Some Thoughts on Revolution and Christianity, Courtesy of Jonathan Edwards

Over the week of my internment after surgery in late February I read George Marsden's justly lauded biography of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards is a fascinating figure and so far removed from the caricature of the high school philosophy class excerpts of Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God. I had intended to write more about this at the time, but other concerns presented themselves. So here is the first in what may turn into a set of reflections on the great theologian and philosopher of early America. And it begs a pretty interesting historical question.

Edwards was a British citizen as well as the foremost American theologian in an era when this was not yet a contradiction. One of the more interesting historical "what ifs?" surrounding the life of Edwards is the question of what role he would have played in the American Revolution had he lived to see it come. Edwards was slightly older than Benjamin Franklin (Franklin actually published a number of Edwards' treatises from his Philadelphia printing house) so it is not inconceivable that had he been spared his unexpected death at the age of 54 he could have been called on to play a pivotal role. Princeton University, of which Edwards was president when he died, was a hotbed of revolutionary fervor during the war and it is difficult to see how it would have become this way under Edwards' leadership. 

Edwards believed in a hierarchical structure as a God-ordained ordering of society. In his role as minister he saw himself as more than just the spiritual life coach of today's stripe, but as a father to his children. He believed that God had called pastors to serve as leaders in all areas of a community's life. He was a loyal subject to the crown and believed that God appointed kings to lead a people. This is not to say that he could not have been swayed by the arguments of the revolutionaries, merely that it was not the default position for a colonist to be against King George and his tyranny. 

Thinking of the speculative response of Edwards to the revolution has caused me to think a lot about the revolution myself. Just as we are taught that the Crusades were 100% the work of evil Christians, we are taught that the revolution is a purely noble event, wherein the forces of liberty banished the forces of oppression. The plucky little underdog defeated the best military in the world. 

But of course it is far more complicated than that telling. There is a joke in Richard Linklater's early 90s nostalgia-fest Dazed and Confused where a hippie teacher dismissing her students into the summer of 1976 cautions them to not get caught up in the patriotic fervor of the bicentennial: "Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes." There is enough truth in that to bring a smile to the face of even the most ardent patriot. We have a lot to be proud of from our revolutionary heritage but a lot to be ashamed of as well. 

Clara and I were talking the other night about how conservative Christians tend to view the revolution as a battle for religious freedom as much as a battle for political or social liberties. But the England of 1776 was not the England the Puritans fled in 1620. England in the early seventeenth century was a nation torn between competing loyalties, with Catholic strongholds in the north yet to be broken, and numerous splinter sects of crazy cult groups. The state church was oppressive and cruel with dissenters, and the idea of separation between church and state had yet to take root. But the Puritan revolution and the English Civil War of the 1640s did away with a lot of these tensions (unless, of course, you were Catholic; but early America was not exactly a bastion of Catholicism either). Dissenters became the leaders in Cromwell's commonwealth. Even after the Restoration Charles II was crafty enough to not punish dissent with the same severity. 1776, after all, is after the ministries of Whitefield and Wesley had made Methodism an intractable part of British Christianity. (This is a grievously incomplete picture of one of the most fascinating centuries of any country, ever, a fact of which I am well aware. Read this and this and this.) In short, the issues between the colonists and Britain were not religious, but largely political: "No taxation without representation", etc. 

And for Christians this raises interesting questions. I remember well the moment when I first started really reading the Bible for myself and read the texts about submitting to our rulers and the thought flashed through my mind in an instant: what about the Revolutionary War? How did Christians find justification for overturning the legitimate, God-ordained authority of King George? Since then I have read Augustine's theory of just war, Niebuhr's modern adaptation of the idea, Milton's impassioned defenses of liberty and distinction between king and tyrant and in general have come to accept the Revolution as a net good, but it is interesting to make note of the fact that it was far from clear at the time and is still murky today. 

The argument is entirely plausible that a nation following the dictates of the New Testament will tend toward democracy and greater liberty for the individual, but the question of whether to use force to bring this state about is far from clear. Particularly when the matters of freedom are more economic and political than religious or despotic. In any event, the Revolutionary War seems to have a far smaller degree of legitimacy than the Civil War, which some on the right are prone to argue was an egregious misuse of federal power and a denial of gospel gradualism.

I don't know. Something to think about. At the very least, thinking through these things has helped me see a more balanced view of history, one that is neither hagiography approaching idolatry about the founders of this nation, but at the same time doesn't buy into all of the sarcasm of the hippie teacher in the movie. The truth is so much more complicated and so much more interesting.