Ministers and the church should have nothing to do with politics. Or so we hear all the time. Thankfully, during the settling and founding eras of America, that was not the dominant opinion.

In fact, ministers often helped lead the way to American independence.

Christian educator Travis Witt of Virginia once remarked: “Every single one of the issues mentioned by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence had been preached from the American pulpits in New England before 1763.”

His remarks are well-documented in a 1928 (revised in 1958) book by Duke professor Alice M. Baldwin (1879-1960), titled The New England Clergy and the American Revolution.

For example, Baldwin notes: “The teachings of the New England ministers provide one unbroken line of descent. For two generations and more New Englanders had heard their rights and the political philosophy underlying them carefully analyzed; they had been taught that these rights were sacred and came from God and that to preserve them they had a legal right of resistance and, if necessary, a right to resume the powers they had delegated and alter and abolish governments and by common consent establish new one.” (p. 169)

And she adds, “With a vocabulary enriched by the Bible they made resistance and at........

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