No Kings: Why We Don’t Have One | 5-Minute Videos

Ask what inspired American government, and you’ll hear the usual answers: Greece, Rome, the Enlightenment. The Founders studied them all. But none of them fully explains why America rejected kings altogether. So where did that conviction come from? Noted historian and author William Federer explains.

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Transcript:
No Kings: Why We Don’t Have One
Presented by William Federer

Ask someone what inspired the American system of government, and you’ll usually get one of three answers: Greek democracy. The Roman Republic. Or the European Enlightenment.

These answers aren’t wrong. The American Founders studied all of these eras. But if you want to find the deepest, most foundational roots of the American Republic, you have to look much further back than the Enlightenment, back further even than Greece or Rome.

You have to look at the Hebrew Bible.

And to understand how the Bible shaped America, you have to place yourself on a cold, storm-tossed ship called the Mayflower.

When the Mayflower set sail from England in 1620, its intended destination was the Colony of Virginia. But violent gales blew the ship hundreds of miles off course. Instead of reaching Virginia, where they would have simply submitted to the King’s colonial government, the ship’s captain told his passengers they would have to disembark in the wilderness of Massachusetts.

Immediately, they faced a crisis. Of the 102 passengers on board, no one had been appointed by the King of England to take charge under these unforeseen circumstances. There was no royal governor. No one of nobility in the group. From the perspective of the 17th century, this was a recipe for anarchy. How could commoners possibly survive, let alone thrive, without a royal master to tell them what to do?

To solve this dilemma, the Pilgrims did something revolutionary. They created their own government.

Before setting foot on the New World, they drafted a short document known to history as the Mayflower Compact. It contains a sentence that would set the course of American history:

“We… in the presence of God and one of another, covenant… ourselves together into a civil body politic.”

Note that the Pilgrims didn’t use the word “contract.” They used the word covenant. This is a profoundly biblical concept. It is the same concept God used when He made agreements with Noah, Abraham, and Moses.

The early settlers of America, and later the Founding Fathers, were intimately familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures. They knew that ancient Israel had no king. For several hundred years after the time of Moses and Joshua, the Hebrew Republic was governed by laws given by God, administered by local leaders, and guided by judges who rose up during times of trouble.

But eventually, the ancient Israelites had a change of heart. They looked at the pagan nations surrounding them and said, “We want a king to rule over us, so we can be like everyone else.”

The prophet Samuel warned the people what would happen if they traveled down this path. A king will take your sons and make them serve in his army. He will take your daughters. He will take the best of your fields and your vineyards. He will take a tenth of your flocks. And you yourselves will become his slaves.

In other words, a king will consolidate power, strip away your liberties, and tax you into poverty.

The Israelites ignored the warning and suffered the consequences Samuel prophesied.

Steeped in the Bible, the American Founders were very familiar with First Samuel chapter 8. So much so that Thomas Paine referred directly to it in his highly influential 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, writing, “monarchy… [has] laid… the world in blood and ashes. ‘Tis a form of government which the word of God bears testimony against…”

The Founders understood that human kingship was inherently flawed, that centralizing all power in the hands of a monarch was a rejection of the freedom God intended for humanity.

That’s essentially why the colonists came to America in the first place — to be free of kings.

Here’s how King James I of England described himself: “The king is overlord of the whole land… master over every person … having power over the life and death of every one.” And: “Kings are… God’s lieutenants upon earth… sit upon God’s throne…”

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