American history books and textbooks often rightly connect the Great Awakening (ca. 1730–1743) to the American Revolution, but they frequently overlook a crucial link: the Awakening’s indirect challenge to established churches and their tax-supported legal privileges helped loosen Americans’ allegiance to British ecclesiastical and political authority and would later foster resistance to parliamentary supremacy, particularly the power to impose taxation and establish an Anglican hierarchy throughout the colonies.
The traditional explanation of the connection between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution usually goes something like this: The Great Awakening, similar to the secular Enlightenment, encouraged colonists to question religious authority, think independently, and challenge traditional institutions. These attitudes subsequently helped prepare Americans to challenge British political authority.
There is truth in that explanation, but it fails to fully connect the two movements. Indeed, the traditional account often makes the Great Awakening sound more like the secular Enlightenment, overlooking the intimate relationship between established churches and political power. The preaching of the Great Awakening was not merely a general challenge to ecclesiastical authority, religious establishment, or political power, but rather emphasized the authority of Scripture and the necessity of genuine conversion.
What Austro-libertarians—whether religious or secular, Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise—can particularly appreciate is how the Great Awakening indirectly challenged the privileges of tax-supported religious establishments, often unintentionally. The movement’s decentralized character, its frequent operation outside established ecclesiastical institutions, and the resistance it encountered from privileged religious authorities exposed long-standing tensions between religious liberty and political coercion. Combined with a history of state-sponsored religious persecution, wars of religion, and growing opposition to compulsory religious taxation and legal privilege, these developments helped cultivate an ideological environment in which many colonists resisted the expansion of British authority for religious as well as political reasons.
Rothbard and the Great Awakening
For all Rothbard’s brilliance in so many areas, we must always think critically and, at times, exercise caution regarding some of his historical analysis (as we should with any thinker or writer). While providing penetrating insights and valuable information, Rothbard sometimes lacked nuance and precision, especially regarding subjects in which religious and theological distinctions were essential. In interpreting history through his Rothbardian framework, he sometimes allowed his own philosophical preferences and biases to color his analysis, failing to make meaningful distinctions between particular beliefs, their adherents, and their historical consequences.
This was arguably also the case with his treatment of Calvinism and Puritanism and, consequently, the Great Awakening. Although Rothbard recognized some of the Awakening’s important contributions to religious liberty, his overall unfavorable assessment of its theology appears to have obscured the significance of the religious convictions and institutional conflicts that helped produce those very consequences.
It is true Rothbard had a soft spot for Roman Catholicism, partly because the medieval Church provided an institutional counterweight to political states, Thomas Aquinas further developed natural law theory, and the Spanish Scholastics made important contributions to economic thought and derived libertarian conclusions from natural law principles. However, his affinity also likely reflected his perception of Catholicism as more doctrinally flexible, adaptable, less dogmatic, and more receptive to autonomous human reason and free will than Protestant and Reformed traditions, particularly Calvinism and Puritanism.
In chapter 29 of Conceived in Liberty, “The Great Awakening,” Rothbard provides his overall negative assessment of the evangelical revivalist movement. Rothbard portrayed the Great Awakening rather unsympathetically as an anti-intellectual, reactionary, almost exclusively Calvinistic movement, which was characterized by religious intolerance and frenzied emotionalism. Yet such sweeping generalizations obscure important distinctions and key counterexamples.
For example, not all revivalists were Calvinists (e.g., the Wesleys), while many established churches opposing the New Lights were themselves Reformed. Nor were the revivalists generally anti-intellectual, as demonstrated by Jonathan Edwards’s philosophical, scientific, and theological works and the revivalists’ contributions to higher education (e.g., Princeton). Edwards also emphasized the love of God and Christ (e.g., “Heaven, a World of Love”) and, in his Religious Affections, carefully distinguished genuine spiritual conversion from mere emotional excitement. Although excesses certainly occurred, leading revivalists recognized and criticized them.
Moreover, the Awakening transcended denominational boundaries—as demonstrated by Whitefield’s interdenominational cooperation—and was not inherently opposed to established churches. Whitefield remained an Anglican, and Edwards ministered within the Congregational establishment until removed later. The movement’s central emphasis was biblical preaching, genuine conversion, and spiritual renewal, not denominational exclusivism or ecclesiastical rebellion. However, Rothbard summarized his views of the movement in one sentence, strongly averring that the Great Awakening was anti-civilization,
In short, this was a cry of mystical religious fundamentalism against the trappings of civilization that had begun to emerge in America. Whitefield denounced Christians and their ministers for not having experienced their Christianity in an emotional frenzy.
Nevertheless, Rothbard also admitted, perhaps begrudgingly, some of the unintended libertarian consequences of the Awakening,
The Great Awakening, while reactionary in nature, also had progressive and libertarian consequences: the Awakening split had fragmented the Protestant churches. In doing so, the New Lights found themselves at war with the established church in the various colonies—with the Puritans in New England and the Anglicans in the South. At war with the establishment, the New Lights were willy-nilly pushed by the logic of their situation into libertarian positions and they contributed greatly to the weakening of the establishment in New England and the South. Liberalism in Massachusetts and indifference in the South had already weakened these establishments internally, and the fissures opened by the Awakening greatly furthered this task. Moreover, the ensuing multiplication of sects made it far more difficult for any one sect to establish itself in place of the old creed. In short, the Awakening permanently made matters far more difficult for any sect to become or remain an established religion. (emphasis added)
Following this, Rothbard goes on to list examples of how the Great Awakening challenged the established churches, including the Church of England—particularly through resistance to compulsory religious taxation, restrictions on itinerant preaching, licensing requirements for religious meetings, the persecution and imprisonment of dissenting ministers, and the legal privileges enjoyed by established denominations.
One particularly revealing example of the relationship between church, university, and state involved David Brainerd—the New Light itinerant preacher and missionary, whose life and diary were later published by Jonathan Edwards. In 1742, Connecticut enacted legislation restricting the legal privileges of established ministers to those educated at approved colleges, while also imposing restrictions on itinerant preaching. These measures protected the established religious order against the growing influence of revivalist ministers and their supporters. One biographical account of Brainerd explains,
Because of the increase of lay preachers, a law now provided that “no person who has not been educated at Yale College, or at Harvard College in Cambridge, or some Foreign College or University, shall be allowed the special privileges of the established ministers of the government [paraphrased],” and this law must have increased Brainerd’s efforts to gain his degree. Another law, passed by the Hartford Assembly in the spring of 1742, outlawed itinerant preaching. No minister could preach in the parish of another without permission, and no consociation of ministers could license candidates for the ministry to preach within the jurisdiction of another. The Assembly, which opposed the revival as a threat to law and order, realized that only through such a law could they restrict the influence of those consociations of ministers that favored revival preachers and sent them as itinerants throughout the country. Therefore, Brainerd, who was first an itinerant preacher before he became a missionary, had either to break the law or remain silent.
Rothbard’s treatment of the Great Awakening reveals an interesting tension in his historical analysis. For a thinker so consistently opposed to state-supported privilege and religious establishment, he displayed remarkable hostility toward the revivalists who challenged precisely those institutions. While established churches enjoyed tax-supported privileges, benefited from licensing requirements and restrictions on religious competition, and sometimes employed civil authorities to prosecute and imprison dissenters, the New Lights and other revivalists frequently relied on voluntary contributions, practiced itinerant preaching, organized unauthorized religious meetings, and endured fines, imprisonment, and persecution for challenging established religious monopolies.
Although Rothbard acknowledged the Awakening’s libertarian consequences, his unfavorable disposition toward Calvinism and evangelical revivalism appears to have prevented him from fully appreciating the extent to which the New Lights’ religious convictions themselves motivated their resistance to established ecclesiastical power and, thus, to the coercive state that supported them. Ironically, it would seem that—judging by Rothbard’s own libertarian principles—the revivalists often occupied the more sympathetic position in their conflicts with the established churches.
The traditional narrative connecting the Enlightenment, the Great Awakening, and the American Revolution often emphasizes how Enlightenment rationalism encouraged Americans to question traditional religious and political authority. Yet this evidence complicates that narrative considerably. In many cases, Americans challenged the authority of the British state not because they had become less religious and more secular, but precisely because they had become more religious. The Great Awakening’s emphases and practical strategies brought many colonists into conflict with established churches whose privileges were maintained through political power. Thus, religious revival itself helped cultivate resistance to the expansion of state authority, particularly where that authority potentially or actually threatened religious liberty.
Eventually, as plans for an Anglican episcopate in America continued to develop over time and successively—from the early 1700s to the eve of the American Revolution—religious and political issues converged. Rothbard wrote, “an Anglican episcopate inevitably could not be a simply spiritual matter; it had grave political implications for American liberty.” In fact, this was an underappreciated aspect of the American Revolution itself. The relationship between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution was not merely that religious revival encouraged colonists to question authority in general. Rather, the revival indirectly challenged established ecclesiastical institutions whose privileges were maintained through political power, compulsory taxation, and legal restrictions on competing religious ministries. The resulting conflicts over religious authority and liberty helped prepare Americans to recognize the dangers of expanding parliamentary jurisdiction.
Thus, the controversy over taxation without representation involved more than taxation itself. If Parliament possessed the authority to tax the colonies, it could also use that authority to establish and finance the Church of England throughout America, extending British political power and ecclesiastical privilege at the expense of religious liberty. The Great Awakening, together with the colonies’ long history of religious persecution, resistance, and relative autonomy, helped prepare many Americans to jealously guard their religious and political liberties against the expansion of British ecclesiastical and imperial authority.
