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).