The Rebellion To Tyrants
The phrase “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God” is the essence of the sermon by Jonathan Mayhew in 1770 that sparked the American Revolution.
Michael Boldin, host of Tenth Amendment Center, says Mayhew’s sermon on resisting tyranny laid the moral, religious and philosophical foundation for much of the Revolution.
Boldin reports that shortly after the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, a committee of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin worked to design a great seal for the United States, which originally included the powerful phrase on the obverse of the seal. Here’s more.
American War for Independence (1775-1783)
“The Americans who protested against British encroachments on colonial liberties wanted to preserve their traditional rights. They were not revolutionaries seeking the radical restructuring of society… They used the word ‘innovation’ pejoratively… ‘no freeman should be subject to any tax to which he has not given his own consent’ [-John Adams]… From the American point of view, such taxation without consent was an intolerable novelty… They protested that their ancient chartered rights were being violated… The Americans defended their traditional rights. The French revolutionaries despised French traditions and sought to make everything anew: new governing structures, new provincial boundaries, a new ‘religion,’ a new calendar—and the guillotine awaited those who objected…
“In a certain sense, there was no American Revolution at all. There was, instead, an American War for Independence in which Americans threw off British authority in order to retain their liberties and self-government. In the 1760s, the colonies had, for the most part, been left alone in their internal affairs… [The] colonists did not seek the total transformation of society that we associate with other revolutions, such as the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, or the Russian Revolution. They simply wished to go on enjoying self-rule when it came to their internal matters and living as they always had for so many decades before British encroachments began. The American ‘revolutionaries’ were conservative, in the very best sense of that word…
“When modern-day liberals justify extremely broad readings of the Constitution on the grounds that we need a ‘living, breathing Constitution’ that ‘changes with the times’, they are actually recommending the very system the colonists sought to escape. The British constitution was very flexible indeed — too flexible for the colonists, who were inflexibly committed to upholding their traditional rights. The ‘living, breathing’ British constitution was no safeguard of American liberties.”
—The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History
from Chapter 2: “America’s Conservative Revolution”
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D.