Green’s reform regime emerged in stages over three decades. In the late 1760s, he first wrote a series of tracts for a learned audience, primarily theologians, that argued his case for creating a pure church and why it was so important to religion and society. In 1770, he took his cause to the general public, publishing a best-selling pamphlet called A Vision of Hell that lampooned the materialism and selfishness of contemporary society. Using illustrations by Paul Revere of Boston fame, A Vision of Hell was a brilliant satire that poked fun at a wide-ranging group of targets—from less-than-devout ministers to sybaritic merchants and Sabbath-ignoring farmers who cared more about the state of their crops than the state of their souls.16
The revolutionary crisis of the 1770s presented Pastor Green with a new set of opportunities and headaches. This Calvinist saw the arrival of war as preordained and a God-given opportunity to achieve the changes in society Green believed were needed. The crisis of war would force Americans to work harder and to put the good of society ahead of their selfish private interests, he reasoned. And the ethos of liberty had the potential to sweep away another dark cloud hovering over the landscape—the holding of Africans in slavery. However, the Revolution’s emphasis on liberty and freedom of choice presented a special challenge for Green and other American Calvinists. How do you reconcile liberty with divine control? How much freedom does God give a person? Just how controlling is he? Moreover, how do you maintain Christian order and improve religiosity in an era of freedom and liberty?17
Green’s answer was sophisticated and, at first blush, paradoxical. In the late 1770s and early 1780s, he began to preach the virtues of voluntarism and the need for granting more rights to laymen. Yet, at the same time, he also preached the need for greater discipline and for maintaining high standards in church and among the devout. Green resolved this inherent paradox—greater discipline during an era of greater freedom—by giving people a choice. They could work hard, show they were of the elect, and commit to the church—or not. It was up to them whether to act righteously or sinfully, but when they decided to join, they had to truly commit to the high standards Jacob Green was demanding.
The doctrine of the covenant helped Green reconcile his political and religious views. God, he reasoned, entered into a covenantal relationship with chosen individuals (the predestined “elect”), and it was up to these individuals to respond to his offer of salvation. No one could be coerced into grace; it could only be freely offered by God and freely accepted by man. Melding his knowledge of Lockean political philosophy with his Edwardsean thought (which stressed free choice within the bounds set by God), Green in the 1770s increasingly viewed the laity as constituting the real church—the moral authority of the congregation rested on individual believers. When one was of the elect, he or she was on an equal footing with the church’s minister. Such equality gave the laity a great say in the running of their congregation. Equally important was the covenant’s contribution to his conceptions of liberty. Green increasingly believed in voluntary associations of like-minded believers who joined of their own free accord. By 1780, liberty for him had come to mean the liberty to choose—within the dictates of God’s mandate to act morally. He not only opposed any kind of religious establishment, he also argued that “every man . . . [should] be encouraged to think and judge for himself in matters of religion.” No one, in other words, should be forced to join a church or to partake in the sacraments.18
In the 1770s, Green grasped the direction that American society was heading, and he was an early proponent of laymen’s rights and of Jeffersonian democracy before it even existed. In the late 1770s, he wrote two letters on liberty that extolled independent yeomen and tradesmen as the bedrocks of a democratic society. Green disdained the rich and decried their excessive influence on the body politic. During the war, he broadened his rebellion against the king to the American Presbyterian Church because he saw the Synod of New York and Philadelphia as high-handed and imperious. Green opposed the centralizing trend in the church and wanted power to rest with individual congregations and their laymen. This belief led him in 1779 to secede from the Presbyterian Church—a decade before the American church approved a stronger, centralizing, federalist-style constitution—and to direct an independence movement resting on the creation of associated presbyteries, which were voluntary associations of like-minded churches that pursued a congregational system of Presbyterianism. Green was also out front on democratizing education. As early as 1770, he was calling for changes in how ministers were educated and ordained; Green wanted less emphasis placed on formal education and more on evangelical values—in other words, a fairer and more democratic system. He wanted the ministry opened to more people, all in an effort to create a more nimble Presbyterian Church that could meet the needs of a democratic, frontier society.
In these diverse ways, Jacob Green’s attempts to reconcile Calvinism during the revolutionary era fostered an activist, democratic faith that led him to undertake an extremely ambitious reform program that had both secular and religious components. To fully understand just how radical Green’s Calvinism was, Jacob Green’s Revolution tells a second story. High Church Anglicanism and its values of sacramental ceremony, conformity, and obedience to the state were polar opposites of Green’s Edwardsean and democratic values. Thus this second story, told as vignettes between the main chapters, focuses on another New Jersey minister, Thomas Bradbury Chandler, who lived about twenty miles from Green in Elizabeth Town.
Chandler was one of the most colorful—and hated—American members of the English church, who was despised by Presbyterians and Congregationalists because of his main reform cause: the effort to bring an Anglican bishop to American shores (fig. 1). Chandler’s mentor was not a Calvinist like Jonathan Edwards but Samuel Johnson, the conservative theologian, royalist, and first president of King’s College in New York City, and Chandler built his conservatism on the scaffolding of Johnson’s High Church Anglicanism. Inferiors owed their superiors loyalty and obedience; they especially owed allegiance to their church and king. The threshold for rebellion, in Chandler’s mind, was high, and the colonists had not met it. With fierce, biting sarcasm, he turned Whig arguments on their head by denouncing the Continental Congress as tyrannical and corrupt, and he warned that breaking away from Great Britain would prove suicidal for the American people.
The differences with Green went beyond crystalline ones over reform; they extended to their worldviews arising from their religious principles. Besides improving the church’s administrative efficiency, Chandler believed the episcopal office was a linchpin of a properly functioning society where hierarchy and monarchy would reign. Traditional English society with its social gradations and elaborate governmental system thrilled Chandler, and he wanted it replicated in British North America. Bringing bishops to America was one way he would accomplish this goal. Jacob Green strongly disagreed with Chandler’s worldview. He rejected episcopacy, believing it was unbiblical and unnecessary. Moreover, as he made clear in his 1776 tract, Green detested the British system with its hierarchical ranking of power and its multitude of offices; he derided the system as undemocratic and financially reckless—lordly offices such as the bishoprics cost money, required oppressive taxation to support, and were meddlesome in the laity’s affairs. Bishops and High Church councils should not be running things, according to Green; the people in their congregations should. For these reasons and more, Green wanted the thirteen colonies to declare independence and establish their own nation.
Besides providing a stark contrast in the ministers’ reform drives and worldviews, Chandler’s story is included for two other reasons. One is to break free from the limitations of the traditional biographical format, which