In the spring of 1775, a Presbyterian minister sat down to write a letter he hoped his congregations would never need. Blood had already been spilled at Lexington. The Second Continental Congress was gathering in Philadelphia, uncertain whether it was convening a negotiation with the king or a revolution against him. The synod of New York and Philadelphia asked one of its members to draft a pastoral letter that would be read aloud from Presbyterian pulpits across the colonies.

The letter that was written was sober, even cautious. It calls congregations to a day of fasting and prayer. It urges Christian charity toward other denominations. And it offers this counsel regarding the delegates assembling in Philadelphia:

As the Continental Congress, now sitting at Philadelphia, consists of delegates chosen in the most free and unbiased manner by the body of the people, let them not only be treated with respect, and encouraged in their difficult service; not only let your prayers be offered up to God for his direction in their proceedings, but adhere firmly to their resolutions.

The man who wrote those words was Founding Father, the Reverend John Witherspoon.

Witherspoon and Other Clergymen Continue the Work

A year later, Witherspoon would become the only ordained clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. But by the time he picked up his pen in Philadelphia, he had already spent a year doing the less dramatic work of shepherding his denomination through a crisis: counseling patience, urging prayer, and asking ordinary Presbyterians to support a Congress whose members they had never met. The signature came later. The pastoral letter came first.

Acts 17:26 tells us that God “determined allotted periods and the boundaries” of the nations he has made, and Witherspoon’s two acts, a year apart, look very different from the inside of that providence than they do from the outside. One is a famous signature on a world-changing political document; the other is a forgotten letter to the people of God. Both came from the same pastor, and both were instruments God used to shape a nation that did not yet exist.

Witherspoon was not an isolated case. By the time the Revolution broke out, loyalist officials and Anglican clergy in the colonies had begun describing the rebellion, with some bitterness, as “a Presbyterian affair.” Royal governor Thomas Hutchinson recorded a 1774 exchange in which King George III, hearing of the colonial leadership, asked simply, “Are they not Presbyterians?” British observers wrote home that the war was, in their estimation, a Presbyterian rebellion from the start.

Whether or not the king ever used that precise phrase himself, his own circle clearly believed it and they were not entirely wrong. Two-thirds of the colonial population at the time of the Revolution had been shaped, directly or indirectly, by the Reformed tradition, and Presbyterian synods were among the first ecclesiastical bodies in America to publicly throw their weight behind the patriot cause.

The Significance of Representative Connected Church Government

The reasons many considered the American Revolution to be a Presbyterian war are worth pausing to reflect upon. One significant reason is the influence of Presbyterian ecclesial polity on American political polity. Presbyterians governed their own churches through elected elders, regional presbyteries, and a general assembly accountable to a written constitution rather than to a single bishop or king, and this structure is quite similar to how the founders structured our nation. To be clear, the framers drew on many sources—English common law, Lockean political theory, classical republicanism—and they were not building a national church when they wrote the Constitution. But Presbyterians had spent two centuries practicing representative, connectional government inside their own sanctuaries before the Americans applied a polity very similar in their statehouses.

Put differently, when the colonists began to imagine a government answerable to the people rather than to a crown, they were not working from a blank slate; in the ecclesial realm, they had grown up watching their elders elected, their courts of appeal exercised, and their assemblies debate. They already knew, from Sunday mornings, that government by consent and government by accountability were possible.

Moreover, the colonists had been taught that “the king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord,” turned “wherever he wills” (Prov 21:1). The same God who turns the hearts of kings can also use the patient habits of a church to prepare a people for self-government, without that people, or that church, ever becoming the nation’s established religion. Presbyterians providentially shaped the civic imagination of a nation that would have to find its own way to honor God or refuse him, generation after generation, ever since.

A Weighty Action in 2026

That history is why the action taken at this year’s General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America carries more weight than a ceremonial gesture. The 53rd General Assembly resolved “to give thanks to the Lord for the United States of America as we approach the 250th Anniversary of the Nation’s Founding.” It is a modest sentence simply asking Christians in America to do what Christians have always claimed scripture commands: to give thanks. Paul’s instruction to Timothy is direct. “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions” (1 Tim 2:1-2). Thanksgiving for one’s nation is simply Christian obedience.

Two hundred fifty years after a Presbyterian minister sat in Philadelphia drafting a letter no one would remember and signing the declaration everyone would remember, his Presbyterian brethren are still doing the same two things he modeled. They are praying for those in authority, however imperfect those leaders may be. And they are giving thanks because the same God who turns the hearts of kings and orders the boundaries of nations has allowed this nation to exist, to falter, and to endure. That is not a small thing to be grateful for. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing scripture tells us to observe.