Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution by Joseph S. Moore (review)

We are on the cusp of a Presbyterian moment in the historiography of early America. A number of recent studies demonstrate the distinct philosophical, religious, and even political contributions of the Church of Scotland in North America from the era of the English Civil War to the disintegration of the United States in the 1860s. Joseph S. Moore contributes to this scholarly moment with a fresh study of an overlooked group within the Scottish Presbyterian Atlantic world: the Covenanters. That group had a special role in the history of the South after the American Revolution, a contribution that should interest readers of this journal.

Covenanters, according to Moore, formed in 1643 when "Scotland and England pledged themselves to become explicitly Protestant nations with clear enforcement of Presbyterian morality" (p. 4). They sought to make Anglo-Scottish cooperation contingent on the promotion of morality within nations that were individually covenanted with God. After the 1688 Glorious Revolution, they were considered by mainline Scottish Presbyterians, as well as many English Protestants, as too radical. Covenanter contractual reasoning seemed, somehow, destabilizing to more moderate coreligionists in Scotland and England. A few Covenanters made their way to North America, perhaps to gain greater religious freedom, and even, according to Moore, becoming "America's other Puritans" (p. 8). This kind of statement, like those describing the Covenanters as "America's first Christian nationalists," tells us more about the marketing of the book than the actual bread and butter of its argument, which is sound and salient (p. 4). Actual source material on the Covenanters in North America, or those who might be linked to their ideology, is very tricky to locate. Moore makes deft use of that source material we do have available to us and is to be commended for drawing together as much as he has in such innovative ways.

American Revolutionaries, according to Moore's reading of Presbyterian Covenanting sentiment, were perceived as impious because they failed to insert God into the national Constitution. Moore is particularly interesting when describing those "[e]vangelical Anti-Federalists" whom he links to Covenanter ideology at both the state and federal levels (p. 56). A resentment of the irreligious centralization of the federal government, in Moore's narrative, eventually characterized the Covenanter contribution to the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.

Some might question Moore's attempt to draw the Covenanters into contemporary discussions about American Christian nationalism in general and the separation of church and state more specifically. Moore, however, makes a punchy case for resurrecting forgotten religious groups that may tell us intriguing and even explanatory stories about the relationship between political theology and American constitutionalism. Nowhere is this the case more so than in Moore's attention to the issue of slavery in the post-Revolution American South.

Covenanters were prone to abolitionist discourse. Moore may overreach when defining the theological distinction between Covenanters and Presbyterians, as well as other doctrinally conservative Calvinists in the new American republic. The same might be said regarding the distinction between evangelically inclined Covenanters and other Presbyterians when it came to relative opposition to slavery. There were many among the latter who were also able to link their focus on total human depravity, and the necessity of a covenanted relationship with God, with tacit or even explicit opposition to slavery. Many more, of course, did indeed come to the opposite conclusion. That said, Moore's discussion of the Covenanter contribution to the evangelical abolitionist movement, including in the early-nineteenth-century South, is illuminating. While some Presbyterians were at pains to distinguish between temporal and spiritual freedom, Moore shows the zealous Covenanters were not. Having contributed to the abolitionist effort, Moore's Covenanters were inspired to create the National Reform Association, which advocated for the explicit association between civic enterprise and biblical...