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).

For it is not the prerogative of the church to define either its status or activity. It is Christ’s church, not humankind’s. It is Christ, therefore, who declares both that his church shall have a government and what the nature of that government will be. This he has done through the inspired Scriptures (“History and Character of Church Government” by Joseph H. Hall in Paradigms in Polity: Classic Readings in Reformed and Presbyterian Church Government, eds. David W. Hall & Joseph H. Hall, 4).

Beza is surely correct in his contention that laxity in applying biblical principles of church government leads eventually to erosion of doctrine in the church. Therefore, we ought ever to be assiduously conforming church polity to biblical norms (“History and Character of Church Government” by Joseph H. Hall in Paradigms in Polity: Classic Readings in Reformed and Presbyterian Church Government, eds. David W. Hall & Joseph H. Hall, 3).

The Trinity is not a mystery among others, but it constitutes the central mystery of Christian faith and should illumine the entirety of the Christian life. The Trinity is the mystery of salvation, as Karl Rahner vigorously reminded us: ‘The trinity is a mystery of salvation, otherwise it would never have been revealed’ (From “Introduction” by Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, 1).