Religion and Revolution: A Historiographical Look at Christianity’s Influence on the American Revolution

Historians seek to explain processes of change. In The Purpose of the Past, Gordon S. Wood writes, “explaining change through time ” always seems “to lie at the heart of historical reconstruction.”1 Consequently, periods of accelerated change beckon historians to interpret and reinterpret the meanings of the era. The tumultuous years of the American Revolution continue to inspire historical treatises intended to expose the forces, beliefs, and decisions that drove Americans to rebel and then sustained them in that course despite formidable obstacles and terrible setbacks. Historians generally agree that one source of ideological direction and motivation for this event was Christianity. They certainly differ on the manner and extent to which Christianity influenced the Revolution. The consensus of most, however, is that Christianity played a significant role in motivating the general American populace to throw off the chains of Britain’s political tyranny and form a vision for a new nation. The study of Christianity’s influence on the Revolution is mostly an examination of a grassroots historical phenomenon, a movement among the masses. For that reason, historians, with a few notable exceptions, did not give much attention to this subject before the rise of social history in the 1960s and 1970s. Until then, history was mostly a study of top-down influence