306 - Revolution and Religion: American Revolutionary War and the Reformed Clergy

Revolution and Religion: American Revolutionary War and the Reformed Clergy
By Keith L. Griffin
New York, Paragon House, 1994. 145 pp. $29.95.

This is a puzzling book. The dust jacket proclaims that "Griffin's study ... belies the idea that New England's theological culture dominated the whole of Revolutionary American religious life." Griffin does occasionally try to make a case for some distinctive aspects of Reformed theological reflection on the Revolution, but his argument generally shows more continuity with New England Puritanism than discontinuity. Curiously, he pays relatively little attention to John Witherspoon and the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment and common sense realism, which did play a major role in shaping conceptions of politics in the early Republic. His sources are only those in English, a major problem for a comprehensive view of the middle colonies in the eighteenth century. He slights the role of the debate over establishing a resident Anglican bishop in the colonies and thereby ignores the critical influence of Presbyterian William Livingston and his Independent Reflector. Admittedly, Livingston was not a minister, but here is a case where a focus on "Reformed clergy" is so narrow that it distorts historical realities. The book on religion and the Revolution in the middle colonies remains to be written.

John M. Mulder
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Louisville, KY.