Presbyterians

PRESBYTERIANS. While most Christian groups in America supported the War for Independence, Presbyterians were distinctive with respect to the extent and intensity of their enthusiasm for revolution. The denomination contained comparatively few Loyalists, the great exception being Scottish merchants, British officials, and Scottish Highlanders resident in the colonies, who tended to maintain their allegiance to the crown throughout the war. The denomination also contained few neutrals, especially after the war got under way, and fewer pacifists. Rather, the great majority of Presbyterians were Patriots, who in terms of the depth of support for and breadth of participation in the war had no rivals among the other major denominations, with the possible exception of the New England Congregationalists. Historians have frequently commented on the Presbyterian penchant for patriotism and, like Leonard Trinterud, author of The Forming of an American Tradition (1949), have wondered whether there wasn't "something inherent in Presbyterianism that made the cause of colonial independence congenial to it" (pp. 251-252).

SOURCES OF PRESBYTERIAN PATRIOTISM

American Presbyterian patriotism flowed from three initially separate streams of Reformed Protestant dissenting thought and behavior, each of which was intrinsic to the denomination's rise to religious and political prominence in the colonies. First, colonial Presbyterianism was founded on principles of English Puritan religious dissent, revived by second and third generations of New Englanders embroiled in ecclesiastical conflict with the leaders of the Congregational way. Proclaiming the freedom to leave New England and to create their own churches, the dissenters formed in the Middle Atlantic region the first Presbyterian communities in America.

A second stream of dissent was Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism. Over 100,000 Presbyterians migrated from Northern Ireland to the colonies in the period from 1717 to 1776, populating principally the mid-Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and adding greatly to the strength of Presbyterianism there. Having faced and resisted English religious and political persecution for many decades, the Ulsterites added to the church strong traditions of dissent that easily overlapped with and, in turn, deepened those inherited from British and early New England Puritans.

A third stream was the Great Awakening, an intercolonial religious revival sparked by the transatlantic evangelical ministry of George Whitefield, an English divine. Evangelizing the mid-Atlantic and southern frontiers during the 1740s and 1750s, Presbyterian revivalists helped convert frontier settlers, often of Scotch-Irish extraction, to New Light ideals of personal piety and individual conscience that rejected inherited authority and doctrinal traditions. In the period after the Great Awakening, the New Light converged with the other two dissenting streams of the denomination.

Puritan evangelism, religious revivalism, and Scots-Irish immigration together turned Presbyterianism into the second largest and the fastest growing denomination in America (as recently as 1700 it had been among the smallest). In the midst of this dramatic surge in membership, colonial Presbyterians succeeded in building a unified national Church, one based on a network of synods, presbyteries, and sessions, and on an American identity separate from the Ulster and Scotch Presbyterian churches. This identity contained radical political as well as religious elements. New principles of political dissent, introduced to Americans through the writings of English liberals such as John Locke, intermingled with traditions of Puritan, Scots-Irish, and New Light dissent. Initially, early modern English political science was considered a godless set of ideas, highly antagonist to Christian doctrine and theology. But during the Anglo-French wars of the 1740s and 1750s, Presbyterian ministers, among others, were found mixing political with religious dissent in diatribes denouncing "papalist" and "monarchist" French threats to American freedoms. When the crisis with England erupted, Presbyterians, redirecting their diatribes against their own mother country, lost much of their earlier reluctance to combine liberalism and Christian dissent, however increasingly volatile the compound. Presbyterians became widely know as uniquely patriotic, as is indicated by the many contemporary comments on the war as a "Presbyterian War."

PRESBYTERIANS IN REVOLUTION AND WAR

The war years led Presbyterians to fully embrace republican ideals and to complete the process of synthesizing them with Christian theology. The Presbyterians were not alone in effecting this merger, however. Other American denominations, especially the Congregationalists, helped to create a truly unique blend of republican and Christian convictions, the likes of which the world had never seen. Although Presbyterians never adopted a formal position on the conflict, it came close to doing so in May 1775 when, in response to Lexington and Concord, the synod of New York and Philadelphia issued a pastoral letter to the membership seeking to explain the nature of the crisis. This and other documents, including war sermons delivered by Presbyterian ministers and radical statements issued by the local laity, reveal a generally unified liberal-Presbyterian rationale for war and revolution.

Presbyterians saw themselves, first and foremost, as Christians, which meant that they were conscience-bound to support the Christian gospel of peace. As Christians they had consistently prayed for reconciliation with Britain throughout the crisis. They also had hesitated to criticize the king and his Parliament, and had sought to restrain the passions of the masses. But Britain had refused reconciliation, and had begun to commit atrocities against the colonists. By 1775 Presbyterians believed their backs were against the wall, and by 1776 they were convinced they had no recourse but to go to war against the mother country.

To Presbyterians this was thus a just war, a point that both Christian and liberal dissenting ideals could be used to defend. Christians, who professed to be lovers of peace, nevertheless had a duty to resist tyranny, even if the tyrant were a Christian king. In the face of tyranny, non-resistance or even passive resistance were not viable options. Once convinced of the the tyranny of the king, Presbyterians had a God-given responsibility to resist, even if that meant loss of limb or life. As an American battle flag proclaimed, "RESISTANCE TO TYRANTS IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD."

Presbyterians freely inserted liberal ideals into war sermons to strengthen the "just war" defense, borrowing freely from the ideas of Locke, among others. Political power had bounds and limits that rulers could not breech without threatening the natural rights and liberties of the people set by the laws of God and of reason. Britain had exceeded these bounds and, therefore, the people had the right to resist and to establish a new government, more attentive to their needs and happiness. Abraham Ketteltas, a Pennsylvania Presbyterian minister, put succinctly the multiple Christian and liberal justifications for war: "The cause of this American Continent, against the measures of a cruel, bloody, and vindictive ministry, is the cause of God. We are contending for the rights of mankind."

In addition to a "just war" defense, liberal and Christian ideals were brought together to prepare Presbyterians for the urgent yet fearful task of waging war against the world's mightiest military power. Such times called for civic virtue, the sacrifice of self for country, as well as Christian courage and fortitude. The New Light movement's stress on religious conversion was used to assuage rising Presbyterian anxieties regarding the war. Within the New Light movement, the main argument was that conversion, by giving believers assurance of salvation, provided the perfect antidote to fear of death, and thus the perfect source of Christian courage. Presbyterians also stressed the centrality of conversion to the achievement of success on the field of battle: "There is no soldier so undaunted as the pious man, no army so formidable as those who are superior to the fear of death" (quoted in Trinterud, p. 247).

Furthermore, Presbyterians argued that Christian piety and liberal ideals had to be mutually reinforcing if the republican revolution were to succeed. The Continental Congress could not achieve the democratic goals of the revolution unless it had the respect and support of all the people. Presbyterians could ensure political solidarity by working to unite Christians behind the new republic. By exercising Christian charity towards all religious denominations in America, Presbyterians could lay the groundwork for Christian, and hence republican, union.

Finally, Presbyterians saw religious and civil liberty as formerly antagonistic, but now necessary allies in the revolutionary struggle. There was "no example in history," the Synod of May 1775 observed, "in which civil liberty was destroyed, and the rights of conscience preserved entire" (Trinterud, p. 248). As John Witherspoon, president of the Presbyterian College of New Jersey, put it, "our civil and religious liberties, and consequently in a great measure the temporal and eternal happiness of us and our posterity, depended on the issue" of the war.

Historians have argued that the Christian use of republican language may have been determinative in drawing believers into the war and revolution. Certainly, Presbyterians helped lead the ideological campaign against Britain, and contributed a disproportionate number of people to the conflict. A particularly striking instance of this comes from the records of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. The college contributed so many leaders to the war and revolution that it became known as a "seminar of sedition" or "the Cradle of Liberty." Of 279 students who matriculated between 1746 and 1768 and were still alive in 1775, 94 saw some kind of service in the military, while only 8 became Loyalists. In addition, of the 178 students who studied under President Witherspoon in the period 1769–1775, 105 became important state or national officials, while a mere two became Royalists. By comparison, as many as 50 percent and 22 percent of King's College and Yale College students, respectively, whose political allegiance is known, were Loyalists.

IMPACT OF REVOLUTION ON PRESBYTERIANISM

Because of the political and religious changes wrought by war and revolution, Presbyterians saw a new ecclesiastical world arising once the smoke of battle had cleared. More than anything else, the disestablishment of the Anglican Church and the promotion of religious equality presented the Presbyterian Church with new challenges. Faced with rising competition for adherents from new denominations, especially the Methodists and the Baptists, Presbyterians responded by rejecting the idea of a state church and pushing the idea of the liberal arts school as the chief instrument of Presbyterian proselytism. In tune with the great ideological synthesis of 1776, they argued that a Liberal education would strengthen the church as well as the new republic, for knowledge of the world was a prerequisite for virtuous citizenship.

In the process of rushing to establish academies and colleges in the post-Revolution period, Presbyterians created what amounted to an educational empire. Because of their unique stress on higher education, Presbyterians acquired a distinctive denominational identity, which could be used for evangelical purposes in a world now marked by religious competition. Gone were the days of working for Christian union; Presbyterianism during the nineteenth century became a denomination devoted more to spreading distinctive modes of piety than to elaborating principles of American patriotism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Griffin, Patrick. The People with no Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World 1689–1764. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Miller, Howard. The Revolutionary College: American Presbyterian Higher Education 1707–1837. New York: New York University Press, 1976.

Mulder, Philip N. A Controversial Spirit: Evangelical Awakenings in the South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Neimeyer, Charles Patrick. America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Noll, Mark. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Sandoz, Ellis, ed. Political Sermons of the Founding Era: 1730–1805. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1991.

Tiedemann, Joseph S. "Presbyterianism and the American Revolution in the Middle Colonies." Church History 74, 2 (June 2005): 306-344.

Trinterud, Leonard. The Forming of An American Tradition: A Re-examination of Colonial Presbyterianism. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1949.