Op-Ed: As We Enter Our Own 1776 Moment, Christian Leaders Must Make a Stand

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  — John Adams

The French and American revolutions happened within a dozen years of one another, yet they centered on two very different concepts of individual liberty.

For the French, the goal was to ensure political equality. For the Americans, it was personal independence. This distinction helps shed light on what made the outcomes of the two revolutions so different.

To understand the American Revolution, we have to go back to the period between 1730 and 1750 when a religious revival spread across the colonies.

It began with Johnathon Edwards, John and Charles Wesley and an amazing evangelist by the name of George Whitfield. Whitfield delivered 18,000 sermons, and it has been estimated that over 80 percent of the colonists heard him preach. Many historians admit that there would not have been a revolution without this “Great Awakening.”

We think of the Boston Tea Party and slogans like “no taxation without representation” as the key rallying cries of the American Revolution. Although they spoke to the issues, these were not the root causes.

Pastors had begun preaching about individual liberty, rights granted by God and natural law. In fact, you can find phrases in our Declaration of Independence taken directly from sermons given during that period.

The British called these pastors the “Black Regiment” (later known as the Black Robe Regiment) and knew they were the enemy. They were not organized but were united in preaching religious liberty. Churches were burned and pastors jailed for saying that rights did not come from a king or government but only from God.

The French Revolution was totally different. During his despotic period of leadership, Maximilien Robespierre went so far as to create the Cult of the Supreme Being, a state religion based on secularism. This was part of Robespierre’s revolutionary program to completely destroy France’s Roman Catholic tradition in pursuit of an ambiguous “political equality” amongst the masses.