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The Religious Conspiracy Theory of the American Revolution: Anglican Motive

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

William M. Hogue
William M. Hogue
Affiliation:
Mr. Hogue is headmaster of the Tome School, North East, Maryland
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Extract

The historian of American religion seeking to establish the relevance of his specialty to the event of 1776 labors under something of a handicap, a disability epitomized in the cold silence about religion in those documents which have become the secular scriptures of the nation's political faith. Neither the official justification for the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, nor the popular contemporaneous one, Paine's Common Sense, accords the remotest of influences to formal religion. If the Revolution had a religious dimension, evidence for it must be sought elsewhere. Both the exegete, hoping to throw new light upon old truth, and the skeptic, to whom a received dogma is a standing challenge, have perforce turned to the antiquarian's shelves, stuffed with the literary remains of a pamphleteering age.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , September 1976 , pp. 277 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1976

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