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).