HuzzahDisobedience to Tyrants Is Obedience to God
The Sermon That Lit the Revolution Twenty-Five Years Early
June 5, 2026 | AmRev Resurrected
January 30, 1750. Boston.
Across the Atlantic in England and in every Anglican parish in the American colonies, the day is being marked as a fast day. The Church of England has set it apart in mourning for King Charles I, executed by Parliament one hundred and one years earlier outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall.
In the High Church tradition, Charles is the Royal Martyr. The official theology holds that his execution was the murder of God’s anointed by rebellious subjects. The fast day sermons across the colonies will preach Romans 13. Submit to the higher powers. The powers that be are ordained of God. Whoever resists the power resists the ordinance of God. Charles was lawful authority. The men who killed him were rebels against God.
In the West Church on Cambridge Street in Boston, a twenty-nine-year-old pastor named Jonathan Mayhew steps into the pulpit.
He has chosen his text. Romans 13:1-7. He has chosen his day. January 30. He knows what the establishment will be preaching across every Anglican parish in the empire. He has come to preach the opposite case.
The sermon he is about to deliver will be published within months. It will go through multiple editions in Boston, then in London. John Adams will say sixty-eight years later that it was read by everybody. Adams will count Mayhew among the men who prepared the way for the Revolution. The Revolution Adams is talking about will not begin for another twenty-five years.
The argument that will produce it is already in print.
This is the story of the sermon that lit the Revolution twenty-five years early.
The Pastor
Jonathan Mayhew was born on Martha’s Vineyard in 1720. His father, Experience Mayhew, was a missionary to the Wampanoag of the island, fluent in the language, the author of a Wampanoag translation of the Psalter. Jonathan grew up in a household where the work of preaching had reached past the comfort of English parishes and into the lives of an indigenous people who had not heard the gospel before.
He went to Harvard. He graduated in 1744. In 1747, at twenty-six years old, he was ordained pastor of the West Church in Boston, where he would serve for the next nineteen years until his death in 1766.
He died ten years before the Declaration. He never saw the war that the sermon he preached at twenty-nine helped produce. The men he formed by his preaching, James Otis and Samuel Adams and a generation of younger Bostonians, would carry the argument forward. Mayhew did not live to see the harvest.
What he did, in the nineteen years he had, was preach. He preached the doctrine of covenanted government. He preached the limits of magistracy. He preached the Word against the establishment when the establishment had grown comfortable. He died young, at forty-five, exhausted by the work.
The sermon he preached on January 30, 1750 was the most important single sermon he ever delivered and one of the most important sermons preached in colonial America. It was titled A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers. The title itself was the argument. The discourse concerned the case against unlimited submission. The High Church tradition that required unlimited submission was being directly answered.
The Text and the Establishment
To understand what Mayhew did, you have to understand what the establishment had done.
Romans 13:1-7 is the New Testament passage most often used in the history of Christendom to demand obedience to civil authority. Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God.
For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the established Church of England had read this passage as commanding unconditional submission to the king. The king is the higher power. He is ordained of God. To resist him is to resist God. The execution of Charles I in 1649 was therefore not the just punishment of a tyrant. It was the murder of God’s anointed by men who had rebelled against the divine order itself.
After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the established church formalized this reading. January 30 was declared a fast day in the Book of Common Prayer. Anglican parishes across the empire preached submission sermons every year on the anniversary of the execution. The doctrine that the king could not be resisted, that any rebellion against the crown was rebellion against God, was preached annually by official appointment for nearly a century before Mayhew stepped into his pulpit.
The reading had not always been universal. The Reformation had produced a substantial body of political theology arguing the opposite case. Calvin in the Institutes had defended the right of lesser magistrates to resist a tyrant. John Knox had exhorted the Scottish nobility to resist Mary Tudor. Theodore Beza had written The Right of Magistrates Over Their Subjects in 1574. The anonymous Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos had laid out a systematic Reformed theory of resistance in 1579. Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex in 1644 had argued from Scripture against absolute monarchy.
The Reformed tradition had spent the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developing a sophisticated political theology of conditional obedience. Then the Restoration buried it. The official Anglican submission reading became the only reading most colonial congregants ever heard.
The doctrine was not lost. It was buried. Mayhew unburied it.
The Sermon
Mayhew opened to Romans 13 and read the passage carefully.
His move was not to deny the text. The establishment had read the text as commanding unlimited submission. Mayhew did not argue that the text said something else. He argued that the text said exactly what it said, and that the establishment had stopped reading too soon.
For he is the minister of God to thee for good. Romans 13:4. The verse the establishment passed over quickly. Mayhew sat on it.
The obligation to obey civil authority, Mayhew argued, is given a specific reason in the text itself. The ruler is to be obeyed because he is God’s minister for good. The obedience commanded is not abstract. It is owed to a specific kind of ruler. A ruler who functions as God’s minister for good. A ruler who serves the people as God intends civil authority to serve.
The question this opens is straightforward. What about a ruler who does not function as God’s minister for good? What about a ruler who has turned against the office Romans 13 describes and used his power against the people God set him over?
Mayhew answered the question directly. Such a ruler is no longer God’s minister for good. He has departed from the office Scripture describes. He has forfeited the obedience the text commands, because the text commands obedience to a kind of ruler he has stopped being. Resistance to him is not rebellion against God’s ordinance. It is fidelity to it. The same God who ordained the office has ordained the limits of the office, and a man who exceeds those limits has placed himself outside the protection the office gave him.
The application followed. Charles I had been such a ruler. He had broken his coronation oath. He had governed against the law of England and against the people of England. He had made war on his own subjects. He had departed from the office Romans 13 describes. The men who resisted him, including the men who eventually tried him and put him to death, were not rebels against God. They were defenders of the office God had ordained against a man who had betrayed it.
Mayhew was not merely defending the regicides of 1649. He was establishing a principle. The principle would do its work for decades.
The sermon ran long. It worked through every objection the establishment had raised. It cited the Reformation tradition. It anchored the argument in Scripture passage after Scripture passage. It built the case that the New Testament does not, in any honest reading, require submission to a tyrant, because the office to which submission is owed has already been forfeited by the man who has chosen to be a tyrant rather than to be God’s minister for good.
When Mayhew finished, the doctrine that had been buried since the Restoration had been preached again in an American pulpit by a young pastor of a Boston congregation, on the very day the establishment had set aside for the opposite teaching, in language that could be quoted and would be quoted for the next twenty-five years.
The Spark and the Powder
John Adams said the sermon was read by everybody. The phrase is not casual. Adams was eighty-three when he wrote it, looking back across a long life, and he meant what he said. Mayhew’s discourse circulated. The first Boston edition sold out. London printed a reprint. The argument moved across the colonies through the 1750s and into the 1760s.
By the time of the Stamp Act in 1765, the men leading colonial resistance had been forming themselves for fifteen years on Mayhew’s argument. James Otis cited him. Samuel Adams drew from him. The men who would become the Sons of Liberty in Boston had been Mayhew’s parishioners or had read his sermons.
The standard account of the Revolution treats the political philosophy of the founding as the work of Locke and the Enlightenment. The truer account is that the political philosophy was in the colonial pulpits before Locke’s influence had penetrated the popular mind. Mayhew was preaching the doctrine of conditional obedience to civil authority from a Reformed theological base in 1750. The men he formed did not need a philosophical theory to convince them of resistance. They had received the doctrine from their pastor and they had received it as the teaching of Scripture.
This is the move the historians miss. The Revolution did not require philosophical persuasion because the theological persuasion had been done first. By the time the Stamp Act passed, the colonial mind had been formed by twenty-five years of preaching that took Mayhew’s argument as established doctrine. Locke could explain in the language of natural rights what Mayhew had already established in the language of Romans 13. Both languages were operating. The theological language had primacy because it had been preached first and preached longer.
Mayhew was the spark. But the powder was already in place. The covenant theology that had been preached in New England since 1634 was the substructure. The Election Sermon tradition that ran from 1634 to 1884 was the institution. The pulpits across the colonies were the distribution network. Mayhew lit one match in one Boston church on one January morning in 1750, and the match caught because the powder had been laid down for a hundred and sixteen years before he struck it.
He was the man who said the thing the moment was ready to hear.
The phrase often attributed to him, and to Franklin, and to the Jefferson seal, captures the doctrine in one line. Disobedience to tyrants is obedience to God. Mayhew did not invent the doctrine. He preached it at a moment when the country needed it preached. The man who says the thing the moment is ready to hear is the man whose name is remembered when the harvest comes.
He did not live to see the harvest.
What Mayhew Did Not Live to See
Mayhew died in 1766. The Stamp Act crisis had just ended. The Townshend Acts had not yet been passed. Lexington was nine years away. The Declaration was ten.
He had preached the sermon at twenty-nine. He had served his Boston congregation for nineteen years. He had spent his life forming a generation of younger Bostonians who would carry the argument into the Revolution. He died exhausted, at forty-five, before any of them fired a shot.
The men he formed did not need him to be present when the hour came. They had already received what he had to give. James Otis carried the argument into the courts. Samuel Adams carried it into the streets. John Adams carried it into the Continental Congress. The covenant theology of conditional obedience, drawn out of Romans 13 in a Boston pulpit in 1750, walked into Philadelphia in 1776 in the hands of men who had been forming themselves on it their entire adult lives.
This is the pattern. The preaching that produces a harvest does not always reach the harvest. The man who lays the doctrine into the mind of a generation does not have to live to see the generation act. He has to do the work in front of him while he is in front of it. The harvest, when it comes, is not his to control. It belongs to God and to the men who carry the doctrine forward.
Mayhew preached on January 30, 1750. He did the work. He died sixteen years later, before the war. The republic he helped produce stood up twenty-five years after his sermon. He never saw it.
You will not get advance notice of the hour the people in front of you are being formed for. The preaching that matters is preached before the hour, in the long stretch of ordinary Sundays when no Revolution is on the horizon. Mayhew did not preach his great sermon knowing it would be quoted by Adams for sixty-eight years afterward. He preached it because the establishment was preaching a lie and someone needed to preach the truth into the same morning. The harvest came because he did the work he could do in the time he had.
Do the work.
The texts have not changed. The Word has not changed. Romans 13 still says what it says. The men who can read it as Mayhew read it can still preach it as Mayhew preached it.
The mountains are still there.
Lift your head.
Value for Value
Two hundred and seventy-six years ago, on the morning the establishment was mourning a martyred king, a twenty-nine-year-old Boston pastor preached the doctrine that would justify a revolution he would never live to see.
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The book this essay points to is Made for the Mountains: How the Preached Word Built the Free American Mind and How to Recover It. The First Republic Series, Volume Two, is now live on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle.
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~ Brett Hahn, AmRev Resurrected 🇺🇸
Brett Hahn is the founder of AmRev Resurrected and the author of Forge the Son: A Father’s Manual for Raising Sons by the Spirit That Built America and Made for the Mountains: How the Preached Word Built the Free American Mind and How to Recover It.
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Where this first appeared
First published on AmRev Resurrected on June 5, 2026. Read it there.