Faith at the Founding: Religion and the American Revolution

Jonathan Beasley: If you walked through a town like Cambridge on a Sunday morning, would everyone be in church? How did religious leaders shape public life? And what role did faith play in the Revolution itself? 

The answers are often more complicated than we imagine. 

Religion was deeply woven into everyday life in the colonies, but Americans worshipped in very different ways. Ministers were influential public figures, women formed the backbone of many congregations, and enslaved and Indigenous people experienced religion under very different circumstances than those who held power. 

At the same time, the Revolutionary era helped lay the groundwork for one of the defining features of American public life: the separation of church and state. 

I'm Jonathan Beasley, and this is the Harvard Religion Beat. 

Today, I'm joined by Harvard Divinity School professor Catherine Brekus, a historian of American religion whose work explores Christianity, religious practice, and the role of faith in shaping American culture. 

Together, we'll step back into the world of 1776 to explore what religious life looked like, how faith shaped the American Revolution, what was happening here at Harvard, and why these stories still matter today. 

Jonathan Beasley: Professor Brekus, thanks so much for joining me today. If we dropped into a town like Cambridge in 1776, what would religious life have looked like? 

Catherine Brekus: So, historians really argue about this in terms of, if you dropped into, say, Cambridge or someplace in the South or anywhere in the 13 original colonies, how many people would actually be attending church? 

So, we don't have any firm membership statistics from the eighteenth century. Even today, when survey companies go out and ask people, people tend to over-report whether they're attending. So even today, these kinds of statistics are difficult. But they're especially hard for the 1770s because we know how many churches there were, roughly. But we don't have any firm membership records. 

The estimates for how many people were attending church are very low on one side, say maybe only 10 percent to 20 percent of the population, to fairly high on the other side: 50 percent to 80 percent; 80 percent being more like New England, 50 percent being more like the South. And not surprisingly, there's an ideological slant to these numbers and these debates. 

Really, the way that people come up with these numbers is to say, and this is just a guess, "We think the average church probably had X number of members, and we know that there were this many hundred number of churches. So that's how many members there were." Someone else might say, "No, actually, the average church size was probably much larger. It was probably 300 people, not 30 people."  

And so they come up with bigger numbers. But, you know, what this ends up—these disputes end up reflecting—is that some historians really want to emphasize the religiosity of Americans on the eve of the Revolution. And other historians want to suggest that religion was really not all that important in the founding, and therefore we should not think of the United States as being a Christian nation, either formally or informally. 

So I'm—I carve a path sort of in the middle here, where there are issues about how many people were actually in church, but I do think that culturally, Christianity was really quite important during the 1770s. Most people learned how to read the Bible, learned how to read by reading the Bible. And they were just very familiar with biblical stories in a way that modern Americans are not. 

So it was sort of—Christianity was sort of the language of the times, even if people were not devout and in church on Sundays. 

So, so the first question is, you know, dropping into this town, how many people are even in the churches? And then there's a lot of variety because there was so much variety in Christianity in early America. 

Jonathan Beasley: Beyond church attendance, what role did religion play in everyday life? 

Catherine Brekus: Sundays were the Sabbath, and that meant that no work was done, and that included cooking. So, women would've prepared all the food for the Sabbath the day before. And families, in New England usually lived close enough to the church that they could walk. 

New England towns were really organized around central greens with a church in the middle. And then farms were sort of in, you had to walk to them. They were a little bit farther away, your animals and barns, because the idea was that it was so important for the community to be centered around this worship space and churchgoing for people in New England was really a kind of all-day thing. You would go in the morning, and then you would take a break, and you would go eat the food that had been prepared the day before, and then you would go back again in the afternoon. And it was in the afternoon where you would take communion, where children would be baptized, where those kinds of ceremonial things would happen.  

The pattern in the South was somewhat different because there were very large plantations that developed, and so people would have to get in a carriage or go to church by horseback. So there are these regional variations just even in the way people worship.  

Quakers had silent worship in Pennsylvania. People would assemble in a very sort of bare bones building and sit quietly until somebody felt moved by the Holy Spirit to speak. Sometimes that happened, sometimes it didn't, and people would just sit quietly for an hour together with nobody speaking. 

Jonathan Beasley: Especially this New England style of setup where there is that green, and I'm thinking about so many towns now in New England that look like this with the church centered in the middle. What role did community and even religious leaders play in shaping belief and practice at that time? 

Catherine Brekus: I think one thing that many Americans have forgotten is that the Revolution really did have a dramatic impact on religion in terms of the separation of church and state. Before the Revolution and the articles of the Constitution, this was not the case. So on one hand, the colonies were not theocracies where ministers were actually serving in political office, but politicians saw themselves as working in tandem with ministers.  

Ministers were often among the best educated people in a town. They had the largest library. They had gone to college. So they're distinguished people, and most of the colonies had church establishments, which meant that actually ministers were paid by the state. So ministers really played a very significant role in town affairs.  

In New England, it was common for ministers to preach what were known as Election Day sermons after somebody, after the town elections, where they would talk about the qualities of a good ruler. So, ministers didn't see themselves as sort of standing apart from politics because they were in 9 out of the 13 colonies, they were actually paid by the government. So there were taxes that were collected, and you had to pay your taxes to support the minister.  

This was true even if you didn't want to go to that church, and this is how some of the protections of religious freedom developed in the eighteenth century. Because not surprisingly, we fought a revolution about taxation without representation. Many Americans did not like paying taxes to churches that they did not attend. 

Jonathan Beasley: Wow. Even if you're not attending that church, you're still paying taxes toward that particular minister. That is, that is so fascinating. Let's stick with the Revolution, especially around the role of religious ideas there and just what role did religion, play in how the colonists understood the American Revolution? 

Catherine Brekus: This is another area where historians really debate. The Revolution, I think, was a political event first and foremost. It was an argument over representation, the kind of government that is best for the people. But what I think a lot of historians have overlooked is that ordinary people brought their religious sensibilities to bear really on every aspect of their lives. 

And people were going, were willing to go to war not because they thought they were defending some abstract political principle, but because they thought that this was God's will for the best form of government. So there was a very strong, religious strain in the Revolution where ordinary people made sense of what was happening, in the conflict with England by suggesting that the Bible actually sanctioned a republican form of government. 

This was a really dramatic change. This is perhaps one of the greatest transformations that took place during the Revolutionary years, this argument that, the Bible, rather than sanctioning monarchy, actually sanctioned a republican form of government. This was an argument that Thomas Paine made in Common Sense.  

It was an argument that was made by Samuel Langdon, who was one of the presidents of Harvard. He became president of Harvard in 1774, just in time for all of Harvard's students to have to decamp to Concord, Massachusetts, because the buildings at Harvard were being used to house troops. But Samuel Langdon agreed with Thomas Paine that a close reading of the Bible revealed that God wanted governments to be republics and not monarchies. 

This is really a kind of fascinating biblical exegesis. For hundreds of years, the assumption had been that there was a divine right of kings in the Bible. And there's a passage in Peter about, obeying the king. But there's also a story in First Samuel chapter eight about the Israelites asking for a monarch, and God warning them that they did not want a monarch and trying to convince them, no, you do not want a monarch. A monarch will oppress you. And the Israelites were sinful, and they disobeyed God, and they end up with a monarchy, and of course things eventually go bad. But so this was Thomas Paine's argument that for hundreds of years people had been overlooking this passage in First Samuel. 

And so ministers were really helping to create the justification for rebellion against England, and they were rooting it in the Bible itself. 

Jonathan Beasley: So some of the colonists were using biblical, or religious language to describe this new nation. How did those kinds of references shape how people imagined the U.S. and its trajectory in those early years? 

Catherine Brekus: The most common image that early Americans used to describe, the sort of rising new nation was to describe it as a new Israel. There are historians who've argued that the ingredients for the nation state or the ideas that animated the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth century, that many of those ideas come from the Hebrew Bible, so that the model becomes God made a covenant with Israel and God can also make covenants with individual nations. 

The British had argued that they were the new Israel. They described themselves as the British Israel and argued that they had been chosen by God to play a special religious role in history because they had been the sort of birthplace of the Reformation that King Henry VIII was the first king to renounce the Catholic Church. 

And of course many of the colonists in what became the United States had come from England and over time they sort of took on that identity as a new Israel for themselves. So instead of a British Israel, it was now a new American Israel, and they argued that God had made a special covenant with the United States, that they were supposed to obey and that they were supposed to be a model for the rest of the world in the same way that Israel had been. 

Jonathan Beasley: Why did so many colonists see the Revolution through biblical stories and religious language?  

Catherine Brekus: I think it's crucial for us to understand that for the people who were going to church, and for people who didn't go to church—people who were reading Thomas Paine's Common Sense—they were hearing that God wanted there to be a new republic. That God was sanctioning rebellion against England. There were many ministers who drew parallels between what was happening in America and the Exodus story. They argued that Americans were being oppressed by England in the same way that Israelites had been oppressed by Egypt. 

And so they imagined that somebody like George Washington was actually a kind of Moses figure. He was often described as the American Moses.  

So, King George, gets end—he ends up, being equated with sort of the evil Egyptians who are oppressing the Israelites in the, in the Bible, and, Americans are trying to cross over into the land of freedom, the Promised Land. 

Jonathan Beasley: You're listening to Harvard Religion Beat from Harvard Divinity School.  

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, and scholars across Harvard to revisit the people, ideas, and debates that shaped the nation's founding. The Revolution is often remembered through its political leaders and military campaigns, but as we've been discussing, religion also played an important role in shaping how many Americans understood the events unfolding around them. 

If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to follow Harvard Religion Beat wherever you get your podcasts. And for more from Harvard Divinity School, including new episodes, articles, and events, follow HDS on social media. You'll find links in the show notes. 

Now, back to my conversation with Catherine Brekus. 

Jonthan Beasley: Just want to shift gears a little bit here and think about some of the perhaps overlooked voices at the time. And how were women participating in religious life at this at this time, and in what ways were they helping to shape religious thought? 

Catherine Brekus: So, from the church records that we do have, whenever we are able to really analyze church membership data there's a common pattern, and that's that women are the majority of members. 

And women were the majority of members in most churches for which we have records since sort of the end of the seventeenth century. It's not entirely clear why that would be. Cotton Mather said, back in the late-seventeenth century noticing this, "There are far more godly women in the world than men." 

But I think there's some sociological issues here that most early American women were giving birth, say, 11 or 12 times. They had very large families. They were frequently considering the possibility of either their own deaths or the deaths of their infants and children. Children's mortality was very high. 

Women were also the ones who were responsible for preparing bodies for burial. So, I think that women had a closer proximity to death and dying, and people who have that kind of proximity are often thinking more about their own spiritual state and what happens after death. So women seem to be the sort of backbone of churches in early America. 

Joathan Beasley: In addition to women's voices at the time, what stories or perspectives have been left out of traditional accounts of early American religion around the Revolution, especially thinking about enslaved voices or Indigenous voices? 

Catherine Brekus: Yeah. When you asked earlier about what would worship look like on a typical Sunday, what I didn't say then was that some people would be in churches involuntarily. 

So there were enslaved people who would accompany their masters to church whether they wanted to go or not. Of course, in some places, this is the 1770s, is before the sort of great wave of evangelism on Southern plantations. There would be some slaves in the South who would just be working. 

There wouldn't be a sense of a Sabbath at all. But there would be a number of enslaved people who would have to go to church with their families on Sundays. They sat separately often in a sort of balcony area where the white people on the floor didn't even have to see them. They were sort of invisible to what was going on, you know, from their sight line. 

So, the voices of enslaved people have often been missing from these stories about the Revolution, and also, of course, the stories of Indigenous Americans. I think this is changing. There has been a lot of scholarship on the way that the Revolution was incomplete, that the promise that all men are created equal did not extend equally actually to all people, that women were not allowed to vote, enslaved people were not freed. 

Even though I think it's significant that in all of this revolutionary ferment, the first abolitionist societies were created. There were Americans who recognized that there was a contradiction and hypocrisy involved in claiming that they were being enslaved by the British while they, in fact, were holding enslaved people. 

I do think that historians have done a lot more work on this, but there's now a backlash against this kind of scholarship, because some people really want to celebrate only the positive about the Revolution, and they're not comfortable about grappling with the fact that the Revolution did not change the lives of everyone, and that slavery continued to exist, and Indigenous people were not treated as citizens. They were not citizens until the twentieth century, and they were driven off their lands. 

Jonathan Beasley: Let's turn and look at our own backyard here at Harvard. What was the, what was Harvard's religious identity around the time of the Revolution, and what kinds of ideas and conversations were happening here? 

Catherine Brekus: It won't surprise people to know that Harvard, even in the eighteenth century, had a reputation for being a liberal religious place. So Yale was more orthodox. Princeton, which was founded in the mid-eighteenth century, was even more orthodox. A number of the faculty at Harvard were very interested in new ideas coming from what we call the Enlightenment, about toleration, about human goodness, and free will. 

And so Harvard got a reputation for, being a place that was not orthodox. There was a famous minister named George Whitefield who was incredibly popular. He was from England, but he traveled to a number of colonies during first the 1740s, and then later in the 1760s, really trying to lead a revival. 

And there was a revival in the 1740s in New England known as the Great Awakening. He was quite negative about Harvard and argued that most of the ministers coming out of Harvard were unconverted, that they were—they hadn't actually experienced a kind of saving experience of grace. That their faith was entirely rational. It was not heartfelt, and so therefore they couldn't really lead other people to God because they did not have that close relationship with God themselves. 

Jonathan Beasley: Thinking about sort of change over time, thinking about maybe bringing us a little bit more closer to where we are now, why does it matter for us today to understand what was happening at this time in 1776 and around the Revolution? 

Catherine Brekus: So, there is a lot of misinformation, I think, in the larger public about the revolutionary years. We are consumed, I think, by debates about the role of Christianity in the United States and what the role of Christianity was supposed to be according to founders. I think a more sophisticated understanding of the revolutionary years can show us two things. 

One, the importance of Christianity in justifying the Revolution, but also the fact that the United States was not formally founded as a Christian nation.  

So, I started off when we were talking earlier speaking about the sort of ideological dimensions of these conversations and how there's some historians who really want to underplay the role of religion in early America because they're afraid that acknowledging the strength of Christian ideas might somehow justify some of the Christian nation arguments. 

And then on the other hand, you have some Christian nationalists today who want to argue that Christianity was really quite strong around the time of the Revolution and that the vision was always that the republic would be Christian. What I want to do in my scholarship is to say that two things can be true at once. 

And that's that Christianity was a very important force in the revolutionary years, but at the same time, the founders made it clear that they were in fact committed to a republic in which people were free to practice their religion as they chose. There is no—the federal government, was explicitly barred from, in the Constitution from creating religious tests for office holding, for example. 

Jonathan Beasley: How has your understanding of the Revolution and the founding era changed over the course of your career? 

Catherine Brekus: I always tell my students that history is a conversation between the past and the present, and the reason we have to keep rewriting history is that our circumstances change. In the course of my lifetime, I have seen enormous changes in the United States, and I think, what strikes me most at this moment is that now when I look back at the Revolutionary period, I can see the seeds for the Christian nationalist ideas that are on the landscape today.  

There were, many ministers who argued that the United States had a special religious destiny—that it was in fact the new Israel, that the United States was supposed to play a role in the redemption of the entire world. And I've always seen those, strands, but they've gone in a particularly dark direction in the past, I don't know, say 10 years.  

I have been teaching a course on religion and nationalism in the United States now for about a decade, and, I feel as if I'm teaching the same primary sources, the same speeches, the same sermons, but students are seeing very different things in them- because of, the situation that we're in today. 

Jonathan Beasley: Professor Catherine Brekus, thank you for your time, and thank you for your insight. 

Catherine Brekus: Thank you.

Jonathan Beasley: The history of religion in early America is often pulled in two directions. 

Some people emphasize the importance of Christianity in shaping the Revolution and the nation's founding. Others focus on the constitutional protections that helped create one of the most religiously diverse societies in the world. 

As Catherine Brekus reminds us, both of those stories are part of the American story. 

Understanding how they fit together can help us better understand some of the most enduring debates in American public life—and why they remain so relevant today. 

The Harvard Religion Beat is presented by the Office of Communications at Harvard Divinity School. It is produced and hosted by me, Jonathan Beasley, and edited by Tyler Sprouse. 

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Thanks for listening. Until next time...