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.

Ebenezer Devotion was born into the family of a Congregational minister in Suffield, Connecticut (then Massachusetts), on May 8, 1714, graduated from Yale College in 1732, and on October 22, 1735 was installed as the first pastor of the Third Ecclesiastical Society in Windham (later Scotland), Connecticut.1 His active ministry began about the time that Jonathan Edwards' parishioners in Northampton were first sensing that all was not right with their souls, and five short years before Whitefield and the great revival would sweep through New England. Ebenezer Devotion died on July 16, 1771 as another consuming excitement, this one political, took shape in America.

November! gloomy Month! approaches fast,

When Liberty was doom'd to brethe [sic] her last,

All, all her Sons agree to fast that Day,

To mourn, lament and sigh, and hope,—and pray

That the Almighty god of all below,

Some Pity would to suffering Mortals show1.

With these lines an anonymous American poet addressed the first day of November 1765, the date the Stamp Act was to take effect throughout British North America. The hopes of patriots and lovers of liberty, he argued, rested upon the interposition of God on behalf of the American colonies. If the Lord would look with mercy on his afflicted people and come to their aid, their freedoms could yet be preserved. In assigning the continuation of American liberty to the intervention and protection of divine providence, this patriotic poet employed one of the deepest and most popular strands of American thought expressed during the era of the American Revolution.

John Wesley, leader of the Methodist movement in England, was a significant figure to the unenfranchised lower class of English society. His movement roused popular spiritual and religious fervor among groups not reached by the bulk of the Anglican clergy, and he was in a position to observe and communicate with the English people in a way few others were. Many Anglicans had initially feared the Methodists as secret Jesuits or supporters of a Stuart restoration, but much of the violent opposition had declined by the 1760s. Still, little would be needed to revive action opposition to Methodist activities. It is in this connection that Wesley's activities in the era of the American Revolution should be viewed1

Patriots at the beginning of the American Revolution were conscious of participating in a tradition of liberty derived from their Puritan forefathers. Not only did they refer back to the crossing of the sea by their ancestors who “bravely threw themselves upon the bosom of the ocean, determined to find a place in which they might enjoy their freedom, or perish in the glorious attempt,” but they also spoke of themselves as “the descendants of Oliver Cromwell's army,” “the descendants of Cromwell's elect.” Benjamin Rush thought of himself as being a son of liberty genetically when he wrote, “I am the great grandson of an officer John Rush who fell fighting against King Charles 1st under Oliver Cromwell.”2

The historical literature on colonial America is extensive and wide-ranging. Those works which deal with seventeenth-century New England in particular describe a society in which the church was an institution of overwhelming importance, and religious concerns were closely integrated with all aspects of life. Even in the diversifying and more secular picture of the eighteenth century, religion continued to occupy a central position in society, and the historiography of the period reflects this reality. Many attempts to trace the origins of the American Revolution are laced with the religious dynamic, and the influence of ministerial leadership is considered significant. In Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, religious issues and the clergy are prominent in the unfolding political struggle.1

In 1790, the year John Carroll was consecrated as the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Baltimore, the Catholic population numbered less than 40,000—a very distinct minority in a country of nearly 4,000,000 people. As a small group living in a society overwhelmingly composed of Protestants, Catholics could not avoid mixing with those of different faiths in their everyday life.1 Carroll viewed such contacts with mixed feelings. As a native American he understood that so many of his countrymen considered his church, however wrongly, an “alien” institution. He resented most the accusation that the allegiance that Catholics owed to Rome detracted from their attachment to the United States.