The Boston sermon of 1750 that taught colonists when to resist a king

Nobody ever accused a Boston congregation of keeping its politics out of church. Still, it takes a certain nerve to stand in a pulpit on the anniversary of a king's beheading and tell the people in the pews that the beheading was not murder.

That is what a twenty-nine-year-old minister did on a Sunday in January of 1750, and the sermon he preached did more to shape the colonial mind than a dozen pamphlets. Let me tell you the story, because it is the answer to a question we keep hearing: did the American founders really think religion had anything to say about when to obey the government and when to stop?

They did. A Congregationalist pastor in Boston had put the argument in print a quarter century before Lexington, and he had put it by reading the very chapter of the Bible that was supposed to settle the matter the other way.

The occasion: January 30, 1750

Jonathan Mayhew was the minister of the West Church in Boston. On January 30, 1750, he preached a sermon that was printed soon afterward under a title as long as a tax code: A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers.

The date was the point. January 30 was the day in 1649 when Charles I went to the scaffold at Whitehall. After the monarchy was restored in 1660, the Church of England marked the day as a fast, with a set of prayers in the Book of Common Prayer for "King Charles the Martyr." The annual observance, which lasted in the English church until 1859, came with sermons, and the sermons had a message. The king was the Lord's anointed. Resisting him was a sin. The regicides had murdered a martyr and the lesson of the day was never to do it again.

Mayhew took the occasion and turned it around. He did not defend every act of the men who tried Charles. His case was narrower and harder to answer: that the doctrine of absolute, unlimited obedience to rulers is not in Scripture, that it makes tyranny into a divine institution, and that the people of England were right to resist a king who had set the law aside.

Notice what a man had to believe to say that in Boston in 1750. The colony was a royal province, with a governor appointed from London. Nobody was talking about independence. Mayhew was a loyal subject of the Hanoverian crown and said so. His argument was about the limits of obedience, which is exactly where every constitutional argument begins.

The text he had to get past

Mayhew had one serious problem, and it was the Bible. The thirteenth chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans opens this way:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.

For centuries, defenders of royal absolutism had read those words as a blank check. If every ruler is ordained of God, then resisting any ruler is resisting God. Paul says it in a few more verses: whoever resists the power resists the ordinance of God.

Mayhew did not avoid the chapter. He went through it as a lawyer goes through a contract, and his reading turned on four points.

1. Paul gives a reason, and the reason sets a limit. The ruler is "the minister of God to thee for good" (Romans 13:4). Rulers are to be obeyed because they are a terror to evildoers and a praise to those who do well. Take away the reason and you take away the command. A ruler who oppresses the good and rewards the wicked is not doing the thing for which obedience is owed.
2. Paul's argument is about rulers who rule well. Mayhew argued that the apostle was describing government as it ought to be, and that reading every sentence as a command to submit to the worst tyrant ever to wear a crown made nonsense of the passage.
3. Scripture elsewhere teaches that obedience has an edge. When the authorities ordered the apostles to stop preaching, Peter answered that "We ought to obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). A text that required unlimited obedience to rulers could not coexist with that answer.
4. The consequences of the other view are absurd. If Paul meant what the absolutists said, then the same chapter would command Christians to submit to a foreign invader who seized power, to a murderer who took a throne, and to any ruler at all, however he came by his office and whatever he did with it. Mayhew thought it unthinkable that a just God had written that into the plain sense of a letter.

He added a line of argument that Americans would hear again in 1776: tyranny is the rebellion. A ruler who tramples the law and the rights of the people is the one who has resisted the "ordinance of God," and the people who stand against him are defending that ordinance, not breaking it.

You can disagree with the exegesis. Many careful readers of Romans over the centuries have disagreed. But notice the method. Mayhew's opponents appealed to authority. Mayhew appealed to reasons. He insisted that a command to obey the government has to be a command a rational God could give, and that the purpose of government, the common good, is built into the command itself.

The steelman: why the old reading had force

Here the fair-minded reader should stop and give the other side its due, because the doctrine Mayhew attacked was not the work of fools.

The old reading came from a real fear, and the fear was justified. Europe had spent the better part of a century and a half killing itself in wars of religion. Order is a good, the first good, and a society where every believer decides for himself when the ruler has become unjust is a society one bad harvest away from civil war. Paul himself wrote to Christians living under an emperor who would soon be killing them. If the apostle could tell those believers to be subject to the higher powers, the argument went, who are we to carve out exceptions?

There is a second point. English history had just given the doctrine a vivid illustration. The war between king and Parliament in the 1640s produced a regicide, then a military dictatorship under Cromwell. Resistance had not produced liberty. It had produced a strongman. A sober person could say: the cure was worse than the disease.

Those are real objections. Here is the answer.

The doctrine of unlimited submission does not produce order. It produces tyranny with a halo, and tyranny is its own kind of disorder. The English themselves had the final word on the question in 1688 and 1689, when Parliament declared that James II had abdicated and left the throne vacant, invited William and Mary to take it, and passed a Bill of Rights that condemned the abuses of the departed king. The "Glorious Revolution" was resistance of exactly the kind the absolutists called sin, and it gave England a century of stable, lawful government. Mayhew was defending that settlement. He stood in the Whig tradition: obedience was owed to a king who governed under law, and no further.

As for the fear of anarchy, Mayhew had an answer in print. I would put the answer this way: history shows that people bear a great deal before they act, not too little. The danger is not that populations resist too quickly. The danger is that they are taught to endure everything.

Where the Founding got it from

Now measure this against the documents, because that is where the stakes are.

The Declaration of Independence, written twenty-six years after the sermon, makes Mayhew's argument in secular dress. It says governments are instituted among men to secure the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and then it says:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

And then, in the same paragraph, the caution that every responsible reader of Mayhew would have recognized:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.

There is the whole structure: a ground for obedience, a limit on obedience, and a bar set high enough that resistance is a last resort and not a hobby. Mayhew's sermon had the same bones. The Declaration also lists its grievances at length, "a long train of abuses and usurpations," because the authors knew they had to prove the case. A tyrant is not a ruler you dislike. He is one who has shown by a pattern of acts that he intends to rule outside the law.

John Adams understood where the Revolution began, and he said it was in the argument over exactly these questions. Writing in 1818 to Hezekiah Niles, Adams looked back at the pre-Revolutionary controversies and named Mayhew among the men who had worked for the American cause years before the shooting started. Adams remembered the sermon of 1750 as one that was read by everybody, celebrated by friends and abused by enemies. I will not put words in his mouth beyond that. You can read the letter for yourself, and you should.

Mayhew's own later sermon on the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766, titled The Snare Broken, kept the same line. He died that summer, aged forty-five, ten years before the Declaration. He never saw independence. He had done much of the intellectual work that made it thinkable.

The pulpit as a classroom

If you want to understand why the colonial clergy mattered, you have to remember what a Sunday looked like. Most Americans had no newspaper in the house. They had a Bible, an almanac, and a minister. Colonial New England had an old custom of preaching special sermons on public occasions: election days, fast days, thanksgivings, the day a new legislature took its seats. These "election sermons" were printed, bought and passed around. The preacher was expected to speak about what makes a good ruler and a good citizen.

Over the 1760s and 1770s the content of those sermons shifted. The clergy kept preaching from Scripture, but they read the Old Testament as the story of a people that kept being told that power belongs under law: Samuel warning Israel about what a king would take; Nathan confronting David; Elijah standing before Ahab. They read the Gospels as teaching the infinite worth of the individual soul, which no earthly power could claim. And they read Romans 13 the way Mayhew had.

Loyalists noticed. Writers on the royal side, among them the Massachusetts judge Peter Oliver, complained bitterly about the preachers who had stirred the people to rebellion, and wrote of "Mr. Otis's Black Regiment," the dissenting clergy who took an active part in the rebellion. It was meant as an insult. The clergy's admirers have worn it since as a badge. The loyalist complaint is itself evidence. Men do not coin an insult about an irrelevant opposition. They coin it about the people who are winning.

Some of those preachers did more than preach. John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey, signed the Declaration of Independence. Others served as chaplains and some took up arms. Tradition has it that a Virginia pastor named Peter Muhlenberg ended a sermon in January 1776 by taking off his clerical robe to reveal a uniform, but historians treat the story as tradition, and I will leave it as that.

What I will insist on is the larger point. The American Revolution was not an argument between believers and a secular state. It was an argument within a Christian society about what a Christian people owed a government that had stopped keeping its side of the bargain. Most of the clergy of New England and many in the middle colonies came down for resistance. Plenty of Anglican ministers in the South and in New York remained loyal, and they were sincere, and they believed Romans 13 meant what the old reading said. The disagreement was real. The side that won the argument won it partly in the pulpits.

A point-by-point objection: isn't this just politics in a robe?

Here is the strongest objection to the story I have told. It runs like this. Mayhew and the Black Regiment were political actors who found a text to justify what they already wanted. Today's critics of religion in public life say the same thing about every preacher: he starts from his politics and works backward to a verse.

Answer it in three points.

One, the objection proves too much. Every reader of every text, the Constitution included, brings convictions to the page. The question is whether the reading holds up under the text. Mayhew's reading survived: it took the context of Romans 13, the reason Paul gave for obedience, and the rest of Scripture seriously. His opponents were the ones leaning on a single verse and ignoring the next sentence.

Two, the political result was liberty. If pulpits had preached unlimited submission in 1775, the cause of the Crown would have had the best recruiters in the colonies. A faith that tells people to accept whatever the ruler does serves the ruler. A faith that says the ruler answers to a law above him, as the Hebrew prophets said again and again, serves the people. It matters which one a free country wants teaching its children.

Three, nobody was compelled. The colonial clergy persuaded. They did not tax anyone to pay for it and did not require anyone to attend. The First Amendment, adopted in 1791, kept Congress from establishing a church or prohibiting the free exercise of religion, and the same amendment protects the freedom of speech. A minister who speaks to his congregation about when government has exceeded its bounds is doing the oldest kind of speaking the Amendment protects. The Founders did not wall faith off from public argument. They walled the government off from running the churches. You can read the text of the Amendment in the Constitution and judge for yourself, and Sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment, read phrase by phrase deserve a slower read than most civics classes give them.

What this teaches us now

The sermon's lesson is not that preachers should run the country. Mayhew would have been horrified by the idea. The lesson is about the source of rights and the limit of power, and it comes in four parts.

• Rights do not come from the government, so the government cannot cancel them. If the ruler is God's servant for the good of the people, then he is a servant. A servant who turns on the people loses the claim to be obeyed.
• A free people needs a moral education that is not issued by the state. The colonial pulpit taught millions of ordinary people how to think about authority, without a ministry of education. When the government tries to monopolize that task, the result is not neutrality. It is a state-approved doctrine.
• Resistance has rules. Mayhew did not bless every rebellion. The Declaration says prudence dictates restraint, and demands proof of a long train of abuses. A tradition that teaches when to resist also teaches when not to.
• Arguments that start from the text beat arguments that start from authority. Mayhew won by reading closely. That is available to anyone with a Bible, or a Constitution, and a willingness to quote the whole sentence.

Look at how the argument comes back in later American history: in the abolitionists who said an unjust law has no claim on the conscience, in the preachers of the civil rights movement who appealed to a law above the segregation statutes, and in the believers today who answer a government mandate by asking what is owed to God and what to Caesar. They are all heirs of that January sermon. You can follow the thread through Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable, through Thomas Paine, a deist, argued for independence from the Book of Samuel, and through The 1688 Germantown protest and the believers who started abolition that began the religious case against slavery.

The case in brief

1. Jonathan Mayhew's sermon of January 30, 1750, read Romans 13 as a command to obey rulers who serve the common good, not a command to submit to tyrants.
2. He made the case from the text itself: the reason Paul gives for obedience, the apostles' answer in Acts 5:29, and the absurd results of the opposite reading.
3. The old doctrine of non-resistance deserved a hearing, since order matters, but it turns tyranny into a sacred duty, and the English settlement of 1688 and 1689 had already rejected it.
4. The Declaration of Independence makes the same argument in secular language: a right to alter or abolish a destructive government, tempered by the warning that prudence forbids changing governments for light and transient causes.
5. The colonial pulpit taught these ideas to ordinary families, and the nickname loyalists gave the clergy, the Black Regiment, is the record of how well it worked.

What you can do: read the full text of Romans 13 next to the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, then ask your own pastor or study group what each says about the limits of obedience.