Before the Bell: The Deep Roots of American Liberty

From Runnymede to Philadelphia — a story many Americans have never been told

Most Americans, if pressed, would locate the origins of their liberty somewhere around 1776 — in Philadelphia, in a declaration, in the courage of men in frock coats and powdered wigs. A few would push it back further, to the Pilgrims, or to John Locke, or to the misty origins of English common law. Almost none would begin where this story actually begins: on a meadow beside the Thames in 1215, with a furious king and a group of barons who had finally had enough.

The roots of American liberty run deeper, and stranger, and more theological than the standard account allows. They pass through a burned book, a Scottish castle prison, a seventy-foot drop on a rope of knotted blankets, and a Princeton classroom. And at every point along the way, they are watered not by abstract Enlightenment philosophy but by a conviction older and tougher than that — the conviction that there is a law above the law of kings, and that its Author is the God of Scripture.

That is the story worth telling on the republic's 250th anniversary.

Runnymede, 1215: The First Crack in the King's Armor

King John was not a man who welcomed constraint. Devious, cruel, and thoroughly convinced of his own prerogatives, he had spent years alienating barons, bishops, and commoners alike: taxing without consent, imprisoning without trial, and operating on the assumption that what a king wills, a king may do. Rex Lex, in the Latin shorthand of the day: the king is law. His word is the standard against which everything else is measured.

In June 1215, his barons ran out of patience. They forced him to a meadow called Runnymede, on the south bank of the Thames, and compelled him to seal a document he had every intention of ignoring. He did ignore it, almost immediately. He appealed to Pope Innocent III to annul it, was at war with his barons again within months, and died the following year with the whole business still unresolved.

And yet Magna Carta — the Great Charter — changed the world, not because of what John did with it, but because of what it said and what later generations did with it.

Two clauses matter most for our story. Clause 39 established that no free man could be imprisoned, dispossessed, or exiled except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. Clause 40 declared: "To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice." In those two sentences lay the seeds of what would eventually become due process of law — the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the American Constitution, the right to a fair trial, the presumption of innocence. The medieval language is archaic; the principle is permanent.

But the deeper significance of Magna Carta was not in its specific clauses. It was in what the document demonstrated: that even a king could be brought to terms. That power has limits. That there is something called "the law of the land" to which the king himself is subject. This was not, in 1215, a widely held view. The operating theory of medieval monarchy was that the king's authority descended from God and was therefore absolute. To challenge it was not merely political rebellion; it was something close to sacrilege. Magna Carta cracked that theory for the first time. It would take another five centuries to shatter it entirely, but the crack began at Runnymede.

Five and a half centuries later, Thomas Jefferson's list of grievances against George III reads like a Magna Carta indictment: obstruction of justice, taxation without consent, denial of trial by jury. The Americans who signed the Declaration understood themselves not as radicals conjuring something new, but as Englishmen reclaiming something ancient. As one historian has put it, they were "very conservative rebels, trying to preserve their constitutional rights, not overthrow a government."

There is a straight line from Runnymede to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. William Penn, in whose honor the Bell was commissioned, published a pamphlet on religious liberty in 1687 that included a copy of Magna Carta. Penn's 1701 Charter of Privileges, the document the Bell was made to commemorate, carried the same conviction Magna Carta had established: no earthly power speaks the final word. Before Leviticus 25:10 was inscribed on a bell, the principle behind it had been inscribed on the conscience of the English-speaking world at a meadow beside the Thames.

The Reformation Deepens the Roots

Magna Carta established a principle. What it could not supply was a foundation for that principle — a reason why the law should stand above the king that was more than a temporary arrangement of power between feudal parties. That foundation came three centuries later, from Geneva and Edinburgh, and it was unmistakably theological.

John Calvin taught that lesser magistrates — regional and local governors — had not only the right but the duty to resist tyrannical rulers who violated God's law. Calvin was a careful, even conservative thinker on politics, and he did not issue this as a license for popular rebellion. But the logic, once loosed, was far-reaching. John Knox applied it to Scotland with characteristic bluntness, insisting that ungodly rulers forfeited their claim to obedience and that the people of God were not obliged to tolerate sacrilege merely because it wore a crown. The Scots Confession of 1560 wove resistance theology into the constitutional fabric of the Scottish Kirk, the national church that would, in time, shape the Presbyterians who crossed the Atlantic and helped found a republic.

What emerged from this tradition was a concept of popular sovereignty, the idea that authority ultimately belongs to the people. This idea was grounded not in abstract democratic theory but in covenant theology. Covenant, the central category of Reformed political thought, meant something precise: a binding relationship of mutual obligation, with defined terms, under a transcendent authority. In biblical terms, God covenants with his people; the people covenant with one another; rulers govern within and under that covenantal structure, not above it. Abuse the covenant, and the people may reclaim what they delegated.

Translated into the language of the Enlightenment, that conviction reads: "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and when any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."

The Founders did not invent that sentence. They inherited it from Geneva by way of Edinburgh — and it arrived in America carrying the full weight of Scripture behind it.

Samuel Rutherford and the Book They Burned

In 1644, a Scottish Presbyterian minister named Samuel Rutherford did something the British crown would very much have preferred he hadn't: he published a book.

Rutherford was not a peripheral figure. He was one of the four Scottish commissioners to the Westminster Assembly, the great convocation of theologians that between 1643 and 1649 produced the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Shorter Catechism, documents that still govern Presbyterian and Reformed churches across the world. He was rector of St. Andrews, the oldest and most prestigious university in Scotland. Whatever he wrote would be read, and the crown knew it.

The book was called Lex Rex: The Law and the Prince. The title was a provocation by design. The Latin phrase Rex Lex — the king is law — described the constitutional reality of the age. Monarchs governed on the theory of divine right: God had appointed them; therefore, their authority was absolute, their word was final, and to resist them was to resist God. Rutherford turned the formula on its head. Lex Rex: the law is king. And by "law" he did not mean parliamentary statute or judicial precedent. He meant the law of God, the moral law inscribed in Scripture and in creation, to which every human ruler is answerable whether he acknowledges it or not.

His argument was built on three interlocking pillars. First: all civil authority derives from God, and precisely because it derives from God, it is accountable to God — a king who governs in violation of God's law has no legitimate claim to obedience. Second: the relationship between ruler and people is covenantal and mutual — the king's authority rests on an implied compact with the governed, and a ruler who breaks that compact releases his people from their obligations to him. Third: when a ruler refuses to execute justice, those who appointed him, under God, retain the right and the duty to do so themselves.

The British authorities grasped the implications at once. Lex Rex was banned in Scotland and publicly burned in England. Rutherford was charged with high treason. He died in 1661 before the charge could be tried, reputedly saying from his deathbed: "I behove to answer my first summons; and before your summons comes, I will be where few kings and great folk come." The crown burned the book. But the book was already in too many hands.

You do not publicly burn books that are merely academic. Fire is reserved for ideas that frighten you. The British crown understood that Rutherford had done something more dangerous than write a political treatise — he had supplied a theological justification for constitutional government, grounded not in human preference or social contract theory but in the character of God and the nature of his law. That idea, once it escaped the flames, proved impossible to extinguish.

It surfaced, a century later, in a Philadelphia assembly hall.

Doune Castle, January 1746: A Founding Father in the Making

The transmission of Rutherford's ideas from Edinburgh to Philadelphia did not travel by a tidy intellectual route. It traveled, among other ways, through the body of a young Scottish minister who found himself dangling seventy feet above a frozen courtyard on a rope of knotted blankets, at one o'clock in the morning, in the depths of a Scottish winter.

His name was John Witherspoon.

In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie (Charles Edward Stuart, grandson of the deposed Catholic King James II) launched a rebellion to reclaim the British throne for the House of Stuart. To most Scottish Presbyterians, the prospect of a Stuart restoration was not romantic; it was alarming. The Kirk had fought for a century to establish Presbyterian governance of the Scottish church, and the Stuarts had repeatedly tried to reimpose episcopacy (government by bishops appointed by the crown). A Stuart king meant bishops. Bishops meant the end of the Kirk's hard-won independence. The choice was not between Scotland and England; in their view, it was between the gospel being freely proclaimed or its message being muted by a throne in Westminster.

Witherspoon, twenty-two years old and barely a year into his first charge at Beith in Ayrshire, read the situation through the lens of his Rutherford. He raised a militia from his own congregation, wrote a subscription paper arguing that the funds would be used "for the support of our religion and liberties," and rode out at their head. He arrived at the Battle of Falkirk on January 17, 1746 — and watched the Jacobite forces win. Not a good day! He and his servant were captured by the Young Pretender's men, marched through the Scottish countryside for over a week, and imprisoned in Doune Castle near Stirling, seventy feet above the ground.

The guards were complacent. They permitted the prisoners to walk the battlements at will, apparently unconcerned that free men with views about liberty might choose to exercise it. At one in the morning on either January 30 or 31, Witherspoon and seven others knotted their blankets into a rope and went over the parapet. Four made it to the ground. The rope broke. A fifth man fell and shattered his leg on the frozen courtyard below. The rest were warned. They descended anyway. Witherspoon made it down and vanished into the Scottish night.

He returned to Beith. He resumed his ministry. He carried for the rest of his life a nervous disorder acquired in the damp cold of Doune Castle, which left a measure of reserve on an otherwise commanding presence. One contemporary observed that he had more natural authority than any man he had ever met, George Washington alone excepted.

Something had been settled at Doune Castle that a classroom could not have settled. Witherspoon now knew, in his bones and not merely in his theology, that convictions have a price, and that the price is worth paying.

It might seem contradictory that Witherspoon fought for the British crown in 1746 and against it in 1776. The logic, on examination, is perfectly consistent. In both cases, he fought for Presbyterian religious liberty — against the imposition of episcopacy and the concentration of unchecked power. The spirit of Falkirk and the spirit of Philadelphia were the same spirit. Rutherford's spirit, in the end.

Princeton, 1768: The Inheritance Transmitted

In 1768, twenty-two years after Doune Castle, Witherspoon crossed the Atlantic to become president of the College of New Jersey, the institution now known as Princeton University. He had been recruited by Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush, who saw in him what the fledgling college desperately needed: a man of European intellectual distinction, uncompromising Reformed convictions, and the capacity to form not merely scholars but statesmen, and he delivered on a scale they could not have imagined.

As DG Hart notes, Witherspoon was an enigmatic man. He did not support the Covenanters and their loyalty to the Stuarts, remaining loyal to the Hanoverian monarchy, notwithstanding his strong disagreements with Parliamentary abuses of power.

While a supporter of revivalist piety, he was no friend of Edwards’ views and revivals. He purged Princeton of Edwards’ philosophical idealism and rooted instruction in “Scottish Common Sense Realism.”

And one of his brightest students was a young James Madison.

Madison was a slight, bookish young man from Virginia who would go on to be called the Father of the Constitution. Witherspoon taught Madison theology, moral philosophy, and political theory in the direct lineage of Calvin, Knox, and Rutherford. The federalism that structures the American Constitution — distributed power, separated branches, checks and balances — reflects not only Montesquieu but a distinctly Presbyterian polity, forged through a century of hard experience with what happens when any single human will, whether king, bishop, or majority, goes unchecked. The Presbyterian church had governed itself by councils, assemblies, and mutual accountability long before Madison wrote the Constitution. It had done so because it understood, theologically, that human beings are simultaneously made in the image of God and fallen in sin — capable of both greatness and terrible corruption, and therefore never to be trusted with unchecked authority.

Madison learned this from a man who had once escaped from a Scottish castle on a rope of knotted blankets.

The scale of Witherspoon's influence is almost impossible to overstate. From his Princeton classrooms came one president, one vice president, nine cabinet officers, twenty-one senators, thirty-nine members of Congress, three Supreme Court justices, and twelve state governors. Five of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were his former students. He was the only active clergyman — and the only college president — to sign the Declaration of Independence. He signed the Articles of Confederation. He supported the ratification of the Constitution. And in 1789, the same year the Constitution came into force, he served as the convening moderator of the First General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.

The minister who had ridden out of Beith with a militia and escaped from Doune Castle in the dark had, thirty years on, helped build a republic and organized the church to serve it.

The Line of Descent

Five and a half centuries. One continuous thread.

At Runnymede in 1215, English barons established the precedent that even kings are under the law, and that rights can be wrested from power by those willing to risk everything to do it. The Reformed theologians of the sixteenth century took that precedent. They gave it a foundation — not the shifting sands of aristocratic interest, but the character of God and the nature of his covenant with humanity. Samuel Rutherford in 1644 systematized that foundation into the most formidable political theology of his age: Lex Rex — the law is king — and paid for it with a treason charge and a burned book. John Witherspoon embodied it, suffered for it at Doune Castle, carried it across the Atlantic, and through Princeton's classrooms transmitted it directly into the minds of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The Declaration's most famous phrase — "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" — is written in the language of the Enlightenment, but the theology beneath those words is older than Locke. It runs through Westminster, St. Andrews, Geneva, and the Reformed reading of Scripture itself. It is not an Enlightenment idea wearing theological clothing. It is a theological idea that the Enlightenment, at its best, had the good sense to borrow.

The Constitution that followed institutionalized it: a government of laws, not of men; three branches held in mutual tension, because power corrupts and must be restrained; rights that precede and limit the state, because they come from a Source the state did not create and therefore cannot revoke.

What the Silence of the Bell Should Tell Us

The Liberty Bell has not rung since 1846. It sits in Philadelphia behind glass, cracked and still, visited by millions who come not to hear it but to read it. The inscription they come to read is from Leviticus 25:10 — the ancient Jubilee command, from the year of release, when debts were canceled, bondservants freed, and land returned to its original owners. Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.

The Bell was not called "the Liberty Bell" in 1776. Abolitionists gave it that name in the 1830s, arguing that a bell bearing that inscription rang hollow while one-sixth of the American population remained enslaved. They were right. The crack in the Bell was never just physical.

But the inscription does not crack. And the tradition behind it — from Runnymede to the Reformation, from Rutherford's burned book to Witherspoon's knotted blankets to Madison's Constitution — is not a tradition that collapses when the institutions built on it are shaken. It is a tradition built on something older than institutions: the conviction that there is a law above the law of kings, that human dignity is not the gift of any government to give or take, and that the Author of both law and dignity is the God who declares liberty to the captives and means it.

Andrew Reed and James Matheson, two English Congregationalist ministers who toured American churches in the early 1830s, wrote home: "America will be great if America is good. If not, her greatness will vanish away like a morning cloud." These were not Americans flattering themselves. They were outsiders, and they were seeing clearly. They did not locate the source of American vitality in the genius of the constitutional framers, or the riches of the continent, or even the remarkable courage and energy of the people. They found it in the virtues of a private and public faith, nourished by Scripture and a Christian tradition that was at once deeply personal, familial, as well as ecclesial; one determined to keep the government out of the Church’s work, with the Churches free to pursue their mission, with the liberty of conscience - a sacred property possessed by every person - protected by Law.

To forget that tradition is not a matter of historical carelessness. It is to uproot the tree from which every branch of freedom and flourishing here has grown. Liberty without its roots does not gradually decline. It vanishes, as promised, like a morning cloud.

The crack in the Bell is a warning as much as a relic. The question the 250th anniversary puts to this generation is not whether we can admire the founding. It is whether we understand it deeply enough — and love it truthfully enough — to pass it on.