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).