Religion's Role in the American Revolution

The Library of Congress exhibit Faith of Our Forefathers can teach us a great deal about our own history. It certainly filled in some gaps in my knowledge. We learned in school that the Boston Tea Party was the beginning, and that the party was all about taxation without representation. But what I did NOT learn about was the influence of religion in this movement. Is it good that the USA become its own Country? If religious leaders had kept quiet then, as many people say our religious leaders should do today, would the USA have become independent? Would we prefer that course had taken place?

From the Library of Congress article:

Religion and the American Revolution

"A debate about the role of religion in the American Revolution began while the war between Britain and the Colonies still raged. Opponents of the Revolution, the Tories, claimed that "republican sectaries," specifically, Presbyterians and Congregationalists, had caused the conflict. In the 1960s, a scholar argued that evangelical Christians, converted during the Great Awakening, were responsible for the war. Although neither of these views has been widely accepted, there can be no doubt that religion played a major role in the Revolution by offering, through the sermons, pamphlets and actions of the American clergy, a moral sanction for opposition to the British, an assurance to the average American that opposition to the mother country was justified in the sight of God."

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Faith of Our Forefathers