(Daily Signal)—On Aug. 14, 1774, the Rev. John Bullman climbed into the towering pulpit of Charleston’s St. Michael’s Church and told his South Carolina congregation that they needed to know their place.
As tensions with Great Britain mounted, Bullman, St. Michael’s assistant rector, preached “The Christian Duty of Peaceableness.”
He ridiculed the “silly Clown” and “illiterate Mechanic” who presumed to “censure the conduct of his Prince or Governor.” There was, Bullman declared, “no greater Instrument or Ornament of Peace” than for every man to keep “his own Rank” and perform the duties of his station. The congregation erupted.
The next day, the vestry—the parish’s lay governing body—considered a sermon that had caused “great offence and exasperated many of the inhabitants.” Some parishioners threatened to leave the church; the controversy grew so heated that violence was feared.
The vestry moved against Bullman almost immediately. By the following morning, he had been relieved of his position. He remained in Charleston for several months, hoping for reinstatement, before returning to England.
Completed in 1761 at Charleston’s famous Four Corners, St. Michael’s was among colonial America’s grandest churches. Its 186-foot steeple dominated the skyline. Its pews held men who would help lead a revolution their ministers struggled to accept. Thomas Heyward Jr. and Thomas Lynch Jr. would sign the Declaration of Independence; Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Rutledge, and Pierce Butler would sign the Constitution.
At nearby St. Philip’s, the Rev. Robert Smith reached a different conclusion about Christian duty and political resistance. In February 1775, he preached to South Carolina’s political leaders on a day of fasting and prayer amid the dispute with Britain. Smith defended the colonists’ cause as the “sole Defence of undoubted rights,” while urging them to examine their own conduct and acknowledge their dependence on God. He rejected the claim that resistance necessarily sprang from an “unreasonable thirst of power, or factious discontent.”
Smith called his listeners to repentance and placed their cause under divine judgment, but he made clear that defending their rights could be consistent with Christian duty. Sixteen months later, he enlisted as a private to defend Charleston.
The Church of England was intertwined with the British establishment, and its clergy had sworn allegiance to the Crown. Anglican worship included prayers for the king, a practice that became politically explosive as resistance turned toward revolution.
Yet Anglicanism did not dictate one political position. Smith showed that a clergyman could defend the colonists’ rights while remaining a priest of the Church of England. For Bullman and other loyalist clergy, obedience to established authority was a religious obligation. As resistance hardened, Anglican priests faced a question of conscience: What did a clergyman owe the king when his congregation turned against him?
Bullman chose loyalty to the Crown. Many parishioners did not.
St. Michael’s rector, the Rev. Robert Cooper, also remained loyal. He refused to sign the Patriot association, join the militia, or take an oath of allegiance to South Carolina.
By the summer of 1776, the dispute over allegiance was no longer confined to sermons and vestry meetings. It was about to be tested by cannon fire.
The British Royal Navy opened fire on the unfinished palmetto-log fort on Sullivan’s Island. Among Col. William Moultrie’s defenders were Rev. Smith, my fifth-great-grandfather James Baggett, Catawba warriors, Francis Marion, William Jasper, Danger Thomson, and more than 1,200 other soldiers.
Outnumbered by a British force of nearly 3,000 men and facing nine armed warships, Moultrie’s defenders endured hours of cannon fire and lost 12 men, but they ultimately repelled the Royal Navy’s assault. Charleston rejoiced!
Christopher Gadsden, commanding at Fort Johnson across the harbor, sent Moultrie a message: “I congratulate you on the drubbing you gave those fellows.”
Susannah Elliott sailed to Sullivan’s Island to congratulate the defenders, including her husband, Maj. Barnard Elliott, who had fought in the battle. She presented the Second South Carolina Regiment with two silk banners she had embroidered herself, praising their gallant defense of “Liberty & your country.”
The victory at Sullivan’s Island made heroes of Charleston’s defenders. It also made neutrality increasingly impossible.
As Moultrie’s men fought the British fleet on June 28, Cooper publicly prayed at St. Michael’s that God would strengthen George III to triumph over his enemies.
Smith, however, returned to the pulpit at St. Philip’s on June 30 and hailed Charleston’s defenders. The contrast between the two clergymen could hardly have been clearer. One prayed for the king’s victory; the other thanked God for a Patriot triumph he had helped secure.
This was too much for St. Michael’s vestry. On July 2, they dismissed Cooper for persisting in his allegiance to the Crown.
That same day in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress declared that the colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” Two days later, Congress adopted the Declaration explaining that decision.
Bullman and Cooper may sincerely have believed that Christian duty required obedience to the Crown. But the question was not settled by sincerity alone. Political authority is not absolute, and resistance to earthly authority is not necessarily rebellion against God.
Smith’s example offered another understanding of Christian responsibility. He defended the colonists’ rights while placing their cause under moral scrutiny. The Patriot conviction that government existed to secure liberties endowed by the Creator, rather than exercise unlimited authority over the people, gave many colonists a powerful moral argument for resistance.
The dividing line in Charleston did not always run between denominations, or even between churches. Sometimes it ran straight down the aisle.
In August 1774, Bullman climbed into one of colonial America’s grandest pulpits and told his congregation that peace required every man to keep his proper place. The people listening were about to help create a new country.
They had no intention of staying in their place.
This article is part of a series on the American Revolution in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
