Was the Revolution only a religious war for the Americans?

Before I got deep into the text of God of Liberty, I continually found myself being dogged by the feeling that Kidd might be overreaching in his arguments about the active role of religion in the Revolutionary war itself.  As I got farther and farther into the book, those feelings decreased, as he brought more and more sources to bear on the subject. By the end of the book, I got the distinct feeling that as Kidd saw it, no part of the war and the events leading up to it were not religious, at least from the point of view of the American patriots.

I wonder though, how did the British think about the war? Possibly more importantly, how did the Loyalists think about the war?  While some Americans apparently thought that the Quebec Act was the beginning of a "long-feared European plan to destroy Christian liberty" in the colonies, how did the British see this development, as it had to do with religious liberty?[1]  Did Loyalists see the passage of this law as a sinister plot of the British Parliament, did they see it as a praiseworthy development in religious freedom, or were they split down the middle?  We don't know, as Kidd does not address these questions.  While I think the book makes an excellent contribution to helping us see the Revolution and its aftermath in a different light, as an especially religious war for some of the Colonists, I am left to wonder how much we lose by only viewing the religious content of the war from the point of view of patriot colonists.


[1] Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: a Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 67.