Religion and the American Revolution, Then and Now

Mark Noll

September 16, 2025

Although I intended my first book, Christians in the American Revolution (Christian University Press, 1977), to ride a tidal wave of interest in the nation’s bicentennial, difficulties in finding a publisher led to its appearance a year late in 1977. The prompt from “Back Pages” to review the book—and also exploit the contemporary marvel of retrievability to find reviews—has been sobering. Much that historians now rightly regard as essential to any full-orbed treatment of any national subject was absent. Reviews at the time in the New England Quarterly and Quaker History pointed out that my title said “Christians,” but there was almost nothing on Roman Catholics. From a perspective benefiting from the last half-century of broadened historical concerns, the absence of Native, Black, and female voices is all too obvious. 

Yet if in response to criticism at the time and with the benefit of hindsight I had entitled my book, Protestant White Men in the American Revolution, my doubtlessly self-serving conclusion is that under this more accurate title it did a reasonably good job. In setting out to provide “a comparative study of religion and Revolutionary ideology in eighteenth-century America,” the book featured four different Protestant responses to the struggle for independence: patriotic, reforming, loyalist, and pacifist. The text as well as an extensive bibliography made it clear that I was employing an interpretive framework defined magisterially by Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1967) and applied insightfully to religion by monographs like Nathan Hatch’s The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (Yale University Press), also published in 1977 but based on a dissertation I had read earlier. Also in the background was my conflicted response to Alan Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1966)—appreciative for highlighting religious-political connections but critical for misconstruing the nature of those connections.

The book begins with scene-setting chapters reviewing political and military events from the earlier imperial wars to the Revolution and describing American religion in the 1770s as shaped by late-puritan and post-Great Awakening sensitivities. Substantive chapters based on meaningful, if not extensive use of primary sources describe patriotic and loyalist responses as mirror images of each other. Christian patriots and Christian loyalists both enlisted a wealth of biblical texts, evocations of providence, biblical images, and specific points of theology to support their positions, but mostly as surface structure atop the deep structure supplied by Real Whig (patriot) or British Protestant (loyalist) commitments.

I remember trying to be objective, but also remember that I hoped readers would see why I viewed reformers and pacifists as acting more directly from Christian convictions. Reformers self-consciously exploited the patriots’ fervent defense of liberty for their own purposes. They included the Baptist Isaac Backus who challenged leaders like John Adams and Sam Adams for railing against the corruption of Britain's state church while maintaining their own religious establishments in New England. Students of Jonathan Edwards like Samuel Hopkins attacked an even more obvious hypocrisy: why take up arms against the “slavery” of  taxation without representations but not the whole-life, chattel enslavement of Africans? And pacifists like the Quaker Anthony Benezet as well as humble Mennonites, Dunkers, and Moravians remained faithful to their interpretation of the New Testament despite opposition that could be ferocious.

Reviews of the book were the best kind for a fledgling author. They included a number of helpful criticisms like too much New England and too little consideration of economic and social contexts. But with these corrections came gratifyingly positive judgments: “on balance . . . a careful and expert study [that] contributes admirably to the current broadside of scholarly comment on the American Revolution” (American Historical Review);  and “a very sensible account of a complex situation . . . woven into clear and interestingly written chapters” (Journal of American History).

Reviewers at the time did mention one of what I now consider the book’s two main weaknesses. Why did I not do more to explain how parsing out the different Protestant stances might contribute to understanding later American history or to addressing contemporary concerns? With the near approach of the nation’s semiquincentennial, that challenge has only become more pressing. It is to show how serious historical study can inform a public sphere torn between fantasies about an ideal, but now threatened Christian past and a blithe secularism dismissing the founding generation’s universal belief in the necessity of a moral basis for republican government. 

The other weakness, which could have been remedied by resources available at the time, has been thrown into relief by the recent publication of two excellent books. Gideon Mailer’s John Witherspoon’s American Revolution (Omohundro Institute, 2019) and Kate Carté’s Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) have together demonstrated the short-sightedness of my effort. The political ideologies, theological convictions, and especially institutional connections of the Americans I treated were also, albeit with different proportions, English and Scottish as well.

Mailer’s exhaustive research into Witherspoon’s Scottish antecedents and his post-war aspirations for pan-Atlantic religious cooperation provided a specific correction. Witherspoon’s embrace of Real Whig republicanism did not replace his evangelical Calvinism, as I had written, but created a complex religious-political amalgam that bequeathed both traditional religion and social-political innovation to generations that followed.

For her part, Carté persuasively demonstrated that the Revolution must be viewed in the context of British imperial Protestantism, “an interlocking system of religious networks, societies and communities [that] connected distant protestants to one another across the British Empire.” She has shown that the institutional disruption of the War forced each of the constituencies--defined carefully as Anglican, dissenting, and awakened--to abandon deeply entrenched habits of mind and reconfigure what it meant to be a faithful Protestant and a worthy Christian citizen.

In my mind, historians’ earlier emphasis on the centrality of Real Whig ideology remains crucial for understanding religion and the American Revolution. But if I were setting out to write as an old person what I had attempted as a young person, I would broaden the populations under consideration and add a new set of magisterial guides to those I had followed before.