Americans commonly think of King George as an authoritarian overlord. Our founders, however, viewed him as weak-willed and anarchic. Drawing on a long and rich history of Christian political theory, they charged that George III failed to protect his citizens. Bad government often manages to oppress the people for its own gain while abdicating its government and leaving the people open to the oppression of others at the same time. The Declaration of Independence argues that government is a positive good, but accuses King George of abdicating his own government.[1] Until the moment of independence, most of the founders were not republicans, but loyal monarchists. They felt the need to justify their actions and clear their names of the charge “rebel” with extreme care. Governments are instituted to seek the people’s good, and if they fail to energetically govern they abdicate their God-given duty—just like King George III. Let us dig into history and the Christian tradition to discern the purpose of government and examine our founders’ understanding of that tradition, before we apply these lessons to our day.
The Purpose of Government
In the Declaration, the second paragraph declares: “it is the Right of the People . . . to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”[2] Is the “safety and happiness” of the people truly the purpose of government? According to ancient Christian tradition, yes! Samuel Rutherford’s classic Protestant political text, Lex Rex, makes the case quite plainly:
…Salus populi, suprema lex.[3] The safety of the people is the supreme and cardinal law to which all laws are to stoop. . . . This supreme law must stand; for if all law, policy, magistrates and power be referred to the people’s good as the end, (Rom. xiii. 4)[4] and to their quiet and peaceable life in godliness and honesty, then must this law stand, as of more worth than the king.[5]
Another classic Protestant text, A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants, concurs.
See then, wherefore kings were created in the first ages: to wit, to administer justice at home, and to be leaders in the wars abroad, and not only to repulse the incursions of the enemy, but also to repress and hinder the devastation and spoiling of the subjects and their goods at home; but above all, to expel and drive away all devices and debauchments [i.e., threats to public order] far from their dominions.[6]
Of course, some version of this truth underscores the entire history of political theology. Augustine lays the legitimacy of the state in the justice it enforces when he asks: “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?”[7] Aquinas held that Israel sinned in asking for a king because their king would be a tyrant like those of the nations around them.[8] Luther in his commentary on Psalm 82 speaks of the proper ministrations of a prince turning the whole country into a hospital—a place of healing.[9] Calvin, in his commentary on the same passage, holds that magistrates are accounted guilty before God if they do not “succor [help] those who stand in need of their interference.”[10] Both Scripture and the entire Christian heritage speak with a single voice: government exists to protect its citizens.
How Britain Abandoned its American People
The political sermons of the American founding era are justly famous. Political theology and ethics propounded by the pulpits molded the founding generation, and so frequent is the description of civil government as a positive good which must energetically steward the well-being of the people that it becomes background noise. Take this passage from a sermon preached in Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1774 by Samuel Sherwood:
Men in such high places of trust and authority, instead of being released from the laws of God, and having their obligations to faithfulness in the discharge of duty, lessened and diminished; have them increased, in proportion to their advancement; and it is not beneath the dignity of their stations, to attend very seriously to the advice and exhortation of the Psalmist, Be wise now therefore, O ye kings; be instructed ye judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear; kiss the son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little[11] . . . If a private man neglects his duty, he, and others connected with him, may suffer. But if a chief ruler is unjust and unfaithful, the whole community or body politic suffers.[12]
Moses Mather in 1775 warns most strenuously of confusing government with the abuse of government “lest we raise an army of rebel spirits more dangerous and difficult to reduce, than all the legions of Britain.”[13] In the absence of government, the evils of anarchy are worse than the abuses of government. Wariness of the abuses of government may lessen its energy until it is overcome in lawless rebellion. Of course, there is explicit biblical instruction towards energetic government as needed. Consider Psalm 82: “God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods . . . Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.”[14] The whole tradition of political theology up through the founders spins its cloth straight from Scripture. Governments are a positive good, established for the common safety of the people.
At the time of the American War for Independence, the founders did complain of active oppression by King George, yes. However, they also accused him of a profound lack of energy in fulfilling his executive duties. “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most . . . necessary for the public good.”[15] “He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance.”[16] “He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection.”[17] Jefferson has even stronger language in his original rough draft of the Declaration, accusing the king of having “prostituted his negative,”[18] that is, abusing his veto powers.
One cannot forget that part of the founders’ legal theory in support of independence was that the royal colonies were to be governed directly by the king, not by Parliament, which was only the parliament of Britain. They complained in The Declaration that George III had “…combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.”[19] Thus, they appealed to their “most gracious sovereign”[20] directly in the Olive Branch Petition of 1775, and asked for his intervention against the new colonial laws and regulations being promulgated by Parliament. However, he flatly rejected their petition. Against the semi-foreign oppressor that was the British Parliament, the king had proved ineffective in protecting his subjects. Combined with his own predations on the rights and goods of the people, and the active war he maintained against them, the founders argued that he had abjured his own authority; they had not rebelled against it.
The tale of the founders’ relations to republicanism and monarchism is long and complex, and for a complete treatment, Eric Nelson’s The Royalist Revolution shows all sides in the primary sources.[21] Suffice it to say that in the main, by the late stage of the war and the framing of the Constitution, two camps had formed. Diehard antimonarchists, persuaded by Thomas Paine’s exegesis of 1 Samuel 8 in Common Sense,[22] eschewed the trappings of executive power completely as some form of idolatry, while a party of prudentialists took the lessons of the Scriptures and of history to demonstrate that a lack of power in the executive was as injurious as its misuse.[23]
In the framing of the Constitution, the prudentialist party, if they may be so called, held sway among the American elites appointed to the Constitutional Convention. Fearing the results of framing an insufficient government, even while providing mitigation against the avaricious tendencies of rulers, they saw it necessary to provide a unitary executive—that is, a single president to whom the entire executive branch reports. They sought to give over to the president almost every executive power, with sparse limitations, so that he would inherently be imbued with enough energy to execute the law in even unusual situations like anarchy or conspiracies of special interests against the public good. Hamilton takes up the topic in Federalist 70:
Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.[24]
John Adams praises the extent of the president’s executive power as “coextensive with the legislative power” for “he has the right, and his is the duty, to take care that the laws are faithfully executed.”[25] Washington himself, the first to fill the office of president, was no fan of weakness in government, saying that arbitrary government normally comes out of “liberty abused to licentiousness.”[26] It is safe to say that the founding generation was not of one mind with Thoreau, who repeated the motto “that government is best which governs least.”[27]
Conclusion
Two hundred fifty years from our founding as an independent nation, the lessons of the Scriptures and of history hold as true for us as they did for our forefathers. For example, our recent experience with lax or nonexistent border security has again demonstrated that it is as easy to tyrannize a people by laziness in the executive as it is by proactive acts of oppression. Opening up America to all manner of threats to its safety and well-being has harmed the American people as much as any other act of misgovernment in our memory. Such policies opened up a human trafficking market in the United States,[28] caused a fentanyl crisis culminating in over 70,000 annual deaths,[29] and opened up the American people to predation by the Latin American cartels,[30] some of the most brutal criminals we have ever experienced in our long history, committing crimes that are not fit to print. In our relations to other sovereign states, these lax policies have proximately caused the smuggling of a potential agroterrorism weapon from China into the United States[31] and allowed Venezuela to rebadge Chinese, Russian, and Iranian agents and smuggle them into the country,[32]. Of course, the quantity of the other crimes committed is difficult to catalog, and one does not wish to dwell on the constitutional crisis the registration of illegal aliens on our voter rolls has already caused.
Our founders and those they stood on the shoulders of spilled much ink, and as much blood, to pass on the heritage of free and just government to their posterity. They took the Scriptures at their word when they laid out that the civil government was to be a terror to the evildoer, a scourge to the oppressor, and to pursue the good of the people. With wisdom, they read the lessons of history and saw again and again that the danger of factional tyranny and anarchy required the loosing of the sword to restore order and justice. We should be as comfortable as they were with these timely truths.
End Notes
“The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” National Archives, accessed January 27, 2026, https://www.archives.gov. ↑
“The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” National Archives. ↑
“The safety of the people is the supreme law.” ↑
“For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” Rom. 13:4 (KJV). ↑
Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex, or, The Law and the Prince: A Dispute for the Just Prerogative of King and People (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1982), 119. ↑
Junius Brutus [pseud.], A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants: Or, Of the Lawful Power of the Prince over the People, and of the People over the Prince [1579]. (New York: Peter Smith, 1963), 141. ↑
Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1871), bk. 4, chap. 4, accessed January 27, 2026, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org ↑
Aquinas, De reg., 1.5–6, in On the Government of Rulers: De Regimine Principum, ed. and trans. James M. Blythe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), as cited in Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). ↑
Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: Volume 13, Selected Psalms II, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1956), 53. ↑
John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1846), on Ps. 82:3. ↑
Ps. 2:10–12a. ↑
Samuel Sherwood, “A Sermon Containing Scriptural Instructions to Civil Rulers, and All Free-born Subjects” (1774), in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805, ed. Ellis Sandoz, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), accessed January 27, 2026, https://oll.libertyfund.org. ↑
Moses Mather, “America’s Appeal to the Impartial World” (1775), in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, ed. Sandoz, 1:443–92. ↑
Ps. 82:1, 4, KJV. ↑
“The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” National Archives. ↑
“The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” National Archives. ↑
“The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” National Archives. ↑
Thomas Jefferson, “Original Rough Draught” of the Declaration of Independence, Library of Congress, accessed January 27, 2026, https://www.loc.gov. ↑
“The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” National Archives. ↑
“Second Petition from Congress to the King, 8 July 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed January 27, 2026, https://founders.archives.gov. ↑
Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. ↑
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia: R. Bell, 1776), accessed January 27, 2026, ThomasPaine.org, https://thomaspaine.org. ↑
Nelson, The Royalist Revolution, 128–145. This entire chapter of Nelson’s The Royalist Revolution (chap. 3, “The Lord Alone Shall Be King of America”) is an excellent jumping-off point for anybody wanting to find sources for English political theology regarding the executive after the Reformation and through the American founding. ↑
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, no. 70, Barnes & Noble Classics (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006), 387. ↑
John Adams, “To Roger Sherman, 18 July 1789,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed January 27, 2026, https://founders.archives.gov. ↑
George Washington, “Circular to the States,” June 8, 1783, Center for the Study of the American Constitution, University of Wisconsin–Madison, accessed July 23, 2026, https://archive.csac.history.wisc.edu ↑
Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” in Aesthetic Papers, ed. Elizabeth P. Peabody (Boston: The Editor, 1849), 189. ↑
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “DHS Initiative Uncovers Widespread Abuse, Exploitation of Unaccompanied Kids Placed with Previously Improperly Vetted Sponsors,” ICE News Release, June 5, 2025, accessed January 27, 2026, https://www.ice.gov. ↑
Matthew F. Garnett and Arialdi M. Miniño, Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 2003–2023, NCHS Data Brief no. 522 (Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, December 2024), accessed January 27, 2026, https://www.cdc.gov ↑
Nadine El-Bawab, Jeffrey Cook, and Luke Barr, “ICE Carries Out Raid in Colorado, 100 Members of Venezuelan Gang Targeted for Arrest: Officials,” ABC News, February 5, 2025, accessed January 27, 2026, https://abcnews.go.com; Matthew Barakat, “Life Sentence for Gang Member Who Turned Northern Virginia into ‘Hunting Ground’,” AP News, April 30, 2024, accessed January 27, 2026, https://www.apnews.com; U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Virginia, “Four MS-13 Gang Members Sentenced for Racketeering, Violent Crimes, and Drug Distribution,” U.S. Department of Justice, May 17, 2023, accessed January 27, 2026, https://www.justice.gov ↑
Adithi Ramakrishnan, “What Is Fusarium graminearum, the Fungus US Authorities Say Was Smuggled in from China?,” AP News, June 4, 2025, accessed January 27, 2026, https://www.apnews.com. ↑
Damien Gayle and Nigel Nelson, “Political Murder: Iran Hitman Majid Farahani Planned to Kill Mike Pompeo, Authorities Say,” Daily Mail (March 2024), accessed January 27, 2026, https://www.dailymail.co.uk. ↑
