Among scholars of the American Revolution, it is well-known that the loyalist clergy, especially in the northern colonies, was well placed to make a case against the American patriots during the opening years of the war. The clergymen had the requisite education, ready access to print, and the ear of devoted parishioners. In God Against the Revolution, Gregg L. Frazer makes a valuable contribution: he analyzes the most critical strands of their argument and explains why their case for conciliation with the empire proved finally insufficient. He joins scholars who show that allegiance to the empire—British patriotism—cannot be discounted as a series of individual choices but must be considered as part of a coherent ideology.
Frazer proceeds methodically by analyzing the writings of the five most prolific loyalist clergymen: Jonathan Boucher, Thomas Bradbury Chandler, Charles Inglis, Samuel Seabury, and John Joachim Zubly. Put simply, these loyalists’ arguments rested on the past, both ancient and recent. They drew from the Bible, the British Constitution, and the colonial charters to make a theological and legal case against rebellion. Their writings drew direct support from biblical passages that most directly addressed the matter of people's relationship to government: Romans 13 and I Peter 2. Loyalist pamphlets based on these passages fundamentally established obedience to God's authority—and then made the case for submitting to King George III. Far from degrading or servile, honoring the king was to honor God. Joining an unwise and sinful rebellion would encourage God's wrath and lead to unimaginable chaos. Frazer's careful attention to the biblical basis of loyalist ideology is his most original contribution.
Drawing on the work of Janice Potter, as well as more recent scholars of loyalism, Frazer shows that the loyalist clergymen shared a coherent ideology (The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1983). They cannot be dismissed as apologists for empire or cast as cowardly or shallow in their convictions. Their version of “liberty” consisted of opposing the tyranny of rebel leaders who they cast as manipulative, ambitious, and untrustworthy. Distrusting the “people” as volatile and malleable, the loyalist clergy criticized the vision of republican equality as inherently unstable; they praised British governance, especially its balanced constitution, and constitutional monarchy. They focused on the financial, military, and moral benefits accorded to subjects who remained dutiful to the parent empire.
Ready to contest the actions of the Parliament as unjust, the loyalist clergymen refused violent rebellion as a justifiable response. They constructed the colonies as dependent children who owed respect and gratitude to the British Empire which had nurtured and protected them from economic competition and foreign threat. They dismissed patriot complaints as trivial in comparison to the longstanding shared history with the empire and advocated negotiation and ultimately, conciliation. As Zubly wrote, “there may be just cause for complaint et there is no cause for war” (160).
Frazer explains loyalist clergymen's failure to create a successful opposition movement by emphasizing their lack of organization and their lack of reach. American patriots pushed them into hiding early in the war. The loyalists were silenced by committees and mobs, forced to write under pseudonyms. They confronted systematic large-scale confiscation of their properties, even banishment. All this is crucial and shows the patriots’ growing control of the press in the cities and eventually the countryside.
Unlike patriot leaders and patriot clergymen, loyalist clergymen, even those born in the colonies, did not reach within the colonial world to create their alternate cause. The patriots’ highly effective use of the press has been highlighted in Robert Parkinson's The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (University of North Carolina, 2016). Parkinson demonstrates how Indians and slaves were scapegoated as predators and criminals to unite the patriots and create a “common cause.” Indian alliances with the patriots, for instance, were suppressed and Indian alliances with the British were publicized widely. The British were portrayed as friends of Indians and slaves and not of the more deserving white settlers.
Four other points for loyalist failure are also worth considering. First, the approximately one hundred eighty-two loyalist clergymen appeared unable to translate their legalistic and theological arguments into a vernacular more accessible to a wider colonial populace. Second, the British military failure to suppress the colonial uprising in 1775–1776 left the loyalist clergymen shocked, and especially vulnerable and quiet. Third, the loyalists defended the past—the status quo—and depended on a more pessimistic and fixed view of human nature. Arguably, this proved less inspiring to a people who viewed themselves as pioneers, trailblazers. Last, the loyalist clergy's weaker appeal may indicate that white American settlers had gradually become prepared for a tyranny of another kind—the tyranny of the white majority in place of God or king.
