The Bible was by far the most widely owned and read book in both Britain and America, and the Great Awakening made this Bible-centered civilization all the more Bible-centered. The Bible provided Anglo-Americans with bedtime stories, reading lessons, entertainment, moral and religious instruction, and general education about the world, including an education about human nature, human psychology, law, and political science.
Protestantism emphasized innate and immutable human sinfulness, and Biblical history confirmed and reconfirmed this theological message. The Old Testament in particular offered a vivid and insightful chronicle of human wickedness and abuse of power. When Anglo-Americans considered King Saul, for example, they knew that he was a bad king not because he was a bad man. In fact, they knew him to be a uniquely good, humble, and admirable man. It was kingly power that transformed him into a bad king.
A long line of Israelite kings followed, who likewise were wicked. Each of them confirmed the prophet Samuel’s blistering exhortation to the Israelites against instituting a monarchy. As Samuel had warned, these kings used the Israelites’ sons and daughters as soldiers and servants, they increased the tax burden to finance their palaces, ruled harshly, took property arbitrarily, and instigated wars.
This prophecy proved correct not because Samuel knew the future – he did not – but because he had an Old Testament understanding of human nature. He had a dim view of centralized government because he believed that people with power will abuse it.
As a civilization that had internalized this philosophical and theological belief about human nature, Anglo-Americans were suspicious and fearful of government officials – local, provincial, and imperial. They believed that political power naturally and predictably produced abuse of power. It is in this philosophical context that Thomas Jefferson made his stoic observation that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” James Monroe similarly noted humans’ difficulty, “in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism.”
It is this bleak view of human history that explains Americans’ vigilance and fearfulness regarding the centralizing imperial reforms of the 1760s and 70s. Ever on the lookout for creeping advances of arbitrary power over the consent of the governed, they viewed with alarm Parliamentary policies that strengthened the central government and weakened local communities’ control over their governments and courts of law.