God’s Country?

God of Liberty

George Whitefield (1714-70) preaching in the open air

World History Archive / Newscom

A Religious History
of the American Revolution

by Thomas S. Kidd

Basic Books, 304 pp., $26.95

On New Year’s Day 1802, nine months after Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration as America’s third president, a gigantic block of cheese—1,235 pounds of it, to be precise—arrived at the White House as a gift for the president. A gesture of solidarity from old French revolutionary comrades? A sigh of relief from grateful Virginians and perhaps a gaggle of agnostic hangers-on? No indeed: The mammoth gift had been delivered by the farming community of Cheshire, Massachusetts, on the instructions of none other than the leading Baptist evangelical of his day, John Leland. It symbolized one of the strangest, but most significant, political and cultural alliances of the early post-independence nation: what Thomas S. Kidd calls “an unlikely alliance of evangelicals, Enlightenment liberals, and deists working together to win religious freedom.”

What made the alliance significant is that the evangelicals and the Enlightenment liberals—meaning, principally, Jefferson himself—were profoundly aware that each party’s ultimate goals differed glaringly. Leland unabashedly declared that his “only hope of acceptance with God is in the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ.” Jefferson, as is well known, didn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God, or had even claimed to be such, and he considered the Christian doctrine of the Trinity to be sheer foolishness. What brought them together, however, was more than the motto inscribed on the crust of the cheese: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” It was a subtle, but important overlapping of shared convictions about freedom of conscience, about the role of Providence in American life, and about the essential nature of virtue in the governance of a healthy republic.