Part 4 of the series: Faith and the Founding: A Theological Engagement with America’s Origins
Pilgrims aboard the ship Speedwell in 1620, praying and signing their covenant before departing for the New World (Robert W. Weir, 1843). In a creaking wooden ship off the coast of New England, a small group of Pilgrims crowded together below deck, quill and parchment in hand. They had survived an arduous ocean crossing and now faced an uncertain future in a wilderness far from home. Before setting foot on land, these devout settlers did something quietly revolutionary: they drafted a covenant. In the Mayflower Compact of November 1620, forty-one English colonists “solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one another” covenanted and combined themselves into a civil body politic . This brief document – declaring their voyage undertaken “for the Glory of God, and advancement of the Christian Faith” and vowing to enact “just and equal laws” with the consent of the governed – would echo through history. It was a humble, pastorally worded pact, yet it planted the seed of a grand idea: that a free people might build their government as a covenant under God rather than under the whims of a monarch. From this tiny covenant would eventually grow constitutions, a federal union, and a nation.
This storytelling moment of the Pilgrims’ covenant is not just a quaint tale from Sunday school or a footnote in a history textbook. It is a doorway into understanding how biblical covenant theology shaped the American mind and system of government. The journey from that shipboard agreement to the United States Constitution of 1787 is one of remarkable continuity in principle. It traces how a biblical concept – the idea of covenant, a solemn bond of mutual obligations under God – influenced the development of American federalism and layered authority. In this pastoral yet scholarly essay, we will explore that journey. We will see how the Old Testament covenant idea took root in Reformed theology, blossomed in Puritan colonial practices, and left an indelible mark on the American founding. We will trace how early Americans, steeped in Scripture, crafted compacts, “Fundamental Orders,” and constitutions that echoed the covenants of ancient Israel. And we will reflect theologically on what this heritage means for liberty and our responsibilities as citizens today. The story of “from covenant to constitution” is both historically rich and spiritually resonant – a story that can inspire thoughtful Christians and convince academic skeptics that the Bible’s influence on American political development was profound and enduring (Lutz, 1988) .
The Covenant Idea in Old Testament Israel
To understand America’s covenantal beginnings, we must first understand the biblical concept of covenant. In Scripture, a covenant (Hebrew berith) is a sacred, binding agreement between parties, usually sealed by promises and obligations under divine sanction. The Latin word for covenant, foedus, is the root of our English word “federal” . In other words, at its core federal carries the original sense of a covenantal bond. Covenants in the Bible typically involve God Himself as a witness or guarantor – or even as one of the parties. The Bible recounts several major covenants initiated by God: with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses and the Israelites, with David, and ultimately the “new covenant” in Christ. Each of these covenants bound people together under shared commitments, divine law, and promised blessings.
The covenant that most concerns the political realm is God’s covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai. In the Book of Exodus, after delivering the Israelites from slavery, God invited them into a covenant: “If you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession… a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5–6, ESV). The people of Israel agreed, and thus the tribes of Israel entered into a sacred national covenant with God, accepting the law (Torah) as the terms of their relationship . This moment essentially constituted Israel as a nation under God’s kingship and law. The Israelites understood themselves to be bound by this covenant to follow God’s commandments, with blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience (as outlined later in Deuteronomy). Notably, the covenant established not just a theology but a polity: a defined community with a legal and moral order under a higher authority.
Within this covenantal nation of Israel, we can discern a layered authority structure that would later sound familiar to Americans. The basic social unit was the family, organized under the patriarchal authority of fathers (a vestige of earlier covenants with Abraham and the patriarchs). Families belonged to tribes – the twelve tribes of Israel descended from Jacob’s sons – each of which had its own elders and leaders. Above the tribes was the national union of Israel, first led by prophets and judges, and later by kings. Importantly, even when Israel had kings, those kings were not absolute but were themselves bound by covenant to God and the nation. On several occasions, the Bible describes a covenant between the people and their king, affirming mutual obligations: for example, when David became king over the tribes, or when the boy-king Joash was crowned under Jehoiada’s guidance, “they made a covenant between the Lord and the king and people, that they should be the Lord’s people” (2 Kings 11:17) . In these biblical covenants, the ruler pledged to govern justly under God’s law, and the people pledged to obey, with God as witness. If the king violated God’s law – as tyrants like Ahab or later Athaliah did – the covenant framework implied that he could be held accountable or even removed (which is exactly what happened in those biblical narratives ). Thus, the Bible presented an early theory of limited government: the idea that human authority has legitimacy only within the bounds of a higher law and covenant, and that consent and accountability are key. This was not democracy as we know it, but it was a seedling of the rule of law and the consent of the governed, under God.
Early American thinkers were well aware of these biblical examples. Many in the founding era read the Hebrew Scriptures and drew lessons for politics. For instance, the congregational minister Samuel Langdon – a figure of the Revolutionary generation – explicitly argued that ancient Israel’s polity was a model for America. In a 1788 election sermon, Langdon preached that “the Israelites may be considered as a pattern to the world in all ages; and from them we may learn what will exalt our character, and what will depress and bring us to ruin” (Langdon, 1788/1998, p. 947) . He proceeded to describe the Israelite government in great detail, noting that after the exodus, Moses and the elders organized the people with rulers of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens (an allusion to Exodus 18) – effectively a representative hierarchy for civil and military order . Langdon pointed out that God led Moses to establish a council of seventy elders(Numbers 11), which “evidently constituted a senate… under a chief commander,” with the people having a voice in choosing leaders – so that “the government was a proper republic” (Langdon, 1788, p. 954) . Furthermore, each Israelite tribe had its own “elders and a prince” and could govern local matters, parallel to the general government, making the tribal system “very similar to the general government” (Langdon, 1788, p. 955) . In short, Langdon saw ancient Israel as a federal republic of tribes under a national covenant, remarkably analogous to what the United States would become. His sermon was not an outlier; many American clergy and statesmen of the 18th century were deeply familiar with the Bible and believed that the “Hebrew Republic” provided a usable model for liberty . The biblical notion of covenant – voluntary unions formed under the law of God – had, by God’s providence, laid a conceptual blueprint for layered, federal governance.
Before the American founding ever put these ideas into practice, however, they were refined and transmitted through another channel: the Reformation-era revival of covenant theology.
Reformation Roots of Covenant Theology
The idea of covenant as a basis for society did not jump straight from ancient Israel to colonial America; it was mediated by centuries of theological development, especially during the Protestant Reformation. In the 1500s, Protestant reformers returned to the Bible with fresh eyes, and many were struck by the prominence of covenants in Scripture. They began to articulate a robust covenant theology that extended beyond personal salvation to encompass communities and civil life (Hall, 2019). Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger in 1534 wrote A Brief Exposition of the One and Eternal Testament or Covenant of God, teaching that all of God’s dealings with humanity were covenantal (a “testament” being a covenant) . Around the same time, John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) emphasized the continuity of God’s covenant of grace from the Old Testament to the New, thereby reinforcing the idea that all believers are joined in a covenant under God’s sovereignty . This theological framework – sometimes called “federal theology” (from foedus, covenant) – became a hallmark of Reformed (Calvinist) Christianity. It posited that God relates to humanity through covenants, and that humans in turn ought to order their relationships by covenant.
This religious covenant theology soon bore political fruit. In the later 1500s, Protestant thinkers facing tyrannical governments started applying covenant ideas to the relationship between rulers and the people. If God’s covenant with Israel was the template, then a king ought to be understood not as an absolute master by divine right, but as a party to a kind of covenant with his subjects under God. Theodore Beza, the disciple of Calvin, and Philippe de Mornay (pen name “Junius Brutus”), a Huguenot theorist, both argued in the 1570s that because government is established by God’s ordinance, a magistrate who rules unjustly breaches the covenant and can be resisted . Their writings (such as Mornay’s Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants, 1579) drew explicitly on the biblical example of Israel’s covenant and on the idea of a contract between the ruler, the people, and God. By 1603, Johannes Althusius – a Reformed jurist in Germany – published his masterpiece Politica, which built an entire political system out of covenantal associations . Althusius envisioned society as a network of covenants: families covenanting to form communities, communities covenanting to form provinces, and provinces federating into a commonwealth. In other words, long before 1776, a Christian thinker had proposed a model of federal republicanism grounded in covenant theory.
All these developments show that more than a century before the American colonies were founded, covenantal ideas were energizing political thought in Europe. The Reformers and their heirs linked the ancient concept of covenant to emerging ideas of constitutionalism and federalism. They insisted that legitimate authority rests on agreements and consent, under a higher divine law (Lutz, 1988). They also cherished the biblical conviction that God’s moral law transcends kings – an outlook that would later animate American patriots. Donald S. Lutz, a scholar of the American founding, notes that this era’s covenant theology taught the early colonists to balance “virtue and trust” in community with the rights of individuals – what he calls a creative tension between individualism and communitarianism in “federal liberty” . In essence, covenant theology furnished a moral justification for people to constitute their own governments by mutual consent, so long as they did so in line with God’s principles of justice. It was the theological seedbed for what we now call social contract theory, but with God explicitly in the picture (Hall, 2011).
Covenants in Early American Colonial Governance
When the Pilgrims and Puritans set sail for America in the early 1600s, they brought this covenantal worldview with them in their hearts and minds. These settlers were not abstract political philosophers – they were families and congregations in search of a new life and freedom of worship – but their community life was profoundly shaped by Reformed theology and biblical examples. They saw themselves, in many ways, as re-enacting the story of God’s people. Like the Israelites fleeing Egypt, the Puritans believed they were entering into a covenant with God in a new “Promised Land.”Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop famously exhorted his fellow colonists in 1630 that “we are entered into covenant with Him [God] for this work. We have taken out a commission…the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles” (Winthrop, 1630/1985). In his lay sermon A Model of Christian Charity, delivered aboard the Arbella on the way to New England, Winthrop cast the Puritan colony as part of a divine mission: they would be “as a city upon a hill” with the eyes of the world upon them (citing Matthew 5:14) . But this lofty status was conditional. Winthrop warned that if the colonists forsook the covenant – if they failed to uphold justice and mercy and the love of God and neighbor – then “the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us” and make them an example of judgment. These were the heartfelt words of a people who viewed civil society itself as an outgrowth of covenant theology.
Thus, it is no surprise that the New England colonists made covenant-making a regular practice, both in church and state. In their churches, they formed Congregational covenants – voluntary agreements by which each church congregation constituted itself, independent of any state church hierarchy. Every member swore to walk together in faith and discipline. This ecclesiastical independence fed into political independence: if a group of believers could covenant together to form a church under Christ’s headship, they could also covenant to form a civil community under God’s sovereignty. The Pilgrims of Plymouth did exactly that with the Mayflower Compact (1620), America’s first civil covenant . Just a few lines long, the Compact explicitly stated the colonists’ purpose of glorifying God and advancing the Christian faith, and bound them “in the presence of God” to form a body politic and enact just laws by common consent . This was both a practical solution to govern themselves (since they landed outside the jurisdiction of their original charter) and a profound statement of biblical self-understanding. They believed that a community could legitimately govern itself by covenant – essentially a forerunner of constitutional government – so long as that covenant honored God’s higher law.
In the decades that followed, other New England colonies followed the covenant pattern. The colony of Massachusetts Bay operated under a royal charter but was suffused with covenant language in its laws and declarations. The colonies of Connecticut and New Haven, founded by even stricter Puritans, actually wrote out founding covenants that function as the first written constitutions in America. The most famous of these is the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639). In the Fundamental Orders, the settlers of three towns in the Connecticut River Valley (Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield) agreed to “associate and conjoin ourselves to be as one Public State or Commonwealth,” entering “into Combination and Confederation together” to maintain the peace and pursue the ends of Christ’s gospel . The document, clearly influenced by a sermon from Puritan leader Thomas Hooker, does not explicitly mention the word covenant, but its preamble invokes “the word of God” and the desire to maintain “the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus”. Scholar Donald Lutz observes that Connecticut’s Fundamental Orders was “the first expression of federalism in the American colonies.” It created a federal (covenantal) union of semi-autonomous towns, bound by a common agreement for governance . In fact, Lutz calls the Connecticut constitution “a covenant-derived compact written by a deeply religious people who knew a great deal about the political and religious covenants in the Bible.” (Lutz, 1988, p. 44) . Here we see plainly how biblical federalism took shape: separate communities linked by covenant for mutual benefit, sharing power between local and central authorities.
Other colonies had similar founding documents. The New Haven Colony Laws (1643) began with biblical references and the requirement that judges rule according to “the Scriptures” as far as possible. The Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641), one of the earliest legal codes, was compiled by Rev. Nathaniel Ward and rooted many provisions in biblical law (for example, it outlawed the cruel punishments that were forbidden in Scripture and affirmed due process rights echoing the Mosaic law). These documents sometimes incorporated Bible passages verbatim or as guiding authority . Even colonies outside Puritan New England were influenced by covenant ideas: Pennsylvania’s 1682 Frame of Government, penned by the Quaker William Penn, declared governments are “ordained of God” and famously quoted Romans 13: “Let every soul be subject to the higher powers…”, making civil obedience a Christian duty . It also enumerated “offenses against God” (like swearing, drunkenness, and blasphemy) that magistrates should punish – reflecting the belief that the community was accountable to God’s moral order.
In sum, by the early 18th century, the American colonies – especially in New England – had established a strong tradition of viewing civil society as founded on covenant. They practiced what one historian calls a “federal theology of politics”: towns, counties, and colonies were bound by compacts that bore a family resemblance to the ancient covenants of Israel. The prevalence of local self-government through town meetings and colonial assemblies also reinforced the covenantal idea that authority comes upward from the governed through consent, not just downward from a king. All the while, most colonists remained devout Christians who saw no sharp divide between their faith and their public life. They continuously referenced biblical history as instructive for their own political challenges. As Mark David Hall notes, we must appreciate these “Christian colonial roots” of America – colonists of European descent were overwhelmingly serious Christians, and their laws and institutions reflected that fact (Hall, 2011) . While not every colony was a theological commonwealth like Massachusetts, virtually all of them, from Virginia to Pennsylvania to South Carolina, assumed that God’s providence and moral law undergirded social order. This was the fertile soil in which the seeds of an eventual Constitution were planted.
From Colonial Covenants to the American Constitution
By the time of the American Revolution and the drafting of the Constitution, the language and concepts of covenant and federalism were part of the colonists’ intellectual DNA. The founding generation inherited the covenantal tradition and transformed it for a new national project. When the thirteen colonies declared independence and later formed a more perfect union, they did so with Bibles in hand and covenant ideas on their tongues. Political scientist Donald Lutz conducted a famous study of the political literature of the American founding era (1760–1805), and he found that the Bible was the single most cited source in that discourse – accounting for roughly one-third of all citations, more than any Enlightenment writer . The Book of Deuteronomy (which retells Moses’s constitutional sermon to Israel) was the most frequently referenced book of the Bible, appearing even more often than Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, the leading secular source . Far from being secular-minded rationalists only, the founders and their compatriots were steeped in Scripture. One scholar observes that “the Bible was the lingua franca of the era”, the common cultural touchstone that both educated elites and ordinary citizens knew by heart (Dreisbach, 2011, p. 414) . Revolutionary pamphlets, congressional proclamations, and sermons brimmed with biblical allusions, from calling King George Pharaoh or Saul, to naming the American struggle a fight for the “sacred cause of liberty” . This biblical framework helped Americans see their political cause in covenantal terms – a fight to renew the true covenant of government against the usurpations of a tyrant who had broken it.
Indeed, many Patriot leaders explicitly invoked the idea of breaking covenant as justification for independence. The Declaration of Independence (1776) can be read as a covenantal lawsuit: it lists the king’s breaches of the implicit social contract (much as a prophet like Samuel might list a king’s violations of Israel’s covenant), and concludes that the people are therefore absolved of allegiance. Even earlier, in 1775, some colonists formed associations literally called “solemn leagues and covenants” to boycott British goods, deliberately echoing the 17th-century Solemn League and Covenantsworn by the Scots and English Puritans (Elazar, 1998) . This shows the persistence of covenant language in the political sphere.
When independence was won, the newly free states first joined in a loose union under the Articles of Confederation (1781). The term confederation itself indicates a covenantal pact (from Latin confoederatio, “a coming together by covenant”). The Articles explicitly styled the union as a “firm league of friendship” among the states, each state retaining its sovereignty. It was, essentially, a multi-party covenant among thirteen state republics. However, this confederation proved too weak to sustain the nation. Thus in 1787, delegates gathered in Philadelphia to draft a new Constitution – a stronger framework of federal union. While the U.S. Constitution is often described as a product of Enlightenment reason, it is crucial to recognize how much it owes to the covenant tradition. The Constitution begins with an act of covenanting: “We the People… do ordain and establish this Constitution.” In doing so, the people (through state ratifying conventions) entered into a binding agreement, a national compact, to form a more perfect Union. As one educational foundation puts it, the Constitution “created an association of states joined together by a consensual, binding agreement – by a compact or contract – to form and abide by a national law and government” . This is covenant language, albeit “secularized” and written in legal terms. It still carries the essence of what a covenant is: mutual promise, consent, and commitment to an agreed order (in this case, the rule of law under a written charter). The act of ratification itself – requiring approval from the people in each state – reflects the covenant principle of consent of the governed, much as the Israelites covenanted with God and with each other to accept the Law.
Moreover, the structure of the Constitution exhibits a federal (covenantal) design. Under the Constitution, political power is divided and layered: certain powers vest in the national government, while others are reserved to the states and localities, and all power ultimately originates from the people. This system is known as federalism, and as we noted, the word comes from foedus, covenant. Donald Lutz explains that the “essence of federalism” in the American sense lies in “the preservation of local control, diversity, and the individual character of each component [each state], and the provision for unity on matters where unity is required” (Lutz, 1988, p. 43) . In other words, our federal system was designed to allow self-governing communities to retain their integrity (just as tribes or towns in a covenant do), while joining together for common ends. This logic directly mirrors the covenantal arrangements of the early Puritans – e.g. the towns of Connecticut covenanting to form a colonial government . In fact, Connecticut’s nickname is “the Constitution State”in honor of its 1639 Fundamental Orders, and historians note that its early covenantal government provided a model for American federalism . The framers of 1787 did not concoct federalism out of thin air; they had grown up in a world of colonial compacts, local charters, church covenants, and federations like the New England Confederation of 1643. They secularized and broadened those principles to apply to a large republic.
Several Founders explicitly acknowledged the influence of biblical and Reformed ideas on American constitutionalism. For instance, John Adams once wrote that “rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees for the people… and if the trust is broken, the people have a right to revoke the authority” – a concept that resonates with covenantal accountability (Adams, 1779). Adams also praised the Puritan founders of New England for their wisdom and learning, which included deep knowledge of Scripture and theology. Likewise, during the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin proposed that the national seal of the United States depict Moses lifting his hand over the Red Sea, with the motto “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” drawing directly on the Exodus covenant story and a well-known phrase from the Reformation era (Sandoz, 1998). While Franklin’s seal idea was not adopted, it shows the mindset of the founders: they saw themselves in continuity with the children of Israel escaping oppression and forming a new covenantal community under divine providence.
Modern scholars such as Daniel Dreisbach and Mark David Hall have argued compellingly that Christian and biblical ideas profoundly shaped the Founders’ political philosophy (Hall, 2011; Dreisbach, 2017). This does not mean the framers established a theocracy – far from it. They built a regime of religious liberty and no official national church. But as Hall succinctly puts it, “while America did not have a Christian founding in the sense of creating a theocracy, its Founding was deeply shaped by Christian moral truths.” (Hall, 2011, p. 1) . One of those truths was the concept of covenant: the notion that true liberty is found in a mutual agreement to uphold justice and serve the common good under God. This is reflected in the Founders’ emphasis on constitutionalism (fundamental law binding both government and people), consent (no legitimate authority without the people’s approval), and the rule of law (all are under the “laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” as the Declaration says). In Federalist No. 2, John Jay wrote of Americans that “providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people,” almost suggesting a divine hand in our union. The overarching point is that the American Constitution did not emerge in an ideological vacuum – it was the political harvest of seeds sown by biblical covenant ideas through the Reformation and colonial experience (Lutz, 1988; Sandoz, 1990). “The New England Way… gave us federalism,” notes historian Bradley Birzer, highlighting that Puritan covenant practices influenced American institutions for generations .
Let us recall Samuel Langdon’s sermon once more. Preaching as his state (New Hampshire) debated ratification of the U.S. Constitution, Langdon reminded citizens that “the Lord [has] endued [us] with wisdom to provide for [our] own safety… The Israelites [under Moses] did not wait for a special command to form a civil government; they had an undoubted right to provide for their own welfare… [Thus] the government [of Israel] was a proper republic”* . He explicitly drew a parallel to the Americans of 1788, implying that it was not only our right but our duty under God to establish good government by mutual compact. The ratification of the Constitution, in the eyes of many devout Americans, was a solemn covenanting act. And interestingly, some early American writers even used the word covenantto describe the Constitution – for example, in 1788 one writer called the Constitution “a covenant with death” (intending criticism), while others like President Ezra Stiles of Yale saw it as a positive covenant of union (Dreisbach, 2017). The concept was very much alive.
In the end, the American system of layered authority (town, colony/state, nation) ended up closely echoing the biblical covenant structures of family, tribe, and nation under God’s law. The resemblance is not perfect, of course – the United States is a modern republic with no established religion – but the influence is there. The family and local community remain crucial in American life, just as the family and tribe were in Israel. States in the U.S. function a bit like tribes: each has its own identity, laws, and sphere of autonomy, yet all are united under a national covenant/constitution. And just as the tribes sent elders to a national council in biblical times , the states send senators and representatives to Congress. We even informally refer to the national union as a “family of states.” None of this is coincidence – it is the product of a culture marinated in Scripture.
Covenant, Liberty, and Citizenship Today
Exploring this history is not mere antiquarianism; it holds practical and spiritual insights for us as citizens today. The American founding’s linkage of covenant and constitution reminds us that liberty is not license – it is a gift that thrives within moral boundaries and mutual responsibility. The Puritans spoke of “civil liberty” or “federal liberty” – meaning freedom under law and within covenant – as opposed to “natural liberty” which, in their view, was human willfulness unchecked by higher authority (Winthrop, 1645) . Governor John Winthrop famously described civil (or federal) libertyas “a liberty to do only that which is good, just, and honest”, a liberty that is maintained “in subjection to authority” and to God’s ordinances, in contrast to wild natural liberty which he said makes men “grow more evil” (Winthrop, 1645, p. 3). This notion may sound paradoxical to modern ears, but it carries profound truth: true freedom flourishes in covenant. When each member of a community agrees to restrain selfish impulses and uphold shared laws and values, all are freer and more secure. This is the essence of a covenantal view of society – and it underlies our constitutional order. Our Constitution is not just a legal document; it is a covenant of the people, and it assumes a citizenry capable of self-government, virtue, and fidelity to the rule of law.
Theologically, the pattern is clear: covenant binds freedom with responsibility. In the Bible, God’s covenants offer blessings of peace and prosperity, but they come with conditions – “choose this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15). Similarly, the American experiment in liberty has always depended on an underlying moral and religious framework. The Founders spoke often of the need for virtue in the people. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, warned that morality and religion are “indispensable supports” of political prosperity, and that one cannot expect national morality to prevail without religious principle. This reflects a covenantal mindset: the idea that our national well-being is contingent on honoring certain fundamental commitments – to God-given rights, to justice, to our constitutional structure. It is reminiscent of the Old Testament, where Israel’s fate rises and falls depending on its adherence to the covenant. While America is not ancient Israel and has no direct covenant with God as a nation, many Christians believe (and the founders themselves often remarked) that Divine Providence has blessed this country for as long as it honored basic biblical values of liberty, justice, and charity (Psalm 33:12).
What does this mean for us today? First, it can inspire a sense of reverence and renewal for the American Constitution. If we see the Constitution as a covenant – not sacred Scripture, but a solemn pact under God – we might approach civic duties with more gravity. Voting, jury duty, public service, or even civil discourse become ways of keeping our covenant as “We the People.” In a culture that often prizes individual autonomy above all, remembering our covenantal heritage calls us back to community and accountability. It reminds Christians that our faith has public implications: to love our neighbor and seek the common good requires engagement in civic covenant. The responsibilities of citizenship (paying taxes justly, obeying laws, advocating for righteousness in the public square, and holding leaders accountable) can be seen as acts of stewardship of the covenant our forefathers entered into. We are stewards of both a spiritual covenant (as members of Christ’s church) and a civil covenant (as members of the body politic). Those dual roles should not be in conflict but in harmony – as Jesus said, we render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s, knowing that God is above all.
Second, the covenant perspective offers a corrective to the polarization and atomization of our times. The American system intentionally balances multiple levels of governance (local, state, national), which encourages people of different backgrounds to unite in local covenants and not see the national government as the source of all solutions. This layered federalism, rooted in covenant thinking, gives space for local communities – even families and churches – to thrive. It is analogous to the biblical idea of subsidiarity or sphere sovereignty: that certain responsibilities belong to certain levels of society (family, congregation, city, etc.), and higher levels should not usurp them. In our context, this means cherishing federalism not only as a dry constitutional arrangement but as a value that aligns with human scale and relational covenant. It pushes back against both excessive nationalism and excessive individualism by fostering covenanted communities at every level. For Christians, this resonates with the concept of the church as a covenant community and the family as a “domestic church.” We learn to live in covenant in our homes and churches, and we bring that ethic to our civil life.
Finally, reflecting on “from covenant to constitution” can deepen our spiritual appreciation for liberty. We can see the hand of God’s providence in how biblical principles molded a nation that, despite its flaws, has provided unprecedented religious freedom and opportunities for the Gospel’s spread. We might echo the sentiment of the Continental Congress in 1776, which declared a day of thanksgiving, observing that “it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge God’s providence” in their affairs. The American founders – even the more skeptical ones – often acknowledged that freedom was a gift from a higher source. This aligns with Paul’s words that “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1) – though spiritual in context, the idea that liberty is part of our God-given dignity permeated the founding era (Hall, 2019). Covenant theology contributed to the founders’ understanding that rights are endowed by a Creator (as the Declaration affirms) and that government exists by the consent of morally equal persons under God. If we forget these roots, we risk turning freedom into selfishness or the state into an idol. But if we remember the covenantal roots, we are prompted to use our freedom for good – to uphold justice, protect the vulnerable, and honor God. In the words of the prophet Micah, our duty is “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8) – a fitting summary of both the civic and spiritual dimensions of covenant life.
In conclusion, the American mind and the American Republic have been indelibly shaped by the biblical concept of covenant and the federal (covenantal) theology of the Reformed tradition. From the Mayflower Compact’s humble “covenant and combine ourselves together” , to the Constitutional Convention’s ambitious federal design, the idea that true liberty and lasting union arise from covenantal commitment runs like a golden thread. This heritage should be both a comfort and a challenge to us. It comforts us by revealing that our nation’s foundation is not merely a social contract of self-interest, but something more profound – a moral vow rooted in transcendent principles. It challenges us by asking: Are we keeping our covenant? Each generation must renew the covenant by embracing the responsibilities of citizenship and the higher law of God. As in Joshua’s time, so in ours, the call goes out: “Choose this day whom you will serve”. If we, like those before us, choose to serve the Lord and the cause of liberty He ordained, then we can hope that liberty will be preserved for our children and our children’s children. In the layered family, church, town, state, and nation that make up our civic life, let us recommit to covenant faithfulness – to God, and to one another. In doing so, we follow a long line of believers who understood that covenant is the soul of freedom, and that a constitution, rightly ordered, is not just a contract, but a collective covenant of “one Nation under God.”
References
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