If anyone doubts the key role religion played in the founding of this nation they need go, not to a patriot in this country, but to a supporter of America in England. On March 22, 1775 Edmund Burke, in a speech entitled, “On Conciliation with the Colonies”, chastised England for its austere measures toward America.
The first salvo in a six pronged attacked dealt with the heritage that England had bequeathed to its colonies.
First, the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, Sir, is a nation, which still I hope respects, and formerly adored freedom. The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to a liberty according to English ideas. . .
He then argues that while the influence of religions, Protestant and Catholic, have been beneficial to governments, the religious worship of the colonies was not closely tied to the government itself.
If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect. Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of the kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it. (emphasis mine)
All 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. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but the communion of the spirit of liberty. . .
At one point England had dismissed the governing body of Massachusetts. Burke explains the results:
Pursuing the same plan of punishing by the denial of the exercise of government to still greater lengths, we wholly abrogated the ancient government of Massachusetts. We were confident that the first feeling, if not the very anarchy, would instantly enforce a complete submission. The experiment was tried. A new, strange, unexpected face of things appeared. . . .A vast province has now subsisted, and subsisted in a considerable degree of health and vigor, for nearly twelvemonth, without governor, without public council, without judges, without executive magistrates.
The religious foundation that was so essential in rendering liberty, was also that factor that was able to preserve it in practice, even when the outward form of government was removed. He then muses that perhaps they had
adverted to some other far more important and far more powerful principles, which entirely overrule those we had considered as omnipotent.
Those “far more powerful principles” birthed our nation into existence. It cannot hope to be sustained without them. Burke felt that a nation so empowered could not be stopped.
One month after his speech was the Battle of Lexington.
Crusaders Church of Bloomington 