The Lord willed the new Testament to be written in Greek, because he had determined to bring forth the gospel from the narrow bounds of Judaea into a broader field, and publish it to all people and nations. On this account the Lord selected the Greek language, than which no other was more commonly known by all men, wherein to communicate his gospel to as many countries and persons as possible. He willed also that the heavenly truth of the gospel should be written in Greek in order to provide a confutation of the Gentiles’ idolatry and of the philosophy and wisdom of the Grecians. And, although at that time the Romans had the widest empire, yet Cicero himself, in his oration for the poet Archias, bears witness that the language of the Greeks was more widely extended than that of the Romans. As, therefore, before Christ the holy doctrine was written in that language which was the peculiar and native tongue of the Church; so after Christ all was written in Greek, that they might more easily reach and be propagated to the Church now about to be gathered out of all nations (William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 127).

In both Scotland and Ireland, antislavery activism constituted another unmistakable aspect of the Presbyterian fringe. Opposition to slavery is generally viewed as a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century response to the growing horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and the unfair advantage the slave economy held against free white workers. But over a century before and for much different reasons, seventeenth-century Covenanters belied these paradigms. Covenanters of all stripes held unique and long-standing articulations of antislavery thought rooted in their logic and theories of Christian nationhood.

The earliest antislavery Covenanter was Scottish theorist Samuel Rutherford. In Lex, Rex, Rutherford taught that “Slavery of servants to Lords or Masters, such as were of old amongst the Jews, is not natural, but against nature.” Despite its presence in the biblical text, slavery for Rutherford was a malum natura that was only valid if it was a punishment for sin. The “buying and selling of men; which is a miserable consequence of sin,” created “a sort of death, when men are put to the toiling pains of the hireling,” to “hew wood, and draw water continually.” This was contrary to the nature of humanity. People were made in God’s image and therefore “can no more by nature’s law be sold and bought than a religious and sacred thing dedicated to God.” Tying slavery to the state tyranny he discussed in his critiques of Charles I, Rutherford claimed that “Every man by nature is a freeman born, that is, by nature no man comes out of the womb under any civil subjection to King, Prince, or Judge to master, captain, conqueror, teacher.” This was the heart of seventeenth-century Scottish radicalism. Both the individual and the state had the natural right to obey God. Neither the individual nor the state had the natural right to offend God. Both were free to do right. Neither was free to do wrong.

This early birth and long incubation of Covenanter antislavery thought sprang from a different front than that of later activists. Though Covenanters were not Lockean liberals, their articulations of Scottish radicalism’s antislavery were grounded in natural law. They were not biblically literalistic and needed not be. Seventeenth-century paradigms had not yet encountered the commonsense literalism used by nineteenth-century pro-slavery advocates. But Covenanters had long experience with the literalism of figures such as James VI/I. Such conservatives used biblical texts to support the autocratic rule of kings, and Whigs across the British Isles refused to concede this point. Rutherford, like those who followed him, was antislavery because of his distinctive approaches o antityranny and religious liberty. Covenanters perceived their greatest threats in Catholicism’s power over its members and the state’s attempt to make “perpetual Slaves” to “our English Pope.”

The early slavery Covenanters opposed, however, was no metaphorical flourish. It was real oppression tied to their own experiences. Bond slaves from Scotland and Ireland populated the American plantation labor force. Yet to encounter monolithic chattel race slavery, Covenanter notions of bondage arose out of a compilation of forms of coerced labor and man stealing. In the mid-seventeenth century, North African raiders stole people from English towns, city streets were swept to export vagrants, defeated Scottish Royalists and Irish Catholics were deported, and London “spirit rings” stole thousands and shipped them–without indenture contracts–to Barbados and Virginia. In 1660, there were more bond slaves in the British New World than chattel slaves. This number soon included those on the Presbyterian fringe. Many survivors of the 1679 Covenanter debacle at Bothwell Bridge were exiled to the plantations of Barbados. In 1685 [Covenanters] refusing to take the oath of Abjuration renouncing the covenants were shipped to New Jersey (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 32-33).

This is not a book about the Founders and Christian America advocates per se, but, rather, about one particular group of their detractors. It places forgotten Covenanter voices back into the debate over America’s founding (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 5).

To square the circle on national religious identity, Covenanters argued, “the People” should look backward rather than forward. The secular American state was a new and dangerous departure from a traditional Christian Europe. Thus, the Covenanters did not hold up 1787 nearly as highly as they did 1643, when Scotland and England pledged themselves to become explicitly Protestant nations with clear enforcement of Presbyterian morality. These Christian realms, if only briefly a reality, dominated Covenanters’ political sensibility. They were not so much interested in creation a Christian America as in recreating a Christian Scotland in America. This accounts for much of what made Covenanter logic and tactics different from those of Christian conservatives today.

Another difference was their position on race. Covenanters rejected slavery and racism in the very era both emerged as common sense to most Americans. In this, they represent another peculiar historical anomaly. America’s first Christian nationalists were also some of its most radical racial egalitarians. Their antislavery views predates even those of the Quakers. Unlike the Quakers, these were Christian militants, protecting their Underground Railroad stations with both prayer and gunfire. . . . Their long staying power [antislavery views] in Covenanter circles, predating and outlasting most other forms of racial egalitarianism, indicates the ferocity with which they were held even when they eventual gave way. Covenanter racial views eventually experienced widespread acceptance in American life, while their political perspective did not. This was an outcome they would never have predicted. To the Covenanter mind, the one must necessarily flow from the other. American racism sprang out of its lack of Christian law (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 4).

Covenanters saw the church and state as brothers of the same father who possessed different talents. The one instituted the father’s spiritual will; the other, his physical will. Since both sprang from God’s will, both sat beneath the authority of Christ and should reflect the same moral standard. State laws should reflect biblical morality. The state could not force religious belief; that was a matter of the heart and the church. It could, however, coerce religious obedience, suppress immorality, and keep people from offending God’s name and commands because these were issues of the body, not the mind. This distinction was largely lost on their detractors–another reason Covenanter political theology was a hard sell in America. It also caused at least one historian to refer to them as Presbyterian Taliban (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 3-4).

Author’s endnote: “As Alexander McLeod tried to elucidate, “Coercion, indeed, may never be used in order to make his subjects religious; but it may and must be used in order to suppress immorality, profaneness, and blasphemy; and in order to remove the monuments of idolatry form the land.” Alexander McLeod, Messiah, Governor of the Nations of the Earth (Glasgow: Stephen Young, 1804), 25; G. A. Edgard, “Right Relation of church and State,” undated pamphlet, 14, EC; David W. Miller, “Did Ulster Presbyterians Have a Devotional Revolution?” in Evangelicals and Catholics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed. James H. Murphy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 41″ ( (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins, 163).

Like most extremist arguments, Covenanter political logic was deceptively simple. A nation was its laws, and law was rooted in the authority of God. The English Magna Carta’s preamble issued laws “at the prompting of God.” In America’s great charter, however, God was neither prompting nor prompted. He was not there at all. Therefore, the Constitution had a “We the People” problem. . . . A Christian culture, even a Christian majority, did not equate to a Christian nation, they insisted. . . . Yet the Covenanters’ critical distinction–that by the standards of its own time the newly born United States was simultaneously a Christian civilization and a secular nation–has been lost on our contemporary debates (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 3).

Covenanter critiques centered on two interrelated themes. The first was the absence of Jesus Christ in the Constitution: an affront to God’s name and an open statement of rebellion against his reign over the people. The second was human slavery and its long wake of American racism: a desecration of God’s image. Even as America changed and as life in America changed the Covenanters, these arguments maintained a remarkable continuity among their religious adherents in both the North and the South, spanning the years from the Early Republic to the Civil War era and Reconstruction and into the twentieth century. . . . The Covenanters’ insistence on God in the law and humanity’s equality before it gave purpose and energy to their fight against America’s twin founding sins (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 2).

When the Founders failed to found a Christian nation it was not by accident. They were intentionally dismissing those who sought to mix God and government in the new nation in old, European ways. That failure was loudly protested. In the thick of America’s first culture wars were the Covenanters, an assortment of radical Scotch-Irish Presbyterian sects sharing the conviction that all nations must be in an explicit covenant with God (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 1-2).

The United States was not founded as a Christian nation, because slavery was in the Constitution and Jesus was not. The people who said this, rather loudly and for quite a long time, were called the Covenanters [aka Reformed Presbyterians, Cameronians, Society People, Old Light/Old School, Anti-Burghers, Seceders, Associate Reformed Presbyterians, United Presbyterians, etc.]. Whereas today most religious conservatives insist that America’s Founders created a Christian nation, Covenanters were the most conservative Christians in early America, and they vehemently disagreed. . . . the most strident critique of America’s failure to be a Christian nation came from the right (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 1).

Though every statement in the Scripture cannot be regarded as absolutely essential to salvation, yet everything there is essential to some other wise and important end, else it would not find a place in the good Word of God. . . . All Scripture is profitable. . . . The faith of a Christian should strive to reach and grasp everything that God has honoured with a place in that Word, the design of which is to be a light to our feet as we thread our way through this dark world. Besides, this, unlike every other book, is not doomed to perish. Heaven and earth may pass away, but the words of Christ shall not pass away. The seal of eternity is stamped on every verse of the Bible. This fact is enough of itself to make every line of it important (“The Apostolic Church: Which Is It? by Thomas Witherow in Paradigms in Polity: Classic Readings in Reformed and Presbyterian Church Government, eds. David W. Hall & Joseph H. Hall, 37-38).