LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
HELMS SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT
Colonial American Religious Justification for the Rebellion During the Colonial and
Confederation Era
Submitted to Dr. Michael Robinson,
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the completion of
PLCY 702 – B03
Founding Era and the Constitution
by
Robert H. Carey, Jr.
June 9, 2022
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Thesis
The American Colonies were not sufficiently justified by biblical principles to engage in
armed conflict against the British government. While many colonial Christian faith and secular
leaders made strong assertions as to biblical justification for taking up arms against the Crown,
in the end (and especially for a set of colonies so overwhelmingly Protestant), the Protestant
principles of Sola Scriptura and Scriptura sacra sui ipsius interpres (“sacred Scripture is its own
interpreter”) still apply, and the interpretations of men – even men of considerable faith – is
irrelevant if it violates the Scripture. To the extent the colonists call upon God or the Bible for
justification of their rebellion, it is to give the veneer of divine approval to what is, by the
colonists’ own argumentation, more an issue of violating their Positive Law rights under the
British common law and the colonies charters from the crown.
American Justification for Revolt
McClellan ably explains how the American colonists, who simultaneously claimed all
justifications, theological and temporal, for their revolt – jumping to and fro from natural law
and Godly sanctification, to English common law and constitution, to the colonies’ charters
granted by the Crown – ended up undercutting their own justification arguments with their
confused argumentation. The problem for the colonists’ eventual republic is that such confusion
“was carried over to the Declaration of Independence two years later…[where] Jefferson
presented an argument for the right of revolution and secession based on the philosophy of
natural rights; but when he turned to an enumeration of rights that had been abridged, he
mentioned only constitutional, common law, and charter rights” (McClellan 2000, 124). But in
his defense, Jefferson starts his Summary View of the Rights of British America by focusing on
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the abridgement of the colonists’ secular rights by “unwarrantable encroachments and
usurpations, attempted to be made by the legislature of one part of the empire, upon those rights
which God and the laws have given equally and independently to all”, further equates natural
rights with those rights given by God, but also calls on the empire’s positive laws as well to
justify the colonists’ grievances (Jefferson 1774). Jefferson then proceeds to lay out a litany of
abuses by the British government including an apparent natural right for free trade (although this
author has not been able to find the “Book of Exportation and Interchange” in his New American
Standard translation of the Bible and is looking in apocryphal texts for support of this
imaginative natural right which Jefferson claims), suspension of colonial legislatures, sustaining
of the trade in slaves, the landing of British troops on American shores against the will of the
colonies, and ignoring the Americans’ repeated petitions to Parliament and the Crown for
redress.
The Continental Congress built on these justifications for revolt the next year, starting off
their declaration on The Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms by setting a covenantal tone to
their declaration by calling on “a reverance [sic] for our Creator, principles of humanity, and the
dictates of common sense” to explain their “last appeal from reason to arms” (US Continental
Congress 1775). Referencing the charters the original colonists received from the Crown, the
Continental Congress declared by their own fiat that those charters “vested [them] with perfect
legislatures”, and that while acknowledging the colonies origins from the empire, talk as if even
before the colonists taking up arms, they were already their own country, beholden to none by
the Crown. The Congress too provides their litany of British abuses, including taxation,
imposition of courts, taking away trial by jury, joining Jefferson in citing the suspension of
colonial legislatures and curtailing American trade, and they equate the British toleration of
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Catholicism in Quebec to be “a despotism dangerous to our very existence.” (Ibid.) But it is in
their turning to what they see as the blessing of God on their endeavor, that the colonists
“gratefully acknowledge, as signal instances of the Divine favour towards us, that his Providence
would not permit us to be called into this severe controversy, until we were grown up to our
present strength…and possessed of the means of defending ourselves” (Ibid.). In other words,
because the colonists have the means to rebel, God must believe they should rebel, otherwise
God would have made the colonists situation so there was no reasonable chance of success,
essentially implying a fatalistic view of the world, God’s relationship to it, and what is now, by
the colonists’ arguments, a complete lack of free will or personal responsibility on the part of the
colonists.
Tocqueville too alludes to the inherent American trust in ruling their individual lives and
its divine origination, and each level of government as it moves up the hierarchical chain,
according to a principle of “individual interest; that is the great principle found constantly when
you study the laws of the United States” (Tocqueville 2012, 128f). And according to
Tocqueville, that individual interest is best served at the very lowest level of government, and the
most complete embodiment of an individual’s protection of their individual interest, because
“The town is the first element of the societies out of which peoples take form; it is the social
molecule; if I can express myself in this way, it is the embryo that already represents and
contains the seed of the complete being” because “the town seems to come directly from the
hands of God” (Ibid., 100f). But McClellan returns to inherent inconsistency of the Ameicans’
justification arguments and attempt to tie to a religious justification, describing how the
Preamble of the Constitution is based on very Natural Law-based principles “that the American
people are entitled to certain natural rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
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and that all men are created equal”, but that the main text of the Declaration is all about the
abrogation of the colonists’ constitutional, common law, and charter rights (McClellan, 90).
Colonists’ Belief in the Christian Justification for Their Revolt
While no Christian review of the issues of legitimate government and the right of citizens
could start without referring to Paul’s admonitions in Romans 13:1-7, the colonists were very
aware of that Scripture, and the debate raged hard on whether their revolution was in accordance
with God’s Divine Law. In Samuel Adams’ The Rights of Colonists he labels one of the sections
“The Rights of Colonists as Christians”, but then only makes a passing reference to “the
institutes of the great Law Giver and Head of the Christian Church, which are to be found clearly
written and promulgated in the New Testament” (Adams [1772] 1906, 419) before proceeding to
a decidedly temporal discussion of various acts of the British Parliament, most importantly the
Toleration Act, which, by restoring a right to worship “God according to the dictates of his own
conscience…there shall be liberty of conscience allowed in the worship of God to all Christians,
except Papists…” (Ibid., 420), with the irony of that last clause apparently lost on Adams. But
the great mass of Adams treatise is on the temporal issues of American rights in relation to acts
of Parliament, with periodic references back to Natural Law and rights in a veiled calling on
Divine support for his arguments, and a declaration of the colonists’ equal rights as British
citizens so legislated as well by Parliament.
Such opportunistic calling on God’s ordination of the colonists right to revolt carried
forward to Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, where he calls upon the “laws of
nature and of nature’s God” entitling a People to a ”separate and equal station” with other States,
and by grammatically associating so closely “the right of the people to alter or abolish” their
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government with that same People being “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable
rights” (Jefferson 1776), Jefferson makes the right to abolish their government just as divine as
the inalienable rights with which they are endowed. Just as he himself did in 1774, as well as the
Continental Congress and Adams did in 1775 and 1772 respectively, Jefferson provides an
extensive list of British “injuries and usurpations” to justify this revolt, but with little explanation
and proof of the Natural Law that is violated and which therefore justifies setting aside Paul’s
strictures in Romans 13 to abide by an apparently higher holy calling. It is only at the end of the
Declaration that Jefferson and his fellow Committee members declare their “firm reliance on the
protection of divine providence” as the signatories covenantally pledge to each other their
“sacred honor” (Ibid.).
Much of this biblical justification for active resistance started with what was one of the
most famous sermons delivered by a pastor in colonial America, Jonathan Mayhew’s Discourse,
Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers. While Mayhew
starts off this sermon reading Romans 13:1-7, with its famous first verse of “Let every soul be
subject unto the higher powers. For…the powers that be are ordained of God” (Mayhew [1750]
1818, 7), he makes human judgement of these divinely ordained powers allowable because “It is
the duty of christian [sic] magistrates to inform themselves what it is which their religion teaches
concerning the subjection they owe to the higher powers” (Ibid., 8). And because Christian
magistrates have such a responsibility to rule justly and in accordance with Divine Law, Mayhew
argues that for the People
who supposes that the apostle ever intended to teach, that children, servants and
wives, should, in all cases whatever, obey their parents, masters and husbands
respectively, never making on any opposition to their will, even although they
should require them to break the commandments of God, or should causelessly
make an attempt to ponder lives? No one puts such a sense upon these
expressions, however absolute and unlimited. Why then should it be supposed,
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that the apostle designed to teach universal obedience, whether active or passive,
to the higher [ruling] powers, merely because this precepts are delivered in
absolute and unlimited terms? (Ibid., 18f)
Mayhew refers here to the biblical injunction not to obey the command of a ruling power when
such ruling compels the individual either to do that which God specifically commands they not,
or not to do expressly that which God commands they must, much as Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abed-nego refused to “fall down and worship the golden statue that Nebuchadnezzar the king
has set up” even upon threat of being thrown alive into the blazing furnace (Dan. 3:5, 15
[NASB]). But Mayhew presents no such evidence Parliament nor the Crown is compelling the
colonists to do that which God prohibits, or not to do that which God commands. Instead, he
simply raises a doubt that Paul knew how his writing would be interpreted by Man, apparently
dismissing Paul’s later writing about the Divine Inspiration of Scripture in that, “All Scripture is
inspired [lit. “God-breathed”] by God and beneficial for teaching, for rebuke, for correction, for
training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).
Because of that, Mayhew continues that Romans 13:1-7 is not about obeying all rulers,
but only those who rule justly, where “such as rule for the good of society, which is the only end
of their institution. Common tyrants, and public oppressors, are not entitled to obedience from
their subjects, by virtue of anything here laid down by the inspired apostle” (Mayhew, 28). From
there, Mayhew argues that where the ruler turns into a tyrant, the People “are bound to throw off
our allegiance to him, and to resist” because that is what he believes Paul commands in Romans
13:4, where the ruler “is a servant to God to you for good” and “an avenger who brings wrath on
the one who practices evil” (Ibid., 29), apparently ignoring how Scripture also tells of how
Joseph’s brothers, his elders and adults sold him into slavery because they meant evil against
Joseph, but “God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as
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they are today” (Gen. 50:20). Mayhew even admits that Paul did not condition the caution to
obey all rulers by providing an exception for “such a tyrannical Prince” but since Mayhew
claims Paul, by his writing at Romans 13:4, grounded all “his argument for submission wholly
upon the good of civil society; it is plain he implicitly authorizes, and even requires us to make
resistance, whenever this shall be necessary for the public safety and happiness” (Mayhew, 30).
Biblical Opportunism and the American Rebellion
The Protestant scriptural interpretation concepts of Sola Scriptura and Scriptura sacra
sui ipsius interpres are largely set aside by Mayhew in crafting his justification of reinterpreting
Romans 13. As Atchison points out, Mayhew’s arguments are an enunciation of the concept of
“distanciation, the pursuit of objectivity in reading the passage in such a way that one can
connect the surface reading to the events taking place in the lives of the original audience”
(Atchison 2018, 252) that almost appears to be a biblical version of the concept of “The Living
Constitution”. In fact, the whole basis of the Living Constitution theory is because of what was a
growing “disjunction between state-centered form and nation-centered substance” of how
American government should operate to engage on modern issues that may not have been
directly addressed in the original text of the Constitution, and to therefore allow for additional or
contrary interpretation of the Constitution’s meaning to address these present day problems
without having to amend the Constitution (Ackerman 2007, 1743). But as Bolick writes,
whether one believes in a constructionist, textualist, or originalist approach to legislative and
constitutional interpretation, as well as the
doctrine of stare decisis – honoring past precedents - is important to the rule and
predictability of law. But judges take oaths to the Constitution, not to the stare
decisis doctrine. All constitutional interpretation should begin with the words of
the Constitution, and where the meaning of those words is clear, that is where the
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inquiry should end. Our job is not to conform the Constitution to our precedents,
it is to conform our precedents to the Constitution. (Bolick 2018)
So too Mayhew’s interpretation of Romans 13 smacks of rejecting the concept scriptura sacra
sui ipsius interpres, and reinterpreting Scripture to fit needed present-day desires and exigencies.
But if one interprets Scripture by other Scripture, Mayhew’s justification does not hold up. Paul
reiterates in his letter to Titus to tell the Christians to be subject “to rulers, to authorities, to be
obedient” (Tit. 3:1). Saint Peter also relays that warning, telling readers to submit to every
human authority and “honor the emperor” (1 Pet. 2:13-17) When the Apostles did disobey the
Jewish high priest who prohibited them from teaching and preaching about Christ because, as
Peter answered, “We must obey God rather than men.” And that is the biblical standard for
disobedience – to disobey the government only when it commands the individual to do
something the Bible commands. In the case of the Peter and the Apostles, it was to preach in
support of the Great Commission. But the American colonials were not being forced to do that
which God prohibited, nor prevented from doing that which God commanded. The litany of
abuses they detail in the Declaration do not rise to the level of moral wrong against God’s Laws
that would justify rebellion from a biblical perspective.
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