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The right of private judgment: Jonathan Mayhew's religious route to political individualism.

Article Excerpt
I. Introduction

As Ayn Rand wrote, "There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man's rational faculty--the power if ideas." (1967, p. 165) Many classical liberals believe that the restoration of the economic and political liberty Americans enjoyed in the past requires a radical change in American political culture--a renewed understanding by the American people of the proper purpose and limits of government. (1) But where does public opinion come from? This question is a black box to most economists who do not investigate the source of people's beliefs. Yet if public opinion and ideology are so crucial, understanding what influences them is of the utmost importance for those advocating social change. One of the purposes of this article is to highlight an extremely important yet often overlooked source of ideological change in political culture: religious figures. (2) Over the centuries, American clergy have served as both the enemies of liberty and its most dogged champions. In this article, I highlight the importance of one clergyman who used religion --in its rationalistic, Enlightenment form--to instill a love of individual rights in the leaders of the American Revolution as well as the general public: Dr. Jonathan Mayhew.

Over the twenty-five years preceding the Declaration of Independence, no minister did more to advance the political principle of individual natural rights than Jonathan Mayhew, whom Murray Rothbard correctly described as America's "leader of libertarian thought since ... 1750" (1976, p.334). Mayhew helped radicalize the political outlook of his congregation, his lay readers, and his fellow Congregationalist clergymen during his tenure as pastor of Boston's Old West Church from 1747 to 1766. His political sermons resonated with New Englanders, from the mob in the street to middle class readers and such rising secular Whig leaders as John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Paul Revere, James Otis, Samuel Otis, and Samuel Quincy. Adams explained to his friend Thomas Jefferson that he read Mayhew's first political pamphlet at the age of 14 and re-read it "till the Substance of it was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly grafted on my Memory" (Cappon, 1959, p.527). Calling him a "transcendent genius," Adams named Mayhew, along with Samuel Adams and John Hancock, among the six men most responsible for starting the American Revolution. Meanwhile, Robert Treat Paine styled him as nothing less than "the father of civil and religious liberty in Massachusetts and America."

In his first book, Seven Sermons of 1749, one can see how the pastor's lifelong advancement of radical Whig political ideas followed from his religiously inspired commitment to the "right and duty of private judgment." By grounding Whig politics in Protestant Christianity by way of rationalist theology, Mayhew mobilized his Boston congregation and his international readership for political activism on behalf of liberty, thereby contributing to the intellectual origins of the American Revolution. His great success in demonstrating the religious significance of liberty to the general public and a new generation of leaders provides a historic example of the role that American religion, when allied with reason, has played in shaping the general public's understanding of the proper role of government in human life.

II. The Right and Duty to Think for Oneself

Jonathan Mayhew's commitment to individual natural rights originated in his view of man as the rational and moral creature of a rational and benevolent God. In the first of his Seven Sermons, the twenty-eight-year old pastor defended his proposition that God creates all human beings with the natural capacity for acquiring moral and religious knowledge. He conceded that all people do not possess this ability to...