Presbyterians' Progress: Protestants and Patriots - D.G. Hart's New Book

In 1775, King George III reportedly told Parliament that the American rebellion was "a Presbyterian rebellion." That claim—whether accurate or apocryphal—captures something real about how British authorities viewed the Presbyterian tradition: as a politically disruptive force that threatened monarchy itself. D.G. Hart's new book Protestants and Patriots: Presbyterians in the Age of Revolution (Notre Dame University Press) traces this thread from the Scottish Reformation through the American founding, showing how Presbyterian church polity was not merely a theological preference but a political innovation that clashed repeatedly with established authority.

The radical novelty of Presbyterian polity

For most of church history, episcopacy—rule by bishops—was the default form of church government. Presbyterianism, with its system of elders, sessions, presbyteries, and general assemblies, was genuinely new. Hart explains that when John Calvin wrote his ecclesiastical ordinances for Geneva, he was drawing partly on Martin Bucer in Strasbourg, but the model he produced was unprecedented. The real flashpoint came when English and Scottish exiles under Mary Tudor fled to Geneva, witnessed what they considered a godly society, and returned determined to implement Presbyterian polity in the British Isles.