Editor's note: To celebrate Independence Day, we've reached back to the July/August 2011 issue for Matt Reynolds' review of Thomas Kidd's God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution. And if you're in the mood for more reading about the American Revolution and the Founding era, Thomas Kidd himself has a number of pieces on the B&C website examining the subject from multiple angles—not to mention pieces by Mark Noll and many other scholars: more than enough to occupy your entire holiday weekend.
For all the heated debate over the Founders' faith—or lack of faith—the American Revolution is often treated as exclusively a political affair, overlooking how thoroughly a range of religious convictions, yearnings, and forebodings suffused the spirit of '76. Reckoning with the Revolutionary era's many religious dimensions is the mission undertaken, and carried off marvelously, in Thomas Kidd's God of Liberty. A prodigiously productive professor at Baylor University, Kidd—already the author of a Great Awakening history and a forthcoming Patrick Henry biography, among other volumes—has established himself as a leading student of early American religion. In all likelihood, he'll soon be mentioned in the same breath as luminaries like Mark Noll, George Marsden, and Harry Stout, all of whom grace the book's star-studded roster of endorsers. God of Liberty effortlessly straddles the divide between scholarly and popular history, uniting academic rigor with a pleasing readability. It deserves, and hopefully will receive, an audience well beyond the ivory tower.
Readers might naturally expect an explicitly "religious" history of the Revolutionary period to challenge certain secularist interpretations, and if so, they will not come away disappointed. In particular, Kidd debunks the notion that the founders sought to immunize American politics and public life against the influence of religion. Even Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the early statesmen most habitually invoked by contemporary advocates of rigid church-state separation, would have recoiled at the dogmas promulgated by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. Elements of secularist mythmaking, then, receive a solid thrashing, however politely administered. Nor, it should be added, does this unfailingly fair-minded book hesitate to puncture extravagant conservative claims about the Christian character of the American experiment. Kidd wisely refuses to portray the Revolution as a merely religious or merely political episode. Categories the modern mind instinctively segregates fused too tightly in the Revolutionary mind to permit any facile disentanglement. To the American colonists, Kidd writes, "political and religious liberty were intertwined and inseparable." No less than British encroachment on their pocketbooks, they feared British encroachment on their consciences.
Religiously and politically, the American founders were a diverse lot. Emory University scholar John Witte has helpfully assembled them into four groups: Puritans, who favored the Godly commonwealth model of colonial Massachusetts and Connecticut; civic republicans, who synthesized non-sectarian Protestant morality with an ethic of public spiritedness redolent of ancient Greece and Rome; evangelicals, who preached the redeeming power of the new birth; and Enlightenment skeptics, who sought the scientific axioms behind a divinely-ordered cosmos. In Witte's telling, the Puritans and civic republicans united on behalf of government support for religion, setting aside divergent perspectives on the specifics of Calvinist theology. And the evangelicals and Enlightenment skeptics, reaching across a more pronounced theological gulf, fought to dismantle structures of state sponsorship and control.
Nowhere in God of Liberty does Kidd refer explicitly to Witte's classification scheme, but the echoes shouldn't be missed. For the signal achievement of this book is to re-create the religious atmosphere—the matrix of principled alliances, marriages of convenience, bitter feuds, and surly standoffs—within which a common set of Revolutionary ideals arose and gained momentum. Especially in the unlikely collaboration between devout evangelicals and their deistic detractors, Kidd locates the genesis of remarkably durable beliefs about American identity and purpose. At no point, he insists, was the struggle with Britain "simply about unfair taxes and colonial politics." Rather, "religion, both during the Revolution and afterwards, provided essential moral and political principles to the revolutionaries and forged the new American nation."
Kidd enumerates five major precepts around which evangelicals, skeptics, and other Revolutionary compatriots coalesced: the campaign to disestablish state churches, the belief in a creator God who endowed all men with inalienable rights, the reality of human sinfulness, the corresponding need to foster private and public virtue, and the certainty of Providential governance over the affairs of mankind. Although evangelical and Enlightenment rationales often differed dramatically, both camps could identify common ground—and, in the British threat, a common enemy.
Underpinning these individual ideals was a ferocious, all-encompassing devotion to the "sacred" ideal of liberty: Coercive religious establishments trampled on it; divinely anchored human rights safeguarded it from tyrannical abuses; restraints on sinful passion and exhortations to virtue slowed its descent into selfishness; and God, in his good judgment, might restore or rescind it based on a nation's faithfulness, or lack thereof. Many of Kidd's finest passages revolve around anguished speculation, during this or that pivotal battle, that God—angered by a retreat from righteousness—might suddenly withdraw his protection.
To communicate the odd-couple quality of the Revolutionary coalition, Kidd periodically juxtaposes Jefferson against the Baptist minister and religious liberty champion John Leland, who embodied the evangelical ethos as unmistakably as our third President embodied the Enlightenment alternative. Although they "could not have been more opposed in their personal religious views," both men "believed that government should afford liberty of conscience to its citizens and should not privilege one Christian denomination over another." While battling to secure religious liberty in Virginia, Jefferson assiduously courted evangelical support. And Leland, mirroring the sentiments of his Baptist brethren, rejoiced in Jefferson's ascent to the presidency, believing it portended a waning of persecution.
Of course, as Kidd readily acknowledges, Revolutionary ideals commanded nothing like universal assent, and not infrequently did entrenched interests and ingrained prejudice conspire to thwart their full flowering. Established churches, clergy tax support, and religious tests for public office lingered on for decades. And slavery, despite the Declaration of Independence's ringing endorsement of equality, endured even longer, provoking the bloodiest conflict in American history. Still, Kidd shows how the evangelical-Enlightenment consensus set in motion religious and political forces whose progress, if halting, was nonetheless inexorable.
If God of Liberty forces us to rethink the religious nature of the American Revolution, it also forces us to rethink its historical scope. To say that the Revolution began at Bunker Hill and ended at Yorktown is pitifully insufficient. Even including the French and Indian War and the ensuing Parliamentary taxation schemes leaves too truncated a picture. Kidd's narrative doesn't shortchange battlefield history, and he provides a riveting chapter on the beleaguered band of chaplains who helped boost morale, preach virtuous conduct, and meditate on the war's providential meaning. But he recognizes that any genuine history of this period must transcend the military showdown and its proximate political causes. Kidd's vision is capacious, stretching back generations before gunfire rang out over Lexington and Concord, and peering ahead to the revivalist upsurge of the early 19th century.
Without descending into anti-American hyperbole, Kidd's epilogue ponders certain tensions and dangers within the Revolutionary mindset bequeathed to subsequent generations. Providential awareness, for instance, can inhibit self-criticism: If God smiles upon the American cause, by what standard can imperial misadventures be questioned, or brutalities condemned? Kidd seems most interested, however, in thinking through the possible permutations of liberty, virtue, and religion in American life. This leads him to a sustained discussion of Alexis de Tocqueville, who so famously limned the early American synthesis of Christianity and liberal democracy. Liberty, by its nature, chafes at moral constraints. With Tocqueville, Kidd finds in religion's virtue-generating potential an essential solvent for selfish appetites.
Somewhat offhandedly—and forgivably, in a book so blessedly free of contemporary political allusions—Kidd links "rampant greed and deception" to America's recent recession. Leave the experts to decide whether this suffices as macro-economic analysis (when, one wonders, have greed and deception not been rampant?), but there's no gainsaying the underlying point: Untrammeled self-interest undermines the common good.
Though he might have, Kidd declines to mention the vast financial overhaul enacted last year, purportedly to prevent just such greed and deception from again running rampant. America's founders knew well the fanatical libertarian impulse, but they were ill-acquainted with disciples of the modern technocratic temptation, fondly "dreaming," in T. S. Eliot's memorable words, "of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good."
Greed confounds a regulatory behemoth as surely as it exploits a regulatory vacuum. Whatever the vice, it will elude a thousand legislative snares and outwit a thousand bureaucratic busybodies. This is not to nitpick at Kidd's recession diagnosis, much less to countenance the overthrow of sensible laws and regulations, but to reinforce his powerful conclusion: Religion "retains unmatched power to motivate believers to do good." For Massachusetts militiamen, Wall Street investment bankers, and Americans of sundry talents and dispositions, nothing else will do the trick.
Matt Reynolds is an associate editor at Christianity Today magazine, where he presides over the Books section.
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