A higher ideal for war





In his book God of Liberty, T.S. Kidd refers to the effect of the Great Awakening and its principle of God "favoring" the colonies as  "This civil spirituality served as a transcendent framework in which to define, justify, and fight a war and establish the new American nation."(Kidd, 9) In his study Sacred Scripture, Sacred War, J. Byrd gave an insight on how the Bible "was used to make the patriotic case for the war" (Byrd, 3)  which fits well with the principle mentioned above. Both historians seem to agree in that deists, preachers, and soldiers had, at some extent, to link the revolutionary cause with either God or the Bible. Therefore, the level of literacy, I consider, was a determinant of the kind of relationship that the colonist held with those two elements. Still, higher ideals for the war had to be maintained and religion provided not only palpable evidence through the Holy Book but also moral support in the higher ideals that it contained.