of human life and must only be employed when no other means will suffice. Howard therefore counsels man to first resist threats or encroachments through the “gentle methods” of reason, persuasion, and avoidance “if he can; and if by such means he can prevent the injury, he is to use no other.”

As Howard preached, the Americans were in the waning days of over a decade of attempts to persuade the king to restore their rights through petitions, letters, remonstrances, demonstrations, and tea parties. Other than the events that “once crimsoned the stones of the street” in Boston, blood had not been shed. The maxim to seek peace applies equally to individuals as to peoples, and if resolution through speech is reasonably to be hoped for, words are the only instruments one ought to use.7. Howard, 194, 190, 206.

Yet “the experience of all ages has shewn, that those, who are so unreasonable as to form designs of injuring others, are seldom to be diverted from their purpose by argument and persuasion alone.” Prudence decrees that moderation be coupled with vigilance to ascertain the true nature of a threat; he who seeks to rob one at knifepoint has already declared himself to live by a law other than those of God and man and should be regarded with the same degree of wariness with which one would hold a wild beast.8. John Locke, “The Second Treatise,” in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 272–74. The “unruly passion” that induces the predatory men to attempt their injustices is likely to “persist… till they have gratified” their desire. This leaves the intended victim with the alternatives of resistance or, through surrender, “to be robbed of his liberty or his life.”

The gifts of God are not so lightly to be surrendered, Howard argues: “Nature certainly forbids this tame submission and loudly calls for a more vigorous defence.” The right to life is accompanied by the duty to self-preservation, “one of the strongest” and most “universal” principles of human existence. It allows for “every thing that is necessary to self-defence,” including “opposing force to force, and violence to violence.” This corollary is so clear that Howard says he “need not attempt to prove it,” but he still does, responding to unnamed objectors who claim that Christianity “forbids all violent resisting of evil, or defending ourselves against injuries in such a manner as will hurt, or endanger those who attack us.” How, after all, can the Prince of Peace countenance war?9. Howard, 190–91.

John the Baptist does not instruct the soldier in Luke 3:14 to cease his profession; Jesus implies that His servants would have been justified in using force to protect Him 10. Howard, 191–93. Howard cites Luke 3:14, John 18:36, Acts 10, Romans 12:18, and Revelation 11:7, 12:7, 14:19–20, 17:14, and 19:14–21. He had sought to establish a temporal kingdom; Peter, whom God had commanded the centurion Cornelius to seek and hear, does not forbid practicing arms; Paul instructs the Romans to seek peace as much as it is within their power, leaving room for war if higher obligations require it; and several passages in Revelation prophesy that Christians will fight and defeat Christ’s enemies “by an amazing slaughter of their persecutors.” Christ and His apostles, presented with opportunities to produce a general condemnation of war and violence, do not.

Still, other New Testament passages seem to condemn violence, especially “our Saviour’s own words in his sermon on the mount. I say unto you that ye resist not evil—love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, etc.,” and Paul’s instructions that one ought “recompence to no man evil for evil.—Avenge not your selves.” Howard examines these passages and provides four points to explain the true meaning intended by Christ and the apostle. First, Jesus describes “small injuries,” such as a slap, a seized cloak, and a forced walk of a mile, to which charity and prudence may command one to surrender. The price of using violence to remedy these insults and petty depredations outweighs the cost of the injuries. “But it does not follow,” Howard claims, “that because we are forbidden to resist such slight attacks, we may not defend ourselves when the assault is of a capital kind.”

When Christ provides discrete examples, His disciples should not extrapolate to create an inapt universal precept. Just as Christ’s command to “give to him that asketh thee” should not be taken to mean “to give to every idle fellow all he may think fit to ask,” neither should Christ’s admonition be taken as a universal prohibition against violent defense of self and others. Further, the use of force to defend oneself “is a quite different thing from rendering evil for evil.” The use of force to defend against serious injuries, when other means have proven or are reasonably thought to be inadequate, comes from the intent to preserve one’s “own happiness,” not “malice and revenge.” The defender seeks to avoid the hurt himself, not to injure the assailant; if the assailant is hurt, it comes not from “ill will” against him. Indeed, Howard argues, “necessary self-defence, however fatal it may prove to those who unjustly attack us, implies no principle inconsistent with that love to our enemies which Christ enjoins.” While engaging in defense, one may nevertheless “bear good-will towards them, wish them well, and pray God to befriend them: All which we doubtless ought to do in respect to our bitterest enemies.” This framework considers the obligations one has to God, to oneself as an agent of God, and to one’s enemy. The Christian obligation to love one’s neighbor requires actions appropriate to meet the threat with the least cost and the proper inward disposition toward the attacker.11. Howard, 193–94. Howard cites Matthew 5, Romans 12:17, 19.

Though one may turn to violence too quickly, through deficient courage and vigilance one may also fail to use violence when necessary. Howard expands the principles of an individual acting in self-defense to include a collection of individuals, which also expands the beneficiaries of standing fast from the individual worthily preserving his own happiness to the courageous people defending their weaker neighbors and other innocents. Good men must be willing to do what is necessary, and so an admonition against remissness is warranted. In a passage that anticipates the claim in the Declaration of Independence that “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves,” Howard warns that “a people may err by too long neglecting such means, and shamefully suffer the sword to rust in its scabberd when it ought to be employed in defending their liberty.” Should they become complacent or timid, submitting to the “unjust demands” of a “grasping and oppressive power,” their liberty will be sapped bit by bit until it “is irrecoverably gone.”

The people should resist the first unjust encroachment offered by such power, even at the cost of war, which “though a great evil, is ever preferable to such concessions, as are likely to be fatal to public liberty.” Just as the knife-wielding thief might proceed from armed robbery to rape or murder, the oppressive power might begin with slight but unjust economic usurpations and proceed to more severe forms of depredation. Howard exhorts men to prevent such escalation by resisting the first encroachment with appropriate force.12. Howard, 194–95.

As he encourages the use of force when it becomes necessary, Howard also counsels men to “set reasonable bounds,” lest they cease to be the innocent party and “become as guilty as their first aggressors.” The goals of resistance are “nothing more than repelling the injury, obtaining reparations for damages sustained, and security against future injuries.” Though violence may be warranted in response to the threat or reception of injury, a people is not entitled to a disproportionate response. Violence, like all human action, remains governed by the law of nature and follows the maxim Howard provided for all resistance: no more than is necessary. With violence thus governed by reasonable bounds and clear ends, the sermon shifts to preparing a people to stand fast.

Here, Howard describes the conditions required for men to be ready to stand fast. Fond of practical lists, both easy to apprehend and simple to remember, he provides five points for political and martial readiness. The first three interlock seamlessly: a people ought to “endeavor to be united and at peace among themselves,” “cultivate a general disposition to submit to government,” and “take care that their internal government be free and easy.” Tyrants, “sensible of” Christ’s maxim that “every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation,” muse on their designs to “first divide the people… into parties” and “then easily bring them under our power.”

The people should avoid petty factions so they remain ready to unite in the common defense. Like disunity, rebellion, and sedition, animated by what Locke deems “every little mismanagement in publick affairs” and the Declaration calls “light and transient causes,” undermine the ability of government to protect its citizens, as well as violate Howard’s principle of proportionate response. Citizens should recur to the tools of reason and persuasion, not sedition, to resolve minor inconveniences and mistakes by the government, and support their defender in its primary purpose. To help prevent civil errors, they should participate in their government, which promotes “a spirit of liberty” and invests them in the defense of their society. In turn, the government should not lay “unreasonable burdens and restraints” upon the people, lest their taxes and chains smother the people and prevent them from becoming “valiant and martial.” This point about citizen valor and martial character introduces the next—and perhaps most shocking—condition of readiness to stand fast.13. Howard, 195–97.

Howard asserts that “a people who would stand fast in their liberty, should furnish themselves with weapons proper to their defence, and learn the use of them.” He does not mention the duties of the government here, instead asserting that the people ought to arm “themselves” with “weapons proper to their defence” and “learn the use of them.”14. Howard, 197.

By arming themselves, the ability of the people to perform their duty to preserve themselves and others does not depend on the beneficence, competence, or justice of their rulers alone. They will have the equipment necessary to assist their government in protecting the liberty of its citizens from foreign adversaries and domestic criminals, and they will possess arms sufficient to oppose the government if it forsakes its purpose and turns to tyranny.

The prudence of the people will determine what types of arms they should acquire. They should put themselves on as equal a footing as possible with the threats they could face, which means, to the extent that they can, matching the equipment of foreign enemies and their own government. This sermon, being delivered to a volunteer citizen artillery militia, provides a clue as to the discernment of Americans concerning preparedness to perform their defensive duties. Finally, acquisition and possession of appropriate arms prove necessary but not sufficient. The people must be skilled in their use; they must train to fight.

A people may be reluctant to learn how to fight. Howard says that they must overcome their hesitation and prepare for the real threat posed by human wickedness. Though a people may wish to practice piety, virtue, and commerce in peace and freedom, following the commandment not to covet anything of another’s, the condition of man, as described in Scripture and borne out in history, necessitates martial preparedness:

It is indeed an hard case, that those who are happy in the blessings of providence, and disposed to live peaceably with all men, should be obliged to keep up the idea of blood and slaughter, and expend their time and treasure to acquire the arts and instruments of death. But this is a necessity which the depravity of human nature has laid upon every state. Nor was there ever a people that continued, for any considerable time, in the enjoyment of liberty, who were not in a capacity to defend themselves against invaders, unless they were too poor and inconsiderable to tempt an enemy.

This visceral passage builds upon the case Howard has constructed thus far, challenging Christians to eschew squeamishness and prepare themselves for the harsh duties which may be required of them to preserve peace. Better to comprehend and prepare for the arts of blood and slaughter, to know what fighting and killing really mean, in times of peace than to hope to rise to the occasion under duress.15. Howard, 197–98.

The difficulty of acquiring the military art and preparing for the severity of war tempts many peoples to rely on “a STANDING ARMY: a number of men paid by the public” for their defense. Rather than risk both the sin of injudicious application of violence and the harm they may incur in battle, they pay professionals. Howard discourages this due to the tendency for vice to proliferate among professional soldiers and the risk they pose to the people, should the ruler who employs the soldiers call upon them to assist him in “oppressing and enslaving” the people. A “safer way” is to lodge the means of defense “in the body of the people, to a well-regulated and well-disciplined militia.”

The people have the common good in mind, as it is their own lives, property, families, and neighbors they shall be called upon to protect. This strong incentive, coupled with the rigors of their ordinary occupations, such as farming, produces the “strength of body and firmness of mind” necessary to oppose oppressors. To prevent lassitude on the one hand and anarchic vigilantism on the other, the people should make the militia subject to the government. Americans in general agreed with this position and lodged the powers to raise, train, equip, and call forth the militia in Congress, the executive, and the states.16. Howard, 197–200. Article I, sec. 8; Article II, sec. 2. Congress further defined these powers with two militia laws in 1792 and numerous other laws thereafter.

Maintaining “the general practice of religion and virtue” stands as the fifth and final condition necessary for a people to stand fast in their liberty. Against those who claim Christian hope for bliss in the next life saps their will in this life, Howard claims that “the truest fortitude is ever to be found where the passions and affections are in subjection to the laws of God,” while hope of His “favour will naturally inspire a brave and undaunted resolution” in war.

In summary, Howard recommends that a people equip themselves to stand fast in their liberty by seeking national unity, supporting a free government, participating in the politics of their society, arming and training themselves, and cleaving to religion and morality. These sentiments were already circulating in Boston and throughout the colonies, and they would come to fruition as the Americans formed their own congress in 1774, began fighting for the restoration of their rights (after a decade of petitions) in 1775, and ultimately declared their independence. Howard anticipates these developments in his closing, but first explains the specific duties which impel men to stand fast in their liberty.

Obligations

Having defined liberty, justified the defense of it with evidence from scripture and political philosophy, and explained the conditions conducive to resisting encroachment, Howard turns to the “obligations men are under to defend that liberty which providence has conferred upon them.” Here is the heart of the sermon, in which the theoretical arguments that precede mature into the duties Christian men fulfill to God, themselves, their families, posterity, and mankind.17. Howard, 201.

Men owe their first duty to God. Here Howard includes himself by use of the first-person plural, arguing that liberty is “a trust committed to us by heaven: we are accountable for the use we make of it.” They are to avoid the example of the servant “in our Lord’s parable” who wasted the talent his master had provided. As liberty is a gift of greater worth than a talent, he who through inattention, indolence, or cowardice, suffers it to be wrested from him, is little less criminal. Should a person, for instance, whose ability and circumstances enable him to do good in the world, to relieve his distressed brethren, and be an example of charity and other virtues, tamely yield up all his interest and become an absolute slave to some unjust and wicked oppressor, when he might by a manly resistance have secured his liberty, would he not be guilty of great unfaithfulness to God, and justly liable to his condemnation?

The first obligation men are under to stand fast in their liberty, then, is to God, who bestows the gift of liberty with the expectation that men will use it to do His work. For those men with the ability to maintain their liberty, and with it their capacity to do good, help their neighbors, and demonstrate charity, the virtues of courage, vigilance, justice, and prudence coincide with obedience. The cultivation of these virtues creates opportunities for men to love their neighbors. Strong, free, prosperous men can make judicious use of their property to feed the hungry and clothe the naked; they can make use of their power to enforce justice and defend the weak. Surrendering their liberty to oppressors, on the other hand, reduces their capacity to do good and puts them at risk of becoming “ministers of sin through the compulsion of their masters,” meaning they could be impressed into service of an unjust regime that persecutes and exploits the poor and lowly. Standing fast in liberty is therefore an act of obedience that facilitates protection of the weak, almsgiving, and upholding justice while impeding acts of sin.18. Howard, 201.

After expounding on the duty to God, Howard turns to the intertwined duties to oneself and family. Men are bound to preserve themselves and take care of their temporal happiness, which, though it requires compliance with other duties, is most readily attained through the proper use of liberty. Submission to oppressors, on the other hand, exposes one to “every evil that the malice of man and devils can inflict.” By preserving his liberty, including his life and property, a man maintains his ability to fulfill his duties to those in his care, as “every man is bound both by the law of nature and revelation to provide in the best manner he can, for the temporal happiness of his family,” who depend on him for their safety, education, and prosperity.19. Howard, 202.

Howard pays special attention to the inheritance of future generations. While expressing gratitude “for the care our progenitors took for us,” he entreats men “in the best manner we can, to provide for the happiness of posterity.” He, like Washington, who uses the same phrase in his July 2, 1776 General Orders, anticipates the “unborn millions” whose fate will depend, in part, on the courage or cowardice of their ancestors.20. Washington writes to his troops that “the fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army.” George Washington, “General Orders, July 2, 1776,” in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 5, 16 June 1776–12 August 1776, ed. Philander D. Chase (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 180. This is an obligation laid upon men by their Creator: “Heaven has made us their guardians, and intrusted to our care their liberty, honour, and happiness.” He said earlier the fell deeds of “blood and slaughter” are difficult for faithful, content, peaceful men to contemplate. What better could induce those men to shoulder their rifles than the prospect of innocent infants and children subjected to “the iron scepter of tyranny?”21. Howard, 202.

Finally, having explained the foregoing obligations, Howard notes that resisting the oppressor serves the “happiness of mankind in general” by weakening the strength of evil men. Every wound inflicted by the righteous upon the wicked reduces their ability to extend their cruelty. “It is therefore an act of benevolence,” Howard says, “to oppose and destroy the power which is employed in injuring others,” especially since abandoning the helpless to the “slavery” that is “subjection to wicked men” exposes them to the “temptations of vice” and “the loss of all virtue and religion.”22. Howard, 202. Howard cites the confirmation of “experience,” which he fortifies with poetry: “The conqer’d also, and inslav’d by war shall with their freedom lost all virtue lose and fear of God,” from Paradise Lost.

In sum, Howard presents a broad and comprehensive case that men have “not only the right but the duty to defend that liberty, with which providence has made them free.” Freedom is to be enjoyed, yet equally to be protected. In doing so, men may act in fulfillment of the summary of the law.

Present Considerations

Howard approaches his conclusion, as good preachers ought to do, with observations about the circumstances of the day, to which the faithful may apply his lessons. He warns “all,” but clearly means the king, “against invading the liberty of others,” lest “he” put “himself into a state of war.” He encourages the Christian minister to inculcate “upon his hearers” the “duty for men to resist encroachments,” without filling “the minds of people with groundless prejudices against their rulers,” but showing them “their real danger” and exhorting “them to such exertions as are necessary to avoid it.”

He then exhorts the people to possess the “arts of war” and praises the militia for the preparation they have done to this end, dismissing the conceit that America’s geographical advantages and the protection of Great Britain make American arms superfluous. He offers the pregnant warning that even if Great Britain’s protection can be counted upon, and gathering evidence suggests that it cannot, “it would be shameful for so numerous a people as this, and a people of so much natural strength and fortitude, to be, thro’ inattention to the art of war, incapable of bearing a part in their own defence.” Americans should instead prepare to defend themselves, aspiring to attain the “military skill and valour” of Alexander and Caesar, though they should “detest the principles from which they acted,” which led them to become “public robbers and murderers.” Without himself fomenting armed rebellion, Howard challenges his “hearers” to examine their condition and consider what they may be obliged to do.23. Howard, 203–08.

He concludes with two bracing paragraphs. The first reminds Americans that “religion is the main concern of man, and a necessary qualification for a good soldier.” Christianity, Howard argues, “beyond any thing else, inspires with the love of liberty, with fortitude and magnanimity; and this alone can enable them to meet death with a rational composure and tranquility of mind, which is an enemy before which the bravest soldier must fall at last.” Knowledge of death with assurance of salvation provides the best chance for man to perform with excellence in the face of the terrors of war. But though Howard earlier listed virtue and religion as indispensable conditions for standing fast, their primary purposes are not instrumental. Religion is, of course, man’s most important pursuit. With his final words, he points to a more valuable kind of liberty… a liberty, which consists in being free from the power and dominion of sin, through the assistance of the divine spirit, concurring with our own pious, rational and persevering endeavors. Whatever our outward circumstances may be, if we are destitute of this spiritual liberty, we are in reality slaves, how much soever we may hate the name; if we possess it we are free indeed; And our being free in this sense, will give us the best grounds to hope for temporal freedom, through the favour of heaven; and, at length, gain us admission into the regions of perfect and uninterrupted liberty, peace and happiness.

Howard’s sermon exhorts Christian men, and specifically his American audience, to use the gifts of God well: to defend them bravely, balancing the urgency of temporal life, with its duties, toils, and happiness, with the eternal goal of man.24. Howard, 208.

Introduction

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a fitting occasion to reflect upon one of the defining features of America: religious liberty. As an American Presbyterian myself, I am especially interested in how mainline Presbyterians negotiated the terrain of religious liberty in America, particularly from the Founding through Reconstruction. In many ways, Presbyterians and religious liberty are strange bedfellows. There is a reason why Jefferson despised the former out of his love for the latter. The “threatening cloud of fanaticism” must be “owing to the growth of Presbyterianism.” He described Presbyterians as “advocates impatient of reasoning, irritable & prone to denunciation.” The harmony between the various denominations did not exist where “Presbyterianism prevails undividedly” because their “ambition and tyranny would tolerate no rival if they had power.” Jefferson perceived the Presbyterians as “systematical in grasping at an ascendancy over all other sects.”1. Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, November 2, 1822. Jefferson may be forgiven for his prejudices. Historically, Presbyterians were known for their intolerance. One need only read Rutherford’s A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience to see why “Presbyterian” might have taken the form of a swear-word in Jefferson’s vocabulary.

John Witherspoon

In reality, various strands of American Presbyterians held a diversity of views. It is true that some dissenting Presbyterians could not be unreasonably charged with fanaticism. These dissenters opposed the early republic’s settlement on religion in the strongest terms, refusing to vote or hold offices that required an oath to the Constitution. “Since Messiah is the Prince of the kings of the earth,” preached James Renwick Willson, “the national constitution is sinful, in refusing this allegiance.”2. James Renwick Willson, “Prince Messiah’s Claims to Dominion Over All Governments: And the Disregard of His Authority by the United States in the Federal Constitution” (1832), 23. Wilson would often use his prayers before the New York Legislature to advance his opposition in the most strident terms. In response, the Legislature banned him from praying before their assemblies—and Wilson was burned in effigy before the State House door.3. W. Melancthon Glasgow, History of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in America (Hill & Harvey, 1888), 726. However, the Southern Presbyterians of Virginia supported Jefferson’s arrangement with their Hanover Memorials, declaring “there is no argument in favor of establishing the Christian religion but what may be pleaded, with equal propriety, for establishing the tenets of Mahomed.”4. Charles F. James, Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia (J.P. Bell Company, 1900), 223. However, the majority position—at least among the mainline Presbyterians of the Middle States—was articulated by men like John Witherspoon, Founding Father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Witherspoon did not deny the permissibility (and even desirability) of state-established churches. However, he also affirmed that such churches must be established according to republican principles. In his words:

Many are of opinion, that, besides all this, the magistrate ought to make public provision for the worship of God, in such manner as is agreeable to the great body of the society; though, at the same time, all who dissent from it are fully tolerated. And, indeed, there seems to be a good deal of reason for it.5. The Works of John Witherspoon (1815), 7.121.

To those who decried established churches as anti-Christian, Witherspoon said:

I do not see how this sentiment can be supported, either from Scripture or reason, as it would seem to make it impossible for the kingdoms of this world, to become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ, or for kings to become nursing fathers, and queens nursing mothers to the church; but so far I shall readily admit, that an intolerant establishment, and all tyranny over the conscience, partakes of an anti-Christian spirit.

Moreover, he affirmed the necessity of the magistrate to set a positive example of piety and promote true religion among the people, but he also asserted the duty of the magistrate to “defend the rights of conscience” and “tolerate all in their religious sentiments.” Nevertheless, “in all polished nations,” there are punishments for transgressions of the “moral laws,” even transgressions “against God.”6. Witherspoon, Works, 8.726, 7.125.

Witherspoon’s position was codified in the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA). On the one hand, the mainline Presbyterians declared that they did not “even wish to see any religious constitution aided by the civil power, further than may be necessary for protection and security, and, at the same time, equal and common to all others.”7. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America Containing the Confession of Faith, the Catechisms, the Government and Discipline, and the Directory for the Worship of God (Synod of New York and Philadelphia, 1788), CXXXIV. Moreover, “as nursing fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest.” The Constitution also affirmed protection for non-Christians:

It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual manner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretence of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury to any other person whatsoever.

Nevertheless, the American government was recognized as a “Christian government.” The magistrate was also saddled with the duty to “maintain piety” among the people “according to the wholesome laws of each commonwealth.” It even included in its exposition of the Lord’s Prayer the petition that the church be “countenanced and maintained by the civil magistrate,” a phrase which suggested state financing. Indeed, the Constitution went even further, affirming that magistrates—along with all men—were commanded by the Second Commandment to disapprove, detest, and oppose “all false worship,” and even remove it along with “all monuments of idolatry.”8. The Constitution, 35, 79, 105, 213. However, Witherspoon and his Presbyterian compatriots no longer required ministers to affirm that “tolerating a false religion” is a sin.9. Compare The Constitution pages 79-80 with the original version of the Westminster Confession. As we will see below, future generations of American Presbyterians would face pressure to clarify how these apparent tensions may be synthesized into a coherent public policy. However, at the time, the Constitution of the PCUSA was seen as conciliatory and received without controversy, with a few exceptions. The dissenting Presbyterians, zealous for an official recognition of Christ’s Lordship over the federal government, continued their protest, declining to join the new national Presbyterian church. They remained separate from the mainline, but national crises in the future would bring dissenters and mainliners together into a political coalition.

The Constitution and Disestablishment

One may still wonder how the Constitution of the PCUSA did not spark further controversy. By modern standards, it appears quite illiberal, failing to reach the heights of religious liberty envisioned by the Founders. However, this assessment betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the religious settlement of the early American republic. Justice Joseph Story proves helpful in this regard. Story was nominated to the Supreme Court by James Madison in 1811. In 1832, Story published an influential commentary on the United States Constitution, including a discussion of the original meaning of the First Amendment. In this commentary, Story distinguishes between three different types of religious establishments:

Three cases may easily be supposed. One, where a government affords aid to a particular religion, leaving all persons free to adopt any other; another, where it creates an ecclesiastical establishment for the propagation of the doctrines of a particular sect of that religion, leaving a like freedom to all others; and a third, where it creates such an establishment, and excludes all persons, not belonging to it, either wholly, or in part, from any participation in the public honors, trusts, emoluments, privileges, and immunities of the state.10. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1833), 3.723.

After Independence, different states took different positions along the spectrum of these views. The cases where religious toleration and liberty were secured are well known. Here, it is worth noting the more illiberal elements.11. For a discussion of the history of the various state constitutions, see Carl Esbeck and Jonathan Den Hartog, Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833 (University of Missouri, 2019). Some states, like Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, required a simple confession of Christian faith in order to serve in public office. Other states, like Georgia, required all representatives to be Protestant. In New England, states like Massachusetts established Congregationalism as the official church of the state. New Jersey went so far as to only guarantee civil rights to Protestants. Until 1790, South Carolina only offered toleration to religious societies that were monotheistic, acknowledged a future state of rewards and punishments, and believed that God must be worshiped in public. Along similar lines, Connecticut had an especially strict law against blasphemy on the books, though the extent of its enforcement is unclear. If you had been taught Christianity, but you were then convicted of teaching, speaking, or writing in favor of atheism, anti-Trinitarianism, polytheism, or denying the truth of Christianity or the authority of the Scriptures, you would be “incapable to have or enjoy any offices or employments, ecclesiastical, civil or military, or any part in them, or profit by them: And the offices, places and employments enjoyed by such persons at their conviction, shall be void.” Moreover, if you were convicted a second time, then you would be “disabled to sue, prosecute, plead, or maintain any action or information in law or equity; or be guardian of any child, or executor of any will, or administrator of any estate.”12. The Public Statute Laws of the State of Connecticut (The General Assembly, 1808), 296.

In short, there was diversity among the various states regarding how religion ought to be regulated by the state. Moreover, debate was passionate, ongoing, and unsettled. The purpose of the First Amendment, then, was to ensure that those disputes did not rise to the federal level and fracture the federated union. Congress would be forbidden from passing any laws related to a religious establishment or prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Those powers (according to the Tenth Amendment) would remain with the states.

Even Thomas Jefferson acknowledged this reading of the First Amendment in his second inaugural address:

In matters of religion, I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the constitution independent of the powers of the general government. I have therefore undertaken, on no occasion, to prescribe the religious exercises suited to it; but have left them, as the constitution found them, under the direction and discipline of state or church authorities acknowledged by the several religious societies.13. Thomas Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805.

This reading of the First Amendment has significant import. It was not intended to make the government (federal or otherwise) neutral on religious matters. As Story notes, “An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.” Instead,

The real object of the amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to an hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.

In other words, the purpose of religious liberty as enshrined in the First Amendment was not to eliminate all state support of Christianity. As Story notes, the American colonies “did openly, by the whole course of its laws and institutions, support and sustain, in some form, the Christian religion.” Moreover, “this has continued to be the case in some of the states down to the present period, without the slightest suspicion, that it was against the principles of public law, or republican liberty.” Indeed, “in a republic, there would seem to be a peculiar propriety in viewing the Christian religion, as the great basis, on which it must rest for its support and permanence.”14. Story, Commentaries, 3.724-728.

By and large, the American Presbyterians were satisfied with the religious settlement of the early republic—and many of them championed it. In their view, America was and ought to be a Christian nation, but any legislation concerning religion per se belonged to the states, not the federal government.15. See Ashbel Green, “Obedience to the Laws of God, The Sure and Indispensable Defense of Nations” (1798).

The constitutional debates did not leave the states unaffected. The arguments surrounding the First Amendment left many wondering about the propriety of even the states exercising their constitutionally protected power to sponsor churches. Increasingly, those that had maintained their financial support of churches began to disestablish. It is worth noting that from time immemorial, the church had been (one way or another) financially supported by the state. To cut the church loose from state sponsorship was a radical move. Many Presbyterians enthusiastically supported it, but not all shared the same level of confidence in the outcomes. Archibald Alexander strikes a melancholy tone. “It may be laid down as a reasonable expectation that sincere Christians will be disposed to support their ministers,” Alexander wrote. However, “people are not generally pious in any country.” What if the people did not properly support churches with their charitable giving? Then perhaps “it is the duty of the civil authority to provide for the maintenance of religion by law.” Indeed, disestablishment was a “grand experiment,” and “awful forebodings alternate with our most sanguine hopes.” However, Alexander sensed that “we must go forward” because “to talk of a union of church and state in this country” was “folly in the extreme.” “No such event can possibly take place,” said Alexander, “until the country undergoes a revolution greater than has been experienced on this side of the Atlantic.”16. Archibald Alexander, “The Church Establishment of England,” The Biblical Repository 4 (October 1834), 543.

Under different conditions, disestablishment could have led to disastrous consequences, but at the time, the Protestant bones of the American people proved strong enough to bear the new weight placed upon them. The people did support the churches in their charitable giving. In fact, voluntary religious associations funded by charity exploded in size and number, from missionary endeavors to Bible societies.

Despite disestablishment, America remained a stalwart Christian society through its institutions, from voluntary associations and public schools to state legislatures and judiciaries. Hence, for all its wide-ranging influences, “the United States Constitution’s disestablishment did not secularize society, nor did it remove institutional Christianity from the civic, state educational, or political sphere,” as Miles Smith has shown.17. Miles Smith, Religion & Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War (Davenant Press, 2024), 1. In fact, the United States continued “protecting and even perpetuating institutional—usually but not always Protestant—Christianity through federal and state courts, state colleges and institutions, state legislatures, and executive proclamations from governors and presidents, and through state cooperation with religious institutions and Protestant divines.” In short, advocates for disestablishment resisted “subordinating the American republic to a church,” but they also “maintained Christian principles in their nation’s various societies and political institutions.”18. Smith, Religion & Republic, XXV, 2. At root, disestablishment was the ascendency of the laity over the clergy.

Charles Hodge and Joshua McIlvaine

As the 1800s progressed, two institutions, in particular, were seen as especially important: Christian instruction in publicly funded schools and laws against breaking the Sabbath. Charles Hodge, for example, was an adamant defender of both institutions. “When a state resolves that religious instruction shall be banished from the schools and other literary institutions,” he wrote, “it virtually resolves on self-destruction.” Indeed, “the banishment of religious influence from our schools is impossible.”19. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (Hendrickson, 2020), 3.353. The question was not whether the schools should teach religion, but which religion would be taught: “If you banish Christianity from the schools, you thereby render them infidel.” Hodge defended the Sabbath with no less verve: “If the Sabbath, therefore, be abolished, the fountain of life for the people will be sealed.” Hence, “If the government should disregard the Sabbath” and “direct that the custom-houses, the courts of law, and the legislative halls should be open on the Lord’s Day, and public business be transacted as on other days, it would be an act of tyranny, which would justify rebellion.” In effect, disregard of the Sabbath amounts to demanding that “the government should be conducted on the principle that Christianity is false.” By contrast, Hodge argues that “the organic life, the institutions, laws, and official action of the government, whether that action be legislative, judicial, or executive, is, and of right should be, and in fact must be, in accordance with the principles of Protestant Christianity.”20. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 343, 346-347, 356.

What explains the intensity of Hodge? While America remained demographically homogeneous in its primarily Anglo-Protestant stock, the social institutions central to its national way of life remained undisturbed. However, starting in the 1840s, the nation began to experience its first wave of mass immigration. The Irish and Germans began flooding into America, bringing with them both “papism” and “atheism.” It was these “imported atheists and infidels” that raised Hodge’s ire.21. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 340, 343.

According to Hodge, these new citizens appealed to the “separation of the Church and the State” to mount their attack against Sabbath laws. “All citizens have equal rights irrespective of their religious opinions,” so the argument went. Therefore, “it is an infringement of those rights if one class of the people are required to conform their conduct to the religious opinions of another class.” Hence, “why should Jews, Mohammedans, or infidels be required to respect the Christian Sabbath?” In response, Hodge conceded that in America (1) all citizens are equal before the law; (2) no form of religion can be established or one denomination shown preference above the rest; (3) no man can be forced to support any church or religious institution; and (4) every man has the liberty to live according to his convictions “provided he does not violate the law of the land.” Nevertheless, Hodge argued that the American government is also under divine obligation to enact and enforce civil laws that conform to God’s moral law. Moreover, America was founded by Protestants and continued to be demographically dominated by Protestants. According to the facts of the matter, America simply was a “Christian and Protestant Nation.” Hence, “the demands of those who require that religion, and especially Christianity, should be ignored in our national, state, and municipal laws, are not only unreasonable, but they are in the highest degree unjust and tyrannical.”22. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 341, 346. It would necessitate America to deny its national identity for the sake of catering to the sentiments of “foreign-born citizens.”

Hodge was not alone in his passionate defense of American religious life against its opponents. Similar notes were sounded by Joshua McIlvaine. McIlvaine was an important 19th-century Presbyterian, one who is, sadly, understudied. He was a graduate of Princeton College and Princeton Seminary, a distinguished Presbyterian pastor, and respected scholar. He gave two series of especially noteworthy lectures, one at the Smithsonian Institution and the other at the University of Pennsylvania. His longest held post was a professorship at his alma mater, Princeton College. His 1859 essay, “A Nation’s Right to Worship God,” marshalled a forceful argument for a Christian America. The zenith of the discourse is startling. He addresses the “enemies of Christianity,” including the “Jew, Pagan, Mormon, Mohammedan, or Infidel.” He says Christians will defend “with our blood” the “rights, liberties, and blessings you can enjoy in consistency with this our Christian character as a nation.” However, he notes how these non-Christians now “demand in the name of religious freedom, as a right of your consciences,” that America not conduct itself as a Christian nation.23. Joshua McIlvaine, “A Nation’s Right to Worship God,” The Princeton Review No 4 (October 1859), 695. In response, McIlvaine says:

We also have a conscience, which binds us by the most sacred of all obligations, to worship our God in our most solemn and significant national acts, and to educate our children in our Christian faith. We will defend and maintain our sovereign right to do this against the world in arms. Beware how you touch it. You cannot be gratified in this thing. Set your hearts at rest. And if you cannot rest, go form a nation and a state where you can find a place, and see if infidelity will do for you what the Christian religion has done for us.24. McIlvaine, “A Nation’s Right,” 696.

Notice the concept at the center of the dispute: liberty of conscience. In a previous generation, Witherspoon had argued “the magistrate ought to defend the rights of conscience.” He construed this responsibility as a critical means by which the magistrate may “promote true religion.”25. Witherspoon, Works, 7.118-119. Now, however, liberty of conscience was being cited as a reason why the government ought not to promote true religion. McIlvaine points out the essence of the dilemma: the conscience of one group demands the Christian God be worshiped and obeyed in all national acts, but the conscience of other groups demands the Christian God not be so worshiped and obeyed. In this conflict, the government is not free to remain neutral because religious neutrality is the point at issue. It must pick a side.

The National Reform Association

McIlvaine was a minister in the mainline Presbyterian church, but he joined with the dissenting Presbyterians in advancing a political project for which they had long advocated: a Christian amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1864, the National Reform Association was founded for just such a purpose. That same year, McIlvaine chaired the delegation appointed to meet with President Lincoln and presented to him the following amendment:

We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations, and His revealed Will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the inalienable rights and the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to ourselves, our posterity, and all the people, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.26. “Proposed Amendment to the Constitution.” See also Jerome Copulsky, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale University Press, 2024), chapter 4.

Formally, Lincoln replied as follows:

The general aspect of your movement I cordially approve. In regard to particulars I must ask time to deliberate, as the work of amending the Constitution should not be done hastily. I will carefully examine your paper in order more fully to comprehend its contents than is possible from merely hearing it read, and will take such action upon it as my responsibility to our Maker and our country demands.27. “Proposed Amendment.”

The assassination of Lincoln dashed any hopes of the President championing the amendment. However, the National Reform Association continued its advocacy, arguing for Sabbath laws, Christian instruction in public schools, and its principal objective meant to lay the legal foundation for the rest of their policies: the amendment.

McIlvaine was not the only mainline Presbyterian to join the Association. Other mainliners participated as well, including Charles Hodge and his son A.A. Hodge. In fact, the effort received enough support from the mainline Presbyterians that their General Assembly adopted the following overture in 1864:

Whereas, Almighty God, the God of nations, is the head and source of all authority and power in civil government, and nations as such are the subjects of his moral laws, and his revealed will is the supreme law of national life: whereas, the Christian and loyal people of our country are everywhere beseeching God to interpose for our deliverance as a nation from the assaults of a most groundless and wicked rebellion, and to establish and maintain the national unity and authority: and whereas, resolutions have already passed the Senate of the United States, and are pending in the House of Representatives, recommending amendment of the National Constitution in several other particulars. Therefore,

Resolved, That it is our solemn national duty so to amend our fundamental and organic law, that the preamble of the National Constitution shall read in substance as follows: “We the people of the United States, [humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations, and His revealed Will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government, and] in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure [the inalienable rights and] the blessings of [life,] liberty, [and the pursuit of happiness,] to ourselves, our posterity, [and all the people,] do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

And, further,

Resolved, That this General Assembly recommend to all the people in the congregations under its care to memorialize Congress upon this subject.28. Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1864), 315. A few years earlier, James Henley Thornwell overtured the General Assembly of the Southern Presbyterian church to adopt a similar amendment. However, he retracted the overture before it went up for a vote. See “Relation of the State to Christ” in The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell: Volume 4 (Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1873), 549-556.

Furthermore, it was not merely the clergy who supported the movement. Presbyterian Supreme Court Justice William Strong served as president of the National Reform Association. In his 1872 “Call for a National Convention,” Strong said “a nation is under obligations to acknowledge God as the author of its existence and the source of its authority, Jesus Christ as its ruler, and the Bible as the fountain of its laws and the supreme rule of its conduct.” The next year, in his 1873 call for a convention, Strong stated why a Christian amendment was necessary. He noted those who “assail the Bible in the Schools, Sabbath Laws, Laws against Polygamy, and every similar element of our Christian civilization.” They cite as the basis of their arguments “the Constitution of the United States, which acknowledges neither God nor the Bible.” Hence, “the assailants must be met at their own point of attack.” Indeed, “Shall we obliterate every Christian feature from existing institutions?” Therefore, “let the acknowledgment of God and the Bible be inserted in the Constitution.”29. Proceedings of the National Convention to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution of the United States (1873), 1-2.

When Strong’s calls for this national convention went out, they included the names of prominent men serving as an endorsement and indication of their support. In 1873, the call included McIlvaine and Charles Hodge, plus three governors and one lieutenant-governor, six judges, five public education officials, eleven college and university professors, and fifteen college and university presidents. The clergy were well represented as well with 46 names, including Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Dutch Reformed, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Baptists.30. Proceedings of 1873, 2-4.

McIlvaine was one of the strongest voices and most active members of the National Reform Association. At the 1873 convention, he gave one of the keynote addresses. He relates the idea of a Christian amendment to two other important questions: the intention of the Founding Fathers and the separation of church and state. In his words, “I do not think that the framers of it were all infidels, or hated morality.” However, “the people came from countries where the church and the state had been united in such a manner as to degrade and oppress.” In response, “the representatives of the people having such powerful prejudices guarded against such union by leaving out of the expression of the national life all reference to the church.” In this way, “our fathers went to the opposite extreme.” Indeed, “when we have taken religion out of our political life, the salt is taken away, and it is left to irretrievable corruption.” McIlvaine went even further: “When in our national acts we fail to recognize our national obligations to God, it seems to me that we sin as a nation.”31. Proceedings of 1873, 23-24. Emphasis in original.

Earlier in the 19th-century, it was the dissenting Presbyterians of the “fanatical” sort who decried the Constitution as sinful. Now, a mainline Presbyterian lodged the same accusation. The audience did not burn this Presbyterian in effigy but received his words with approbation. Judges, governors, educators, and ministers across Protestant lines desired to rectify what they now saw as an error (if not worse) in the United States Constitution. The 19th-century was a tumultuous century. Mormonism, mass immigration, civil war—all these conditions and more ate away the social fabric that had held America together as a Christian nation. By the Reconstruction Era, Presbyterians who held Witherspoon’s moderate position now perceived that it was unsustainable without a change to the founding documents of the nation. It was no longer reasonable for them to believe that Christian institutionalism (the state legislatures, the judiciary, public schools, the voluntary associations) could maintain the Christian character of America without the support of the federal government. In the words of McIlvaine: “If we admit these extreme consequences of the idea of individual religious liberty, we give the death-blow to national unity, liberty, and responsibility.” Indeed, it would “overthrow all our free institutions.”32. McIlvaine, “A Nation’s Right,” 694.

The Christian amendment would receive support from US Senators. However, counter organizations like the National Liberal League continued to combat the National Reform Association—and the opposition won the day. The amendment never made it out of the Senate.

The demographics of America had changed, and in a republic, when the people change, the laws change, often by first giving the current laws new meanings and applications before finally changing the laws themselves. On the surface, advocating for a constitutional amendment seemed like the right course of action for the Presbyterians to stem the tide, but the reason the amendment was needed was the very same reason it could not pass: the people had changed. Perhaps many of the Christians at the Founding who had argued against a recognition of God, Christ, and the Scriptures in the Constitution would have changed their minds had they the gift of clairvoyance, foreseeing the demographic shifts that threatened to erode their Protestant social order. With the requisite prophetic powers, perhaps the mainline Presbyterians who passed over these absences would have raised their voices. Perhaps both groups would have reversed course. By the Reconstruction Era, these were all vain speculations. When the Presbyterians felt they needed an amendment the most, they could not garner the necessary support.

Conclusion

We may draw a few conclusions about American Presbyterianism from this narrative of the 19th century. First, we see convictions shared between prominent Presbyterians of various stripes: mainline and dissenters, clergy and laymen. Second, these convictions amounted to an affirmation that human governments must recognize that they are responsible to God, that Jesus Christ is their appointed ruler, and that all their civil laws must conform to the authority of Scripture.33. See Fred J. Hood, Reformed America: The Middle and Southern States, 1783-1837 (University of Alabama, 1980), 88. Third, we see that these Presbyterians held to religious liberty (liberty of conscience) and the separation of church and state. But for them, neither of these principles contradicted the right of the government to instruct citizens in the Christian faith (via public schools), enforce Christian laws (like Sabbath laws), or take similar actions as a self-consciously Christian government. For Presbyterians and Protestants today, it remains for us to evaluate the validity of their arguments and the coherence of their models. Were they right? Can Christian government fit together with liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state? But before we evaluate, we must read to understand.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So reads the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, submitted by the 1st United States Congress to the states for ratification on September 25, 1789. In the centuries since its ratification, the First Amendment has come to be thoroughly identified with America’s lively and spirited political culture. Writing some 150 years later, Justice Robert Jackson would conclude that “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”1. West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. (1943), 642.

This “fixed star” has often been interpreted in absolutist terms. Justice Hugo Black—a First Amendment fundamentalist if ever there was one—famously read the Amendment strictly literally, remarking

I believe when our Founding Fathers, with their wisdom and patriotism, wrote this amendment, they wanted to ordain that Congress, elected by the people, should not tell the people what religion they should have or what they should believe or say or publish, and that is about it. It says ‘no law,’ and that is what I believe it means.2. https://www.nytimes.com/1962/06/11/archives/black-doubts-suits-for-libel-are-legal-black-doubtful-of-laws-on.html

In Justice Black’s view, the First Amendment strictly limited the interactions of church and state.3. Cantwell v. Connecticut. 310 U.S. 296. (1940); Everson v. Board of Education. 330 U.S. 1 (1947). Writing in Everson v. Board of Education, a case challenging a government scheme to fund student transportation to private, including parochial, schools, Black would argue that “In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between church and state.’”4. Everson v. Board of Education. 330 U.S. 1 (1947). In his reading, the religion clauses were primarily intended to remedy a history of “turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions.” It did so by imposing a “strict separation” of the temporal and spiritual powers. “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state,” Black concludes, “That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.”5. Everson. Justice Black’s rhetoric aside, the Court ruled that the law in question, which used public funds to pay transportation costs for students attending Catholic schools, did not violate the Establishment clause.

Black’s decision to draw on Thomas Jefferson’s language of the “wall of separation” radically reframed Establishment Clause jurisprudence. After all, the First Amendment, as ratified, only forbids Congress from establishing a religion: the constituent states were left free to establish or disestablish religion as they wished. Early American policy varied widely: once we take into account the various forms of establishment or state support for religion—including financial support for ministers, maintenance of glebe lands (tracts of income-generating property benefitting the church), control over ministerial licensure or appointments, systems of mandatory attendance or religious taxation, religious tests for office, etc.—several states extended their formal (if often toothless) establishment of religion well into the 20th century.6. This broader definition of establishment is drawn from Michael W. McConnell, “Establishment and Disestablishment at the Founding, Part I: Establishment of Religion.” William & Mary Law Review 44 (5). 2003. For a broad-ranging account of early American religious establishment, see Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church State Relations in the New American States, 1776–1833. Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog, eds., University of Missouri Press, 2019.

By the 1940s, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the substantive protections of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses applied to the states (a process known as incorporation). In the post-Everson era, the Establishment Clause was reinterpreted as a bulwark against any public or civic display of, or support for, religion. Subsequent cases in federal courts have successfully challenged the state designation of Good Friday as a state holiday,7. Freedom from Religion Foundation v. Thompson, 920 F. Supp. 969. W.D. Wis. February 23, 1996. institutionally mandated Bible reading in public schools,8. School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania, v. Schempp. (1963). 374 U.S. 203. school-sponsored non-denominational prayer,9. Lee v. Weisman (1992). 505 U.S. 577. the installation of a nativity scene within a courthouse during the Christmas season,10. County of Allegheny v. American Civil Liberties Union. 492 U.S. 573 (1989). and the erection of wooden crosses on public property memorializing slain highway patrol officers.11. American Atheists, et al v. Duncan, et al. 637 F.3d. 1095 (10th Cir. 2010). Case was later reheard en banc as American Atheists, Inc. v. Davenport.

In the wake of such decisions, many conservatives and Christians—particularly among Reformed protestants—have questioned the view of the establishment clause, preferring some form of Christian nationalist or establishmentarian regime instead. Yet these reactions surrender the First Amendment too quickly. For what has been lost in the modernist interpretation of the First Amendment is the religious origins of the establishment clause. Contra Justice Black, the religion clauses of the First Amendment did not spring from Enlightenment rationalism or the ideal of a secular public sphere freed from religious influence. Instead, they represented the triumph of a particular and distinctly Protestant (and, to be specific, Baptist) account of the liberty of conscience that rejected religious coercion while still envisioning an expansive role for religion, in which Christianity could shape public life and policy.

Few things written on the First Amendment have been as deeply obfuscating as Hugo Black’s decision to rely on Thomas Jefferson’s beliefs to define the meaning of the First Amendment. While Jefferson may have played a limited role in the fight for religious freedom, there is little reason to give his interpretation primacy. Despite dominating Black’s reading of the law, Jefferson was in France while the Amendment was debated, with his role in promoting the Amendment largely confined to occasional correspondence with James Madison. Moreover, as a rationalist and republican, Jefferson’s hostility toward religious influence in politics was uncharacteristic of the other framers—including most of those who supported the First Amendment. The Amendment was established thanks to an uneasy alliance between Enlightenment deists and the deeply religious—what Sidney Mead famously called the “rationalist-pietist alliance.” The pious—like the Baptist pastors Isaac Backus and John Leland—who supported the Amendment saw it as narrowly forbidding religious coercion, rather than barring religious influence in the public sphere. Jefferson’s view was marginal: despite his apparent attempts to court the Baptists who had allied to secure the Amendment (including his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists on the “wall of separation”), contemporary evidence shows that few, if any, supported Jefferson’s view.12. See Philip Hamburger, The Separation of Church and State. In choosing to elevate Jefferson over, say, Backus, Justice Black sided with those Enlightenment deists and 20th-century liberals for whom the separation of church and state came to represent a sort of contempt for the very religious faith—and religious influence in politics—that birthed it.

In this essay, I hope to recover the religious frame of the First Amendment, demonstrating that it guarantees the liberty of conscience while presenting no barrier to a robust Christian presence and influence in public life. I begin by charting the development of the doctrine of religious liberty among English Baptists, before demonstrating the role of American thinkers such as Roger Williams, Isaac Backus, and John Leland in providing both theoretical and political support for the First Amendment. I conclude by offering a re-reading of the First Amendment that recognizes the central role of conscience, reorienting First Amendment interpretation toward its proper—and original—meaning.

The Liberty of Conscience

The American story of religious liberty, as it is most frequently told, begins with the “Pilgrims”—protestant separatists who traveled first to Holland, then to the New World aboard the Mayflower in search of religious liberty. This congregation would have an outsized effect on the world. While still in Holland, a member named Thomas Helwys would draft what is perhaps the first Baptist confession of faith, which sets out a distinctive view of government authority. “Magistracy is a Holy ordinance of God,” Helwys writes, “that every soul ought to be subject to it not for fear only, but for conscience sake.”13. A Declaration of Faith of English People Remaining at Amsterdam in Holland” (1611). Magistrates are “ministers of God to take vengeance on them that do evil,” and as such it is “a fearful sin to speak evil of them that are in authority, and to despise Government.” Moreover, Helwys (unlike some protestants) did not declaim the possibility of Christians in government: the church ought to pray that “God would have them [magistrates] saved,” but that they may retain their civil position, “for no Holy Ordinance of GOD debars any from being a member of CHRISTS Church.”

Notably, however, Helwys limits government’s rightful scope: that the civil magistrate is tasked with promoting the “wealth” of citizens and punishing evildoers does not grant them carte blanche authority over their subjects. Instead, as Helwys argues in his 1611/1612 tract A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, “an earthly sword is ordained of God only for an earthly power, and a spiritual sword for a spiritual power.”14. Thomas Helwys and Richard Groves, ed., A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity. Mercer University Press, 1998. 35. The earthly sword, delegated by God to the civil magistrate, is to be used only to punish civil offenses: it is given only for “the well-governing and ruling of a king’s state and kingdom, which is worldly and must fade away.”15. Helwys and Groves, The Mystery of Iniquity. 39. Spiritual affairs, by contrast, belong to “the kingdom of Christ, which is heavenly and endures forever.”16. Helwys and Groves, The Mystery of Iniquity. 38–39. Though well-meaning Christian magistrates may think themselves to be serving God when they prosecute false religion, Helwys argues that they usurp Christ’s divine prerogative to punish spiritual error. Accordingly, Helwys concludes that the civil authority must remain wholly contained to civil affairs: so long as citizens remain obedient to proper civil law, “let them be heretics, Turkes, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”17. Helwys and Groves, The Mystery of Iniquity. 53.

Helwys’s distinction between civil and spiritual authorities was taken up by other Baptists, including Henry Jacob, Leonard Busher, Hanserd Knollys, and John Vernon. Several of these would become prominent figures in the growth of the Calvinistic Particular Baptists, and bring this view of the civil magistracy to the 1646 London Baptist Confession, which echoes Helwys in asserting that the civil magistracy is “an ordinance of God, set up by Him for the punishment of evil doers, and for the praise of them that do well.”18. A Confession of faith of seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, which are commonly, but unjustly called Anabaptists” (1646). Though the confession praises the “king and parliament (now established)” for “throwing down the prelatical hierarchy,” it reiterates that “concerning the worship of God; there is but one lawgiver … which is Jesus Christ, who hath given laws and rules sufficient in His word for His worship.”19. Ibid. To “make more, were to charge Christ with want of wisdom, or faithfulness, or both, in not making laws enough, or not good enough for His house.”20. Ibid. Accordingly, the confession continues, the magistrates’ duty is “to tender the liberty of mens’ consciences … which is the tenderest thing unto all conscientious men, and most dear unto them, and without which all other liberties will not be worth the naming, much less enjoying.”21. Ibid.

“A hedge of separation”

As the London Baptists formulated their relationship with the civil magistracy, Roger Williams collided with the civil magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A Cambridge- educated minister with Separatist leanings, Williams was initially welcomed by Governor John Winthrop and offered an interim post in the Boston church.22. Williams’ spiritual journey was varied: after taking holy orders in the Anglican church, he became persuaded of separatism and later helped found the first Baptist Church in America—which he left several years later. Williams, however, declined, on the grounds that the congregation remained unseparated from the Church of England. Williams’ dissenting bent soon led to trouble: several years later, he was banished from the colony. The charges levelled against Williams were many: he had called doubt on the legitimacy of the colonial land patent; he had argued that “it is not lawfull to call a wicked person to Sweare, to Pray, as being actions of Gods Worship”; he had claimed that it was unlawful to hear “any of the Ministers of the Parish Assemblies in England”; and finally, had asserted “That the Civill Magistrates power extends only to the Bodies and Goods, and outward state of men, &c.”23. Related by Williams in Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered (1644).

The distinction between the inward (spiritual) and outward (civil) state of men proved critical for Williams’ understanding of church-state relations. Williams had spent months among the Native Americans, studying their language and culture in the hopes of effectively evangelizing them. The product of this study—Williams’ A Key Into the Language of America reveals his judgment that the natives were fully capable of practicing “civility”, their pagan spiritual state notwithstanding. In fact, Williams claims that the Natives often outstripped the colonists in good behavior, writing:

When Indians hear the horrid filths Of Irish, English Men, The horrid Oaths and Murthers late Thus say these Indians then. We wear no Cloaths, have many Gods And yet our sinnes are lesse: You are Barbarians, Pagans wild, Your Land’s the Wildernesse.24. Williams, A Key Into the Language of America in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. Russell and Russell, 1963. Vol. I. 227.

Though perhaps exaggerated for effect, Williams contradicted those who viewed religious conformity as essential for civil peace. If spiritual and civil spheres are distinct, it is possible for pagans to practice civility and live together with Christians in decent political communities.

Williams conceives of the civil sphere as a wilderness in which pagans and believers live intermixed. Within that wilderness, the church is a garden completely surrounded by a “hedge of separation.” This separation was intended to protect the church from an encroaching world, rather than to preserve (as Hugo Black would frame it) the civil sphere from religious influence. The church is bound to practice internal self-discipline, casting out “idolaters, extortioners, covetous … the obstinate in sinne” just as gardeners pluck up weeds from within the garden. Yet this spiritual discipline only needs to cover the church itself, for “If the weeds be kept out of the Garden of the Church, the Roses and Lilies therein will flourish, notwithstanding that weeds abound in the Field of the Civill State.”25. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644)(Hereafter Bloudy Tenent) in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams,Vol. 3 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 187. By the same token, he disavows that “because briars, thornes, and thistles may not be in the Garden of the Church, therefore they must all bee pluckt up out of the Wildernesse.”26. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 95.

The chief error of “Christendome,” in Williams’ view, was that by attempting to maintain “their Religion by the material Sword … by degrees the Gardens of the Churches of Saints were turned into the Wildernesse of whole Nations.”27. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 184. Christian monarchs had, by unwitting zeal, “opened a gap between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world,” with the disastrous effect of flooding the church with unbelievers performing coerced acts of false worship.28. Williams, Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined, and Answered in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (1654) (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 392. This posed substantial problems, given Baptist ecclesiology. The 1646 Baptist Confession identifies the Church as “a company of visible saints, called and separated … to the visible profession of the gospel, being baptized into that faith, and joined to the Lord, and each other, by mutual agreement.”29. 1646 Baptist Confession. Article XXXIII. Much like Williams, the writers of the 1646 Confession adopted the metaphor of a garden, writing that the saints are “to lead their lives in this walled sheepfold and watered garden.”30. Ibid. Article XXXV. Moreover, “every church hath power given them from Christ … to choose among themselves meet persons for elders and deacons … none have any power to impose on them either these or any others.”31. Ibid. Article XXXVI. Not only does the church have collective authority to select officers according to Scriptural qualifications, but “Christ hath likewise given power to His Church to receive in, and cast out, any member that deserves it; and this power is given to every congregation, and not to one particular person, either member or officer, but in relation to the whole body, in reference to their faith and fellowship.”32. Ibid., Article XLII. Emphasis added.

This view of ecclesiology presupposes regenerate church membership: the “visible saints” are professing, baptized believers who have been recognized and admitted into the church by the existing membership. As Baptists interpret Jeremiah 31 and Hebrews 8 to mean that the New Covenant comprises believers only, the visible church attempts to approximate this covenant community to the best of its ability by only admitting into membership professing, baptized believers bearing the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Only then is the church itself competent to not only ordain pastors and elders but also exercise the church discipline necessary to keep the garden free of weeds.33. It is for this reason that Baptist churches must have a high view of church membership and discipline, for a church that fails to carefully guard membership and to practice discipline will be unable to exercise its authority in all purity and faithfulness. A church flooded with unregenerate members performing acts of compulsory false piety will be rendered incapable of sustaining the tasks assigned to it by Christ. This is the fundamental reasoning behind the “hedge of separation”: as Williams would have us remember, the wilderness is always attempting to creep in upon the garden; and so let not civil authorities aid it in doing so by tearing down its hedge.

Establishing Religious Liberty

Though Williams was responsible for articulating a colonial Baptist view of church-state relations, it took the herculean efforts of other Baptist preachers to see this view enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Foremost among these were Isaac Backus (b. 1724) and John Leland (b. 1754). Backus, a long-time Separate preacher, became a Baptist in 1751, eventually founding the First Baptist Church of Middleborough. Backus and a number of his followers were arrested and imprisoned for their refusal to pay a parish tax supporting the construction of a new meetinghouse for the established church. This incident—surprisingly typical of the colonial Baptist experience—lit a fire in Backus’ life. By the late 1760s, Backus began working alongside the newly established Warren Association (comprised of delegates from a number of New England Baptist churches) to campaign for greater religious liberty. Backus was quick to connect the problem of religious establishment with growing colonial discontent with the Crown, writing “the two main rights which all America are contending for this day are—Not to be taxed where they are not represented, and—To have their cases tried by unbiased judges.”34. Letter from Isaac Backus, acting as Agent for the Baptist Committee of Grievances, to Congress of the Massachusetts province. December 2, 1774. Contained in Alvah Hovey, A memoir of the life and times of the Rev. Isaac Backus, A.M. Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1859. 216. After affirming the Baptist sympathy with the American cause, he notes that the colonists complained of “a tax of three pence per pound upon tea; but your law of last June laid a tax of the same sum every year upon the Baptists in each parish … they can avoid it by not buying the tea; but we have no such liberty.”35. Ibid., 220–221.

Despite Backus’ efforts, the Massachusetts legislature proved remarkably resistant, offering little relief to the Baptists who had been forced to pay religious taxes. A few years later, as Massachusetts considered a new state constitution, Backus would propose the inclusion of a Bill of Rights, reading, in part:

As God is the only worthy object of all religious worship, and nothing can be true religion but a voluntary obedience unto his revealed will, of which each rational soul has an equal right to judge for itself; every person has an unalienable right to act in all religious affairs according to the full persuasion of his own mind, where others are not injured thereby.36. In Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism: Pamphlets, 1754–1789. Ed. William G. McLoughlin. Belknap Press of Harvard, 1968. 487–488.

Once again, Backus’ enjoinders fell on deaf ears: the Massachusetts constitution formally established Congregationalism. The promoters of disestablishment would be more successful at the federal level, however. John Leland—a generation younger than the elder Backus—was one of the most influential preachers of the revolutionary-era United States, preaching and baptizing across Virginia and the Carolinas in a largely itinerant ministry. Like Backus, Leland became involved in Baptist associational life, working to reject proposed religious assessments and to secure a bill for religious liberty in his home state of Virginia.

By 1788, religious liberty became a central topic of debate regarding the ratification of the newly proposed federal Constitution. The sizable Baptist community in northern Virginia, including in James Madison’s home county, was largely sympathetic to the Antifederalists, who opposed ratification. Elder Leland laid out his own objections to the Constitution in a letter to Thomas Barbour, Madison’s main challenger in the election for delegates to the Virginia ratifying convention. Leland begins the letter complaining of a lack of Bill of Rights, concluding:

What is clearest of all—Religious Liberty, is not sufficiently secured … if a Majority of Congress with the President favour one System more than another, they may oblige all others to pay to the support of their system as much as they please, and if Oppression does not ensue, it will be owing to the Mildness of Administration and not to any Constitutional defence.37. This letter was sent by Leland to Barbour by way of Joseph Spencer, who copied its entirety and included it in a February 28, 1788 letter to James Madison. Copy of Letter from John Leland to Thomas Barbour. www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel06.html#obj148

Despite fierce local opposition, something happened—evidence suggests that James Madison met with John Leland on the eve of the election—and the Baptist bloc supported Madison’s election to the Virginia ratifying convention, and, in turn, to the first Congress. Despite long opposing the inclusion of a Bill of Rights, Madison would himself propose a list of amendments to the Constitution, including a statement that “The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”

This proposed amendment (fourth, in Madison’s numbering), continues on to guarantee the “right to speak, or to write, or to publish their sentiments,” as well as the freedom of press, the right to peaceably assemble, and the right of petition—namely, the other rights in the present First Amendment. Madison, moreover, ambitiously included an additional proposed amendment, to read (in part) “No State shall violate the equal rights of conscience.” These proposals, historians agree, were largely thanks to the influence of Madison’s friend John Leland.

Leland’s concern for religious liberty followed from the Baptist convictions he shared with Williams and Backus. Writing in a 1791 pamphlet entitled The Rights of Conscience Inalienable, Leland would argue that as “Every man must give an account of himself to God,” then “every man ought to be at liberty to serve God in a way that he can best reconcile to his conscience.”38. John Leland, The Rights of Conscience Inalienable. Reprinted in The Sacred Rights of Conscience. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall, eds. Liberty Fund, 2009. 337. Salvation and damnation operated on an individual principle rather than by blood or citizenship, and so the individual must be left free to exercise his faith according to conscience. “If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgment,” Leland continues, “…let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free.”39. Ibid. 337. Though Leland recognizes the authority of government to restrict actions that harm others (such as religious violence), he reiterates that “the religious opinions of men [are not] the objects of civil government, nor in any way under its control.”40. Ibid. 337. This doctrine, it seems, was enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Religion Under the First Amendment

In this brief historical survey, I have gestured at how the First Amendment guarantees of religious liberty arose out of the ideas of colonial Baptists who saw matters of religious conscience as beyond the rightful purview of the state. Faithful treatment of the First Amendment’s religious clauses must recognize the key role that religion played in their formulation and adoption. In this final section, I hope to sketch a few substantive implications that arise from this retrieval.

Contra the strict separationists, no plausible and historical reading of the First Amendment’s purpose can conclude that it was meant to prohibit religious influence in politics. The “hedge” or “wall” of separation was meant to protect faith from legal coercion, rather than to restrain religion. As Isaac Backus wrote in 1773, “Religious matters are to be separated from the jurisdiction of the state not because they are beneath the interests of the state, but, quite to the contrary, because they are too high and holy and thus are beyond the competence of the state.”41. Isaac Backus, “Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty,” 1773. The Amendment itself stemmed from their willingness to not only voice religious reasons for their preferred political policies, but also their willingness to move and exert influence as a bloc of citizens and voters to secure that goal. It would be strange indeed if the First Amendment forbade the type of religious influence in politics that secured it.

In the eyes of those who promoted it, the First Amendment was in no sense meant to exclude religion from public life, nor even, for that matter, to bar public displays of Christianity. Instead, the Baptists solidly aimed at three features of the British-style establishment: direct governmental interference in areas of worship and doctrine (such as licensure and ordination), compulsory taxation or attendance, and formal discrimination between religions in civil affairs.42. Philip Hamburger, The Separation of Church and State. 180–181. Compulsory religious taxation was the issue du jour, and Backus, Leland, and other Founding-era proponents of religious liberty were more focused on ending this form of establishment than on erecting a “high and impregnable” wall between religion and state.

Though Leland and Backus differed on some particulars, both saw ample room for religious engagement in politics. Those of the accommodationist persuasion, like Backus, could still support the use of religious oaths of office, Sabbath or “blue” laws, and publicly-appointed chaplains (so long as they were supported by voluntary contributions rather than assessments). Backus’ objection to religious coercion aside, he nonetheless argued that “civil rulers ought undoubtedly to be nursing fathers to the church, by reproof, exhortation, and their own good and liberal example, as well as to protect and defend her against injustice and oppression.”43. Letter from Isaac Backus, supra note 35. 217.

Early American Baptists saw religion playing an essential role in civil affairs. Several southern Baptist associations, for instance, took issue with Jefferson’s hesitance to publicly proclaim days of fasting and prayer; others restated their view that presidents and political leaders ought to seek to obey a higher power—all of this consistent with their belief that the state ought not to engage in religious coercion. Even John Leland, who held perhaps the most strictly separationist view among his generation of Baptist clergy, clearly saw no bar to religious politicking. Leland was happy to use his influence within the Baptist community to promote particular political goals, including pressuring James Madison to support the First Amendment. In fact, Jefferson’s “wall of separation” notwithstanding, Leland preached (at President Jefferson’s invitation) in the House of Representatives on January 3, 1802.44. In one of the more delightful vignettes of early 19th century political life, Leland was in Washington for the occasion of delivering to President Jefferson a 1,200-pound cheese manufactured by the community of Cheshire, Massachusetts, where Leland pastored. Leland arrived and met with Jefferson the same day that Jefferson dispatched his letter advocating the “wall of separation.”

Contemporary religious critics of the First Amendment often echo the concerns of colonial era Congregationalists—that Baptist-style “separation” would exclude Christian influence from a strictly secular public sphere. Yet the words and actions of the Baptists themselves show no such impulse, while the First Amendment, properly understood and freed from the tyranny of strict separationism, poses no bar to the development and cultivation of robustly Christian engagement and influence in public affairs. In this one peculiar sense, however, the First Amendment represents a type of establishment: namely, the triumph of a particular protestant—and really, Baptist—account of conscience over the many alternatives. The First Amendment, it has long been said, refuses to pick winners and losers among religious sects—yet the clear winner is those that share the colonial Baptist conviction that Christianity must be free to shape civic life, while religion must be freed from legal coercion.

Which way, American man? The question is not rhetorical. At 250, a nation that has made freedom its hallmark must reckon with what freedom actually means, and that question, it turns out, admits of more than one answer, not all of them equally good.

Being American is, by any honest measure, easier to do than to define. In 2026, “What does it mean to be an American?” is a very live question. Whatever else it means to be American, freedom is the animating core of American identity, so central that America has become the benchmark against which other nations in the Western liberal constitutional tradition are measured. “Is Country X more or less free than America is?” we might ask.1. I note that I am saying this as an American. I do not mean to suggest that America is the paragon of freedom. Rather, what I mean is that America, as the sort of historic world player of republican freedom, is often a standard by which other countries are measured against.

The implications of what it means to “be free” would be difficult to examine even if there were a universal agreement on what freedom means. The perennial problem is that not only is there disagreement on what it means to “be free,” but also on what freedom itself is.

As America marks her 250th birthday, that quandary is at the heart of our contemporary political divides. Americans are more factious—that is, divided into competing factions with little shared moral ground—than we have been in recent memory, and the fracture runs deeper than policy. America cannot continue on her current path without a common moral and cultural foundation; how do states like New York, California, and Oregon continue to live in harmony with states like Idaho, Alabama, or Wyoming? How is it possible to have radically different moral and cultural frameworks and still maintain a unified identity as Americans? Or, perhaps a better question, is it possible to maintain a unified cultural identity across moral lines in anything other than a narrow, geographic sense?

In this essay, I will explore three competing views of what it means to be “American.” These views are largely incompatible with one another. My argument is that they are not equally viable: only one view, the Traditional Originalist, provides the moral and cultural foundation necessary to sustain American civil order. The ultimate question of this piece—“Which way, American man?”—is not merely for philosophic speculation. The answer determines whether America can maintain a civil order in which citizens live in harmony while retaining the freedom to respectfully disagree.

The Views Explained

The Traditional Originalist

The colonies that became the United States of America only did so through a long journey of competing European colonial inheritances. The Dutch, the Spanish, and the French all left their mark. The English inheritance, however, is the ultimate foundation for what became the United States. The early Americans (that is, those who made up the population just before and after the War for Independence) were predominantly of English descent; the Declaration of Independence itself is rooted in a principled Lockean, common-law appeal. The cultural framework, from its language to its religion, down to Americans’ preferred drink, was rooted in English forms.

Eighteenth-century English culture does not exist in a vacuum either. By that point in English history, England had been Christian for over a millennium, had experienced religious wars, and had wrestled with the emerging modern world. England, even with subtle Enlightenment undertones, still viewed itself as a distinctly Protestant Christian culture, complete with a Protestant Christian monarch and a Protestant state church. Just as the English colonists saw themselves as the children of Mother England, Protestants in America viewed themselves as the various children of the Church of England: Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and even that wild youngest-born, Baptists, all traced their identities back to Anglo-Saxon Christianity.

In its early setting, America must be understood as belonging to a very particular context, one that was broadly European (W), English (AS), and Protestant (P). While the term “WASP” has often been used as a pejorative, it nonetheless captures something true about early Americans regardless of whether they were in the North or South. America was rooted in (though not exclusively defined by) an English (and more broadly European) Protestant patrimony. Even as America expanded West and received an influx of German and Dutch Protestants, the generally English nature of the country remained.

This English tradition carries a recognizable set of political commitments: the social compact between governed and governor, ordered liberty as distinct from mere license, the rule of law over the rule of men, government by consent of the governed, and the constitutional mechanics—separation of powers, federalism, the right of revolution—that give these commitments institutional form. The classical Christian tradition, mediated through English Protestantism, provided the moral grammar within which these commitments were intelligible: a Creator God who endowed humanity with dignity, a fallen human nature that required institutional constraint, and a covenantal understanding of political community that made self-governance both possible and necessary. These were not abstract propositions arrived at by unaided reason; they were the sediment of centuries of English constitutional struggle, Reformation theology, and common-law practice, intelligible only within the context of a particular tradition.

Given all of this, I term the first view the “Traditional Originalist.” It is rooted in and wishes to conserve the generally English Protestant heritage of America. An adherent of this view does not need to be directly linked by ethnicity or religion to this heritage (one could, for example, be a Brazilian Roman Catholic) to desire to see its general conception of America maintained. We might also call this view the Principled Classical Conservative view, because such a person will be conservative in a way that is consistent with the general contours of the classical Christian tradition.

The Sovereign Self

The second view has something quite different from the first in mind, focusing instead on individual sovereignty. Something in the American character has always prized the self-made man. The vision of the pioneer going out alone, carving a homestead from the wilderness, and prospering by skill and determination carries genuine moral weight. It celebrates real human agency, honest work, and the dignity of a life built rather than inherited. This is not what I intend to criticize. What I have in mind is the philosophical extension of that spirit going beyond its proper limits; the conviction that the self is not merely responsible for its own success, but is the final authority on its own identity and meaning.

The adherents of the view I am describing prize, above all, being “self-defining.” They are distinctly Romantic in that they hold this conviction in a stylized, overly optimistic, and often naïve way. Most do not reason their way to any systematic philosophy of radical autonomy; they simply assume that personal self-expression is the highest good and that any external constraint upon it is an imposition to be resisted. The logic, if pressed, leads to conclusions its ordinary proponents would find uncomfortable, but most never press it that far.

The impulse toward radical self-definition is not uniquely American—its roots run back through European Romanticism and Rousseau’s celebration of the natural self uncorrupted by convention, but it has found particularly congenial expression in American letters. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self-Reliance” is a key transitional text: it inherits the Protestant grammar of the examined conscience but detaches it from the theological framework that had always bounded that conscience from without: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance.” (1841). The individual conscience, not inherited wisdom or received authority, becomes the final court of appeal. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855) extends the logic into lyric form, celebrating a self that refuses all external definition. Consider two rather pointed lines from the poem:

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,

The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,

This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

and

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,

And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,

And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is…3. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass, final ed. (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892), sec. 24.

The point is not that these texts are dangerous in themselves; rather, they gave the broader Romantic logic of self-definition its distinctively American register.

This same current runs through American popular culture in varied forms. Howard Roark, from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943), is the individualist taken to his limit, refusing to allow external pressures to define either his life or his work. Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” condenses the same instinct into something nearly universal in its appeal. The common thread is not any single ideology but a shared grammar: the unencumbered self as the measure of its own life.

This view, in its various forms, represents the prevailing zeitgeist (or, perhaps, the “social imaginary”) of contemporary America across the political spectrum. In teaching students, I often refer to this way of thinking as “Progressive” ideology, whether the adherent lands on the right or the left. As this view characteristically presses away from historic Christian anthropology and the moral order it sustained, “progressive” seems a fitting synonym for what I am calling the Sovereign Self view here.

The Propositional Nation

At first glance, this third view might seem merely to make explicit what the other two already assume. After all, both the Traditional Originalist and the Sovereign Self proponent accept certain propositions about freedom, equality, and human dignity; they simply disagree about where those propositions come from and what they require. The Propositional Nation view is therefore best understood not by its content but by its structure: it treats America’s founding commitments as free-floating, self-evidently binding apart from any particular historical or religious tradition, accessible to anyone willing to assent to and inhabit them. In other words, this view adheres to creedal propositions but lacks a strict traditional structure for defining them.

The historical lineage of this view is not straightforward because its key texts do not straightforwardly teach it. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration grounds its propositions explicitly in a Creator who endows humanity with rights; the claims are propositional in form but theological in foundation. Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address moves the emphasis further toward the proposition itself, describing the nation as “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” but Lincoln was not arguing that the creed was self-sufficient apart from any tradition. What these texts provided was a vocabulary—rights, equality, liberty as founding commitments—that could be incrementally detached from the theological and cultural soil in which they were originally planted. That detachment happened gradually, as the older ethnic and religious markers of American identity became first contested and then politically untenable. The process accelerated through the mid-twentieth century, as the courts systematically disentangled public life from its Protestant inheritance and the mass non-European immigration following the 1965 Hart-Celler Act made the propositional account feel not merely attractive but necessary. By that point, the Propositional Nation view had become the default answer to the question of what holds a pluralist republic together, not because Jefferson or Lincoln had taught it, but because their words remained after the tradition that gave those words their meaning had receded.

A strength of this view is its inclusive nature. Because American identity is here understood as intellectual rather than hereditary, it allows men and women from vastly different backgrounds to participate in a shared political project without necessarily abandoning their previous cultural commitments. Whereas the Traditional Originalist account would require Muslims and Roman Catholics to adopt more Protestant rhythms of public life, the propositional account only requires participation in living out shared propositions, such as treating everyone as free and equal.

Additionally, the Propositional account still retains a kind of internal standard by which American failures can be measured and corrected. Frederick Douglass appeals to the objective nature of American propositions when, in his 1852 address “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” he called on America to apply its founding propositions consistently, not only when convenient. The Propositional account allows one to use Douglass’s call to return to freedom and equality without ties to a particular traditional understanding of those terms, which is perhaps one of the view’s most attractive features.

The problem with free-floating propositions is that, while they may be objective in nature, their objective quality is not clearly grounded in something equally objective. As such, the Sovereign Self proponent can appropriate this framework too, though for quite different ends. If the founding proposition is that all persons are free and equal, the logic can be pressed into service as a warrant for radical self-definition: the individual’s autonomy becomes not merely a personal preference but a creedal entitlement. The Sovereign Self proponent who reaches for propositional language is not, in any strict sense, a Propositionalist—he is largely indifferent to the creed as a binding social compact—but he finds in its vocabulary a useful legitimation for the autonomy he already prizes. The proposition becomes, on this reading, not a demanding standard but a permissive one.

Given that this view can be employed by both objectivists and subjectivists, it has found favor amongst those on both the right and the left. Right-wing thinkers such as Harry Jaffa and, more recently, David French have argued that America is a creedal nation, defined by its commitment to self-evident truths rather than by blood or soil.4. For Jaffa’s thoughts see his Crisis of the House Divided (University of Chicago Press, 2012). David French’s view can be found in his work Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation (St. Martin’s Press, 2020). Jonah Goldberg, in his National Review article “What Trump Means When He Says, ‘America First’” touches on the Propositional Nation sentiment as a normative position amongst those on the American Right. Left-wing politicians, such as Zohran Mamdani, have suggested that “[t]he work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that work endures and it belongs to us all.”5. This was presented in speech through C-SPAN on July 3, 2026. Zohran Mamdani, “Mayor Mamdani Speaks About American Exceptionalism in America 250 Speech,” C-SPAN, July 3, 2026, video. Applying the “creedal” language, President Barack Obama argued that “newcomers embraced this nation’s creed, and this nation was strengthened.”6. Barack Obama, “Farewell Address” (speech, Chicago, IL, January 10, 2017), The Obama White House, Medium, January 13, 2017.

The underlying logic is the same in each case: the proposition, not the tradition, is what makes someone American. The two deployments differ in emphasis, however. Where right-leaning proponents treat the creed as a binding standard of ordered liberty, left-leaning proponents tend to invoke it as a warrant for inclusion, pressing the founding proposition outward rather than inward. The Propositional Nation view is, in this sense, a cross-ideological remnant—an attempt to preserve some objective grounding for American identity after the older cultural and religious markers have been lost.

The Dependency Problem

Having laid out the three views, the harder question presses: are all three equally viable and stable? The Traditional Originalist view can be taken as a historical datum. As the earlier essays in this issue demonstrate, no serious argument can be mounted that early America was not constitutively rooted in English culture and British Protestantism. Whether that foundation is still recoverable is a fair question; whether it once existed is not. What remains to be shown is whether America can sustain civil order without it, and whether either of the competing views can supply what it provided.

My argument is that neither can. The Sovereign Self view is not stable and therefore not viable. The Propositional Nation view has genuine force, but it cannot stand on its own: it depends, whether its proponents recognize the fact or not, on a tradition that the propositional view cannot preserve in isolation. Both views are, in the end, reliant on an inheritance they cannot generate from within.

Begin with the Propositional Nation. The Declaration of Independence states that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” The proposition is not free-floating: it does not assert equality as a brute natural fact but as a conclusion grounded in a specific theological claim. Strip the theology, and the proposition loses the foundation that gives it force.

The natural objection is that reason alone can establish human equality, and that one need not appeal to revelation or a particular tradition to recognize that persons deserve equal treatment. The difficulty of this claim is that nature, surveyed on its own terms, does not obviously deliver the conclusion. The history of political philosophy is littered with careful attempts to read political norms off natural facts, and those attempts have produced results ranging from Aristotle’s defense of natural slavery to Social Darwinism’s justification of racial hierarchy.7. Consider, for instance, the 1904/1906 incidence of Ota Benga or the racial hierarchy chart Die Familiengruppe der Katarrhinen by Ernst Haeckel. Nietzsche, more rigorously than most, argued that the language of human equality was a resentment-driven fiction, the ideology of the weak deployed against the strong.8. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 10-13. See also, Beyond Good and Evil, Section 202. These are not fringe conclusions; they are what serious minds produced when they looked to nature without the prior commitment that every human person bears the image of a Creator who declared them equal.

The point is not that nature teaches hierarchy rather than equality; it is that nature, on its own, cannot settle the question. The proposition that all men are created equal is not a datum of unaided reason: it is the achievement of a specific tradition, one in which a personal God created humanity in his image, endowed it with dignity, and charged it with dominion. Remove that context, and the claim to equality does not immediately collapse, but it loses its grounding and can no longer do the work it needs to do.

The Propositional Nation view also faces a practical dependency: propositions require interpretation, and interpretation requires a shared grammar. In this case, by grammar I mean the set of background commitments about human nature, the proper ends of government, and the relationship between liberty and obligation that allow citizens to argue productively rather than simply past one another. Reasonable Americans have significant disagreements about what “liberty,” “equality,” and “rights” mean in concrete cases.

A constitutional provision, for example, is not self-interpreting. What historically settled such disputes was not the proposition itself but the shared cultural and moral framework, rooted in a shared Protestantism within which the propositions had determinate meaning. The 1892 Supreme Court decision in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States is instructive: the Court drew on the Christian character of the nation to interpret the scope of congressional legislation, treating that character not as an imposition but as a background condition of intelligibility. Remove that framework, and the propositions become a wax nose, pliable in the hands of whoever holds cultural power at the moment. The proposition provides no internal mechanism for resolving interpretive conflict; it is the very thing being disputed.

The problem with the Propositional Nation view, then, is not that it asks too much but that it offers too little. Propositions must be grounded in something both objective and actionable. The claim that all persons possess inherent dignity carries force when it rests on a Creator who endowed humanity with his image and charged it with dominion over the created order. The claim becomes continually weaker the further it drifts from that theological foundation, until, abstracted entirely from it, it is little more than sentiment; a statement of preference with no resources to adjudicate when preferences conflict.

The Sovereign Self view suffers from a more fundamental version of the same problem, compounded by an internal contradiction. Its proponents prize self-definition and individual freedom above all else, and in the Romantic ideal, everyone ought to be able to live exactly as he sees fit. No functioning society has ever operated on this principle, though, and none could: every community constrains behavior through law, and even the most committed libertarian concedes that prohibitions on murder, theft, and fraud are legitimate.9. For purposes here, it may be important to distinguish between libertarians and anarchists. I am not referring to the latter or those who reject all government. The question is what grounds those constraints, and here the Sovereign Self view cannot answer from within its own premises.

Once again, the very concept of individual freedom that the view celebrates is not a natural datum: it is a cultural and theological achievement. The Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers held that every individual is able to stand before God, giving theological grounding to the sanctity of individual conscience. English common law established individual rights against the Crown, providing institutional protection for personal liberty through centuries of legal and political struggle. These are the historical sources from which the Sovereign Self draws its most compelling moral intuitions, and they are precisely the sources the Sovereign Self cannot acknowledge without undermining its own premise: that the self stands prior to and independent of all tradition and external authority.10. If the self can be personally defined, it must be defined outside of tradition. Though a tradition may allow one to be shaped, that shaping can only occur inside the tradition and thus eliminates the possibility of true “self-definition.”

The incoherence becomes visible in practice. Adherents of the Sovereign Self view do not, in fact, refrain from moral judgment: those who transgress prevailing norms regarding identity, expression, and cultural participation are regularly condemned as wrong, backward, or wicked. Freedom is the supreme value in principle, while particular exercises of it are condemned in practice, and no account is offered of why some self-definitions are acceptable, and others are not, because generating such an account would require an appeal to a moral standard outside the self, which is exactly what the view denies.

For example, writing in the wake of Romanticism, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky illustrates the terminal logic of this position through Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov divides humanity into two categories: ordinary people, who are conservative and law-abiding, and extraordinary people, who possess the right to transgress moral and legal norms in pursuit of some greater purpose. The theory has a certain cold coherence until one asks who decides which category a given person belongs to, and why not everyone should be permitted to be extraordinary if they so choose. In a culture organized around the Sovereign Self, the answer is obvious: everyone decides for himself. And if everyone is extraordinary, no one is.

The transgression that was supposed to elevate the exceptional few becomes the universal permission of the many, and the result is not a society of rustic self-made individualists but the dissolution of the social order that made any of their projects intelligible. A civilization cannot be organized around the premise that each person stands above the laws he finds inconvenient. The man who defines himself beyond good and evil discovers that he has not transcended morality; he has merely destroyed the structure within which his own life had meaning.

Which Way, American Man?

America’s birthday, while a time for celebration and joy, is also an occasion for self-examination. The three views sketched in this essay are not simply talking points debated in the halls of academia. They represent real ideas held by ordinary people in the contemporary political and cultural landscape, and the tension between them is part of what makes our present moment feel so unstable. But not all three are equally capable of delivering on their promises.

The question this essay has been circling is not a political question in a narrowly partisan sense; it is not a question of party platforms, policies, or electoral coalitions. It is, rather, centered on some of the most fundamental political questions of all: what is good, what is just, and what kind of civilization America is willing to be. That question cannot be adequately answered by appeal to the Sovereign Self’s unencumbered autonomy or by a free-floating Propositional creed. Both, as the preceding argument has shown, depend on resources drawn from a tradition that neither view provides any principled reason to sustain.

Locke’s distinction between liberty and license, with which this essay began, points the way. Liberty, the freedom to do what we ought, presupposes a standard of “ought” that is not self-generated but received. The moral grammar that makes American freedom intelligible—the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, the rights of conscience—did not emerge from nothing. It was produced by a specific tradition: Protestant, English, and older than the republic itself.

In all honesty, this prescription is easier to state than to put into practice. A substantial portion of Americans today are either indifferent to the tradition or actively hostile to it. The cultural conditions that once made it self-sustaining—a broadly Protestant moral consensus, the assumed background of English common law, a shared understanding of ordered liberty—have been substantially eroded. The question before the American man is therefore not only which way he ought to go, but whether the road back remains passable.

At 250, America is still young by the measure of civilizations, and the tradition that formed her is deep enough to sustain renewal; it has survived religious pluralism, civil war, mass immigration, and the upheavals of industrial modernity. Whether it survives the continued erosion of its foundations, however, depends on whether Americans are willing to undertake the long work of recovery. That work begins with a recognition: what is needed is not innovation but renewal, not the construction of a new creedal identity or the performance of an autonomous freedom untethered from any ground, but a return to the tradition, willing to receive what it still has to give.

So, the charge: “Which way, American man?” The same way American liberty has always required, of course: not inward toward the sovereign self, not upward toward the abstracted proposition, but back to the tradition, with enough honesty to acknowledge how far we have drifted, and enough confidence in its depth to believe the distance is not yet fatal.

.

Matthew Spalding, The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence, (Encounter Books, 2026). Winner of ISI’s 2026 Conservative Book of the Year Award

 

“When forced, therefore, to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind…”

– Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825

In The Making of the American Mind, Matthew Spalding presents a close reading of The Declaration of Independence that draws on insights from history, literature, political philosophy, and theology, all the while remaining an accessible work of American political thought. Each chapter analyzes a section of the Declaration to elucidate central concepts and comment on academic and popular disputes. Throughout the book, Spalding returns to the above quote from Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Henry Lee. In response to Lee’s question about the origin of the ideas expressed in the Declaration, Jefferson wrote that he had summarized the “plain and firm” arguments, principles, and sentiments of the American people at the time of the Revolution. Spalding’s book makes those “common sense” views of the eighteenth-century revolutionaries accessible to Americans today. Spalding has crafted a work that will elevate the reader’s “instinctive patriotism,” founded on their love of people and place, into a “reflective patriotism,” a “spirited attachment to American self-government as well as a reasoned devotion to the general principles of natural right and human liberty.”1. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 4, 41.

One of the book’s themes—“whether the Americans are a people”—stands out as particularly controversial, insightful, and useful for America’s present concerns. Spalding did not directly address contemporary questions, like mass migration, multiculturalism, or birthright citizenship, that have provoked renewed controversy about American citizenship and peoplehood, but his interpretation of the Declaration bears on these questions. With support from dozens of outside sources, he showed that both the American creed and culture—its universal principles and its people—contributed to the nation’s foundational greatness. Ultimately, Spalding understood the Declaration as a “dogma of civic faith.” He followed G. K. Chesterton, who viewed America as the “only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.”2. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 98, 194. Spalding recognized the English Protestant origins of the revolution, but his creedal conception of American greatness suggests that the Declaration’s natural rights principles can persist without retaining that inheritance.

Although the following account might suggest otherwise, Spalding did not forget the “one people” who founded the United States, the God they worshipped, or their posterity who must preserve it. A significant portion of the book tracks the history of the American people leading up to the revolution. The American founding generation was English “more than anything else” and “overwhelmingly Christian and overwhelmingly Protestant,” and those Protestants were “mostly Calvinist.” The English common law, the classical tradition, and the common-sense Scottish Enlightenment (as opposed to the skeptical French Enlightenment) all informed the thinking that made the Declaration possible. Spalding suggested, though never explicitly stated, that the one American people can continue without these traits because they are secondary to a commitment to the principles of the Declaration. In religious life, for example, “we usually associate” the “natural-law arguments” used to support the Declaration with “Roman Catholicism.”3. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 52, 67, 85. Some traditions might support the Declaration’s principles as much, perhaps more than, the tradition whose ideas formed the document.

Whether Americans maintain their founding inheritances or not, Spalding asserted that they do not constitute the essence of the one people. Rather, the love of the American place, people, and way of life must be “transformed into firm commitments with real substance,” including a civic education in “the creed of America’s civic life and political identity, its temporal scripture and epic poetry:” the Declaration of Independence, which is the “source of America’s true greatness.” The creed contained therein “draws us to things that are beyond the material, allowing us to see a world imbued with meaning and to grasp the transcendent truth that sets us free.” The Declaration’s claims “transcend history, consanguinity, place—as important as those all are.” In the perennial debate about the source of America’s greatness—the creed or the clan—Spalding concluded that the creed “unites us as a people in common purpose and gives meaning to our common citizenship.”4. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 4, 7, 10, 235-236. He defended the idea that the Americans are one people who were reared in English Protestantism, the common law, and the classical tradition, but their peoplehood today depends, above all, on a commitment to the Declaration’s self-evident truths.

Spalding argued that the Declaration created a new political order with a new understanding of citizenship and peoplehood. The new idea no longer relies on ties of ethnicity, language, or religion. Colonial Americans became “one people” sometime between their immigration to the New World and the Continental Congress’s adoption of the Declaration. They did not primarily become a new people, distinct from the British, through shared ancestry, culture, history, land, or language. Instead, the Americans by the time of the revolution had developed “perhaps the most crucial aspect of nationhood,” namely, a set of “common beliefs and principles.” Spalding wrote that the “old distinctions of tribe, race, or ethnicity—of Athenian or Spartan, pagan or Jew, Anglo-Saxon or Gallic, Catholic or Protestant—are no longer the determining factor of political legitimacy or nationhood.” The common beliefs, then, encompass natural rights philosophy and the common law but no longer include Christian faith, let alone the Protestant tradition, whose adherents included the “vast majority of the signers.” Cultural, ethnic, racial, and religious bonds remain “very important, but they are not the basis of civic identity.” Whatever importance these historical, organic, and spiritual connections have left in other spheres, they do not have much of a relationship to citizenship, peoplehood, or political legitimacy. The new ground of American citizenship and peoplehood comes from mankind’s “equal humanity under the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” which Spalding here frames as accessible by universal natural theology or philosophy.5. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 86, 197-198.

As the Declaration made ethnic and religious inheritances irrelevant criteria in determining what constitutes a people, Spalding also asserted that the Declaration rejected allegiance to a sovereign authority as a condition of peoplehood. The Declaration renounced “the British idea of political sovereignty,” which does not recognize “a separate collective entity called ‘the people’ other than the subjects that emerge because of a pre-existing British sovereign.” The natural rights tradition supports Spalding’s claim. Under the social contract theory, a people can come into existence by compact before the creation of a sovereign state, and a people can retain its collective existence after the state’s dissolution. The existence of peoples apart from states makes the right to revolution, and the entire natural rights theory, possible. By the time of the Declaration, the Americans were already a separate and distinct people, albeit one formed of a “loose coalition of states with a strong shared identity.”6. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 28, 195, 206. Despite the absence of true national sovereignty at the time of the revolution, the Americans had already become one people.

A few thoughts of my own, in response: In his letter to Lee, Jefferson insisted that he was not “aiming at originality of principle or sentiment.” Outside of the Declaration, the American founding generation did not uniformly recognize common political principles as the sole or exclusive basis of citizenship or peoplehood. Instead, they appealed to both natural rights principles and the “old distinctions” that Spalding claimed the Declaration excluded from the criteria of civic identity: religious creed, ethnicity, language, customs, and even allegiance. In Federalist 2, when John Jay recognized that God gave “one connected country to one united people,” he listed their political principles as one source of their bond, but he mentioned ancestral blood in the first place and spilled blood in the last place. The Americans are “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”7. John Jay, Federalist 2. Religion and political principles occupy the central positions, but they find their support in ancestry and war. Likewise, James Madison in Federalist 14 did not see the nation’s unity exclusively in the American people’s assent to a common creed; rather, “the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their Union…”8. James Madison, Federalist 14. The blood of ancestry and the blood poured out in war combine to set apart the nation from all others. The first Congress put these ideas into the Naturalization Act of 1790, and they persisted until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Like ancestry, the English language characterized the American people. In his Dissertations on the English Language, Noah Webster described Americans as the “children” of Great Britain, but he asserted that “as an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” While Americans will develop an independent language, “English is the common root or stock from which our national language will be derived,” and eventually North Americans will consist of “a hundred millions of men, all speaking the same language.”9. Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language. Allegiance to the Union also defined American peoplehood, though they could always alter or abolish their federal government without dissolving themselves as a people. In his Farewell Address, George Washington wrote that the American people’s “unity of government,” or their allegiance to the federal government of the United States, “constitutes” them as “one people.”10. George Washington, “Farewell Address.”

Spalding correctly showed that American citizenship, more than citizenship in any other nation, depends on commitments to natural rights: equality, consent of the governed, and the protection of life, liberty, and property. Adherence to these principles, however, cannot replace religion, ancestry, custom, or language—those “old distinctions” that serve as the natural foundation of peoplehood. The Founding Fathers proclaimed their natural rights principles in the Declaration not to supplant that old ground of citizenship or to direct us toward transcendent meaning, but to define and secure their primary political aim: the one American people’s liberty, independence, safety, and happiness. When we see the Declaration as a document intended to draw us away from the material, to elevate us from local attachments to transcendent meaning, we might forget that politics exists to secure “the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life,” as C. S. Lewis put it.11. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 199. When the Declaration’s truths become the “real substance,” the American people, place, and way of life can become instruments to secure abstractions.

Spalding demonstrated that the Declaration’s principles unite the American people in a way that transcends the old distinctions of civic identity, but Americans cannot aspire to a unity of political principles unless they have a shared foundation in natural affections. Spalding began the book with this reflection, noting his own progress from an instinctive American patriotism to a reflective American patriotism. In The Four Loves, Lewis acknowledged the necessity of moving from natural loves to spiritual loves: “As the family offers us the first step beyond self-love, so [love of nation] offers us the first step beyond family selfishness…” Spiritual loves cannot thrive unless built on a foundation of natural affections—from family and homeland to language and tradition. In the case of the nation, the natural affections can lead to a deeper unity in shared political commitments or, if disordered, an uglier national selfishness. The love of family and nation can “become rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of it…”12. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 24. The fact that natural affections for a nation and way of life can distort or undermine political principles does not mean that we can safely discard them.

Nearly everyone acknowledges the dangers of an excessive attachment to one’s people and way of life, but the opposite dangers have been neglected. “As Chesterton says,” Lewis wrote, “a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he ‘could not even begin’ to enumerate all the things he would miss. It would be hard to find any legitimate point of view from which this feeling could be condemned.”13. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 23-24. The founders, like Lewis, felt no shame in loving their own, in defending their way of life, or in basing their civic identity on foundations far more organic and parochial than the pure and timeless principles of the Declaration. An insufficient attachment to the old distinctions of tribe, language, and religion would subvert the natural affections that make possible a reflective dedication to the ideals of the Declaration.

The word “ruin” has a wonderful semantic texture. It denotes demolition either physical or moral: you can ruin a painting or a festive occasion. When applied to persons, as in “John is ruined,” it has an economic register. A state of ruin is one of collapse or overthrow, but not necessarily of annihilation. A ruined person is still alive, though depleted. The ruin of a temple or city is still a definite structure, perhaps even an object of beauty. The face of Milton’s fallen angel Beelzebub is “Majestic though in ruin.” In these different senses, it is possible to hear the resonance of the word’s Latin origin, ruere, which means “to rush,” “to hurry,” “to cast down,” or “to fall.” There is speed and downward motion in the word, a suggestion of gravity. What is ruined is heavy; it has the dignity of its former height.

So when James Matthew Wilson writes that human history seeks “To ruin everything without remorse,” he does not only mean that everything gets worse with time. His word “ruin” is in keeping with that stanza’s conceit of history as a “cataract” or waterfall. Man’s decline is not gradual but steep and violent. The poem gives some examples of this. A great painter who “Begets a school of hacks before he’s gone;” great thinkers who “Give way to pedants who can barely see.” Wilson’s chosen stanzaic form, the “rhyme royal” made famous by Chaucer, suits this traditional topos of poetic complaint—not only conventionally, but in the way that its alternating rhyme scheme cascades into weighty couplets at the end of each stanza. Yet the poem ends with a surprising praise of youthful discovery. When the young reader of poetry “feels its lines go coursing through his chest,” the twinned pumps of human heart and human art defy time’s cruel gravity.

Heather Cadenhead’s “BREAKING: Dragon Kills Again” features a fall, too. Its central action is the death of a monk by falling from the top of a chapel. This death, perhaps a retribution for past sins, both haunts and inspires the speaker: “I called / myself a cave keeper, / daughter of the fallen man.” It is in the context of this fall that the poem’s own act of creation takes place: “Instead, I / dipped string into wax— / building castles out of candles.”

Emily Maxson performs a vivid exegesis of Jesus’ parable of the pearl hidden in the field. Here, the speaker’s creative product is not a castle, but a heap of refuse: “Knee-deep in trash, I sorted my possessions: / Broken; Rotting; and Biohazardous.” Maxson’s wry sonnet turns on a transcendent moment of rereading—one that can only be accomplished with the help of a friend.

The pleasure of Ethan Jones’s poem about AI, “Beyond Contrivances,” comes from comparing its two perfectly parallel stanzas. Unthought-of opposites appear: “fast” vs. “saunter,” “busied with busy” vs. “anxious with unbusy,” “talk” vs. “pray.” The line-pairings are playful, not formulaic. Each rewards reflection. For all its pluck, though, the poem has a note of dread: the one perfect identity between the two stanzas is the line “It can write.” With the poet’s own vocation still under mortal threat, the violent cataract of history is still in view.

Johnny Ruiz and Johannes W.H. van der Bijl have both contributed meditations on biblical poetry—Ruiz on the Song of Songs, van der Bijl on Psalm 90. Both depict new life with gorgeous dawn imagery. Ruiz: “The blossoming of lilies, then upon / The fields, the doe looks on beyond the sea, / For the Bridegroom comes and with Him the Dawn.” Van der Bijl: “the pastures painted with what seemed / to gently sigh a promise of reprieve / from night that takes all colours to the moon.” In Ruiz’s sonnet, dawn is the final hope of eternity with Christ. In van der Bijl’s poem, it is the brightness of mortal life, which, if we have Psalm 90’s “heart of wisdom,” we know will soon give way to night. This poem’s sobriety does not dampen the rapture of Ruiz’s sonnet, but their juxtaposition reveals the emotional range of Scripture’s symbols. Holy wisdom includes both delight and severity.

William Kilgore’s contribution is the most severe in our selection, and one of the most frightening religious poems I have read in a long time. In the tradition of Dies Irae, and deeply infused with the apocalypticism of the New Testament, it hymns God’s power of “uncreating.” But it does so with verve and even humor: “Earth Day becomes irrelevant / when all gets trashed and gutted.” Still, the takeaway is not glee at the ruin of the cosmos, but a warning not to attempt to dictate to God. In the divine there is a trustworthy promise, but also a credible threat: “He may indeed.”

Finally, Eric Hutchinson ends our selection with two professions of frailty. Like Emily Maxson’s sonnet, his own sonnet “Lethe” bespeaks moral poverty: “What can I claim to have in my account? / A heart like flint that envies, lusts, and lies.” Against the ideal of heroic glory stands the verdict of the conscience. The Fall—not just mankind’s, but mine—confronts me most forcefully when I think about human greatness.

In each of this issue’s poems, a sign of hope appears in the ruins: the simplicity of prayer, the encounter with art, the beauty of the sun, fellowship over the Bible. At the endings of both of Hutchinson’s poems, this role is filled by a Sacrament. In “Lethe,” the resolution to “drown in the holy fount.” In “Sin,” simply “absolution, bread, and wine.” The trust these poems put in sacramental objects is quiet, even tentative. The full power of such things is hidden from us, but not to be discounted. May God reverse human tragedy by such ordinary means as water, words, and carbohydrates? Oh yes, he may indeed.

– Joshua Patch, Associate Editor for Arts & Poetry

 

James Matthew Wilson

All Worn-Out Bodies

The times being what they are, some will recall
The wayward father and his no-good son
Who brought about the family’s final fall.
The village women drove him out, that one
Who drank his stolen liquor in the sun,
Who answered every kindness with a sneer,
And, at the name of work, would disappear.

History seems a cataract downhill,
A crash of spray and foam along its course,
Inexorable, as if it had a will
To ruin everything without remorse,
Each generation swept along by force
From worse to worse, and nothing we might say
Deflect such dissolution from its way.

I noticed, even as a boy, how those
Who clung to faith could never pass it on.
The master from whose hand new styles arose,
Whose color made the epoch seem a dawn,
Begets a school of hacks before he’s gone.
And minds that spin fine thoughts in filigree
Give way to pedants who can barely see.

But, where some eastern province sinks in night,
Leaving all worn-out bodies to their rest,
A young man sets a book beneath his light
And feels its lines go coursing through his chest;
At once, the past and future are possessed,
Indifferent to the pattern we’ve perceived,
Who thought ourselves among the less deceived.

 

Heather Cadenhead

Distant Steeples

I keep my eyes fixed to the blacktop
and remember what became of Lot’s wife
when she looked back. If I turned into salt,
you’d pour me into glass shakers and use me
to season your rations, picking your teeth
of whatever you couldn’t consume.

I cleaned until my hands bled—you saw
the floorboard that refused to lie straight.
I crack a window—the church-bonfire
smoke still clings to my clothes—the clap
and clatter of flames a recessional hymn.
A different kind of blood must save me.

BREAKING: Dragon Kills Again

After Varlaam Monastery

I.
The monk stirred one too many
sugar packets into tepid coffee,
white crystals rising to the surface
like wild primrose spreading
over one too many graves.

He washed newsprint
from his hands, headlines
circling the drain with dregs.
A glazed wing grazed the pane,
shaking saints in stained glass.

MONASTERY BREAKS
BREAD OVER BROKEN
BONES, the next line read.
A brotherhood cast as a murder
of crows, cawing overhead.

Anonymous sources spoke
of monastic-order secrets,
cobwebs veiling footpaths,
floors buttered with mist:
Do they serve God or the dragon?

He touched a scratch
in stained glass, cracked
a window, then summited.
His last thought: Anne Shirley
on a roof, taunting Josie Pye.

He fell and fell, his habit
a flicker of color against
indifferent skies—cave walls
splitting and killing the beast,
eye for a gold-coin eye.

II.
I bleached broken rock and
slid flowers into sutures, the
clergyman my muse. I called
myself a cave keeper,
daughter of the fallen man.

But silence starts rumors
and rumors start wars.
Some believed I hid
the dragon still. Instead, I
dipped string into wax—
building castles out of candles.

Winter colors bloomed
and beamed star-white,
frost-circled windows
concealing my survival.

 

Emily Maxson

Sonnet on a Parable

It’s like a merchant, selling all he owns
To gain that precious pearl, they said. And so,
Knee-deep in trash, I sorted my possessions:
Broken; Rotting; and Biohazardous.
What if I burn it all? I thought, and took
My lighter. Click. Oh—try and—click. No good.
I tossed it on the pile. More trash. With all
The poise exemplified by a pissed-off
Raccoon, I crawled out and assessed what you
Might call my assets. Ah. Marketable.

Over a pint, my friend, he says, “Are you
Quite sure you’ve got that right?” and reads anew
This parable on which my worth depends—
“He never says that you’re the merchant, friend.”

 

Ethan Jones

Prayer

For the sophisticated
prayer is mere
superstition.
It is a practice
of those who
haven’t grown up.

They can’t see
God.
They can’t hear
Him.
A grown man
stumbles out
of bed,
bends his knees,
opens his mouth,
and prays.

Beyond Contrivances

It can make you fast,
more efficient, less
busied with busy.
It can write.
It can talk.

It can’t make you saunter,
more attentive, less
anxious with unbusy.
It can write.
It cannot pray.

 

Johnny Ruiz

The Dawn Breathes

A reflection on the eschatological hope of the Song of Songs

Until the Dawn breathes and the shadows flee,
When all is right and all night is no more,
When all shall come to All on golden shore,
Ev’nings gone and morning it shall e’er be.

Until the Dawn breathes and the shadows flee,
When His song brings forth the day as before,
And face to face we see the wounds, a door
To love, to hope, to grace, to joy, to glee.

Behold, the Dawn breathes and the shadows flee!
The winter is past, and the rain is gone,
The ripening of figs on the fig tree,
The blossoming of lilies, then upon
The fields, the doe looks on beyond the sea,
For the Bridegroom comes and with Him the Dawn.

 

Johannes W.H. van der Bijl

Moments

A commentary on Psalm 90:12

Before the dawn had gathered all her gold,
the symphony of birdsong had begun
to usher in the rising of the sun,
while morning mist lay doubled in the folds

of sleeping fields and all the world seemed spun
from silver strands of music. Soon enough
the sun would sparkle brightly through the blush
of cotton clouds, dissolving dew till none

lay twinkling on the blades of grass and leaves
of weeds, revealing shades of grey and green
upon the pastures painted with what seemed
to gently sigh a promise of reprieve

from night that takes all colours to the moon.
For well we know that all in life is lent
for moments that will all too soon be spent,
as dusk descends upon our afternoon.

 

William S. Kilgore

May He?

The fiercest storms play in your palms,
the earth cracks open on your command.
A good God, yet never a safe God,
fatal to fall into Your terrifying hands.
…

May He unleash mayhem?
Mayhem, may He unleash?
Indeed He may, when He decides,
with no more than sovereign speech.

Do not fear those who kill bodies,
limited in what they can ever destroy.
No! Recoil from the Consuming Fire,
swarms of locusts in His employ.

Earth Day becomes irrelevant
when all gets trashed and gutted.
There are no olive branches offered
‘til long after a world gets flooded.

All the frying, crying, drying, dying,
as the Owner of all acres may choose.
This is the One Who created everything,
equally skillful at uncreating too.

May He display His wrath?
What court will question that right?
Beware the field that gives no yield
when the buzzards all take flight.

May He unleash mayhem?
Mayhem, may He unleash?
May He say nay to all maydays?
Oh yes, He may indeed.

 

E.J. Hutchinson

Lethe

The ancient poets sing of noble deeds,
Of fame that can outlast the little span
Traversed by heroes mounted high on steeds,
With hearts like flint and weapons in their hands,
Who only for immortal glory plead,
Aware their bodies must obey the sand
That trickles through life’s hourglass, then speeds
To measure out their days with cold command.

But I am not an Alexander, I
Have no Bucephalus by which to mount
On wings of noble deeds up to the sky.
What can I claim to have in my account?
A heart like flint that envies, lusts, and lies.
To live, I must drown in the holy fount.

Sin

Sunday I wake once again to find
I still have Saturday’s lurid mind,
Needing absolution, bread, and wine.

 

 

Bios

Joshua Patch (Ph.D. University of Dallas) is a poet and literary critic from Texas, now based at Hillsdale College, where he teaches in the Education Department. His poetry, which often deals with Texas and/or the Bible, has appeared in Solum Journal, The Reformed Journal, and The Borough. His academic work focuses on the English Renaissance, especially Edmund Spenser.

James Matthew Wilson is the Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas. The author of sixteen books, his most recent collection of poems is Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds (Word on Fire, 2024). The Strangeness of the Good (2020) won the poetry book of the year award from the Catholic Media Awards. The Dallas Institute of Humanities awarded him the Hiett Prize in 2017; Memoria College gave him the Parnassus Prize, in 2022; and the Conference on Christianity and Literature twice gave him the Lionel Basney Award.

A native Tennessean, Heather Cadenhead holds a degree in creative writing from Union University. Her poems and essays are published or forthcoming in The Rabbit Room, Inkwell, St. Katherine Review, Valley Voices, Arbor Vitae, Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing, Birmingham Arts Journal, and other journals. Her poetry has received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations as well as a New Plains Review Editorial Prize.

Emily Maxson is a Biblical Theology teacher turned full-time mom, and host of the podcasts Halting Toward Zion (currently a high-school level survey of church history) and The Poetry Dojo (an aid for students preparing for recitation contests). She and her husband David live in northern California among a close community of artists, storytellers, and lifelong friends. She holds a B.A. in History from Hillsdale College, and is studying Greek at City Seminary.

Ethan Jones is the author of several books, published and forthcoming, that engage the poetry and theology of Scripture: Psalms in an Age of Distraction (Baker Academic); Psalms as Poetry (Baylor University Press); Prayer in an Anxious Age (Baker); Joy and the Resistance of Despair (IVP Academic), as well as numerous academic articles and essays.

Johnny Ruiz is the Associate Pastor of Youth and Family Ministries at First Baptist Church of Longville, Louisiana. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary studying systematic theology. He and his wife Anjelle live in the small town of DeRidder with their two daughters, Jolie Anne and Jane Evelyn.

Johannes W.H. van der Bijl, originally from Namibia, has travelled and worked extensively in cross-cultural settings in different countries around the world. He and his wife, Louise, serve as missionaries with SAMS-USA. They have two married sons and five precious, rambunctious grandchildren. He is the author of four narrative commentaries published by Langham Publishing. A collection of his poetry, “Of Psalms and Songs and Poetry,” was published by Wipf & Stock.

William S. Kilgore is a sociology professor residing in Houston, Texas. Discovering poetry in 2024 while recovering from a kidney transplant opened a door to a new form of contemplation. Initially writing primarily for himself, he was encouraged to seek publication. William began doing this in 2026, and has poems published or forthcoming in Westward Quarterly, foreshadow, Solid Food, StepAway, Verse-Virtual, The Dewdrop, LogoSophia, VoegelinView, The Raven Review, Ariel Chart, Cathexis, Soul Forte, Wingless Dreamer (anthology), The Raven’s Perch, Vessels of Light, Valiant Scribe, and The Calendula Review.

E.J. Hutchinson is Associate Professor of Classics at Hillsdale College and Director of Hillsdale’s Collegiate Scholars Program. His poems have previously appeared in various fora in print and online.