Before the Revolution, There Was a Revelation

A new film opened this month that moved me in ways I did not fully anticipate — and I did not come to it unprepared. I have spent years researching, lecturing, and writing about America’s Christian founding, building the case document by document that the moral framework of this Republic was not incidental to its founding but foundational to it. So when I sat in that theater, I experienced it not as surprise but as recognition — the feeling of watching a storm gather on a horizon you have studied for years.

That is what great historical storytelling does. It does not merely inform. It recovers. It remembers. It inspires.

Some critics have dismissed the film as agenda-driven, reaching for the “Christian nationalism” label to avoid engaging with the history itself. They apply standards of historical rigor to faith-centered storytelling they never dream of applying to Hollywood’s routine revision of the American past. Historians across the ideological spectrum — including secular ones — credit the Great Awakening as a direct precondition of the American Revolution. Calling that “nationalism” is not criticism. It is intellectual dishonesty. And where it is not dishonesty, it is quite simply ignorance of a history that deserves far better.

We do not know who we are because we have been cut off from who we were. This film helps to restore that connection.

The Awakening Was More Than One Man

The film centers on George Whitefield, and rightly so. But the Great Awakening was not a movement built around a single personality. It was a convergence of theological genius unlike anything the English-speaking world had seen in a single generation — preachers whose collective fire would light the fuse of a revolution.

Before Whitefield ever set foot in the colonies, a Boston Congregationalist minister named Cotton Mather had spent a lifetime praying for exactly this. Historians now call him the first American evangelical: he preached a zealous, Bible-centered Protestantism and interceded year after year for a spiritual awakening he would never live to see. He died in 1728 carrying that prayer unanswered — and within a decade, the Great Awakening broke out across New England and down the eastern seaboard. That is how providence works — not always on the timeline of the man who plants the seed.

Then came Jonathan Edwards, whose Northampton revival of 1734 began the cascade. Then John Wesley and his brother Charles, whose Methodist movement in England sent spiritual shockwaves across the Atlantic. Then Whitefield himself, accompanied by men like Samuel Davies, Gilbert Tennent, Jonathan Mayhew, and John Witherspoon — all imploring settlers and Native Americans alike to trust in Christ alone for salvation.

Whitefield was the first man to travel the entire eastern seaboard, reaching all thirteen colonies, turning evangelical revival into an inter-colonial — effectively national — movement before there was a nation. Over his lifetime he delivered at least 18,000 sermons to perhaps ten million listeners. Benjamin Franklin calculated that Whitefield’s open-air voice could carry to 30,000 souls at a single gathering and became his most powerful promoter. Such was his hold on the colonial imagination that in 1775, soldiers marching north toward Quebec stopped at his tomb in Newburyport, opened it, and cut pieces of his collar and wristbands to carry into battle.

Samuel Davies brought the revival south to the Presbyterians of Virginia, where Patrick Henry and James Madison studied his sermons directly — and while Samuel Adams was still a senior at Harvard, he heard Whitefield preach. The fire they lit was burning in the very men who would sign the Declaration, draft the Constitution, and lead the Revolution.

The Pulpit Preceded the Parchment

Here is what most Americans have never been taught: there is not a right asserted in the Declaration of Independence which had not been discussed by the New England clergy before 1763.

Every idea Jefferson encoded in immortal parchment had already been preached from colonial pulpits for a generation. The theological case for resistance to tyranny preceded the political one — because it had to. Before colonists could pick up a musket, they needed to know it was not a sin to do so. The preachers told them it was not only permitted. It was required.

The man historians call the “morning gun of the Revolution” was not a soldier or a statesman. He was Jonathan Mayhew, a 29-year-old Congregationalist minister in Boston whose 1750 Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission dismantled Romans 13 — long wielded by the Crown as a theological cudgel against resistance — line by methodical line. He demonstrated that the Bible places a clear duty upon Christians to resist tyrannical rulers. This sermon became the source of the declaration that “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” — a phrase Jefferson later proposed for the seal of the United States. John Adams called it “the morning gun of the Revolution” and remembered it “was read by everybody.”

John Witherspoon — signer of the Declaration, Presbyterian minister, and president of what became Princeton — preached that there had never been a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost while religious liberty survived entire. His motto for Princeton: “Cursed is all learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.” He trained a generation that included James Madison, twelve future Continental Congress members, twenty-eight senators, and three Supreme Court justices.

So influential were the patriot pulpits that Prime Minister Horace Walpole declared in Parliament: “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson.” Britain’s war for American independence was referenced in Parliament itself as “the Presbyterian Revolt.”

One moment captures it perfectly. On a cold Sunday morning in January 1776, the Reverend John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg stepped into his Virginia pulpit, opened his Bible to Ecclesiastes 3, and read the ancient words slowly: “To everything there is a season — a time of war, and a time of peace.” Then he paused. When he spoke again, his voice filled the church: “There is a time to preach and a time to pray. But those times have passed away. There is a time to fight — and that time has now come.” He removed his clerical robes to reveal a Continental Army uniform beneath. Three hundred men walked down the aisle to enlist. His statue stands today in the United States Capitol — clerical robes draped over one arm, sword in the other hand. No sculptor could have said it better.

Jefferson did not invent equality. He codified what the pulpits had already preached.

Franklin’s Two Testimonies

Benjamin Franklin is the figure critics most want to claim for the secular narrative — the founding era’s great skeptic, the man of science and reason untouched by faith. But he left two documents that demolish the caricature.

The first is a private letter to Thomas Paine, who had sent Franklin a manuscript attacking Christianity. Franklin’s response was a masterpiece of moral clarity: “If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be without it?” He urged Paine not to “unchain the tiger” and counseled him to burn the manuscript before anyone else could read it. This is the letter of a man who had watched the machinery of self-government operate and understood precisely what fuel it ran on.

The second is public, and it may be the most important speech ever delivered on American soil that most Americans have never heard. It was June 28, 1787. The Constitutional Convention was deadlocked and threatening to dissolve. Then an 81-year-old man rose from his chair.

Franklin addressed the assembly: “In the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for the divine protection. Our prayers were heard and they were graciously answered… And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance?” He then delivered the words history recorded: “I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I have seen of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” He warned that without God’s concurring aid they would succeed no better than the builders of Babel, and mankind would be left to “chance, war and conquest.”

He moved that the Convention open each session with prayer. The crisis broke. The Great Compromise was reached. The Constitution was saved.

The most famous skeptic of the founding generation — at the most critical moment in the Republic’s formation — asked his colleagues whether they had forgotten their powerful friend. It was the same question Whitefield had been asking from a thousand fields and courthouse steps for thirty years. He was right in 1787. He would be right today.

The Warning We Are Living Through

The founders built a Republic on the explicit premise that it required a virtuous people to survive — and said so without embarrassment. John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Washington’s Farewell Address — taught in American schools for 200 years, now quietly removed from many curricula — warned that reason and experience both forbid us to expect national morality without religious principle. Benjamin Rush wrote: “The only foundation for a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty.”

Alexis de Tocqueville arrived from France in 1831 with no reason to flatter American Christianity. He searched for the secret of American greatness in her harbors, forests, mines, commerce, Congress, and matchless Constitution — and found it nowhere among them. He found it only when he entered the churches and heard the pulpits flame with righteousness: “America is great because America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, it will cease to be great.”

We are watching the inadequacy Adams predicted. A Republic designed for a self-governing, morally grounded people strains under the weight of a generation cut off from its own history. We do not know who we are because we have been cut off from who we were — “groping in the dark for political truth,” as Franklin himself put it to his deadlocked colleagues in 1787.

But we were not nothing. We were a people set on fire by some of the greatest preachers the world has ever produced. The men who closed the Declaration with “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” were not composing rhetoric. Fifty-six men proved it with everything they possessed, with over half having attended colleges founded to train ministers for the Gospel. Nine died of wounds before the war ended. John Hart of New Jersey slept in caves for months, hunted like an animal, while his wife died and his thirteen children were scattered. Abraham Clark refused to recant even to save his two sons on the British prison ship Jersey — where eleven thousand Americans died — because he had given his word to something larger than his grief. These men did not pledge their sacred honor to a political philosophy. They pledged it to a conviction about the Author of liberty. The Awakening had put that conviction there.

Whitefield and the Great Awakening gave Americans the identity to justify a break with Great Britain and a Revolution that changed the world. Benjamin Franklin later asked his colleagues in 1787 whether an empire could rise without God’s aid. The better question for us, two hundred and fifty years later, is whether one can survive without it.