I just sent off a review of Joseph S. Moore’s intriguing new book, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution (Oxford, 2016). It is a fascinating history of the Covenanters, a group of “fringe Presbyterians” (Moore’s words) who, in their American manifestation, railed against the Constitution as an un-Christian document that left out Jesus and left in slavery. If they are remembered for anything today, it is for their promotion of the so-called Christian Amendment in the latter half of the 1800s. The amendment would have declared outright that the Constitution established a Christian government. In contrast to their would-be heirs on the Christian Right, the Covenanters never had imagined that there was a Christian America to recover. A truly Christian nation required a clear covenant with God. That’s why the amendment was needed. The difference between Francis Schaeffer (perhaps the most influential popularizer of Covenanter-style political theology) and the Covenanters of the antebellum era is a great example how a radical in one century can be a reactionary in the next.

There is a lot more to this short but impactful book. Overall, it is a great example of how small case studies can shed light on big themes—in this case, the limits of an explicitly Christian politics and the bad history that is often required to embrace it. The Christian Amendment never made it out of committee. Even to get that far, however, Covenanters who promoted the amendment had to lighten up on the Founders, whom they had long attacked as impious secularists. In their own way, they recognized that the jeremiad (with its mode of denunciation for the sake of recovery) works more effectively than an argument that the American project was rotten at the foundation (e.g., that Thomas Jefferson was a theological heretic and George Washington a spiritual slacker—and both slaveholding hypocrites). Frederick Douglass knew the value of the jeremiad, as did Martin Luther King, Jr., even though both also knew just how wedded slavery and racism were to the founding. (Turning to pop culture, a significantly more specious example of the preference for historical recovery is the stoner character in Dazed and Confused, whose implicit argument for marijuana legalization involves praising Martha Washington for having had “a big fat bowl waiting” for George after a hard day’s work.) History usually provides profoundly limited resources for truly progressive change. That fact is kind of baked into the cake (or the brownie) of progress, for those who believe in such a thing.

This kind of “exception that proves the rule” case study is what I would like to do at some point with the history of the Mennonite tradition in the United States (Yeah, I’m still getting around to it . . .). The problem here with the Mennonites concerns what you might call their propensity toward world-historic modesty. The Covenanters were proud and expansive chauvinists. They wanted to proclaim their God as the guardian of society, including the state. The Mennonites, not so much. Well, they have been chauvinistic at times, but usually toward the end of maintaining church purity. In other words, Mennonites are historically comfortable with being a sect. Mennonite nostalgia, if that is the right word, points toward martyrdom, not power. (To be sure, there is a version of Mennonite nostalgia that can also point toward the kind of pre-Bolshevik theocracy that existed in certain Mennonite colonies, mostly in the Ukraine. Even then, that version of Mennonite Christendom amounted to an exemption from full involvement in the Russian Empire.) The Covenanter tradition grew out of the failed attempt in the seventeenth century to turn Scotland (and then Britain) into what Moore calls a “Presbyterian empire.” Covenanters pushed back against being relegated to sectarian status, even as they betrayed all of the stereotypes of sectarian behavior, namely a propensity for splitting.

The true test of Covenanter influence, Mennonite influence, or any sort of sectarian influence might lie in what others have made of their marginality. So, who is the Francis Schaeffer of the Mennonite tradition? Stanley Hauerwas? – Steven P. Miller