Another piece of the “Holy Days and the American Revolution” story:
Hamilton, the musical, featured a song called Yorktown, which included the lines:
I am not throwin’ away my shot!
‘Til the world turns upside down
Some Americans may still remember that the phrase ”till the world turns upside down”, is a reference to the song “The World Turned Upside Down” played by the British Army as they marched out to surrender to the Americans and French at Yorktown in 1781. To the British the tune was appropriate, all the old dependable traditions seemed to be coming apart, when subjects rebelled against their gracious king, they should be punished, not successful, the rebellion should have failed, and the French don’t win wars against the British, it’s inconceivable! The Americans and the French should have been surrendering to them, not vice versa.
But what most Americans don’t realize is that “The World Turned Upside Down” actually hailed from a much earlier Revolution. It was a Tory/Cavalier song from the English Civil War of the 1640s intended as a protest against the Puritan/Presbyterian Parliament banning the celebration of Christmas and other Holy Days dear to the hearts of Royalists, Papists, and Anglicans.
The first verse went:
Listen to me and you shall hear, news hath not been this thousand year:
Since Herod, Caesar, and many more, you never heard the like before.
Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d.
Old Christmas is kickt out of Town.
Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.
The song was considered particularly appropriate because by and large the leading Colonials behind the war were Whigs, descendants of the same Puritans who had banned Christmas in the 1640s and still didn’t celebrate it in the late 1700s while the family of the British General Cornwallis family were all staunch Anglicans and Torys and his uncle was the Archbishop of Canterbury.
It was ironic that in defending Holy Days they would use a phrase “the world turned upside down” used by the enemies of Christ in Thessalonica to describe the effect of the Gospel (Acts 17:6).
And friends we need to understand that whenever the true Biblical Gospel is preached anywhere in human society it has a revolutionary and world-changing effect! But what we need to remember is that it is the fallen world of the natural man sunk in his sin, false religion, and pagan worldviews that is turned upside down, so in a real sense it is the effects of the Fall that are being overturned and the world is actually being turned right side up.
As Matthew Henry put it:
“In one sense it is true that wherever the gospel comes in its power to any place, to any soul, it works such a change there, gives such a wide change to the stream, so directly contrary to what it was, that it may be said to turn the world upside down in that place, in that soul. The love of the world is rooted out of the heart, and the way of the world contradicted in the life; so that the world turned upside down there. But in the sense in which they meant it, it is utterly false… Because they persuaded people to turn from vice to virtue, from idols to the living and true God, from malice and envy to love and peace, they are charged with turning the world upside down, when it was only the kingdom of the devil in the world that they thus overturned.” – Matthew Henry