Religion as a Precipitating Cause

It was a puzzle to the British, and even to some extent many modern historians, why the North American colonists were willing to risk so much—“their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor”—for the cause of independence, when their grievances seemed so trifling. The Americans, after all, were probably the freest people on the planet: their taxes were lower than those of their compatriots in the motherland, they were governed in most respects by legislatures of their own choosing, and they enjoyed greater freedom of speech and religion than their compatriots at home. The most famous answer to this puzzle came from the British statesman Edmund Burke, in his “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies.” Burke identified four socio-cultural characteristics of the American people that made them unusually zealous for liberty, and hence unusually resistant to heavy-handed monarchical rule. The most striking of these was religion.

According to Burke, the colonists’ religion was a “main cause of this free spirit.” By this he did not mean that religion in general, whatever its content, promotes a free spirit, but that the particular variant of religion most common in America, and especially the northern colonies where the Tea Party rebellion broke out, was conducive to resistance to authority. “The people are Protestants,” he pointed out, “and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” He explained that “[a]ll Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.”Footnote ¹

This may sound strange to the ears of modern-day Americans, who are accustomed to keeping religious beliefs separate and distinct from philosophies of government and are reluctant to ascribe special importance to any particular religious sect. But Burke was not alone in thinking that there is a profound connection between the two. As Alexis de Tocqueville was to write some fifty years later, “Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.”Footnote ² This is in part because of teachings about the relations of man to man, and partly because of habits formed by reason of church organization.

Churches as Institutions of Information and Opinion

In the decades surrounding the founding, churches were the principal institutions for the formulation and dissemination of ideas, both oral and written. The leading polemicists on the Loyalist side were almost all Anglican ministers, and many of those supporting revolution were Presbyterian, Congregationalist, or Baptist ministers. Yes, there were almost fifty newspapers—most of them weeklies—and historians have long regarded these as the principal forums for spreading revolutionary ideas. But an empirical study of newspaper readership concluded that only about one quarter of the households in Philadelphia in 1773 had access to a newspaper, and in most of America the number of newspaper readers was far fewer. In addition to newspapers, authors frequently shared their ideas through the medium of published pamphlets.Footnote ³

By contrast, historians estimate that New England churchgoers—and most New Englanders were churchgoers—would hear 15,000 hours of sermons in a lifetime.Footnote ⁴ (By comparison, a student hears about 1,500 hours of lectures in four years of college.) In addition, traveling evangelists such as George Whitefield and Samule Davies reached audiences of thousands. Of course, most of these sermons were not political, but many of them were. Moreover, much of the content in newspapers and pamphlets consisted of reprints or reports of sermons. Some 80 percent of the published political pamphlets surviving from the 1770s were reprints of sermons.Footnote ⁵ It thus makes a difference whether sermons harped on Romans 13 (“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities”) or Acts 4 (“Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you [meaning the authorities] rather than God”).Footnote ⁶

The state establishment of religion was therefore not merely a matter of individual or communal liberty of conscience. It also had great structural and institutional significance. Government attempted to control religion for much the same reason it attempted to control the press: in order to inculcate ideas and opinions favorable to the state among the populace. For this reason, we should think of disestablishment as parallel to freedom of the press, preventing the government from dominating the organs of opinion formation. Aspects of disestablishment were of course central to individual religious freedom and individual conscience. In a disestablishmentarian state, men and women would no longer be required to attend worship services, contribute to a church, or subscribe to certain beliefs as a condition to voting or holding office, as was true under the established Church of England in the mother country and many of the American colonies and early states. But there was an institutional dimension as well: disestablishment meant the absence of an official orthodoxy, and the emergence of a polity in which ideas could compete on an equal basis, whether religious or nonreligious, and whether they conformed to the thinking of the dominant group or not.

Religious Demography of Revolutionary American

At a time when most European nations had a single established church and suppressed most forms of dissent, colonial America was one of the most religiously diverse places on the planet. Virginia and the South were settled mostly by economic adventurers, with the active support of the Crown. Each of the southern colonies recognized the established Church of England, with varying degrees of tolerance for dissenters. Virginia was the most rigid. Baptists were jailed in Virgina to the eve of the Revolution for preaching without a license. Georgia was the most tolerant, partly in the interest of attracting settlers. New England outside of Rhode Island was a place of refuge for Puritans and Pilgrims, the forerunners of Congregationalism. These pious men and women were persecuted in Stuart England and fled to the New World in search of freedom to worship in accordance with conscience—for themselves, at least. Members of other faiths, such as Baptists, Quakers, or Catholics, were not welcome.

The original Dutch colony of New Holland established the Dutch Reformed Church, but New York City also attracted religious dissenters of various stripes from all over Europe. These included members of the Sephardic diaspora who came to New York after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal by way of Amsterdam and formed the first Jewish synagogue in America.

Three colonies were established as havens for religious minorities: Maryland was granted to the Calvert family, who created the colony as a place where Catholics could live and worship. By Independence, Catholics made up 15 percent of the Maryland population, though only 2 percent nationwide. There was no Catholic Church south of Maryland prior to 1796. At the New York state constitutional convention in 1777, future chief Justice John Jay, a descendant of Huguenots, attempted to exclude Catholics from eligibility for citizenship. He was successfully opposed by future constitutional framer Gouverneur Morris, also a descendant of Huguenots.

William Penn, whose father had been granted ownership of Pennsylvania, was a devout Quaker and made the colony a welcoming place for that often-persecuted religious minority. In doing so, however, he did not favor Quakers but guaranteed religious freedom for all. As a result, Pennsylvania was an unusually religiously diverse state, with large numbers of Presbyterians, German Lutherans, German Reformed (a German variant on Presbyterianism), and Anabaptists. The first speaker of the US House of Representatives was a German-speaking Lutheran pastor from Pennsylvania. There also was a significant Jewish population in Philadelphia.

Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams, along with Anne Hutchinson, who were dissidents from the strict Puritan regime in Boston. From the beginning, Rhode Island had something close to full religious freedom, including for the early Jewish community in Newport.

Religious diversity increased with the Great Awakening in the middle of the eighteenth century. This revivalistic movement, led by itinerant preachers, was a populist religious outpouring that emphasized personal encounters with the Holy Spirit and accused the more staid and learned clergy of the major denominations of being hireling priests—ministers paid by government or church authorities. A famous sermon by Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian revivalist, was entitled “The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry.” This did not sit well with ministers in the settled pulpits.

The Great Awakening produced splits within the Reformed Protestant churches between what were called the Old Lights and the New Lights, swelled the ranks of the Baptists, and birthed the Methodist movement. Its effect was radically democratic and disruptive of established institutions. When Burke spoke of “the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion” he could have been speaking of the Great Awakening.Footnote ⁷

Although the Church of England was formally established as the state church in every colony south of Pennsylvania, and semi-established in metropolitan New York, it was far from the dominant or largest religious group. By 1775, Anglican churches served only a ninth of the population. They tended to be concentrated in coastal and tidewater areas, and scarce in the hinterlands. The largest American denominations at the time of the Revolution, in order, were Congregationalists (as noted, the successors to the Puritans), Presbyterians, and Baptists. Congregationalists were concentrated in New England, Presbyterians in the middle colonies, and Baptists were dispersed through all the colonies. There were also significant numbers of Quakers and Lutherans, especially in Pennsylvania. Roman Catholics were perhaps 2 percent of the population, concentrated in Maryland, which had been created as a haven for Catholics. There were enough Jews to constitute a congregation in six cities: Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. With a congregation of five hundred, the Jewish community in Charleston was by far the largest. There were, however, no rabbis in British North America before 1800.Footnote ⁸

History of Persecution

Burke claimed that “the reason of this averseness in the dissenting churches, from all that looks like absolute government, is [not] so much to be sought in their religious tenets, as in their history.”Footnote ⁹ Certainly, there was ample history to make Protestants wary of governments. Dutch Protestants had suffered violence at the hands of the Spanish in Holland; between 10,000 and 100,000 French Huguenots were killed in a state-sponsored pogrom in 1572; hundreds of English Protestants were burned at the stake under “Bloody” Queen Mary. The Puritans of New England fled to these shores to escape persecution at the hands of the Stuart monarchy, and formed their churches in the teeth of governmental opposition. Puritans who remained in England were jailed and exiled under the Stuarts and fought Charles I in the English Civil War, and Scottish Presbyterians were persecuted in the 1680s when James II attempted to force them to accept Crown-appointed bishops.

This history left an indelible mark on the relations between Protestants and the state. Convinced as they were that their particular form of worship was ordained by God, the fact that it was forbidden by the king and the Parliament taught them the lesson that the authority of king and Parliament was in opposition to God’s will, making rebellion legitimate.

Ecclesiology

It was not only historical experience that shaped American political theology. Equally important were doctrine and church organization. The overwhelming majority of Americans (outside of the unchurched, who were numerous) were Protestants of one denomination or another. The most salient differences among denominations had to do with church organization. This is called ecclesiology. Most of the denominations (with the possible exception of Anglicans) believed that the form of church organization was dictated by scripture. They disagreed about what that biblically ordained form of governance is. The four largest denominations were Anglican, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist.

By virtue of its very foundation and its articles of faith, the Anglican Church was committed to royal authority. The church came about when Henry VIII severed ties with the pope, making the king the “supreme head of the church” in England. At first, Henry did not intend to alter the doctrine or ritual of the church, but the break with Rome coincided with the Protestant Reformation. After Henry’s death in 1547, the Anglican Church adopted many of the most prominent Protestant ideas, including the doctrine of justification by faith; a new liturgy in the English language; rejection of clerical celibacy, indulgences, and transubstantiation; and proclamation of a new set of articles of faith.

Unlike Reformed Protestantism, Anglican ecclesiology is hierarchical and top-down, more similar in structure to Catholicism than to Congregationalism or Presbyterianism. Under the Act of Supremacy, the monarch is the supreme governor of the church, with authority to appoint the high officials of the church (though now this authority, like all royal prerogatives, must be exercised on the advice of the prime minister), and to correct “all manner of errors, heresies, schisms, abuses, offenses, contempts, and enormities” that might arise in the church.Footnote ¹⁰ No one may be ordained as a minister unless he (or now, she) swears an oath of allegiance to the monarch as head of both church and state. American ministers had to travel to London to take this oath before the bishop of London, who had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the churches in the colonies. In Virginia and some other parts of North America, where there was no bishop to exercise discipline, Anglican ministers were effectively under the thumb of the parish vestry, an elected office typically held by members of the local gentry. George Washington was a vestryman in his Anglican church near Mount Vernon.

The Puritan, or Congregational, church is governed at the local level by the congregation, much like a New England town meeting. All the male members of the congregation could vote (though in early years, only those who gave evidence of experiencing saving grace could be full members) and had power to elect the minister of their choice. In theory, this could be a clergyman of any denomination, but in practice this almost always meant a Protestant of Puritan persuasion. The minister was often a man of education and great personal influence. Congregationalists placed great emphasis on the importance of what was then termed a learned ministry—hence the centrality of Harvard and Yale. But in theory the minister’s role was solely to preach and lead worship; governance of the church was in the hands of elders elected by the congregation. Each local congregation governed itself, with no higher colonial, state, or national authority.

As fellow Reformed Protestants, Presbyterians resembled Congregationalists in many ways, but their governance was distinctive. Each congregation elected a board of lay members, called ruling elders, who governed the church. This was called the Session. The minister, whose formal title was (and is) teaching elder, was responsible for preaching the gospel, but church discipline was the role of the Session. Each Session sent lay members, plus clergy, to a regional body called the Synod, and ultimately to a national General Assembly. No single person headed the church, and there were no bishops. The Presbyterian Church was nonetheless connectional, and local congregations could be reprimanded and corrected by appeal to the ascending tiers of judicatories. In effect, the General Assembly served the governance function of national bishops or archbishops, but the power flowed up from the congregations rather than down from the top.

The Dutch Reformed Church was virtually identical in structure to the Presbyterian, except that until 1754 its equivalent of the General Assembly, the Classis, was located in Amsterdam. Descendants of the Huguenots, the Protestants of France who were persecuted after revocation of the Edict of Nantes, easily assimilated into the Anglophone Protestant culture, most often as Anglicans or Presbyterians.

Baptists were yet more individualistic. Membership in congregations was fluid, and anyone could serve as a preacher without need for formal theological training. Many were unpaid laymen. Sometimes even women were preachers. Like the Congregationalists—but even more so—each congregation governed itself and chose and ordained its own ministers. The most distinctive feature of Baptist theology was that only believers could be baptized, which meant persons of sufficient age to make a convincing profession of faith. This may seem a trivial difference, but the adherence to believers’ baptism was an affirmation of the ultimate authority of each person over his or herself. We are not born into faith or the society. We must choose for ourselves. The belief that true religion is a matter only between each person and the Creator made the Baptists the fiercest opponents of establishment of religion and advocates of what they called soul liberty.

Why does all this ecclesiology matter? Tocqueville, the most perceptive analyst of American political institutions, wrote that “[e]very religion is to be found in juxtaposition to a political opinion which is connected with it by affinity.”Footnote ¹¹ Some religions are monarchical, some aristocratic or oligarchic, some republican, and some democratic. Alas, some lend themselves to demagogic tyranny or coercive imposition, and some are disruptive of authority.

Anglicanism, by its structure, accustomed its adherents to monarchical rule. If you believe that in the most important things in life, authority flows from the top down—and if you believe, in particular, that religious authority is vested in a hereditary monarchy—you will tend to believe that political authority is of a similar nature. The colonial American variant tended somewhat more toward oligarchy than monarchy. Because distance across the ocean precluded effective governance by a royally appointed bishop, authority in American parishes tended to devolve toward the local vestry, which was dominated by the landed elite. That, too, had its political effect.

Reformed Protestantism was conducive to republican government. As the author of the 1794 History of the American Revolution wrote, from personal experience: “The ministers of New-England being mostly congregationalist, are from that circumstance, in a professional way more attached and habituated to the principles of liberty than if they had spiritual superiors to lord it over them.”Footnote ¹² The absence of a religious hierarchy in religious matters reinforced the idea of an absence of hierarchy in political matters as well. James I tried to impose bishops on the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland because, in his words, “No bishop, no king.”Footnote ¹³ Very likely, James was less concerned with church organization as a matter of abstract ecclesiology than because of its implications for civil government. People who formed their own churches, governed their own churches, and elected their own pastors find it natural to form their own governments, govern their own polities, and elect their own leaders. Political scientist Donald Lutz has observed that the earliest colonists patterned their civic charters and compacts on church charters they had formed in the mother country.Footnote ¹⁴ This is not to say that adherents to hierarchical faiths are unable to be good republican citizens—Tocqueville reported that Catholics in America are “the most republican and the most democratic class in the United States”Footnote ¹⁵ – but it helps to explain why the peoples of the Protestant Reformation were especially inclined toward republicanism.

The distinctive feature of Congregationalism as a branch of Reform Protestantism is its adherence to localized democracy, based on the individual congregation. It is not a coincidence that the characteristic New England civil institution was the town meeting.Footnote ¹⁶ In view of the value placed by Congregationalists on a learned clergy, it is perhaps more precise to say that Congregationalism in practice tended toward a localized form of democracy dominated by an educated leadership class, which often coincided with wealth and birth.

Presbyterian governance is similar to that of Congregationalism in that authority comes from the people, but it has an important difference. Presbyterian congregations are not isolated; they are subject to supervision and control by higher authorities. The congregation elects the Session, and the Session sends delegates to the Synod and, ultimately, to the General Assembly. It is a federal system. Is it any surprise that James Madison—a young man educated at the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, the leading intellectual center of Presbyterian thought in America—became the greatest designer and defender of a constitution he dubbed “partly federal and partly national?”Footnote ¹⁷ Founding-era Presbyterianism thus was as republican in its tendency as Congregationalism but disposed toward a federal rather than a localist or nationalist structure.

The Baptist impulse was more individualistic, more libertarian, more anarchic. If a Baptist did not like the way his church was going, he would leave and join another—a marked contrast from religious traditions like Catholicism, where the faithful often have a lifelong attachment to the church as an institution, whatever they may think of its teachings. Baptists thus tended to be the most anti-authoritarian major movement in the new Republic. Along with their fellow spirits among the New Lights of the Great Awakening, Baptists were a more force for popular democracy than for cautious republicanism.

Political Theology

Then as now, churches generally have a political theology—a doctrine regarding the responsibilities of man to man and the proper organization of society. Reformed Protestants had a series of teachings that, although formulated for reasons other than politics, had profound implications for politics, and that pointed strongly in the direction of republican government. The Church of England, by contrast, had (and has) an explicit article of faith affirming the authority of the British monarch over both church and state.

The Thirty Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England, finalized in 1571, contain an article, number 37, addressing the authority of civil magistrates. It declares that the king or queen has “the chief power in this Realm of England, and other his Dominions,” and goes on to say that the monarchs have the “prerogative … that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers.”Footnote ¹⁸ This article of faith makes the British monarchy not just a preferred form of governance, but one that is divinely ordained. The first provision of the 1604 Canons of the Church of England, which were carried over into the Anglican colonies, required ministers at least four times a year to deliver sermons teaching that the king “is the highest power under God.” Amusingly, the canons specified that this adjuration was to be delivered “purely and sincerely, without any colour or dissimulation.”Footnote ¹⁹ Because all Anglican ministers had to take an oath of loyalty to the Crown, an American minister who supported the Patriot cause would be in violation of his sacred oath. Half of them resigned their pulpits, either out of conviction or fear of their Patriot parishioners. The most public Tory voices during the Revolution were typically found in places like New York, where they enjoyed the protection of British troops.

The Book of Common Prayer was a particular bone of contention. It prescribed prayers for the King as part of the regular liturgy, asking God “to be his [the King’s] defender and keeper, giving him victory over all his enemies.”Footnote ²⁰ That posed an obvious problem after the Declaration of Independence. The Anglican church in Philadelphia took it upon itself to replace these words with the more patriotic sentiment “That it may please Thee to endue the Congress of these United States, and all others in authority, legislative, executive, and judicial with grace, wisdom, and understanding, to execute justice and to maintain truth.”Footnote ²¹ In Maryland, one of the states with the highest percentage of Patriots, the church was in confusion, not daring to continue the old prayers but believing itself without authority to change the liturgy. The church turned to the revolutionary state government, which omitted the reference to the Crown.”Footnote ²² Such are the travails of an established church in revolutionary times. At that point, the Anglican Church in Maryland had ceased to receive public financial support but still understood itself under government control as to its manner of worship.

All in all, these provisions of church doctrine tied the Church of England to the Loyalist cause. A New Jersey Loyalist minister in 1774 wrote: “The principles of submission and obedience to lawful authority, are as inseparable from a sound, genuine member of the Church of England, as any religious principles whatsoever.”Footnote ²³

The foundational text for Reformed Protestant political theology is John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, first published (in Latin) in 1537—in particular, book three, chapter 19 (“Of Christian Liberty”) and book four, chapter 20 (“Of Civil Government”). Calvin taught that individuals have a religious duty to obey their rulers up to the limits of Christian conscience—but not further. The flipside is that individuals have a duty to God to disobey political authorities when they command actions in violation of scripture or forbid actions commanded by scripture. In “Of Christian Liberty,” Calvin wrote that Christians must “voluntarily obey[] the will of God”—with an emphasis on voluntary. Righteous acts avail us nothing if they are done under compulsion. It follows that to obey the will of God, men must be free.Footnote ²⁴

The theological descendants of Calvin thus understood resistance to arbitrary government—not obedience or submission—to be the religious duty of a Christian. As the first seal of the United States, designed by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, proclaimed: “Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God.” Governments that oppress their people and deny the freedom to follow their consciences in obedience to God are acting contrary to the will of God. In sermon after sermon, preachers gave a political twist to this passage from Galatians: “Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”Footnote ²⁵ They interpreted Romans 13 as requiring obedience to civil rulers only when those rulers were using their power for the ends specified in that passage: to reward good and punish evil. Jonathan Mayhew’s 1750 sermon, “Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers,” which was one of the most widely circulated and influential political sermons of the era, gave the following interpretation of the famous passage: “If it be our duty, for example, to obey our king, merely for this reason, that he rules for the public welfare, (which is the only argument the apostle makes use of) it follows, by a parity of reason, that when he turns tyrant, and makes his subjects his prey to devour and to destroy, instead of his charge to defend and cherish, we are bound to throw off our allegiance to him, and to resist; and that according to the tenor of the apostle’s argument in this passage.”Footnote ²⁶ The biblical passage most often cited in support of obedience to civil rulers was thus turned on its head.

In his chapter “Of Civil Government,” Calvin argues that every regime has “lesser magistrates” (counselors, legislators, judges, nobility) who have the duty to protect the people.Footnote ²⁷ When the higher magistrates, including the king, become abusive and tyrannical, these lesser magistrates have the obligation to organize and lead the resistance. As explained by historian John Witte, “The power to resist and remove tyrants, however, lay not directly with the people, but with their representatives, the lower magistrates, who were constitutionally called to organize and direct the people in orderly resistance to tyrants—in all out warfare and revolution if needed.”Footnote ²⁸ Thus, when American colonial legislatures remonstrated against British abuses and their delegates met in formal continental congresses to raise armies in defense of American liberties, they were behaving in good Calvinist fashion.

The Great Awakening further inclined Americans toward resistance to authority. One of the principal themes of the revivalist preaching of the Great Awakening was to undermine the deference of common people to an educated clergy—and by secular analogy to authorities of all sorts. The Great Awakening was, in essence, a populist uprising. Historians generally agree that the political effect was democratizing, and thus to build hostility to the British establishment.

Differences in Support for Independence

Whether because of history, ecclesiology, or doctrine, denominational differences manifested in popular attitudes toward revolution. A meticulous study of the views of every Anglican minister found that only 27 percent of the Church of England clergy supported the Revolution—with most of the supporters being from Virginia. Of fifty-five Anglican clergy north of Pennsylvania, only three supported the Revolution.Footnote ²⁹ Virtually every important pamphlet published in support of the Loyalist position came from the pen of an Anglican priest.Footnote ³⁰ By contrast, Reformed Protestant clergy supported the Revolution almost unanimously. Many observers at the time credited (or blamed) Reformed Protestantism for the Revolution. Joseph Galloway, an early supporter of the American cause who later became a Tory and fled the country, wrote that the Revolution was caused by Presbyterians and Congregationalists, whose “principles of religion and polity were equally averse to those of the established Church and Government.”Footnote ³¹ Another Loyalist blamed the Revolution on “the Black Regiment”—referring to the austere black robes worn by Calvinist ministers.Footnote ³² King George reportedly called the Revolution a “Presbyterian Rebellion.”Footnote ³³

It is more difficult to get reliable numbers on the political allegiances of the people in the pews. The Patriot/Tory split ran along regional, ethnic, and economic, as well as religious lines. Historian Paul Johnson, however, reports that Anglicans were “predominantly loyalist, except in Virginia.”Footnote ³⁴ New York, one of the most heavily Anglican states, was also one of the most Loyalist. There is no reason to doubt that most Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, the three largest denominations, followed their clergy in favoring the Patriot cause. Catholics and Jews, both miniscule in numbers, were overwhelmingly supportive of the Revolution; Quakers and Methodists less so. The Dutch and the German Lutherans and Reformed were divided.

These differences had a major impact on religious freedom in America. The two denominations that held the status of established church in the colonies were the Congregationalists in New England (on a localized basis), and the Church of England throughout the South and in parts of New York. In every state where the Church of England was the established church, it was stripped of that status during the Revolution, for the obvious reason that it made no sense to support a church that was committed to the divinely ordained authority of the monarchy. Establishment never returned to those parts of the country. By contrast, the Congregational Church emerged from the Revolution with increased prestige. John Adams commented that “[w]e might as soon expect a change in the solar system, as to expect [that Massachusetts] would give up their establishment.”Footnote ³⁵ In fact, the establishment of religion survived in Massachusetts for several more generations, being abandoned only in 1833.