"...It is only within the last half century that historians have turned their attention to this relationship—and more recently still that many have come to see religion as essential to understanding the political culture of revolutionary America.
The first scholars to approach this subject, Perry Miller and Edmund Morgan, advanced strong arguments for the formative influence of Puritanism upon the resistance to Britain. Miller argued that Americans saw the colonies as a “New Israel” and that this firm belief in their covenant with God as his “chosen people” prompted them to perceive the revolutionary struggle as a holy war against a sinful, corrupt Britain. In a similar vein, Morgan posited that an enduring “Puritan ethic,” a pervasive religious culture that had long venerated industry and frugality and upheld the superiority of consensual, contractual forms of church government, shaped both the resistance to Britain and the new republican constitutions.
More recent historical inquiry has focused on connections between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution. Alan Heimert’s controversial study,
Religion and the American Mind, probably did more than any other book to prompt that curiosity, for he argued that, at least in New England, the radical evangelical supporters of the revival later became the most ardent rebels, while the moderate and conservative opponents of the Awakening became either neutrals or loyalists when the conflict came with Britain. Most historians today reject this neat dichotomy, mainly because so many nonevangelicals—Christians and otherwise, both in New England and elsewhere—played such prominent roles in advancing the rebel cause. Even so, many historians now believe that the religious ferment churned up by the Great Awakening in the decades immediately preceding the revolutionary crisis had profound implications for American politics.
Most scholars of this persuasion characterize late colonial America as a society steeped in religious enthusiasm and riven by wrangling among competing denominations and opposition to established churches. That contentious spiritual climate, they believe, at once revived older traditions of Protestant dissent, particularly the opposition to the divine right of kings, and lent impetus to popular and individualistic styles of religiosity that defied the claims of established authorities and venerable hierarchies—first in churches, and later, in the 1760s and 1770s, in imperial politics. In short, they argue that the First Great Awakening was a sort of “dress rehearsal” for the American Revolution—that participating in a religious upheaval primed an entire generation of colonials (particularly if not exclusively the committed evangelicals in their ranks) to support a political revolution. Indeed, many scholars of this stripe argue that what brought on the American Revolution was a merging of the traditions of radical Protestant dissent and republicanism.
The best place to begin your acquaintance with these arguments is the chapters covering the Great Awakening and the American Revolution in Patricia Bonomi’s
Under the Cope of Heaven and Harry Stout’s
The New England Soul. And if, after reading their works, you’d like to delve into this subject more deeply, try either Nathan Hatch’s
The Sacred Cause of Liberty or Ruth Bloch’s
Visionary Republic, both of which will enhance your understanding of the interpenetration of politics and religion in this period of American history—how a struggle for colonial liberation came to be perceived as a holy war..."
