Religion and Revolt: Propaganda in the Revolution
Religion and Revolt: Propaganda in the Revolution
The Revolutionary War in Great Britain’s thirteen colonies was the result of America’s desire for political, militaristic, and ultimately religious liberation from their mother country. However, this was not without opposition from the British and their supporters. Consequently, the colonies found themselves in a two front battle with the British on one hand, and an internal conflict between the Patriots, those who supported the revolution, and the Loyalists, colonists who supported Great Britain’s rule over the colonies. As a result of these conflicts, religious images and rhetoric were used as both logical and emotional appeals to join the fight. The use of religious propaganda by the colonists, specifically the patriots, through the Revolutionary War arose from a number of quarters and as the result of a number of events. It was mainly through two religious movements: The Enlightenment and The First Great Awakening, which prompted the idea of rebellion to any suppressive institution. These two movements, along with other political, historical, and ideological events, brought forth a generation of colonists that would question not only their religious beliefs, but also when the Revolution came, their political loyalties as well.
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Four of the main revolutionaries used their rhetoric as propaganda for the Revolutionary War, using either deist or evangelical connotations seen in the Enlightenment and First Great Awakening to help persuade uncertain colonists. The first revolutionary was Patrick Henry, whose 1775 speech most famously ended with the phrase “give me liberty or give me death!”2 Henry became one of the most prominent revolutionaries to use religious rhetoric, specifically using ideas from the First Great Awakening. The next revolutionary was a clergyman and the President of Harvard, Samuel Langdon. Langdon used his sermons to call for a limited government and the need for the removal of corrupt British officials. The third revolutionary is deist Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson uses the Declaration of Independence not only as a list of grievances to King George III in Britain, but also uses it as an emotional appeal to the uncertain colonists on the fate of colonies through his use of religious language in the document. Finally, the last revolutionary explored is Thomas Paine. Paine, a deist, was most famous for his propaganda pamphlet Common Sense. Common Sense quickly spread across the colonies for many reasons, one of which was Paine’s reasoning for joining the cause, putting his feelings about revolt over thoughts. While Paine was a deist, his placement of emotion over logic was “a process akin to that of evangelical conversion”, a view that many had seen and accepted in the First Great Awakening. 3 Across all propaganda, there is a unified message prompted by the patriots: King George III is tyrannical and needs to be stopped. Revolutionaries Patrick Henry, Samuel Langdon, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine used the ideas formed in the Age of Enlightenment and First Great Awakening to muster colonists into joining the war effort using their religious rhetoric.
The colonists began with this thought of rebelling against the “empire on which the sun never sets” as a result of years and years of new ways of thinking mainly outlined in the Age of Enlightenment and the First Great Awakening.
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Throughout the early 18th century, the colonies underwent this intellectual and religious movement known as the Age of Enlightenment. The Age of Enlightenment produced a small, but very influential and politically affluent population of thinkers who believed in deism.4 Deism was loosely based off Christianity, but instead of understanding God through sacred texts and miracles, Deists based “religious belief on reason and observation of the natural world.”5 It is through deism that philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau crafted the idea that citizens have natural rights, one of which is the right to self-governance. These beliefs were very influential in establishing the voice of protecting citizens from the government. They also outlined the government’s job to protect those natural rights, and if the government failed to then the people had a right to revolt and form a new government. It’s through this ideological movement where the thought of rebellion could come to fruition.
The First Great Awakening served as a response to the Age of Enlightenment and soon sprung up in the early 1700s across the English speaking countries in the world including England, Scotland and Wales before moving across the Atlantic in the later 1740s-1760s to the colonies. The Great Awakening used ministers who were not always ordained and followed a more democratic approach to preaching, prompting a message of greater equality.7 These revivals mainly sparked new interest in evangelicalism through the colonies. However, they also created a division within the colonies between New Lights and Old Lights. The New Lights were those swept up by the First Great Awakening. The Awakening ultimately resulted in converted colonists who “defied traditional authorities to uphold their new religious convictions.”8 This generation of colonists not only had a newfound belief that anyone could preach, but were enraptured by these traveling orating ministers. One of the most famous ministers was George Whitefield. Whitefield garnered audiences of hundreds throughout New England only through his orations with the “audience thrilled not only to the gospel message they heard but also to their own great power visibly manifested in mass assembly.”9 It was through the rise of such master orators like George Whitefield that colonists felt this outburst of religious fervor and feeling of faith rooted as a personal matter, rather than one that relied on a minister.
This renouncing of traditional authorities permeated not only through religion, but also through the colonists’ political sphere as well. As a result of the Age
of Enlightenment and First Great Awakening, the political climate in the colonies was one suffused with critiques of authority and established institutions. In the buildup before the Declaration of Independence, Great Britain wielded their internal locus of control on the colonists beginning with the quartering of soldiers in colonists’ homes and levying taxes on the colonists. Imposing such “Intolerable Acts”, including the “Sugar Act”, “Stamp Act”, “Townshend Acts”, and “Tea Acts” on the colonists was mainly due to Great Britain’s incredibly high debt following the end of the French and Indian War in 1763.10 However, despite what had seemed as a logical attempt to help unburden a substantive amount of wartime debt, the colonists took as taking advantage of them and their lack of debt. Some colonists even took it further as their religious duty to overthrow the “old social order, its leaders and its ideals, and installing a new one based on God’s power working through the individual person.”11 It is through this logic of thinking where the comparison between the British officials and older, more conservative Old Light clergyman is made. These same older British officials were also the one’s accused of harming the colonist’s natural rights; this allowed for a stronger connection among colonists and provided a rallying cry for people to join in to the Revolution.
Patrick Henry is most notably known as the man who stated, “give me liberty or give me death!” in regards to the idea of living under British rule and taxation any longer. Henry, previous to his lauded speech, was a representative in the House of Burgesses where he was seen as the face of opposition towards the British’s colonial policies. It was his work in the House that prompted him to be known as the face against British tyranny.12 His famous speech, however rebellious and patriotic, is also filled with many Christian and religious connotations. Very similar to one of the famous orators in the First Great Awakening, George Whitefield, Henry is able to not only capture his audience, but also persuade them. It is in his ability to persuade that makes the colonists believe that fighting this war was inevitable. Henry is able to do so with such zeal because of the many religious notions his speech contains and the very religious audience he is performing to. Throughout his speech, he cites God five times, further implying the importance of using our natural rights to combat the British stating, “make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power.”13 Henry uses the emotional appeal by telling the colonists that God would want them to fight for what is right. In another instance, Henry infers that God is on their side stating, “There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.”14 Playing consistently to his audience, Henry is able to cogently stir up feelings of independence and patriotism while also making it appear to the colonists as their religious duty in becoming a rebel.
One of the other prominent Great Awakening revivalists was Samuel Langdon. Langdon was a clergyman and President of Harvard College throughout the revolution from 1774-1780. As a clergyman, Langdon is most obvious out of the
four revolutionaries in his religious rhetoric for independence. In one of Langdon’s most notable sermons, “Government Corrupted by Vice”, Langdon openly tells his supporters to refuse British rule saying, “refuse the most absolute submission to their unlimited claims of authority.”15 Throughout the rest of sermon he uses the allusions towards the Old Testament and the Kingdom of Israel, drawing upon similarities between the Kingdom of Israel and the thirteen colonies. Langdon states, “The kingdom of Israel was brought to destruction, because its iniquities were full…because there remained no hope of reformation” Langdon argues that it is the vices currently in the British government that have made the colonies felt taken advantage of and much like the Kingdom of Israel, colonists are wishing for a better government. In the end of his 20-page sermon, he calls for God to join the colonists
in purging the land from all the vices stating, “Lord will be our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble, and we will have no reason to be afraid.”16 Langdon emphasizes not only the need to rid the land of British rule, but he argues it is two fold and there needs to be a revival of renewed faith for there to truly be an option of hope in the country.17 This feeds right into those same beliefs of the First Great Awakening. He wants to remind some of the colonists that are wary of joining the revolution to not be so afraid; they have God on their side, something that the British clearly do not have.
Shifting from the Great Awakening revivalists, Thomas Jefferson used the influences of the political philosophical ideas taught in the Age of Enlightenment in much of his work. In his most famous document, the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson appeals to the utopians of both deists and New Lights, crafting the Declaration as a way “to rid itself of all foreign restraints on the realization of its destiny.”18 Jefferson’s creation of the Declaration allowed for not only the idea of such a utopian society to be thought about, but actually had offered the possibility for it to come to fruition. In this regard, he is able to coalesce two religious groups for joining the fight, offering a new hope for many. Specifically right in the beginning of the document, Jefferson cites, “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”19 Jefferson wants to make clear right in the beginning of the document that the entire world deserves to hear why the colonies are seeking independence and it is within their natural rights from God to declare themselves a country. In the next part of the Declaration, Jefferson goes through a list of the 27 grievances against King George III. Jefferson brings out his own inner John Locke, addressing Great Britain’s neglect towards the colonies. He argued that Britain failed in protecting the natural rights of the colonists and the colonists have every right. It was those undeniable rights that Jefferson argued for that ultimately persuaded colonists while also ushering in a new era of politics that inspired hope for many.
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Another deist and Age of Enlightenment thinker, Thomas Paine, used the ideas of the Age of Reason along with imbuing the propaganda pamphlet, Common Sense, with religious rhetoric as well, appealing to the new revivalists in the colonies. There are numerous reasons to cite why Paine was successful in creating arguably the most brilliant and effective political propaganda for the revolution.20 Paine not only was able to enliven audiences across the entire thirteen colonies through the sheer nature of how accessible his writing was to both literate and illiterate colonists, but also the religious overtones of Common Sense. Despite Paine being a deist, he uses a biblical allusion to accentuate his belief against King George III as the monarch, “for the will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings.”21 Paine further used an Old Testament allusion of the Jews rejecting the monarchial government and that even “Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government,” drawing the conclusion that the new “chosen” colonists should do the same.22 It’s through Paine’s reiteration of Biblical language that he is able to craft Common Sense into more than just a pamphlet, but rather have it act more as an evangelical sermon.
Ultimately while Paine himself isn’t particularly overly religious nor is he Christian, yet he understands the effect of religious appeals on his audience, using it coupled with the Enlightenment ideas of natural rights, knowing that it would ultimately motivate colonists to grab arms and join in the fight. It is through Common Sense where the intertwinement is seen so presently between politics and religion for a generation of men and women in the revolution.
From the early 18th century and up until the beginning of the 19th century, the thirteen colonies underwent a tremendous deal of religious change all within short period of time. American historian and theologian Sidney Mead identified pietism and rationalism as the two main religious movements in the 18th century. Pietism more broadly included both the revivalists from the First Great Awakening along with other sects of Protestantism, while Age of Enlightenment thinkers along with some Unitarian and Anglican churches influenced rationalism. 23 However, despite the clear differences in the two religious movements, they were able to unite together in stopping British rule in the colonies. Mead had argued about the two movement’s compatibility in the Revolution stating, “Rationalists appealed to the head and concluded that the manifold differences over which Christian sects fought were matters of nonessential opinion, as pietists appealed to the heart.”24 It is through the combination of these two religious movements and how they were able to appeal to the colonists that religious rhetoric was able to engulf the colonies and find something worth fighting for.
The Revolutionary War became one of the first points in American history for the majority of the people in the thirteen colonies to unify and act as one country for the first time. There were numerous reasons regarding why the Revolutionary War became a liberation for colonists against Great Britain. But religion, as one of those factors, acted as a powerful force that continued to motivate political behavior. Four of most prominent revolutionaries: Patrick Henry, Samuel Langdon, Thomas
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Jefferson, and Thomas Paine used their power of speech and quill to display the thoughts of independence, rebellion and patriotism while also infusing their own religious rhetoric. The combination of disparate Enlightenment deists and Christian revivalist’s came together to form a common bond from their ideas and rally a group of colonists into supporting the Revolutionary cause. As a result of these four revolutionaries, along with the countless others who had came before them and fought alongside them, they have been able to put their mark on American history.
Not only were they masters of their craft, but more importantly, these four men were so effective in capturing a generation of American spirit that still lives today. Their ideas and sentiment for standing in the face of the injustice, inherent rights and freedoms, and unity through adversity brought not only the revolutionists together, but have had a lasting impact on the country’s history that hold the testament of time.
