The separation of church and state disguised the coordination of two very different conceptions of liberty at work in Revolutionary America, one with a religious basis in radical Protestant thought and the other with a legal basis in the secular Enlightenment. The essay combines the disciplines of law, literature, and intellectual history to investigate these contrasting formulations and their changing relationship. Cross-cultural analysis of the language of protest in both England and America gives the investigation a crucial focus. It also explains a larger movement from direct influence to refraction in Anglo-American relations.

The interdisciplinary approach is critical to understanding how the same language came to mean different things. Exegesis of the common law tradition in England and close rhetorical analysis of pulpit oratory and legal pamphleteering in Revolutionary America reveal a striking shift in the meaning of liberty as legal explanation trumped religious protest in the process of national formations. Properly understood, the paradoxical role of the American lawyer was to cap revolutionary impulses through the manipulation of the language of a bible culture. Legal positivism replaced natural law as a ruling impulse in the definition of rights, and a republic based on the right of revolution became a nation state where the test of membership would be loyalty. The long-term result has been that the citizen faces a permanent and often puzzling dichotomy best understood in dialectical terms. National identity, while secular, responds to providential invocation in the American republic of laws, and protest finds its most potent voice in religious expression.