Founding Sins

The Covenanters, now mostly forgotten were America's first Christian nationalists. For two centuries they decried the fact that, Christian nation because slavery was in the Constitution but Jesus was not. Having once rule Scotland as a part of a Presbyterian coalition, they longed to convert America to a holy Calvinist vision in which church and state united to form a godly body politic. Their unique story has largely been submerged beneath the histories of the events in which they participated and the famous figures with important religious movement in American history that no one remembers. Despite being one of North America's smallest religious sects, the Coventers found God's rebels -- just as likely to be Patriots against Britain as they were to be Whiskey Rebels against the federal governments. As the nation's earliest and most avowed abolitionists, they had a significant influence on the fight for emancipation. In Founding Sins, Joseph S. Moore examines this forgotten history, and American's understandings of the separation of church and state. While modern arguments about Ameria's Christian founding usually come from the right, the Covenanters have a more complicated legacy. They fought for an explicity Christian America in the midst of what they saw as a secular state that failed the test of Christian nationhood. But they did so on behalf of a cause -- abolition -- that is traditionally associated with the left. Though their attempts to insert God into the Constitution ultimately failed, Convenanters set the acceptable limits for religion in politics for generations to come. - Jacket.