Jonathan Mayhew, the Colonial Minister Behind America's Case for Independence

Showing 6 Jonathan Mayhew videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

Jonathan Mayhew was a Boston minister who died nearly a decade before the American Revolution began, yet Charlie Kirk returned to him again and again as proof that the war for independence had a theological foundation most Americans are never taught. Mayhew's contribution centered on a single passage, Romans 13's instruction to submit to governing authorities. Where many colonial-era preachers read that verse as a call for unconditional obedience to King George, Mayhew argued the opposite. Authority is legitimate only when it serves the good of the people, he preached, and a government that stops doing so forfeits its claim to obedience. Kirk credited John Adams with tracing the intellectual roots of the Revolution directly back to that argument, and he framed Mayhew as part of a broader movement of colonial pastors, alongside figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, whose sermons in the decade before 1776 built the moral case for resistance long before a shot was fired at Lexington and Concord. For Kirk, Mayhew's example was less a history lesson than an argument about the present. American liberty was born from pulpits willing to take a political stand, he argued, and pastors who stay silent on today's questions are abandoning the very tradition that produced the country's founding.