In God We Don't Trust, Part 2: How Failure to Trust in God Led to the American Revolution. Chapter 11: Not Causes, but Choices. Like most American students, I took American history during my junior year of high school, and I remember that one of the questions on our semester exam asked us to list the causes of the American Revolution.
I dutifully gave the answers we had been taught: taxation without representation, the tyranny of George III, the Boston Massacre, quartering of soldiers in private homes, illegal searches, and other such things. That's exactly what the teacher wanted to hear, and as I remember, I got an A on the exam. In contrast, if I were asked today, "What were the causes of the American Revolution?" my answer would be, "That's a bad question. It's like asking, 'What were the causes of John F.
Kennedy's assassination?'" In other words, when we ask what caused something, we're implying that a given thing follows either naturally or at least lawfully from certain preceding conditions or events. For instance, it's proper to ask what causes a lunar eclipse or smallpox. We can ask what caused the success of Ford Motor Company in the early 20th century or what caused a certain softball team to defeat a rival team. We might even ask what were the causes of someone being fired or promoted.
But we don't ask someone to list the causes of the robbery at the First National Bank, nor do we ask someone to enumerate the causes of Jane Doe's murder. Why not? Because by the mere act of framing the question in that manner, we transfer the blame for those crimes from the criminal to the victim. Nothing causes bank robberies. They are the result of a choice a criminal makes.
So the proper questions are, "Why did John Smith rob at the First National Bank?" and, "Why did Susan Jones murder Jane Doe?" In similar fashion, Christians should never ask what were the causes of an armed insurrection, which is what the American Revolution was. Nothing causes armed insurrections, just as nothing causes bank robberies. Those events are choices. For a Christian, they are unlawful choices. So the question we want to explore is this: Why did the colonists rebel against England?
And the answer is that they failed to trust in God. What rights do humans have? When a student reads about the causes of the American Revolution in an American history textbook, he or she is going to hear a lot about rights. But exactly what rights do we humans have? From where do we obtain our rights? The two major sources of human rights are God and human governments. There are no such things as natural rights. If the rights don't ultimately come from God or human authority, they don't exist.
Whatever rights we receive from God are spelled out in Scripture. Yet in our study of the Scriptures, we search in vain to find anything about rights. The Scriptures speak a lot about gifts with which God blesses us. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning." James 1:17. The Bible also has a lot to say about responsibilities humans have toward their Maker, but it says nothing about rights.
Nevertheless, the gifts and responsibilities we receive from God create certain inalienable rights that no humans have the right to take from us. Here is a partial list of these rights: the right to pray to God, the right to worship God in the manner He directs in Scripture, the right to hear the Gospel and to preach it, the right to live by the teachings of Christ. You can perhaps think of other things that could be added to this list, but they are all similar in nature.
They aren't so much rights as they are God-given responsibilities. Human governments have no right to require their citizens to neglect such responsibilities, nor do they have the right to demand that their citizens disobey God's laws. That's because governments obtain their authority from God. The rights given by human governments are spelled out in their constitutions, statutes, court decisions, and administrative laws.
Because the colonists were English citizens, their rights were set forth in their colonial charters, various statutes, and the British Constitution. Why this is important. It's essential that we grasp these matters as we look at the events that led to the American Revolution. That's because in their complaints against England, the colonists spoke endlessly about their rights. What I've seen from my research is that most textbooks uncritically accept the colonists' claims as to their rights.
No one ever seems to check the actual laws of England to see whether the things the colonists were claiming were true or not. Interestingly, the colonists themselves were never able to point to any specific English laws or to any provisions in their colonial charters that the English government was violating. So in the chapters that follow, we will do something different than what most textbooks do. We will not simply accept uncritically what the colonists said about their rights.
No, we will go to the Magna Carta, the colonial charters, the English Bill of Rights, and the various acts of parliament to see if the colonists' claims were valid. As we're about to see, such an examination of the facts puts the American Revolution in an entirely different light.