Editor’s note: The centrality of religious freedom to the revelatory nature of America’s founding is why we’ve curated seminal selections on this first freedom in honor of America’s 250th anniversary. These essays highlight the critical role faith played and continues to play in living out the inherent truths of the Declaration of Independence.
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Americans today may forget just how difficult it was for Patriots to justify independence in 1776. Popular resistance against taxes was one thing. Destruction of British property, as in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, took matters to another level. Military conflict, beginning at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, amplified the stakes even more.
But finally rejecting monarchical authority and declaring legal separation from the British was an audacious step for which Americans had few historical parallels. Complaints about unfair tax and judicial policies were suitable rationales for framing petitions, but shedding British and American blood demanded more. A cause of the American Revolution’s magnitude required divine sanction.
War typically draws out appeals to divine backing, especially in nations with deep roots in the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition, such as the United States and Britain. Sometimes these appeals can seem manipulative or insincere; sometimes they seem entirely earnest.
Written during the most critical 16 months of the patriot journey from resistance to independence, Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech, Thomas Paine’s enormously popular “Common Sense” pamphlet and the Declaration of Independence all contained notable appeals to God’s blessing and biblical warrant.
These three texts illustrate essential points about the way Americans justified resistance and independence, reflecting the prominent role religion played in American colonial culture. The first point is the most straightforward: Appeals to divine sanction were omnipresent in 1775 and 1776.
The frequency of these appeals to God’s blessing reminds us of a second point: that the Bible — or at least theological language — was central to the rhetorical repertoire of American revolutionaries, including patriot leaders who did not hold devout Christian beliefs.
Finally, theological and natural law justifications for liberty gave some Americans resources to make reformist arguments on questions such as religious liberty and slavery.
Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine
Henry delivered his “Liberty or Death” speech on March 23, 1775, to the Second Virginia Convention assembled at St. John’s Church in Richmond. The convention had reached an impasse about next steps in the burgeoning crisis with Britain over tax policy and parliamentary power. Should Virginians continue to petition British officials for relief or begin defensive preparations in anticipation of war?
Henry responded with an oration long regarded as the most scintillating speech of the revolutionary era.
Henry, a devout Anglican, claimed divine sanction for military preparation in a 1,200-word speech that almost seems more like a revival sermon than a cerebral discourse on political principles. His deep familiarity with scripture was not unusual at the time.
Even skeptical and deistic founders such as Benjamin Franklin were thoroughly conversant with the text of the King James Bible — the most popular translation of the Bible in the American Colonies since the mid-17th century. The King James Bible is arguably the most rhetorically influential text in the English language’s history, and Henry’s speech was a case study for how the Bible could serve as a toolbox for effective oratory.
Americans who supported the patriot cause applauded the declaration and its appeals to God’s blessing. Critics in Britain and Loyalists in America scoffed at its religious rhetoric.
The staccato biblical images came one after another. Referencing Jeremiah 18:22, Henry warned that British assurances of goodwill would become a “snare to your feet.” Next, he warned the American colonists not to allow themselves to be “betrayed with a kiss,” a reference to Jesus’ arrest in the Gospels that would have been familiar to virtually any English-speaking person who spent time in church.
These biblical phrases provided structure to his speech and an appeal to divine sanction, implying that Henry himself was serving as a prophet-like figure in the revolutionary crisis — a role he had embraced since the first days of the crisis, when he denounced the Stamp Act as a freshman legislator in Virginia in 1765. The speech persuaded the convention, which adopted Henry’s call to prepare the militia to resist the British army’s incursions.
Paine’s “Common Sense” appeared at the beginning of 1776. The war with Britain had already been going for nine months, but Americans still found it excruciating to contemplate a final break with Britain. Paine, who had only come to America in late December 1774, began drafting “Common Sense” in fall 1775, framing an argument for independence in the familiar style of a sermon.
The provocative result succeeded beyond all expectations, with some 50,000–75,000 copies of the pamphlet in circulation by the end of 1776. Many people heard excerpts from “Common Sense” read out loud in meetings at taverns and coffeehouses.
The similarities to Henry’s appeals in “Liberty or Death” to divine sanction were ironic since Paine later became known as the most radical religious skeptic among the founders. But like his mentor Franklin, Paine knew the Bible well and was prepared to use it to great political effect.
Unlike the Declaration of Independence, “Common Sense” did not just use generic theological language about God and the Bible. And unlike Henry’s reliance on religious references and allusions in “Liberty or Death,” “Common Sense” actually engaged in detailed biblical commentary.
Paine particularly focused on 1 Samuel 8 from the Old Testament, where the elders of Israel asked the aging prophet Samuel to “make us a king to judge us like all the nations.” God’s response was indignant.
“They have rejected me, that I should not reign over them,” the Lord told Samuel. Samuel warned the Israelites that a king would abuse them and even place burdensome taxes on them! But the Israelites persisted, demanding that they be granted a king “that we also may be like all the nations.”
Paine concluded from this text “that the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government.” This fact was “true,” Paine insisted, “or scripture is false.”
Onward to independence
If Paine inaugurated the public debate about independence, the Declaration of Independence represented America’s leap into the great unknown of separation from Britain. To ensure that the document’s message resonated with American colonists, Jefferson and the Continental Congress urgently needed an appeal to divine warrant for independence in the declaration.
They sought to put the argument in theological terms that were both broad and bracing. They certainly did not want to set off a sectarian controversy over what the declaration said about God, but they also did not want to make the language so generic it lacked persuasive power.
It is instructive to compare the Declaration of Independence to the comparatively vague Virginia Declaration of Rights, penned by George Mason (a pluralistically minded Anglican) and adopted by the Virginia Convention on June 12, 1776.
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The Virginia declaration asserts that “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights.” While Jefferson and Mason may have meant effectively the same thing, Jefferson’s language of equality by common creation was more powerful: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
In a letter to Henry Lee written in 1825, Jefferson explained that the declaration was not seeking “originality of principle or sentiment.” Instead, “it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonising sentiments of the day.”
Unlike Paine, Jefferson was not looking to say anything that would cause exasperation, at least not about the appeal to divine sanction. The mere argument for independence was controversial enough.
The “proper tone” would assert that independence was justified because God had given Americans rights that no person — including King George III — could justly violate. Jefferson focused on “harmonizing sentiments,” or at least principles, that could unify those who agreed that independence was necessary despite the gravity of the decision.
In the same 1825 letter to Lee, Jefferson cited “Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney etc.” as some of the sources that influenced the declaration. Algernon Sidney, an English republican writer from the time of the English Civil War, is a surprisingly illuminating source for understanding the declaration’s religious appeals.
In “Discourses Concerning Government” (1698), a book that Jefferson owned, Sidney made an argument similar to Paine’s about 1 Samuel 8 and God’s opposition to monarchy. Sidney may have also shaped Jefferson’s resonant phrase about equality by creation.
Sidney had written that “nothing can be more evident, than that if many (men) had been created, they had been all equal.” But “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator” was both more theologically specific and more powerful than what Mason or Sidney had written on the matter.
The need for God’s blessing seemed especially acute in 1775 and 1776, when Patriots led Americans into war and independence. Those audacious steps left many Americans looking for biblical warrant and hoping for divine support.
The declaration also opened with an appeal to divine sanction in its assertion that there was a “separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” entitle a people pursuing independence. Here, Jefferson was suggesting that there was a created order, which justified a periodic return to man’s state of nature, a time before the creation of government in which humans were “separate and equal.”
Many have understandably focused on the deistic implications of the phrase “Nature and … Nature’s God.” To Jefferson, people stood equal before God because they each came equally from him as the creator. Jefferson had many reservations about Christian doctrine, but his views about the created order were fairly conventional for the time.
The Continental Congress believed that Jefferson’s draft of the declaration was headed in the right direction. Jefferson had grounded the case for equality and rights in common creation by God and the God-given natural order. But the document dropped the topic of divine approval when Jefferson addressed the long “history of repeated injuries and usurpations” of the British against the American colonists.
Members of Congress wanted to return to the theme of God’s sanction at the end. Consequent edits concluded the document with its most direct comment on God’s judgment when delegates appealed to “the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.” Finally, the delegates professed “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence” in their endeavors.
Americans who supported the patriot cause applauded the declaration and its appeals to God’s blessing. Critics in Britain and Loyalists in America understandably scoffed at the declaration’s religious rhetoric, however, and one pamphleteer argued that “the law of God and of Nature is on the side,” not of the American colonists, but of Britain, just as God’s laws supported a generous “parent, against an undutiful child.”
Maybe the most intriguing responses to the appeals to divine sanction came from reformers who sympathized with the American cause but worried that moral inconsistency or hypocrisy might invite God’s judgment on the Patriots. The two most common concerns along these lines were religious liberty and slavery.
Baptists, for example, had argued since the outset of the revolutionary crisis that the Patriots’ complaints against unjust taxes would fall flat if they continued to impose religious taxes on Christian dissenters to support the colonies’ established churches.
Similar reformist arguments came from critics of slavery: How could Patriots claim to be concerned about liberty when they denied freedom of self-determination to enslaved people? Christian groups such as the Quakers had registered moral concerns about chattel slavery for decades, but the revolutionary crisis generated fresh attacks.
High costs, higher justifications
Patriot appeals to divine sanction were not conversation stoppers. Both pervasive and provocative, they were as likely to generate debate as consensus. They elicited indignation among Loyalists, who believed that Patriots were masking a basically immoral revolution with the veneer of divine approval. Certain appeals to God and the Bible, such as Paine’s use of 1 Samuel 8, struck even some Patriot leaders as extreme and ludicrous.
One’s response to the appeal to divine sanction did not simply depend on which side of the revolution one stood, although partisan alignments obviously made a difference. But it would be difficult to imagine Americans in 1776 — or in virtually any American war — not making at least generic appeals to God’s blessing. The human and material sacrifices of war demand higher justifications than an unwillingness to pay taxes.
Appeals to divine sanction and prayers for protection kept appearing throughout the Revolutionary War. They conveyed a hope not only that God would bless the Patriot cause but that America would be the sort of nation God might bless. This is why the Continental Congress, following older precedents set by Anglo-American legislatures, called for national days of prayer and thanksgiving.
Many revolutionaries also believed that cocky presumption of God’s favor was a surefire way to earn disfavor and that national sins would bring down God’s wrath. Thus in 1779, Congress called for days of national fasting and “humiliation,” that God might “avert those impending calamities which we have too well deserved: that he will grant us his grace to repent of our sins, and amend our lives, according to his holy word: that he will continue that wonderful protection which hath led us through the paths of danger and distress … (and) that he will give wisdom to our councils, firmness to our resolutions, and victory to our arms.”
Such prayers appeared regularly throughout the revolution, both in formal legislative proclamations and in the private devotions of American citizens. But the need for God’s blessing seemed especially acute in 1775 and 1776, when Patriots led Americans into war and independence. Those audacious steps left many Americans looking for biblical warrant and hoping for divine support.
Excerpted from “Religion and the American Revolution,” part of the “We Hold These Truths: America at 250” book series, © 2025 by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
This essay appears in the July/August 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine under the headline “Divine Sanction.” Learn more about how to subscribe.
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