The British called them the Black Robe Regiment, and they did not mean it as a compliment. They were the colonial pastors, men in long black robes who stood Sunday after Sunday in their pulpits and preached the Word of God to people who were watching freedom slip away. They read the Declaration of Independence from their pulpits before it was published in newspapers. They thundered from Scripture about the tyranny of unjust government and the God-given dignity of free people. They sent their congregants to war and many of them went themselves. The British were right to be afraid of them. The pulpit was the most dangerous place in colonial America, and not because the preachers were violent. Because they were telling the truth.

The church was not peripheral to the founding of this nation. It was central to it. The most widely read book in colonial America, by a margin that dwarfs every other text combined, was the Bible. The moral and political philosophy of the founding generation was saturated with Scripture. They quoted Moses and Isaiah and Paul not as rhetorical decoration but as authoritative foundation. When they wrote of self-evident truths and unalienable rights, they were not inventing new philosophy. They were applying old theology: the theology of Genesis, that every person bears the image of God; the theology of Exodus, that God opposes the enslavement of His people; the theology of the prophets, that justice is not optional and that nations are accountable to a God above them.

Salt does not flavor from a distance, and light does not illuminate from behind a closed door. Jesus was very clear about this. He did not say your light might shine or should shine. He said a city set on a hill cannot be hidden. The light of the Gospel, when it is genuinely burning in the hearts of God’s people, cannot be contained. It spills out into neighborhoods and schools and courtrooms and legislative chambers. It shapes culture. It restrains evil. It produces the kind of citizens that a free republic requires. The Black Robe Regiment understood this. They were not meddling in politics. They were being salt and light in exactly the way Jesus commanded.

There are those today who would prefer the church to stay behind her walls, to keep her convictions private and her voice quiet. The same people, essentially, who wished the Black Robe Regiment would stop preaching. The church has heard this before. And the church’s answer, then and now, is the same as Peter’s before the Sanhedrin when asked to stop preaching: we must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). The Gospel is not a private sentiment. It is public truth, the most important public truth in the history of the world.

Remember what it cost those pastors to speak. The liberty you enjoy did not arrive fully formed; it was preached into being from pulpits where men decided that the truth was worth any price. The question for this generation is the same one they answered with their lives: what does it cost me to be a faithful voice in my time? Whatever the cost, it is worth it. The Black Robe Regiment left us freedom. We owe them faithfulness.