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On July 30, 1776, British troops, flush with bravado as they prepared to run George Washington's battered army off of Long Island, burned the general in effigy. Alongside Washington they torched the figure of a minister, the Reverend John Witherspoon. "An account of the present face of things in America would be very defective indeed," complained an English officer, "if no mention was made of this political firebrand, who perhaps had not a less share in the Revolution than Washington himself." That wasn't just sour grapes. As much as any figure in the colonial era, Witherspoon embodied the explosive alliance between faith and freedom that would inflame the American struggle for Independence. Not long after becoming president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), he was accused of turning the campus into a "seminary of sedition." Following a weekend visit, John Adams called him "as high a son of liberty as any man in America."

Few could have seen it coming. A native of Scotland, Witherspoon spent his early years of ministry preaching and teaching. In September 1758, from the Abbey at Paisley, he rebuked pastors for getting entangled in public affairs. He called it sinful and reckless for them "to desire or claim the direction of such matters as fall within the province of the civil magistrates." Twenty years later the same minister would help persuade the American Continental Congress to keep General Washington and his army up and running.

No religious figure of the era exerted greater influence on national politics. Witherspoon's mailing list included the likes of Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Benjamin Rush. He signed the Declaration of Independence—the only cleric to do so—and lost a son in the Revolutionary War. As a state legislator and delegate, he helped ratify the Constitution. And as the principal instructor at Princeton, he groomed a generation of men—including James Madison—for leadership roles in the new nation. Historian Garry Wills has called him "probably the most influential teacher in the entire history of American education."

Not in recent memory has the nation's political culture seemed more primed for—or needful of—the statesmanship of a John Witherspoon. President George W. Bush is making the redemptive work of religious organizations a central feature of his domestic agenda. In so doing, he and his allies apparently hope to reestablish the historic link between robust faith and a healthy civil society. As they continue to collect and fend off their critics, there is much to be learned from the Princeton divine.

Witherspoon entered the ministry precisely when Scottish Presbyterianism was in schism. One faction, the so-called Moderates, levered the British patronage law to get the upper hand over the more conservative Popular Party, or evangelicals, in the church's General Assembly. The young minister emerged as a leader of the evangelicals, who defended the rights of congregations to elect clergy and control their own affairs. The divisions got ugly. Armed soldiers forced ministers on parishes; others were deposed. There were riots. Thousands bolted from the Church of Scotland. Witherspoon, while strenuously defending orthodox doctrine, became known as a conciliator.

These ecclesiastical outbursts were not occurring in a vacuum. In 1747, when Witherspoon attended his first General Assembly meeting, Francis Hutcheson was busy launching the Scottish Enlightenment with his philosophy of "Common Sense." David Hume was proofreading his Essay Concerning the Human Understanding. And Adam Smith was teaching literature and likely gathering material for The Wealth of Nations. The Moderates in the Scottish church, says one historian, were "only another expression of the general stir of intellectual liberty of the eighteenth century."

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