Saturday Class - The American Revolution was a Christian Revolution - June 20, 2026

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The American Revolution was not a tax revolt. It was a Christian revolution — and Britain’s number-one enemy wasn’t an army. It was a network of preachers.

Almost everyone can recite the words: we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights — among these life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Far fewer have read the long list of charges against King George III that follows. And fewer still have noticed what’s missing from it.

“A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
— The Declaration of Independence

In that entire indictment, taxes are mentioned exactly once.

This was not a populist tax revolt over tea and stamps. It was a war over a single question: do your rights come from God, or from a king?

In this week’s Saturday Class — an America 250 address — Bob Ingraham tells the untold story of the men who answered that question with their lives.

Who were the “Black Regiment”?

The name has nothing to do with skin color or race. It was coined by the rulers of the British Empire — the monarchy, Lord North, and others — for the black clerical robes worn by the Christian ministers of the colonies.

These men preached a single, dangerous idea: that every human being is made in the image of God, and that our rights flow from God — not from any earthly throne, court, or parliament.

London understood the threat exactly. It marked the preachers as enemy number one.

“Our inalienable rights as a child of God come from God — not from the U.S. Senate, not from the Supreme Court, not from the White House.”
— Bob Ingraham

It started in a pastor’s house

The “shot heard round the world” did not begin on a battlefield. It began near midnight on April 18, 1775, in the home of Reverend Jonas Clark, pastor of the Church of Christ in Lexington.

John Hancock and Samuel Adams — both with British arrest warrants out for them — were hiding under Clark’s roof. When Paul Revere arrived with word that British troops were marching, Hancock turned to Clark and asked whether the people of Lexington would fight.

“I have trained them for this very hour. They will fight, and if need be, die under the shadow of the house of God.”
— Reverend Jonas Clark

By dawn, about a hundred of Clark’s congregants stood on Lexington Green. Eight of them were killed — every one a member of his church. Standing over the dead, Clark made plain what had just happened:

“From this day will be dated the liberty of the world.”
— Reverend Jonas Clark

The same was true at Concord, and along the British retreat to Boston: the colonists doing the fighting were, overwhelmingly, members of local Christian congregations — Clark’s, and those of Reverend Phillips Payson and Reverend Benjamin Balch.

The preacher who took off his robe

The Black Regiment wasn’t one or two ministers. It was dozens — perhaps hundreds. A few of the men Bob names:

• Reverend Peter Muhlenberg — preaching from Ecclesiastes 3 in January 1776, he read “a time of war, and a time of peace,” declared “and this is the time of war,” closed the Bible, and removed his clerical robe to reveal a Colonel’s uniform underneath. Within half an hour, 162 men had enlisted.
• Reverend Nathaniel Bartlett (Reading, Connecticut) — so feared that local Tories vowed to hang him. He made his parish rounds with a loaded musket in one hand and a Bible in the other.
• Reverend James Caldwell (Elizabethtown, New Jersey) — recruited most of his congregation and stepped into the pulpit wearing two pistols. The British, who called him “the rebel priest,” burned his church and murdered his family.
• Reverend Naphtali Daggett — president of Yale College — grabbed a rifle to fight off the British at his New Haven home. He was captured, disarmed, and bayoneted to death.

Britain burned the churches

This was not random wartime damage. The order to hunt the ministers originated in London, at the highest levels of the British government, and was carried out by commanders like Howe and Clinton.

The preachers were targeted, imprisoned, and killed. And the British burned to the ground nearly every non-Anglican church they could reach — Presbyterian, Lutheran, Congregational, Baptist. The empire knew where the revolution actually lived.

An army on its knees

What carried untrained farm boys against the largest invasion force Britain had ever assembled — and through the misery of Valley Forge?

On the eve of battle, ministers like Reverend Trout preached to Washington’s soldiers. A soldier’s prayer, distributed throughout the Continental Army outside Boston, captured the spirit:

“Teach, I pray thee, my hands to war and my fingers to fight… present me to thy divine majesty, to be disposed of by thee, to thy glory and the good of America.”

This was not private piety. The Continental Congress twice called the colonies to days of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer — once in July 1775, and again in May 1776, weeks before independence was declared. So much for a modern “separation of church and state.”

And when the war was won and the Constitution ratified, the first act of the new president was to give thanks. In his 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation, George Washington called it “the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God.”

What it asks of us in 2026

The sermons speak for themselves. The harder question is what they demand of us now.

What were the principles, the convictions, the dedication that turned farmers into a nation? And how must we approach the fight today? As Bob reminds us — quoting William McKinley — principles must always lead.

Watch the class and discover the untold, Christian story of how America won its independence.

—Promethean Action Editorial Staff