“Unfortunately, the role of religion in the American Revolution is often overlooked, and almost as often misunderstood.” — Michael W. McConnell, “The Role of Religion in the American Revolution”
A previous article attempted to tie a more direct connection between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution, especially the movement’s indirect challenge to established churches, including the Church of England, through its spiritual focus and decentralized nature. While Rothbard begrudgingly recognized some of the movement’s unintentional challenges to state power and toward liberty, he arguably failed to fully appreciate how the Awakening, along with other key factors, helped prepare Americans to more jealously guard against encroachments by the church and the state of England. However, Rothbard—unlike many historians—did recognize the little-known and underappreciated aspect of religion in the American Revolution and how religion and political power were connected.
Decentralization and Religious “Salutary Neglect”
“Salutary neglect dovetailed with the burgeoning religious liberalization and libertarian ideology that flourished during the mid-eighteenth century.” — Patrick Newman, Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1607–1849
The American colonies were uniquely situated in ways that encouraged liberty, decentralization, and economic prosperity. Americans inherited the cultural, economic, political, and religious traditions of Western Christian civilization and Britain, including the developing principles of British classical liberalism. They also benefited from Britain’s policy of “salutary neglect,” which, to some extent, extended beyond economic regulation to ecclesiastical affairs. The colonies were geographically dispersed, politically decentralized, and religiously diverse, while their inhabitants also inherited a historical memory of religious wars, persecution, and state-enforced religious conformity. In “The Role of Religion in the American Revolution,” Michael W. McConnell explains,
At a time when most European nations had a single established church and suppressed most forms of dissent, colonial America was one of the most religiously diverse places on the planet.
This historical and ideological inheritance, combined with the Great Awakening’s indirect challenge to established ecclesiastical privileges, helped cultivate resistance to the expansion of British political and religious authority. This would eventually contribute to the American Revolution, where the religious and political controversies converged.
While it can be justly said that there was considerable religious diversity in colonial America, it might be more precise to say that there was considerable denominational diversity—with some key exceptions (e.g., Catholicism in Maryland, some Judaism, etc.)—within a broad, predominantly Protestant Christian culture, which included Anglicanism. The nature and history of the Protestant Reformation, the unique institutional history and structure of the Church of England (i.e., the monarch is the Supreme Governor of the church), the English and colonial American history of the ongoing conflicts involving sacralism, dissenters, religious and constitutional conflicts (e.g., the Scottish Bishops’ Wars [1639–1640], the English Civil War [1642–1651], the Restoration [1660], the Act of Uniformity [1662], and the Glorious Revolution [1688–1689]), state religious restrictions, and religious persecution—from the Reformation to the eve of the American Revolution (including the Great Awakening), the history of diverse religious refugees settling throughout many of the American colonies in search of greater religious freedom, and the greater possibility for religious competition, decentralization, and separatism in the colonies created a powerful mixture of factors that would challenge the Church of England, and—by extension—the British state.
This distinctive religious and historical inheritance was not lost on Edmund Burke. In his famous Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies on March 22, 1775—on the very edge of the Revolution—Edmund Burke identified the particular character of American Protestantism as one of the principal explanations for the colonists’ extraordinary attachment to liberty and resistance to British authority. Burke explained,
If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect. Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it.
He also noted how the very institutional history and structure of the Church of England connected it with the state, “The Church of England too was formed from her cradle under the nursing care of regular government.” Therefore, resistance to the established church could readily become resistance to the political authority that sustained its privileges, especially if one’s religious liberty was threatened. With the state came the church, and with the church came the state. Burke continued,
All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces; where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not composing most probably the tenth of the people.
Although many colonial governments maintained their own established churches, including the Anglican church—and the many crony and legal restrictions that accompanied them—the colonies lacked the fully-developed Anglican hierarchy of England. The Great Awakening further expanded religious competition and indirectly challenged established ecclesiastical authority. Consequently, renewed proposals for an American Anglican episcopate, coinciding with Parliament’s expanding claims of political authority over the colonies, threatened religious arrangements and liberties to which many Americans had become accustomed.
The Controversy of the Anglican Bishops (ca. 1700–1775)
“. . .an Anglican episcopate inevitably could not be a simply spiritual matter. . .” — Murray Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty
The Anglican churches in America, even in colonies where the Church of England was established (e.g., Virginia [1607], Maryland [1692], South Carolina [1706]), enjoyed considerable local autonomy, particularly in the absence of resident bishops. Over much of the eighteenth century (ca. 1700–1775), however, successive proposals emerged to establish an Anglican episcopacy in the colonies. Were the Church of England merely a voluntary religious institution, the installation of bishops would have been principally an internal ecclesiastical matter, however objectionable some non-Anglicans (and even some American Anglicans) might have found it. However, because the Church of England was legally established and closely connected to the British state, the proposed episcopacy raised far more consequential questions about parliamentary supremacy, compulsory religious taxation, ecclesiastical privilege, and religious liberty. What might otherwise have been a denominational controversy thus became a profound political and constitutional issue.
The concern was not necessarily opposition to Anglican theology or even to Anglican bishops as such, but rather the possibility that Parliament—claiming the authority to tax the colonies, especially after the French and Indian War (1754–1763)—could also use that authority to establish and finance the Church of England throughout America, impose bishops, dioceses, religious tests, and compulsory tithes, and even suppress competing churches. Hence, the controversy over religious establishment became inseparable from the broader question of parliamentary supremacy and the protection of religious liberty.
While this might be difficult for secular moderns to fully appreciate, it was not a foreign concept to the British and Americans during this period. The Scottish Bishops’ Wars (1639–1640)—just over a century before the American Revolution—had already demonstrated how attempts to impose episcopal authority and religious uniformity could provoke not merely ecclesiastical opposition, but political resistance to the authority of the Crown itself. Charles I endeavored to impose Anglican-style religious observances and strengthen episcopal authority in the Scottish Church, provoking resistance among Scottish Presbyterians that eventually led to war. To British Americans, this was not forgotten history. Therefore, as Rothbard put it, “an Anglican episcopate [in America] inevitably could not be a simply spiritual matter.”
The connection between ecclesiastical authority and imperial political power was not merely an invention of suspicious colonial dissenters; it was explicitly recognized by at least some proponents of an American episcopacy. In fact, Rothbard records that the American Anglican, Reverend Samuel Johnson, appealed to the English government to establish an American episcopate specifically in order to prevent American independence. Johnson argued in a letter—on April 5, 1732—that an English-appointed American episcopate would in fact be the best way, in his opinion, to cement British political rule over America.
. . .it has always been a fact, and is obvious in the nature of the thing, that anti-episcopal are of course anti-monarchical principles. So that the danger of our effecting independency. . .would naturally flow from the want of [episcopacy, which]. . .would be the most effectual means that could be devised to secure a dependence on our mother country. . . . (emphasis added)
In other words, instead of the imposition of an American episcopate pushing the Americans toward independence, Johnson believed that such an episcopate would actually secure American dependence. Elsewhere, writing amid the Great Awakening which he opposed, Johnson explained (December 1, 1742):
I have been informed that the chief pretense against sending bishops has been an apprehension of these countries affecting an independency on our mother country. This is indeed a very groundless apprehension but certainly a regular episcopacy here subordinate to the Bishop of London would be so far from promoting [independence] that [it] would be one of the most effectual means to secure our dependency. (emphasis added)
Similarly, when addressing the objection that appointing Anglican bishops might encourage colonial independence, Johnson had insisted (November 3, 1738) that “the reverse is the truth.” Johnson might have been mistaken, but he was not alone in his view that the establishment of an American episcopate would enhance British political control over the American colonies. With the church came the state.
As history moved toward the American Revolution, to many colonists, the question was not simply whether Parliament possessed the constitutional authority to tax them, but what else Parliament might impose if that authority were conceded. The prospect of an established Anglican hierarchy—supported by coercive taxation and empowered to restrict religious dissent—made parliamentary supremacy a threat not only to political liberty and property but also to freedom of conscience. Thus, religious and political liberty were not separate questions in the years preceding the Revolution; they were deeply intertwined.
