In Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, a winning but misnamed work, historian Joseph S. Moore writes the story of what he calls “the most important religious sect in American history that no one remembers today” (36). Covenanters believed that proper political authority comes directly from God and the political order should explicitly acknowledge God as the ultimate head of society. These Covenanters were a loosely defined group, but they looked back to the 1630s as the critical moment in their history. In order to justify the Scottish 1637 revolt against Charles I, the Calvinist Scots created a National Charter, which implicitly put their king under the authority of God himself, as represented by the Scottish national church. Much like John Locke, who made a similar move during the Glorious Revolution, the Calvinist Scots had created a coherent way of rejecting an ungodly king, but their commitment to a religious-sponsored political order would leave them out of step with many of their contemporaries as the English Civil War unfolded. They would be out of step with even more of their countrymen as many of these Covenanters crossed the Irish Sea and Atlantic.

Given their origins in a rebellion, it is not surprising to find that Covenanters were a contentious lot wherever they were found. In America, Covenanters joined the Paxton Boys, the Regulators, the Green Mountain Boys, and even the Whiskey Rebels that President George Washington had to put down. Even when they did not pick up their guns, they remained quarrelsome. They criticized the British monarchy, objected to the constitutional prohibition of religious tests, refused to take oaths demanded by government, and complained about Sunday mail delivery. During and after the Civil War, the Covenanters pushed for various versions of a Constitutional amendment that would include a reference to God in the Preamble. Moore faithfully chronicles these contests, in part to show how the Covenanters often ended up marginalizing themselves, and in part to show how their failures can help us understand their opponents, who included both the founding fathers and nineteenth-century secular liberals.

For the most part, Moore believes that the Covenanters were defined by their political failures, but there was one noteworthy exception: Covenanters were staunchly antislavery. In 1644, prominent Covenanter theologian Samuel Rutherford argued in Lex, Rex that slavery, even biblical slavery, was “against nature” (32). Rutherford's position was an early Christian antislavery, predating Quaker and evangelical versions of antislavery. Moreover, Rutherford provided a different way to resist biblical justifications of slavery. Unlike the Quakers, who used the Golden Rule as a lens to interpret the Bible, Rutherford turned to scholasticism. This was a highly unusual argument for a Calvinist—even the Catholic natural-law tradition was more deferential to biblical tradition when examining slavery—but Moore speculates that Scottish Covenanters moved so strongly against slavery in part because their friends and family were subject to bondage in the years before English slavery became exclusively black.

As a result, Covenanter communities in America became hotbeds of abolition, and Covenanters became some of the most steadfast abolitionists. Southern Covenanters also took up antislavery positions, something that led a few Southern Covenanter churches to relocate to the North. Covenanters who remained in the South brought blacks into their churches, taught them to read, and supported the American Colonization Society, the organization that tried to relocate freed men and women to Liberia. Moore describes these actions as “a bold challenge to the cultural norms” of the South, although it is unclear that the language of challenge is the right way to talk about these types of reforms (103). Whatever one makes of Moore's interpretation of Southern Covenanters, Moore is absolutely right that including Covenanters in the story of antebellum America will make historians think differently about both the slaveholding South and abolitionist movement.

While Moore's book enriches our understanding of American history, there are two notable problems with it. First, Moore sometimes uses anachronistic language from modern politics. For example, the subtitle of the book describes the Covenanters as radicals, but at the end of the first paragraph he describes the Covenanters as situated on “the right” (1). Moore turns to such language to score political points—he intends to show that the American division of church and state was not something invented later on by secular liberals—but forcing the Covenanters to be on the left or on the right downplays the ways that Covenanters’ religious politics did not map neatly onto later political divisions. Second, while Moore sometimes traces Covenanter church development—most powerfully when he documents the Southern Covenanter churches adopting the region's postbellum racism—he is often too quick to presume that Covenanter was a fixed label, even if it was contested among the rival Covenant churches themselves. Moreover, Moore includes in his story people who left the Covenanter churches (78, 97, 112) and other Calvinists or Evangelicals who allied with Covenanters (45, 60, 130, 154), which is problematic for someone who is trying to make Covenanters the subject of the book. Despite these issues, Moore's book is a good one. This is an engaging story with ramifications far beyond this heretofore-forgotten group of Presbyterians on the fringe of the American religious landscape.