"No King But Jesus": American Christianity & The Truth
Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 8:03AM | by Otter 
John Hancock, not signing off on the kingship of Jesus as advertised by Eads Home Ministry. Facebook, however, might change that. He probably meant to.
From an email conversation with a friend:
A friend on Facebook posted that the motto of the Revolutionary War was “No King But King Jesus.”
Now I have studied the American Revolution, perhaps not as in depth as I should have. But I can honestly say that I have never read or heard anywhere that this was the revolution’s motto.
Have I missed a chapter or two out of my history books? Or is this a new modern thought?
I asked where she had found this little gem, and she linked this: http://thefoundationforum.com/2008/0…evolution.html
I don’t see any real evidence-but then again perhaps I should have known better.
Fake History, a website that acts as a sort of historical Mythbusters, has this to say:
Did John Adams and John Hancock reply to Major Pitcairn
We recognize no sovereign but God and no king but Jesus!
when the British officer called on the assembled minutemen to disperse on 19 April 1775? (source: Eads Home Ministries, by 16 January 2006 [*see update below])?
No. This is a recent (probably twenty-first century) concoction.
The Eads Home Ministries site tells the story like this:
Until then let me tell you a story: on april 18, 1775 John Adams and John Hancock were at the home of Rev. Jonas Clarke, a Lexington Pastor and militia leader. That same night Paul Revere arrived to warn them of the approaching Redcoats. The next morning British Major Pitcairn shouted to an assembled regiment of minutement. “Disperse ye villians, lay down your arms in the name of George the Sovereign King of England. The immediate response of John Adams and John Hancock was “WE RECOGNIZE NO SOVEREIGN BUT GOD AND NO KING BUT JESUS!”
The Eads Home Ministry site does not give a source for this tale, but does seem to be the earliest to give it in exactly this form.
Fake History then examines the actual history, beginning with the fact that Hancock and Adams weren’t at the encounter between Pitcairn and the Minutemen. The Eads Home Ministry page seems to have rewritten Charles Jenning’s unsourced account so that Hancock and Adams, not Rev. Jonas Clarke, uttered the words “We recognize… no king but Jesus.” 
John Adams, who did not say that the Revolution had King Jesus, but who did say, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” He had not met the Eads Home Ministry team.
Ah. A bare-faced rewriting of a dubious historical narrative for which we have no primary sources.
Great mythmaking, that, but terrible history. Now that the story’s out on Facebook, it almost doesn’t matter: whatever myth appears there is often granted the status of fact. But the difference between myth and history is that myth structures the mind so you can navigate the factual world while history actually seeks to catalogue that factual world.
Confusing the two creates irrevocable havoc for either faith or mind. You cannot say that the Christian myth is “factual” but then not care about facts. You cannot say that something is history and then not care about the rules for establishing historical fact.
Well, you can. But that does for history what the fundamentalist Christian confusion of science and myth does for science. Myth and fact have an easy relationship, until you confuse one with the other. Then just turn out the lights on one or the other.
So this is Christian revisionist history. But, like a great part of evangelical subculture, it’s incredibly amateurish and uncaring about the rules it’s agreed to play by: the rules of history. It’d make a Holocaust denier wince and blush.
The moral of the story isn’t just “Don’t Make Up History.” That’d let these “Christians” off too easily.
It’s that when you start to care about heaven you’d better start caring more, not less, about the world. Footnotes become more, not less important if Jesus is king. Documentation becomes more, not less, important when you’re doing history.
For Christ’s sake, if Christ is the truth, give some attention to what truth is! If Christ is truth, the most convinced atheist is more Christian than some of these people. At least such an atheist cares about the truth of the world he lives in, the world that (according to Christianity) God has made.
Reader Comments (2)
Yes, for your conclusion! Not that either myth or history is unimportant to Christian living, but that if Christ is King, then both become paramount. This distinction between myth and history, and the importance of both, has been something I felt keenly since my early teen years in fundamentalist evangelicalism but have only begun to be able to articulate recently as I've been coming back to Christianity (but refusing to deny the lessons I've learned in heathenism). If everything we do, think, live is "for the glory of God", then it is crucial to our integrity as Christians to be the best damn historians, scientists, storytellers, bridge-builders, burger-flippers, and street-sweepers we can be according to ALL the standards (scholarly, cultural, AND religious sub-culture) that hold in our time.
Great points, Sandra, and I want to tell you thanks for your outstanding honesty on your blog!