The Lost Institution

October 25, 1780. Boston. Samuel Cooper steps into the pulpit of the Brattle Street Church to preach before the first governor of the newly independent state of Massachusetts.

The constitution John Adams had drafted took effect that same day. John Hancock had been elected the first governor under it. The General Court was seated. The new government of a new commonwealth was beginning, and before it could begin, a pastor stood up to preach it a sermon.

Cooper opened to Jeremiah 30. Their nobles shall be of themselves, and their governor shall proceed from the midst of them. He preached the doctrine of self-government under God to the men who were about to govern. The sermon would be published by vote of the legislature, distributed across the commonwealth, and read aloud from pulpits the following Sunday.

Cooper was not doing anything unusual. He was the latest preacher in an unbroken annual tradition that had begun in Massachusetts in 1634. He was speaking to the governor the way pastors had spoken to governors for a hundred and forty-six years. The institution he stepped into was older than every man in the room.

It would run for another hundred and four years. You have never heard of it. This is the story of the institution that built the American mind and that America forgot.

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What an Election Sermon Was

The Election Sermon was an annual sermon preached before the governor and the legislature of a colony on the day the new government took office.

Massachusetts began the practice in 1634. Connecticut adopted it in 1674. By the eighteenth century most of New England observed it. The mechanics were the same across the tradition. The outgoing legislature chose a respected pastor to preach. On election day, the governor, the lieutenant governor, the council, and the house gathered in a church. The pastor preached a full sermon, often running well over an hour, addressed directly to the magistrates on their duties under God. After the sermon, the legislature voted to print it. The printed sermon was distributed across the colony and read aloud from pulpits the following Sunday.

This was not a ceremonial invocation. It was not a blessing on the proceedings. It was a public theological address to the governing authority of the colony, delivered at the moment of its installation, on the subject of how that authority must conduct itself before God and the people.

The pastor preaching it spoke with authority to the most powerful men in the colony. He told the governor what his office required. He warned the legislature against the abuse of power. He grounded every claim in Scripture and applied it directly to the civil order the men in front of him were about to administer.

The governor sat and listened. The legislature sat and listened. Then they voted to print what had been preached and send it to every town. Year after year. For two and a half centuries.

No modern American institution resembles this. We have prayer breakfasts and inaugural invocations. We do not have a preaching office that holds the magistrate accountable to a specific theology of government and publishes the accounting for the whole commonwealth to read.

The colonies did. For 250 years.

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What They Preached

The Election Sermon was not generic religious encouragement. Across the 250-year tradition, three claims ran through the preaching with remarkable consistency.

First, the magistrate exists under God. His authority is not autonomous and not ultimate. He holds his office as a trust from a higher court, and he will answer to that court for how he holds it. The governor in the front pew was being told, in front of his entire government, that he was not the highest authority in the room.

Second, the magistrate is a steward, not a sovereign. The people consent to his rule. The covenant binds him to serve them rather than to master them. His power is delegated and conditional. He governs by the consent of the governed and under the law of God, and the moment he forgets either, he has departed from his charge.

Third, the people have the right and the duty to hold the magistrate to the Word of God. The obedience owed to civil authority is real but not unlimited. When the magistrate keeps his charge, the people owe him honor and submission. When he breaks it, the people are not bound to follow him into the breach.

That third claim is the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. When a long train of abuses shows a design to reduce a people under absolute despotism, it is their right and their duty to throw off such government.

Jefferson wrote those words in Philadelphia in 1776. The Election Sermon preachers had been preaching them in Boston since 1634. By the time Jefferson took up his pen, the doctrine had been preached annually before the Massachusetts government for a hundred and forty-two years. Six generations of magistrates had sat under it. Six generations of colonists had heard it read from their pulpits the Sunday after.

The framers did not invent the political theology of the Revolution. They inherited it. The institution that handed it down had a name and a calendar and a published record going back a century and a half. The Declaration is the closing argument of a sermon America had been preaching since the reign of Charles I.

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Three Sermons

The institution is best understood through particular men in particular pulpits on particular days.

In 1750, Jonathan Mayhew preached at the West Church in Boston a sermon called A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers. He chose the date deliberately. January 30 was the anniversary of the execution of King Charles I, and the established church marked it as a day of mourning for a martyred king. Mayhew used the occasion to argue the opposite case. He preached from Romans 13, the text most often used to demand unconditional obedience to rulers, and he showed that the passage does no such thing. The obligation to obey civil authority, Mayhew argued, is conditional on that authority keeping its charge. A ruler who turns tyrant forfeits the obedience Scripture commands, because Scripture commands obedience to rulers as ministers of God for good, not to rulers who have made themselves ministers of oppression. John Adams said the sermon was read by everybody and counted it among the sparks that lit the Revolution twenty-five years before it came.

On May 29, 1776, Samuel West preached the Election Sermon before the Massachusetts Council and House of Representatives. He titled it On the Right to Rebel against Governors. West stood before the assembled government of a colony already at war with its king and argued that resistance to tyranny is not merely permitted but commanded. He braided together Scripture, natural law, Locke, and the covenant theology of the New England fathers into a single argument that the men in front of him were doing the will of God by resisting the crown. Five weeks later Jefferson finished the Declaration in Philadelphia. The arguments are the same arguments. West preached to the Massachusetts legislature what Jefferson would write for the Continental Congress, and West preached it first.

Then in 1780, Samuel Cooper preached the constitution into being. The Massachusetts Constitution had taken effect. Hancock was governor. Cooper applied the full weight of the covenant tradition to the new government, framing the constitutional order within the theology that had sustained the colony for a century and a half. The state that John Adams had drafted on paper, Cooper consecrated from the pulpit, binding the new civil order to the old covenant.

Three men. Three sermons. Thirty years. Each one a single instance of an institution that produced a sermon like this every year for two and a half centuries.

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How It Disappeared

The Massachusetts Election Sermon tradition ended in 1884. Connecticut’s ended around the same period. After 250 years, the institution simply stopped, and within a generation it was so thoroughly forgotten that most educated Americans today have never heard the term.

Three forces ended it.

The first was the professionalization of the clergy. The Election Sermon required a pastor who could speak with authority on civil government from Scripture, a theologian of public order as much as of personal salvation. As the nineteenth century advanced, the clergy increasingly trained as specialists in religious matters narrowly defined. The seminary produced pastors equipped to preach personal piety and to manage congregations, not pastors equipped to instruct a legislature on the theology of magistracy. The office outlived the kind of man it required.

The second was the privatization of religion. The nineteenth century moved steadily toward a faith understood as a private matter of the individual heart, walled off from public and civil life. The Election Sermon assumed the opposite. It assumed that the Word of God spoke to the governor in his office as directly as it spoke to the believer in his closet, that there was no wall between the authority of Scripture and the conduct of the state. As that assumption faded from American religious culture, the institution built on it lost its foundation.

The third was the fracture of the theological consensus that had sustained the tradition. The Election Sermon depended on a unified Protestant framework shared across the New England commonwealth, a common covenant theology that preacher and magistrate and townsman all inhabited. The Civil War and the religious transformations that followed broke that consensus apart. The shared framework that had made the Election Sermon coherent for 250 years no longer held, and the institution that rested on it could not continue.

By 1884 it was over. By the early twentieth century it was forgotten. The institution that preached the doctrine of the Declaration into the American mind for six generations vanished so completely that the descendants of the men who built the republic could no longer name the pulpit that built them.

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What Recovery Looks Like

The Election Sermon as an institution is not coming back. There will be no annual sermon before the governor, no vote of the legislature to print it, no reading from the pulpits the Sunday after. That world is gone.

The function of the Election Sermon can be recovered. It can be recovered in three places.

It can be recovered in the pulpit. A pastor can preach the application of Scripture to civil authority. Not partisan endorsement. Not therapeutic comfort. The actual doctrine of covenanted government, applied to the actual order the congregation lives under. The magistrate is a steward. The people owe conditional obedience. The Word speaks to the governor as surely as to the believer. Any pulpit can recover this. Most have abandoned it. It is recoverable in any church that decides the abandonment was a mistake.

It can be recovered in the household. A father can teach his sons the doctrine the Election Sermon preached. The home is the first republic. The father is its first magistrate, governing by covenant, accountable to God, subject to the same law he administers. A son formed in a household that takes the doctrine seriously will carry it into whatever larger order he enters. The formation that built the republic started in households before it ever reached a legislature.

It can be recovered in the texts. The Election Sermons were published by vote of the legislatures that heard them. They sit in libraries, in the public domain, waiting to be read. They are not lost in the sense of being unrecoverable. They are lost only in the sense of being forgotten. Any man can find them. Any platform can make them available again. The recovery begins the moment someone opens one and reads what America used to preach to its governors.

The institution that built the American mind has a name. You know it now. The men who knew this tradition built a republic that threw a king. The men who forgot it inherited the broken horse standing in the pasture with its head down, waiting for the next command, having forgotten it was made for something more.

Recover the preaching and you recover the formation. Recover the formation and the rest follows. The texts have not changed. The Word has not changed. The mountains have not moved.

Lift your head.

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Value for Value

Two hundred and fifty years ago, America had a pulpit that held its governors to the Word of God. We forgot it existed.

If this essay gave you something worth having, give something back. Send it to one man who needs to read it. Post it. Pass the argument forward. That is how the transmission works.

The book that started this platform is Forge the Son. The formation manual for fathers who understand that the home is the first republic and the father is its first magistrate.

Order on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0ezYbsTX

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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.

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