Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World By Eric Metaxas Skyhorse Publishing, 640 pages, $30 If you read one book about the American Revolution during the celebrations of our country’s 250th birthday, make it Eric Metaxas’s Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World. In it, Metaxas recounts “the glorious events of [the nation’s] conception,” in a fast-paced, insightful, and original assessment of what he accurately describes as a “world-changing event.” And the brilliant and courageous men who brought about that revolution frequently looked to a providential Christian God for comfort, solace, inspiration, protection, and victory. For most of our Founders, liberty and faith were two sides of the same coin — God and man made this revolution. Metaxas shows that the American Revolution had its ideologues and its practical leaders. John Adams, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine were the brightest ideologues who shone a light on British tyranny and fed the flames of liberty, while George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox, and Benjamin Franklin, among others, waged war and diplomacy to make liberty and independence a reality. Yet, Metaxas also shows that the American Revolution was a close-run thing. The upstart colonials were taking on the world’s most powerful empire, and that empire had many loyalists in the colonies who opposed independence. General Washington waged war with an undisciplined and untested army against British regulars and a navy that ruled the seas. The odds favored Great Britain, but the revolutionary generation in America followed the inspiring words of Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty or give me death.” The colonists began this glorious crusade wanting only to enjoy the rights of British citizens, but two principal factors caused them to rebel: a stubborn, arrogant, and inflexible British elite and a long tradition of being left alone by the mother country to govern themselves, which made the colonists recoil from the king’s and parliament’s attempts to exercise greater control over their lives. Metaxas goes over familiar ground, highlighting England’s taxes on stamps, tea, and other goods; the dispatch and quartering of British troops; the denigration of the colonists’ Christian faith by British soldiers and some of their leaders; the Boston Massacre; and the so-called “Intolerable Acts.” King George III thought that such measures would crush the Massachusetts rebels, but Metaxas notes they had the opposite effect — the other colonies came to Massachusetts’ defense. England’s repression resulted in the convening of the First Continental Congress at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia. The Congress opened with a prayer. “Something extraordinary was afoot,” Metaxas writes. There was a “Christian atmosphere [in] Congress — and the frank belief among most of its members that their fate lay in God’s hands.” Metaxas quotes letters and speeches among the founding generation that invoke God or Providence or the Creator. Patrick Henry implored the Virginia House of Burgesses that “an appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us.” John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that millions of colonists “will be on their knees … before their Creator imploring … His smiles on American councils and arms.” Christian preachers joined and sometimes led the chorus for liberty and independence. England’s response was to send more troops to America, which led to the war’s beginning at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge on April 19, 1775. Metaxas writes: “If there was a clear bright line at which the Revolution we call the American Revolution began, the events at that bridge on that day were it.” It was the beginning of the evolution of a Continental Army — an army of volunteers that would seize Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point, fight the British in Boston at places called Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill, unsuccessfully attempt to seize Quebec, suffer defeats in Brooklyn and Manhattan, retreat to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, famously cross the Delaware and rout Hessian forces at Trenton, defeat the British at Princeton, surprise the world by its victory at Saratoga, suffer through cold and hunger at Valley Forge, move south and with the help of the French Navy win the war at Yorktown. Then there is the political side of the Revolution, with John Adams leading the way in Philadelphia, with help from Virginian Richard Henry Lee, and the compromise over slavery to win over the southern colonies for independence. The move toward independence was also aided by the sheer cruelty and brutality of British troops. Metaxas notes that by July 2, 1776, independence carried the day in Congress, and Jefferson’s Declaration, which claimed that “all men” had “unalienable rights” that came from their Creator, and was read outside Carpenter’s Hall on July 4th, wasn’t actually signed by all delegates until August 2nd. If John Adams was the political hero of the Revolution, the overall hero was Washington. The “indispensable man” of the Revolution made sure by his words and his actions that the Revolution for liberty would not be in vain. At New Windsor, New York, Washington broke up a planned coup by army officers who had not been paid by Congress, reminding them all that he had grown not only gray but nearly blind in service to his country. Then, at a dinner with his officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York City, he bid them farewell and traveled to Annapolis to resign his commission. In America, Washington demonstrated that the triumphant general in war doesn’t cling to power in peacetime. When King George heard about this, he called Washington “the greatest character of the age.” Metaxas closes this great book with the observation that the American Revolution, unlike so many other revolutions, succeeded because the founding generation of Americans lived in a culture of religious faith and virtue, even when they fell short of living up to that culture’s ideals. It is a culture, Metaxas notes, that is often scorned by today’s American elite class, which has become so secularized and anti-religious. Let us hope that when celebrating our country’s 250th birthday, we are mindful of the religious roots of our liberty. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: In the Iran War, Trump’s Role Model Should Be Bismarck D-Day, Just War, and Pope Leo The Serpent’s New Promise