6 thoughts on “American Revolution Interpretation”

  2. The American Revolution was informed by a relatively tolerant version of Christianity. But it was not a revolution about religion. And many of the leaders were Deists.

    Christianity prevailed over much of the globe in 1776. It didn’t produce anything remotely like the American Revolution anywhere else. In fact, Christianity girded the monarchical tyranny of Europe generally.

    The American Revolution was one of the rarest of things. A good war for an entirely virtuous cause. A revolution that lead to the destruction of the hierarchical structure that had ruled the world since the beginning of time.

    Christians would do well to not try to claim primary credit for it but instead work on trying to get the present US to behave according to Christian morals again.

    Metaxis isn’t a historian. He’s a public speaker and author of children’s books.

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    1. I think many of the founders were informed by their Christian worldview, and relatively few were Deists. Their particular Protestant– and especially Presbyterian– perspective led them to conclude that the Bible says we should have liberty. You are correct that this perspective has not been universally held by Christians throughout history. In fact, the Bible could be interpreted to suggest that hierarchy and slavery are part of the expected order in a fallen world. I used to read Chronicles magazine heavily, and some of its writers (pretty deep thinkers, by the way) had grave misgivings about the fruits of American democracy and our “constitutional republic”; and it was not unusual for some of them to suggest that a monarchical/ hierarchical system might be an improvement, and might be more in accordance with the way God designed things. We need merely to open our eyes to see why they might feel that way.

      I am not advocating for that position, but it is out there.

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      1. Triad, we aren’t far apart I don’t think. Deists were hardly a majority, mostly confined to men who went to college in the 1760-1780 time frame. Add in Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and maybe Abigail Adams (the only woman offhand using Deist language). I suspect they were important to the 1st Amendment though. New England states retained govt-connected churches without a thought. Virginia might have without their Deists.

        Re the Chronicles thinkers, autocracy isn’t the answer. Government is inherently corrupt and corrupting over time. Because power corrupts.

        Making a constitution with lots of features that guard against it isn’t sufficient but helps. For instance, a 2/3 majority of Congress to declare war would be better than what we have…but would have done nothing to prevent Judas Trump from making war on Iran. So the only other thing you do is concentrate on educating each generation on the nature of the inherent corruptness of government, so that they are sensitized and ever on the alert. (Our system has done the diametric opposite: students are taught govt is the solution.)

        Another thing you could do is have a confederation (for purposes of defense and free trade only) of small autonomous states, where people could vote with their feet. That creates a greater degree of accountability than normal voting, which in our oligarchy is manipulated quite a lot.

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        1. I don’t disagree. The confederation approach was attempted before the Constitution was adopted but was quickly scuttled because of challenges that existed at that time, although in retrospect it probably would have been much better in the long run.

          The bottom line is that we live in a fallen world, and none of these approaches is perfect, although our system is the most considerate of individual people by granting them ordered liberty.

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