Every few decades, Americans rediscover that their republic was built on a rejection – the rejection of being ruled by a monarch. Now, in one of the largest protest movements in many years, the phrase “No kings” is everywhere: on placards, online memes, and in chants aimed at a president who seems to want to rule rather than serve.
Yet the words are hardly new. They are the first note in the American political scale, the country’s founding slogan before it even had a flag.
Long before it echoed through the colonies, the slogan “No king but Jesus” rang out in the English civil war, where it was used to declare that divine authority, not royal prerogative, should rule the conscience.
