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During this confused misunderstanding, the Bible was used as a reservoir of images, moral principles, and types. Many sermons in America (and some in Britain) supported revolt, while a few in America and England argued against it. Serious exegesis, however, of what would seem to us like the relevant passages (such as Romans 13) was very rare. Rather, it was much more common for patriots to liken George III to Pharaoh and George Washington to Moses, or to depict the conflict as a struggle between the Woman and the Beast of Revelation 12. Patriots and Loyalists were both much more likely to add scriptural authority to political reasoning rooted in some other ideology than they were to attempt reasoning from the ground up on the basis of Scripture.

As a result, Americans fought a war to gain the kind of freedom that Canada, New Zealand, and Australia were simply given after not too many decades. An evil precedent was also established in America for later times of national crisis by employing the Bible eccentrically (instead of theologically) and by worrying about classical Christian justifications for warfare hardly at all. The lesson here is not that America had a uniquely evil history, for the Founding Fathers were morally exemplary on many other matters. It is that using the Scriptures for public disputes requires a full measure of reasoned calm as well as passionate engagement.

By Mark A. Noll, author of Christians in the American Revolution (Eerdmans).

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February 8 1999, Vol. 43, No. 2