Boston clergy framed independence as divine will through biblical deliverance sermons.

Evidence

A notably religious people, Bostonians gathered in churches to celebrate their city’s deliverance with sermons that left little doubt about popular support for separation. Drawing on the biblical passage “Because thy Rage against me … I will turn thee back by the way by which thou camest” and after recounting the abuses committed by the British Army in Boston, one minister portrayed its “precipitate and inglorious flight” in terms of divine redemption. Expounding a scriptural text about an ancient Israeli victory over its enemy, “Wherefore they arose, and fled in the twilight, and left … the camp as it was,” another cleric spoke of the bloodless liberation of Boston as evidence of God’s support for American freedom. In a service attended by Washington and his generals, a minister spoke of Boston and its deliverance without destruction in terms of the prophet Isaiah’s vision of Jerusalem as “a tabernacle that shall not be taken down.” In their public words and prayers, these civic leaders all but pronounced independence as God’s will for America. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 118

Categorization

• XREF: The sacred framing of the American cause is a recurring tension worth connecting to the Declaration’s later appeal to ‘Nature’s God’ vs. providential language.