by Libertarian Kid

1776: A Christian Libertarian Perspective

America’s Independence Day is coming, and I would like to focus on the event that launched our founding: the American Revolution of 1776. It was on the Fourth of July that Thomas Jefferson’s magisterial Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress. That document lit the fires of revolution in the hearts of Americans, and that was the day that the War for Independence started. That was the day that the freedom of America from the British Empire was won. What would the libertarian and Christian positions be on this groundbreaking event? This post is meant to analyze the correct viewpoint toward the American Revolution. Short Answer: I am in support of it, and I think it was justified.

The Libertarian View of the American Revolution

Most libertarians, even while they are generally in opposition to war, have a sacrosanct spot in their hearts for the American Revolution. Why do they feel this way? Let us look to the great libertarian philosopher, theorist and Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard. In his speech “Two Just Wars: 1776 & 1861,” (republished as “Just War” at LewRockwell.com) Rothbard argued that the revolution “was a just war, a war of peoples forming an independent nation and casting off the bonds of another people insisting on perpetuating their rule over them.” Even while they accepted support from the French and even the Russians to some degree, “the Americans . . . were prepared to take on the daunting task of overthrowing the rule of the most powerful empire on earth, and to do it alone if necessary.” How just can a cause get? In 1978, in the excellent first chapter to his classic For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Rothbard wrote that

the American revolutionaries were steeped in the creed of libertarianism, an ideology which led them to resist with their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor the invasions of their rights and liberties committed by the imperial British government. Historians have long debated the precise causes of the American Revolution: Were they constitutional, economic, political, or ideological? We now realize that, being libertarians, the revolutionaries saw no conflict between moral and political rights on the one hand and economic freedom on the other. On the contrary, they perceived civil and moral liberty, political independence, and the freedom to trade and produce as all part of one unblemished system, what Adam Smith was to call, in the same year that the Declaration of Independence was written, the ‘obvious and simple system of natural liberty.’” The basis of the American Revolutionaries, of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (also known as “Cato”) was classical liberalism (which also serves as the basis for modern libertarianism), whose “earliest theoreticians . . . were the Levelers during the English Revolution and the philosopher John Locke in the late seventeenth century, followed by the “True Whig” or radical libertarian opposition to the “Whig Settlement” – the regime of eighteenth-century Britain.” Locke “set forth the natural rights of each individual to his person and property; the purpose of government was strictly limited to defending such rights. In the words of the Lockean-inspired [and libertarian] Declaration of Independence, ‘to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it….’”

Despite all this, the Lockean libertarian doctrines were not enough to rouse the Americans to revolution. That was done “by radical Lockeans in the eighteenth century, who wrote in a more popular, hard-hitting, and impassioned manner and applied the basic philosophy to the concrete problems of the government – and especially the British government – of the day. The most important writing in this vein was ‘Cato’s Letters,’ a series of newspaper articles published in the early 1720s in London by True Whigs John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.” A year before Rothbard wrote his introduction to For A New Liberty, in his keynote address to the Libertarian Party, he argued that “Trenchard and Gordon not only put Locke’s ideas into stirring and hard-hitting phrases; they took Locke’s ‘if … then’ proposition: that is, if the government transgresses against rights of person and property, then it is proper to rebel against it, and added in effect this insight: ‘The if is always here.’” Thus, a revolutionary theory was in the making. This theory marked the entire essence of power and its ability to corrupt, a century before Lord Acton came in.

It went further with the radical libertarian pamphleteer Thomas Paine, with his magnus opus Common Sense, which Rothbard described as “brilliant.” Rothbard noted in “The Sudden Emergence of Tom Paine” (a chapter from Rothbard’s four-volume masterwork Conceived in Liberty, which tells American history from a libertarian point of view) that “Paine boldly smashed the icon, directing his most devastating fire at King George himself. For the first time, the king, ‘the Royal Brute of Great Britain,’ was pinpointed as the major enemy – the king himself, not just his wicked advisers (the king’s advisers were attacked as being in thrall to him). Paine had quashed the taboo, and Americans flocked to imbibe his liberating message.”

Paine “pressed on to a comprehensive attack on the very principle of monarchy. The ancient Jews had prospered without kings and had suffered under them, he wrote, following the great English tradition of Milton and Sidney; and Holland flourished as a republic. But more important, the division between kings and subjects is unnatural, and bears no relation to the natural distinction between rich and poor on the market. How, indeed, had the natural equality of men before the law become transposed into subjection to a monarch?” He “not only laid bare the roots of monarchy, but provided a brilliant insight into the nature and origins of the State itself. He had made a crucial advance in libertarian theory upon the social-contract doctrine of the origin of the State. While he followed Locke in holding that the State should be confined to the protection of man’s natural rights, he saw clearly that actual states had not originated in this way or for this purpose. Instead, they had been born in naked conquest and plunder.”
Following this radical tradition, the revolutionaries revolted against the British government in what Rothbard called “an explicitly libertarian revolution, a revolution against empire; against taxation, trade monopoly, and regulation; and against militarism and executive power.” Rothbard notes that the revolution of 1776 “resulted in governments unprecedented in restrictions placed on their power,” which was in the form of the Articles of Confederation (the government under the document “was not permitted to levy any taxes upon the public; and any fundamental extension of its powers required unanimous consent by every state government.”) and the Constitution, particularly with the Bill of Rights proposed by the indispensable Anti-Federalists (bsaically the true liberal among the Founding generation), which included such people as Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adams, the “Father of the American Revolution.”

The historian Bernard Bailyn, most famous for his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, summed up the achievement of the American revolutionaries in these words:

“The modernization of American Politics and government during and after the Revolution took the form of a sudden, radical realization of the program that had first been fully set forth by the opposition intelligentsia… in the reign of George the First. Where the English opposition, forcing its way against a complacent social and political order, had only striven and dreamed, Americans driven by the same aspirations but living in a society in many ways modern, and now released politically, could suddenly act. Where the English opposition had vainly agitated for partial reforms… American leaders moved swiftly and with little social disruption to implement systematically the outermost possibilities of the whole range of radically liberation ideas.

“In the process they… infused into American political culture… the major themes of eighteenth-century radical libertarianism brought to realization here. The first is the belief that power is evil, a necessity perhaps but an evil necessity; that it is infinitely corrupting; and that it must be controlled, limited, restricted in every way compatible with a minimum of civil order. Written constitutions; the separation of powers; bills of rights; limitations on executives, on legislatures, and courts; restrictions on the right to coerce and wage warall express the profound distrust of power that lies at the ideological heart of the American Revolution and that has remained with us as a permanent legacy ever after.” (Bernard Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation” in S. Kurtz and J. Hudson, eds. Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 26-27.)

Thus, with all the facts laid out, the general consensus among libertarians is that the American Revolution was indeed a libertarian revolution, maybe even the first libertarian revolution, as Murray Rothbard called it. It was indeed a just war. It was also one of only two just wars in America’s history (the other being the South’s secession from the Union in 1861), as Rothbard documented. And, contrary to some arguments, I view the American Revolution as a genuine revolution, as it involved the movement away from statism to quasi-anarchist, decentralized forms of government. In essence, it removed both internal and external tyranny, as Rothbard documents in Conceived in Liberty.

The Christian View on the American Revolution

Now, having laid out the libertarian viewpoint, which I agree with and hold to, what is the Christian viewpoint on the American Revolution? The reason I am asking this question is the doubts some Christians have of the American Revolution being in line with the Bible, particularly with the commands in Romans 13 to “submit yourselves to the governing authority.” This viewpoint that holds that the American Revolution was unjustified by biblical standards is held today by leading Calvinist minister and theologian John MacArthur. Some common arguments against the revolution from Christians include such arguments as: (1) the revolution seems to violate the principle that governments must be obeyed at almost all costs (except for when the government expressly commands anything that is in opposition to God’s Word; even then, in this view, that doesn’t justify violence against the State), (2) many Christians were killing each other, both in the belief that they were doing God’s will, (3) most of the Founders were not Christians but deists, and (4) Jesus didn’t use violence when he entered the Roman Empire, and he exhorted his apostles not to; therefore, the Christians in the American Revolution were unjustified. I will reply to all these arguments and defend the revolution of 1776 from a biblical point of view.

(1). The American Revolution violated Romans 13 and other biblical mandates to submit to the State.

Answer: There has been debate throughout the history of Christianity what Romans 13 means; there were those Christians who argued that one should not revolt even against a tyrannical government; other Christians held to nonviolent civil disobedience, and still others believed in violent revolution against a tyrannical government that overstepped its bounds and acted in explicit violation of God’s word. I am of the perspective that violent revolution is always justified. How so? Let’s look at the words of the great libertarian Murray Rothbard:

…it is axiom of libertarian thought that the State is a criminal gang, living off the robbery of tax-coercion and using these funds to murder, pillage, enslave, and endow favored groups with special privilege. The State is founded and has its very being in the use of aggressive violence. Therefore, any violence used against the State is moral, for it is the moral equivalent of using violence to protect one’s person and property from armed marauders. The act of revolution is, therefore, always moral. For similar reasons, any revolutionary act against any State is aesthetically pleasing, for at least some State is being weakened, or some State official is getting his deserved comeuppance.

How does this jive with what Scripture teaches about the State, one might ask? Does not Romans 13 and the other passages like it command us to obey the state whenever it is not explicitly commanding us to disobey God? Is not violent revolution a disobedience to God? I would argue that Romans 13 is not so much an endorsement of the State as it is a showing that God uses the State and that He uses it to accomplish His divine purposes. This in no way constitutes an endorsement of exploitation and theft, and it doesn’t necessarily condone the institutialization of such, which is what happens when the State takes power. So in my view, it was always justified for the colonists to revolt against the British government, but it wasn’t practical until later on. Thus, while it is most practical to disobey the state only when commanded to disobey God, it is always just and legitimate (though not necessarily moral and ethical) to disobey the state and to resist its dictates. John Cobin, a Christian libertarian, says on this issue:

…there is no reason to believe that resisting authority is the same thing as “resisting what God has ordained” (Romans 13:4). That is, the resulting “judgment” of an authority like the state does not come on account of our rebelling against God but rather for resisting the evil policies of a (generally) wayward state ruler which God has ordained. The two kinds of judgment are different. The text does not say that God will judge you here or in eternity if you do not obey the civil ruler that He ordained. On the contrary, God expects His people to “rebel” against ungodly decrees as part of our pursuit of holiness. Rulers may judge us on earth, and pour out wrath upon us, but we are not to fear them so long as we are on God’s side. The Bible indicates that in the end the vast majority of rulers will find their place in hell.

2. Even if revolution is justifiable under a biblical standpoint, what of our testimony as Christians?

This is another question from some who may concede that revolution isn’t so un-biblical after all. It is a very important one, as it deals with how the world will view Christians. They will argue that while the world will naturally hate Christians like it hated Christ, that gives no freedom to revolt against the state, because that would hinder the spread of the gospel. I will say that I don’t advocate violently overthrowing the government mainly due to tactical and practical reasons such as this. However, John Cobin ably deals with this:

No Bible-believing Christian should consider the commands in Romans 13:1-7, 1 Peter 2:13-17, and Titus 3:1 to be absolute. Indeed, taking into account the “whole counsel of God”, it is clear that God’s people have not and should not submit themselves to “every ordinance of man” (1 Peter 2:13) in an absolute sense. The Egyptian midwives defied Pharaoh’s decree to murder infants (Exodus 1:15-21). Ehud acted against public policy by deceiving the king’s ministers and then slew the king (Judges 3:1526). Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego refused to comply with public policies that mandated religious rituals contrary to proper worship (Daniel 3:8-18; 6:6-10). The wise men from the East disobeyed Herod’s direct order to disclose Jesus’ whereabouts (Matthew 2:7-12). Peter and John forthrightly disobeyed the “ordinance of man” that mandated that they desist from preaching (Acts 5:28-29). Judging from these biblical premises, therefore, the foremost doctrinal issue for a Christian theology of public policy is apparently not whether Christians may ever disobey state decrees, but rather when civil disobedience by Christians becomes mandatory—or, further, when obedience becomes optional or discretionary for a Christian who must be free to act within the parameters of his conscience. Indeed, the core question boils down to when (or at what point) civil disobedience is justified, and what test must be applied to determine when such rebellion is righteous. Remember, civil disobedience and rebellion to the state are synonymous terms, the former being the patriot’s perspective and the latter the tyrant’s. At many points over the course of history, rebellion has been widely held to be a good thing and has thus been proclaimed by church leaders. Their message has been simple and straightforward: to disobey tyrants is to obey God. So it was at the founding of the United States of America.

So, judging by the situations, one could say that 1776 was the right time to declare independence from the British imperial regime. Parliament was essentially committing idolatry and the British empire engaged in regular violations of property rights and aggressions against the colonists. Some would say that the Sons of Liberty and such rascals were too harsh on the British rulers, but, like I said, since the State is rooted in aggression, there is almost no such thing as aggression against state officials. Thus, the Sons of Liberty were justified in tarring and feathering the British soldiers, and the British soldiers were unjustified in retaliating, for they themselves were aggressors.

3. The American Revolution involved Christians killing each other.

An understandable criticism, indeed. After all, what could be more uncomfortable for a Christian soul than to see Christians killing Christians? Thus, some would argue, the American Revolution was sinful because there were Christians fighting to the death against other Christians. Surely we should not be hateful to our brethren, much less kill them in battle. But is it really egregious? Or were the Christian rebels justified in killing the Christian state aggressors? I would argue the latter, for the Christians in the British Empire decided to exercise domination and control over the colonies rather than leaving them independent and free, and thus the Christian revolutionaries would be justified in using defensive lethal force against these aggressors. Just like self-defense would be justified against aggressors, be they Christian or not, self-defense in revolutionary warfare would also be justified likewise.

4. If self-defense against the state is justified, then why don’t we see Jesus and the apostles using violent force against the state? Simple: because the time for violence against the state was not ripe and it would also be impractical at the moment. Jesus came to earth to die, so it would make sense that he would not violently resist the state, and the apostles refrained from using violent force so they could live to spread the Christian faith. Just because I advocate the right of revolution doesn’t mean I advocate the exercise of such, mainly due to tactical and pragmatic concerns. A more efficient way of avoiding state tyranny, if need be, would be running to the hills (Matthew 10:23; 24:16; Luke 21:21). Plus, if a violent revolution fails, the state will usually increase its own power by crushing the revolt.

5. The Founding Fathers were not Bible-believing Christians, but were deists who believed in false doctrine; therefore the American Revolution is un-Christian. Interesting. I don’t subscribe to the “Christian nation” mythology of some right-wing Christians, though I don’t also view the religion of early America in the same way as the secular left views it. Rather, I view the early American society as a primarily Christian-oriented, albeit religiously diverse society in which religious toleration was respected and supported. Christian values certainly did play a big role, even if the nation wasn’t exactly “Christian.” So how does this factor into the American Revolution? Well, some Christians argue that since our Founding Fathers weren’t wholly Christian, that would make the American Revolution un-Christian. I would argue from the vantage point that yes, many of our Founders had views that would contradict orthodox Christianity. But still, there was a strong Christian sentiment that inflamed the revolutionary spirit in American society. Norman Horn notes in his review of Steve Waldmann’s Founding Faith:

A general theme that is quite surprising is the sense that the faith of the Founding Fathers, or at least that of the five examined in Founding Faith, is much more complex than we often care to admit. They did not have a unified outlook on religion or the separation of church and state. It is this very fact indeed that led them to restrict so profoundly the influence that the state could have upon religion and vice versa! But not only was the Founding Fathers’ outlook not unified, they had just as complex and thought through views as people today. We often take for granted that each of us is a thinking person with diverse experiences, education, and viewpoints. The same holds true for the Founding Fathers. They were not paragons of perfection chiseled in stone for us to observe and model after; they were real people who had complicated, multi-faceted existences. The attitude of many towards the Founding Fathers often neglects that humans are complex creatures and cannot be deconstructed into neatly divisible packets of legal theory, philosophy, and religion.

Indeed. And not only that, the religious diversity in early America was also a contributor to the relative immensity of religious freedom in the new society. And even if our Founders weren’t all Christians (and though they were imperfect), they surely did have a positive impact (and some negatives, but that is not for now) and the new nation is also birth to many American missionaries who spread the Christian faith to other lands. Surely the founders must have done something right in their revolution (though I believe the Constitution wasn’t one of them).

Conclusion

The American Revolution, in my view, was justified from a libertarian standpoint. It was a national-liberation movement against British imperialism. It was the first successful libertarian revolution in history. It was a radical revolution that removed not only British tyranny but internal tyranny. And last of all, it was a just defense of person and property against aggression.

Yes, there were flaws in the revolution (persecution and expulsion of Tories, devaluation of the Continental, inflation, statist motives of some involved in the revolution, etc.). Yes, the Constitution that followed the revolution ended up allowing for a government worse than what the revolutionaries fought against. But still, the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence are the two things that are good about America, and they define further the libertarian heritage that America has, even if it is ruled by a national-security/welfare-warfare/quasi-fascist state. The Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution recall to us a world of freedom, a philosophy of self-governance and of libertarian order, and ultimately a society where freedom is the highest political good.

The spirit of liberty is strong with this revolution, and I can celebrate America’s independence on July the 4th with good conscience.

So let’s give a toast to the Fourth of July and celebrate the spirit of liberty.