Revolutionary churches?

King George III famously called the American Revolution a “Presbyterian rebellion,” and he wasn’t the first to think of Presbyterians as a rebellious sort. The question is, Why? Is there something unique about Presbyterian belief that leads to conflict with civil governments?

Historian D.G. Hart, in his new book Protestants and Patriots (University of Notre Dame Press, 372 pp.), answers that question with a well-researched no. The book offers a thorough history of the relationship between Presbyterians and earthly governments between the 16th and the 19th centuries, and what emerges is the importance of political context.

Presbyterianism, from its beginning, inhabited a political world different from that of other Reformed churches. In the Britain of the 16th and 17th centuries, the union between the crown and episcopacy meant that to oppose the bishops was to oppose the monarch. Presbyterians didn’t in principle oppose the crown, writes Hart, and they “need not have threatened Protestant monarchs without kings and queens themselves seeking to aggrandize their own power and revenues.”

When the English Civil War erupted, Presbyterians sought to have their churches free from government rule while enjoying government support. Over the ensuing decades, they only achieved this type of establishment briefly in Scotland. Meanwhile, controversies in England, Ireland, Scotland, and North America were changing Presbyterian political thinking. “By the eighteenth century,” writes Hart, “Presbyterians were recalibrating ecclesiastical ideals to gain a foothold in the emerging structures of liberal society.”

One result was that, contra George III, the American Revolution was not a “Presbyterian rebellion” but a rebellion that included Presbyterians. Hart cites Founding Father John Witherspoon. “As it turned out,” he writes, “Witherspoon’s own support for American independence likely owed more to ideas he shared with Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson than any theological tradition that ran from John Knox to Thomas Chalmers.” While many Presbyterians supported the revolution, tens of thousands remained loyal to Britain.

Hart chronicles further changes for Presbyterians in the next decades: how, in the United States, “disestablishment and voluntarism finally allowed Presbyterians to voice, full throttle, the spiritual independence of the church”; how the Free Church of Scotland left the established church and entered into a voluntarism that it didn’t, in principle, want; how Canada experimented with church unions and a type of multiple establishment; how Presbyterians across the Anglosphere developed a politics that generally favored moral reform and moderate nationalism. It’s a fascinating story, and Hart tells it well. I just wish he had extended it to include Southern Presbyterian support of the Confederacy. But overall, this book is a good resource for those interested in learning about Presbyterian history and revolutionary motivations as America turns 250.