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

Abstract

Was the American Revolution an old-time religious revival? Did the urge for political independence and individual rights begin with the yearning to find salvation in Christ? For a number of Americans, these questions are settled matters of fact: yes. Some of those folks have entered the public sphere with a definitive notion that because the Revolution was Christian, the United States is also Christian. Ryan Williams at the far-right Claremont Institute declared in 2021 that “The Founders were pretty unanimous, with Washington leading the way, that the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people.”1 Williams has threatened civil war if his visions are not enacted. During the siege of the Capitol on January 6, the QAnon Shaman found his way to the Senate chamber and rededicated it to Jesus Christ. Do I have your attention? Good, because the issue of religion and the American Revolution has become one of the most critical historical questions of our own age. Much of the narrative that pervades sentiment like Williams’s derives in part from shoddy or antiquated scholarship; John Fea has shown, for example, that the popular tale of George Washington praying on his knees in the snows at Valley Forge is a myth. David Barton’s popular Christian history of Jefferson has been pulled from most bookstores because of its falsifications; it continues to sell online.2 In part, these interpretations hang on because many of the Founders were churchgoing men—Congress really did call for a day of fasting and prayer in 1775—and in part they linger because American historiography has a hard time interpreting religion except as a handmaid to politics. The current scholarly consensus assumes that religion and the Revolution were somehow