This essay is a wrecking ball in its own right.
Before the Revolution, There Was a Revelation
... The man historians call the “morning gun of the Revolution” was not a soldier or a statesman. He was Jonathan Mayhew, a 29-year-old Congregationalist minister in Boston whose 1750 Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission dismantled Romans 13 — long wielded by the Crown as a theological cudgel against resistance — line by methodical line. He demonstrated that the Bible places a clear duty upon Christians to resist tyrannical rulers. This sermon became the source of the declaration that “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” — a phrase Jefferson later proposed for the seal of the United States. John Adams called it “the morning gun of the Revolution” and remembered it “was read by everybody.” ...
