THE ANGLOSPHERE IS LIGHT:

Was the American Revolution a righteous patriotic war in which a Christian people threw off the shackles of tyranny to build a government based on the protection of rights, or was it a sinful rebellion against God's duly-appointed magistrates for which Christians should repent? The answer to this question is surprisingly contested among evangelical historians.

Fortunately, we have Gary Steward's new book, Justifying Revolution: The American Clergy's Argument for Political Resistance, 1750-1776, to help us think the question through with greater nuance and precision.

Throughout the book, Steward's major aim is to document that the American clergy's position in the 1770s was traditional, not novel - demonstrating constitutional and religious continuity with their forebears, not rupture. By carefully documenting the arguments of clergy in the Revolutionary period, then tracing the roots of their ideas back chronologically, Steward proves that the religious leaders of the Revolution were in fact true to the Bible as exposited by their Reformation fathers.

For example, one common claim is that Patriot pastors took their ideas from Jonathan Mayhew, a heterodox New England pastor who in 1750 preached fiercely against the doctrines of unlimited submission and passive obedience to tyrants. His (acknowledged) heterodoxy thus becomes the heterodoxy of all patriot pastors in the 1760s and 1770s. Steward disputes this. Further, many historians allege that Mayhew's conclusions were a result of applying Lockean presuppositions to the text of Romans 13 - presuppositions that created new space for Christian resistance to God's appointed magistrates.

Steward spends a great deal of time flipping this interpretation on its head. For starters, Steward points out that Mayhew's 1750 sermon had so closely followed British Bishop Benjamin Hoadly's earlier sermons that Mayhew was accused of plagiarism. Hoadly, in turn, was charged by contemporaries with simply imitating the arguments of the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos and various 16th-century political theologians. These theologians, in their turn, had only promoted the same theological arguments made by the likes of John Knox, John Ponet, Martin Bucer, and other early reformers. From Knox to Mayhew, these theologians maintained essentially the same interpretation of Romans 13: a magistrate who betrays his trust through tyrannical action ceases to be a minister of God, and the people (or inferior magistrates) may rightfully defy him.

Steward also argues that Locke's theories of political resistance to tyranny in his Second Treatise of Government are deeply indebted to the Protestant theological tradition. Instead of interpreting the ideas of the Patriot clergy as a baptized Lockeanism, we ought to understand Locke as a secularized version of the traditional Reformed position (Steward quotes J.G.A. Pocock on this, who called Locke's Second Treatise "the classic text of radical Calvinist politics" [25]).

Additional evidence for this theological continuity was the 1779 publication of Defensive Arms Vindicated and the Lawfulness of the American War Made Manifest. Did it make novel, Lockean-inspired arguments for rebellion and warfare? To the contrary - this pamphlet was actually a reprinting of a Scottish defense of political resistance from 1687. The ability simply to reprint an argument 90 years later and have it fit the context demonstrates a remarkable continuity of American and earlier Reformed religious thought on politics.

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