Journal of Student Research 2023

Black Robes: God’s Patriots that Prepared America for Independence 73 colonial Americans in the founding era were Protestant, 1.9% Catholic, and the remainder being predominantly Jewish. 27 This indicates a connection between pastoral teachings and the civil laws and political philosophy of many influential Americans. One clergyman in particular can be said to have had this type of influential attribute in the American colonies before the American Revolution. The Rev. Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766), referred to as the “Father of Civil Liberty,” was a Congregationalist minister in Boston beginning in the mid-18th century. Mayhew was influential in the colonies when it came to the issue of whether the colonists were duty-bound to obey the King of England if the King, at some point violated his duty as the governing authority. This influence would arise from a specific incident which helped set the framework for colonial political thought. Mayhew became highly influential following his 1750 sermon, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers. In this sermon, on the anniversary of the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Mayhew spoke against the idea that a people owed unlimited and unconstrained allegiance to a governing authority, regardless of any tyranny that that governing authority brought forth against the people. This sermon has been shown to have contributed to the formation of an early motto from the American Revolution “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God,” 28 the inspiration of which proceeded from the fountain of Mayhew’s sermon. The impact that Mayhew’s preaching had on the American colonists, including Founding Fathers, is evidenced when John Adams declared: Another gentleman, who had great influence in the commencement of the revolution, was doctor Jonathan Mayhew… This divine had raised a great reputation both in Europe and America, by the publication of a volume of seven sermons in the reign of king George the second, 1749, and by many other writings, particularly a sermon in 1750, on the thirtieth of January, on the subject of passive obedience and non-resistance. 29 This inducement from the pulpit initiated a great questioning of how far loyalty to tyranny may extend out of obligation to the governing authority. Adams further recounted how Mayhew was considered one of the five most important people to have influenced the initiation of resistance towards Britain in the early 1760’s upon the advent of new British taxes. 30 Mayhew’s role in preparing the colonists to rebel was significant, and the most significant argument that he would make is the 1750 sermon. The “Father of Civil Liberty” truly was one of the first fathers of the country that would become the United States. The question then is what is so powerful in this one sermon that Adams would discuss its deliverer in such glowing terms? Mayhew’s Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher 27 Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society (New York: Crown, 1993), 28–29. 28 John Adams, Letters of John Adams Addressed to His Wife, vol 1, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1841), 152, to Abigail Adams on August 14, 1776. 29 John Adams, Novanglus and Massachusetts: or Political Essays Published in the Year 1774 and 1775 (Boston: Hewe & Goss, 1819), 237. 30 Adams, 235.