In the quiet, sleepy town of Bethlehem, Conn., during the mid-18th century, the rhythms of life were dictated by farming, trade and the local Congregational Church. The townspeople were deeply loyal to Great Britain, grateful for the protection of the crown against French adversaries. Yet, by 1776, this loyalty had evaporated. Nearly three-quarters of Bethlehem’s adult males had taken up arms against Great Britain, and the town’s pastor, Joseph Bellamy, was preaching that the British were “unnatural enemies.”
How did a population of loyal British subjects fundamentally shift their identity to become American revolutionaries?
For years, Colonial-era historians have debated the nature of the American Revolution. Was it chiefly driven by religious ideas or by secular politics stemming from the Enlightenment and its republican forms of thought?
Mark Valeri, the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of multiple books and scholarly publications that explore the role of religion in Colonial America, including “The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty” and “Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America.”
According to Valeri, the story of Bethlehem’s dramatic transformation demonstrates how religious leaders provided the essential framework for this radical change throughout the Colonies. In particular, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist and Catholic leaders were vocal advocates for the Revolution.
“Through the lens of 18th-century Protestantism, we can see how religious conviction did not merely support the Revolution, but actively constructed the intellectual and emotional architecture necessary for independence,” said Valeri, who is also vice director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at WashU.
The spiritual logic of political conversion
The first major contribution of religion to the Revolution was the concept of conversion itself. In the 1740s and 1750s, the American Colonies were swept by religious revivals, where conversion — the turning away from a hollow, ritualistic life toward a heartfelt, compelling relationship with God — was a central theme. This spiritual vocabulary gave colonists a way to understand and legitimize the shift in their political loyalties, Valeri explained.
‘By framing independence as a necessary conversion from tyranny to liberty, religious thought made the treasonous act of rebellion feel like a righteous moral duty.’
Mark Valeri
One of the leading voices in this movement was Sarah Osborn, a schoolteacher in Newport, R.I. Osborn, who had undergone a religious conversion, hosted revivals and used her experience to help others understand the political choices they faced, Valeri said.
“Sarah explicitly blended spiritual liberation with political liberty, freedom from imperial rule,” Valeri explained.
Meanwhile, religious leaders such as Jonathan Mayhew, a firebrand preacher from Boston, preached that American patriots had to wake up to the political danger posed by British tyranny, just as converts had to wake up to the spiritual danger of their sinful state. According to Mayhew, the colonists’ previous contentment with British rule was a dangerous delusion, parallel to a sinner’s false sense of security.
“To understand how conversions could lead to a political revolution, you have to understand the process of going through a conversion,” Valeri said. “First, it involved a self-reflective critique, which was a prompt for change. Secondly, conversion promised a reward. Just as spiritual conversion brought the joy of salvation, political conversion promised deliverance from tyranny.
“By framing independence as a necessary conversion from tyranny to liberty, religious thought made the treasonous act of rebellion feel like a righteous moral duty.”
From political theory to moral urgency
While Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke had long articulated ideas about natural rights and representative government, such concepts were often abstract political theories. It was the clergy — whom the British sometimes referred to as the “black-robed regiment” — who transformed these secular ideas into a divine mandate. Pastors such as Samuel West of Massachusetts played a crucial role in ramping up standard political discourse into a narrative of good versus evil.
Mark Valeri presented “Religion and the Revolution” as part of the 2026 spring course “1776, Then and Now,” offered by the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. Read more about the course here.
“West explained it this way: Political rule was legitimate only if it was just, which means it followed the constitutional law, and equitable, which means it was more than just. It was compassionate and regarded the common good,” Valeri said.
“According to West, rulers who ruled unjustly, based on these Bible texts, would be overthrown by God. No tyrant, he preached, can be a ruler, for as soon as he becomes a tyrant — this sort of echoes John Calvin — he forfeits his authority to govern and becomes a ‘minister of Satan.’”
This rhetorical shift was decisive. It’s one thing to disagree with a tax policy; it’s another to believe that the authority imposing it is an agent of evil.
“In May 1776, two months before the Declaration of Independence, West gave a sermon to recently elected members of the colonial Massachusetts government, or General Court. In this sermon, West said that the British are endeavoring to deprive us, not only of the privileges of Englishmen, but of what is much more sacred, namely the ‘inalienable rights that the God of nature has given us men as rational beings,’” Valeri said.
A sacred purpose for a new nation
As the war dragged on, bringing smallpox, starvation and death to towns like Bethlehem, colonists needed hope for the future. Religion provided Americans with a way to cope with the immense suffering of the war by inscribing their struggle in a “grand history with sacred purpose,” Valeri explained.
Drawing on the Puritan tradition of providence — the belief that God actively orchestrates history — Americans began to view their struggle through biblical analogies. Osborn, enduring the trade blockade and cold in Newport, compared the suffering of New Englanders to the ancient Israelites. Just as Israel had to endure the trials of the wilderness and Babylonian captivity before reaching the Promised Land, Americans believed they were undergoing a divine test.
“This narrative accomplished two things,” Valeri said. “First, it made sense of the tragedy. The death of loved ones, like Joseph Bellamy’s own son in the Continental Army, was not meaningless bad luck, but part of a redemptive struggle.
“Second, it fueled optimism. If America was acting the part of Israel in a divine drama, then victory was ultimately assured because God would eventually deliver His people. This ‘sacred history’ helped construct a new American identity that was distinct from British heritage, rooted instead in a narrative of settlement, suffering and eventual salvation.”
A Christian nation?
Ultimately, the Revolution was driven by more than just taxes and tea. It was fueled by a religious conviction that turned political grievances into a moral struggle. Through the logic of conversion, the sanctification of liberty and the construction of a sacred narrative, religion provided the essential fortitude that enabled a collection of farmers and shopkeepers to defy an empire and forge a new nation.
But that doesn’t mean this story is one of American exceptionalism or religious nationalism, Valeri cautioned.
“West, Osborn and their contemporaries thought the important part of the story was the self-critical impetus,” Valeri said.
“Americans were always to be self-critical, God’s law applied to all nations — not just to this new American nation — and they were very critical, especially of Americans’ complicity with slavery. In fact, Samuel Hopkins, the pastor to Sarah Osborn, had his church forbid slaveholders from becoming members after 1784. And Joseph Bellamy’s son-in-law, Levi Hart, preached and published this amazing anti-slavery sermon.
“So there’s this sense of critique that America may be guided by God’s providence, but it’s not especially guided. And the rule of God applies to all nations. America is one nation, and it is not an especially sacred nation.
“In that sense, nothing in my account here supports the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation,” Valeri said.
According to Valeri, it’s important to not confuse the private sentiments of Protestants, such as Osborn, with national state government identity. As far as they were concerned, the issue was not the nation’s religious identity, but the extent to which the nation adhered to justice, equity, republican and constitutional principles that placed America within a larger story of divine rule and justice over all nations.
