Christian Nationalism: The American Revolution Versus The French Revolution

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Scary stuff, eh? Do you detect a whiff of dangerous “nationalism?”

Image by Andrea Widburg

Christianity was the unchallenged foundation of Western Civilization until the Enlightenment. Many of the Enlightenment’s greatest figures, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition, remained people of faith, such as the father of the Scientific Method, Francis Bacon (1651-1626), who “promot[ed] scientific experimentation as a way of glorifying God and fulfilling scripture.” Other Enlightenment figures, particularly in France, were radicals such as Denis Diderot; they embraced atheism and socialism, which proved to have dire consequences for humanity.

In the Anglo-American branch of the Enlightenment, the most influential political philosopher was John Locke, an English doctor and a Christian who wrote his Second Treatise of Government in 1690. Locke explicitly grounded his political philosophy in the Bible, arguing that rights to life, liberty, and property, and a right to be subject to laws made only by a freely elected legislature, were not grants from government that government could withdraw on a whim, but were laws of nature a Christian God bequeathed to mankind. Government could not legitimately withdraw these laws, and citizens could rebel if governments tried to do so. Locke’s work became the American justification for revolution and a blue-print for the liberal democracy contained in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

In 1750, Boston Congregationalist (i.e., Puritan) minister Jonathan Mayhew relied on Locke’s reasoning to deliver his own Biblical exegesis on government, God-given rights, and justified rebellion in a sermon he titled “Unlimited Submission.” It was the Morning Gun of the American Revolution.”

Mayhew wrote to justify Puritan actions during the bloody English Civil War a century earlier, which culminated with Puritans beheading the Anglican tyrant, King Charles I, for treason. Mayhew grounded English rights and representative government in scripture, particularly Romans 13:1-7, and reasoned from scripture that Christians had a duty to rebel against a tyrant violating their rights to life, liberty, or property. Mayhew had a profound effect on 15-year-old John Adams, who sat in the pews that day. Mayhew also had his sermon published and copies distributed throughout the colonies and Britain.

Christianity was at the forefront of the march to revolution that followed. Peter Oliver, the loyalist Chief Justice of colonial Massachusetts, wrote in 1780 that Mayhew and his fellow Congregationalist clergy—the “Black Regiment”—caused the American rebellion. In 1775, Britain’s Horace Walpole drew a similar conclusion when he quipped that “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian minister.”

Famously, in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson invoked immutable, God-given rights to justify rebelling against a tyrant who violated those rights. Jefferson’s reasoning, and indeed, much of his verbiage, was lifted from John Locke. In the months before Jefferson penned the Declaration, Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, a pamphlet that caused a sea change in the colonial embrace of revolution. He opened the pamphlet with religious arguments against the monarchy.

Ben Franklin, a man who was pivotal in the Christian evangelical movement’s rise in America, proposed in 1776 that the Great Seal of the United States should show Israelites escaping from Egypt as recounted in Exodus, with the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” Jefferson liked that motto so much that he adopted it for his personal seal.

It’s irrefutable that the people who drafted and approved the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Constitution (1787), and the Bill of Rights (1791) believed that the rights to life, liberty, property, and representative government flowed from God and government could not infringe them.* For a good discussion of religion’s role in our government, see this 2006 speech from former federal judge and Senator James Buckley.

The canard of “Christian nationalism” comes from the atheist path that brought the Enlightenment to a bloody end with the French Revolution. Virtually all modern society’s ills can be traced back to that Revolution, which birthed socialism and a modern police state with absolute power. Naturally, the first thing the French radicals had to do to remake society was rid the nation of a competing system of morality and authority—i.e., Christianity—and this they did with brutality and bloodshed. George Neumayr explained,

The secularists of the French Revolution regarded the Roman Catholic Church as the last obstacle to atheism’s final triumph. Blurting this out, the French dilettante Denis Diderot proposed to his fellow revolutionaries that they strangle the last priest with the “guts of the last king.”

The French Revolution’s legacy has been a disaster for humanity. Over 100 million people died in the 20th century because of communist, socialist, and fascist police states unmoored from Judaism and Christianity. Moreover, the children of the French Revolution, people such as Michel Foucault, a gay pedophile, and Herbert Marcuse, have overtaken the West’s ivory towers and poisoned the West with postmodernism, critical theory, DEI, and atheism.

And now, the French Revolution’s legacy gives us the utter canard of Christian Nationalism. It is a charge that relies on historic illiteracy to redefine our nation. It must be fought tooth and nail, for the stakes could not be higher.

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*If you’re wondering why none of our founding documents mention God, while Jefferson only alluded to a “Creator,” it’s because the Founders lived in a world that had been riven by almost 250 years of bloody sectarian strife. As John Adams explained to Abigail, the men gathered at the First Continental Congress were all deeply religious and were concerned with poisoning their gathering with sectarian differences.

Wolf Howling is a pseudonym.

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