Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Founding Sins
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PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
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CITY: Charlotte
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http://gardner-webb.edu/academic-programs-and-resources/colleges-and-schools/arts-and-sciences/schools-and-departments/social-sciences/faculty-and-staff/joseph-moore/index * https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-moore-267a9355/ * http://gardner-webb.edu/Assets/gardnerwebb/academics/social-sciences/moore-vitae.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2015016278
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2015016278
HEADING: Moore, Joseph S. (Joseph Solomon), 1977-
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670 __ |a Information from publisher, Mar. 16, 2015 |b (Joseph Solomon Moore; born December 30, 1977)
PERSONAL
Born December 30, 1977.
EDUCATION:Anderson University, B.A., 2000; Erskine College, M.A., 2005; University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Ph.D., 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, instructor, 2010-11; Gardner-Webb University, Boiling Springs, NC, assistant professor of history, 2011–, head of social sciences department, 2016–, special assistant to the president for academic enhancement, 2017–. University of Notre Dame, visiting scholar, 2009; Queen’s University, Belfast, visiting research associate, 2010.
MEMBER:American Historical Association, Historical Society of North Carolina, Organization of American Historians, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Southern Historical Association.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Zach Dresser and Benjamin Wright, editors, Apocalypse and the Millennium: Providential Religion in the Era of the Civil War, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2013; and Peter C. Messer and William H. Taylor, editors, Faith and Slavery in the Presbyterian Diaspora, Lehigh University Press (Bethlehem, PA), 2016. Contributor to New York Times; contributor of articles and reviews to professional journals, including Journal of Backcountry Studies, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Journal of Southern History, Journal of Southern Religion, North Carolina Historical Review, Center on Religion in the South, and Slavery & Abolition.
SIDELIGHTS
Joseph S. Moore holds the post of assistant professor in the history department of Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina. He specializes in the study of colonial America, “examining early America and the Atlantic World,” explained a contributor to the Gardner-Webb University website, “especially regarding issues of race, religion, and slavery.” His monograph Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution looks at the legacy of Scottish Presbyterianism, especially in the colonial south of what became the United States. The Covenanters were radicals even by the standards of mid-seventeenth century Protestantism; they were among the earliest opponents of African-American slavery in the New World. “A few Covenanters made their way to North America,” wrote Gideon Mailer in the Journal of Southern History. “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.”
These radical Presbyterians believed that strict interpretation of the Bible prevented the owning of slaves. “Covenanters,” said C.H. Lippy in Choice, “argued that the Bible allowed only direct descendants of ancient Hebrews to enslave direct descendants of biblical slaves.” They were able to maintain this belief partly because the distance between their Scottish centers of religion and the Americas. That changed, however, as some relocated to the colonies that would become the United States. “Antislavery activism in the southern states places antislavery southerners in an Atlantic context…. Cultural identities rooted in transnational connections (such as those in Europe or Africa) empowered outliers on the slave question to maintain their antislavery voices,” stated another contributor to the Gardner-Webb University website, talking about Moore’s survey of antislavery activism in the Atlantic World. “The ways these groups moderated their voices over time [changed] as proximity to proslavery institutions created cultural distance from brethren abroad…. Catholics, Covenanters, Quakers, and Wesleyans, and enslaved peoples themselves … integrated into European religious bodies, maintained African cosmological frameworks, or embraced free thought in critiquing institutional bondage.” “If many historians today would condemn the covenanters for such intolerance,” concluded Ned Landsman in the Journal of the Early Republic, “they would be more sympathetic to covenanters’ views of what they came to see as the other of the original sins of the Constitution: its acceptance of slavery. At a time when other conservative Christians were employing biblical literalism to justify slavery, covenanters followed the same path to a different result.”
Critics found Moore’s monograph an important contribution to the study of religious diversity in colonial America. “While our founders were suspicious of a formal link between Christianity and the government, the civil and natural moral views of religious people did play an important and central role in making our Constitutional framework what it is today,” declared Nicholas P. Miller in the American Historical Review. “Those who use the anti-Christian America view of our founders as an argument against the use of moral-based public policy arguments go too far. In learning from the failure of the Covenanters, we cannot ignore the successes that they were a part of and which must inform our view of morality and government today.” “Founding Sins is in many ways an exemplary history book,” concluded Timothy L. Wesley in the Journal of Southern Religion. “Thoroughly researched and skillfully crafted, it rescues these important players in America’s religious and political past from near anonymity. In so doing, its author weighs into the heated historiographical debate over the Christian or secular origins of the nation.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Historical Review, October, 2016, Nicholas P. Miller, review of Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, p. 1281.
Choice, March, 2016, C.H. Lippy, review of Founding Sins, p. 1072.
Journal of Southern History, August, 2017, Gideon Mailer, review of Founding Sins, p. 664.
Journal of the Early Republic, summer, 2017, Ned Landsman, review of Founding Sins, p. 387.
ONLINE
Gardner-Webb University Website, http://gardner-webb.edu/ (January 17, 2018), author profile.
Journal of Southern Religion, http://jsreligion.org/ (February 1, 2018), Timothy L. Wesley, review of Founding Sins.
Dr. Joseph Moore
Department Chair
Assistant Professor of History
Specializations: Early America, African American History, Atlantic World
(704) 406-4468
jmoore26@gardner-webb.edu
Education: Ph.D., M.A., The University of North Carolina at Greensboro; B.A. Anderson University
Professor Moore teaches courses examining early America and the Atlantic World, especially regarding issues of race, religion, and slavery. He is the recipient of various grants and fellowships from institutions such as Harvard, Duke, and the Organization for American Historians. His writings have appeared in The New York Times and a variety of books and journals. Dr. Moore is the author of Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution (Oxford University Press).
Selected publications by Dr. Moore
Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2015)
"Covenanters and antislavery in the Atlantic world," Slavery & Abolition 34, Iss. 4 (2013): 539-561
"White and Black Millennialism and Providentialism in Antebellum Abbeville District, South Carolina." in Dresser, Zach and Benhamin Wright, eds., Apocalypse and the Millennium: Providential Religion in the Era of the Civil War. (Baton Rouge, LSU Press, 2013)
Curriculum Vitae
Joseph Moore
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Joseph Moore
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Special Assistant to the President for Academic Enhancement & Chair, Dept. of Social Sciences Gardner-Webb University
Gardner-Webb University University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Charlotte, North Carolina 219 219 connections
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Experience
Gardner-Webb University
Special Assistant to the President for Academic Enhancement
Company NameGardner-Webb University
Dates EmployedJan 2017 – Present Employment Duration1 yr
Gardner-Webb University
Department Chair
Company NameGardner-Webb University
Dates EmployedJul 2016 – Present Employment Duration1 yr 6 mos
LocationBoiling Springs, NC
Gardner-Webb University
Assistant Professor of History
Company NameGardner-Webb University
Dates EmployedAug 2011 – Present Employment Duration6 yrs 5 mos
Education
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Degree NameDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Field Of StudyAmerican History (United States)
Dates attended or expected graduation 2005 – 2011
Erskine College
Erskine College
Degree NameM.A. Field Of StudyTheological Studies: Church History
Dates attended or expected graduation 2001 – 2005
Anderson University (SC)
Anderson University (SC)
Degree NameBachelor of Arts (B.A.) Field Of StudyLiberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies
Dates attended or expected graduation 1998 – 2000
1
Joseph S. Moore, Ph.D.
Professional Contact
Gardner-Webb University
Box 7227
Boiling Springs, NC 28017
704-406-4468 (o)
Education
Ph.D., M.A., US History, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2011
Secondary Concentration: African American History
Dissertation: “Irish Radicals, Southern Conservatives: Slavery, religious liberty and the
Presbyterian fringe in the Atlantic World, 1637-1877”
Committee: Robert M. Calhoon (chair), Charles Bolton, Thomas Jackson, Mark Noll,
Loren Schweninger
B.A. Liberal Studies, Anderson College, 2000
Monographs
Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution
(Oxford University Press, 2016)
Editor
Loyalist and Moderates in Revolutionary Era America: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon
(under contract with The University of South Carolina Press) (co-edited with Rebecca
Brannon)
“Holy Heritage: Covenanters in the Atlantic World,” Special Edition, The Journal of
Transatlantic Studies 11, No. 2 (June, 2013). (co-edited with Jane G.V. McGaughey)
Articles
“Covenanters and antislavery in the Atlantic world,” Slavery & Abolition 34, Iss. 4 (2013): 539-
561.
“The Covenanter sensibility across the long Atlantic World,” The Journal of Transatlantic
Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (June, 2013): 125-134. (with Jane G.V. McGaughey)
“To the Public: A Transcription of Robert Grier’s 1850 Broadside with an Introduction.” The
Journal of Backcountry Studies IV, Iss. 2 (August, 2009).
Chapters
“Epilogue: Presbyterian Orthodoxies and Slavery” in Peter C. Messer and William H. Taylor,
eds., Faith and Slavery in the Presbyterian Diaspora (Rowman & Littlefield,
forthcoming 2016)
“Colonization and the Limits of Antislavery in Upcountry South Carolina” in Zach Dresser and
Benjamin Wright, eds., Apocalypse and the Millennium: Providential Religion in the
Era of the Civil War. Baton Rouge: LSU Press (2013), 90-109.
2
Works in Progress
The Anti-Slavery South
*This study of antislavery activism in the southern states places antislavery southerners in an
Atlantic context. It looks at the ways cultural identities rooted in transnational connections (such
as those in Europe or Africa) empowered outliers on the slave question to maintain their
antislavery voices. It also examines the ways these groups moderated their voices over time as
proximity to proslavery institutions created cultural distance from brethren abroad. Specifically
examined groups include Catholics, Covenanters, Quakers, and Wesleyans, and enslaved peoples
themselves who integrated into European religious bodies, maintained African cosmological
frameworks, or embraced free thought in critiquing institutional bondage.
Financial Advice Before Financial Advising: Household Economies and Religion in Early
America
*This book-length study traces the changing faces of financial literacy in America, from colonial
inducements to immigrate through the Early Republic. It examines the people and places
Americans have trusted for financial wisdom, especially focusing on religion and race.
Research Grants
Harvard University, International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World
Short-Term Research Grant, 2013
Organization of American Historians and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society
John Higham Travel Grant, 2011
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
History Department Travel Grant, Spring 2011
Allan W. Trelease Graduate Fellowship, 2010-2011
Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Collection
Travel Grant, 2010
The Graduate School of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Summer Research Grant, 2008
Awards, Honors, and Appointments
Selected Participant, Slave Narratives Seminar at Yale University (The Gilder Lehrman Institute
of American History and the Council of Independent Colleges)
June 19-24, 2016
The Historical Society of North Carolina,
elected, 2015
Most Outstanding Junior Faculty Member, Gardner-Webb University (Rising Star Award)
2014-2015
Queen’s University Belfast, Department of History and Anthropology
Visiting Research Associate, Autumn Term 2010
University of Notre Dame, History Department
3
Visiting Scholar, Fall 2009
Atlantic World Research Network
Graduate Student Research Prize, 2008-2009
Invited Public Lectures and Presentations
“The Bicentennial Team: Robert Calhoon and Historians of the American Revolution” at the
Ulster-American Heritage Symposium, University of Georgia, June 24, 2014. Athens,
GA.
“The Covenanter Sensibility: Scotland’s Anti-Enlightenment Atlantic Export” at the University
of Edinburgh’s colloquium “Atlantic World Rhetorics.” March 19, 2012. Edinburgh,
Scotland.
“The Phanatick, the Magician, and the Cow: The variety of historical sources in the research
process,” presented at Elon University. Department of History and Geography. March,
2011. Elon, NC.
“Discovering Moderation in a Polarized Southern Religious and Political Landscape,” Panelist
remarks at the Center on Religion in the South Fall Forum. October, 2007, Columbia,
SC.
Panel Commentator
“An Atlantic Paradox: The Presbyterian Struggle with Slavery,” Consortium on the
Revolutionary Era 19-21 February, 2015. High Point University, High Point, NC.
Research Presentations
“The Porous Borders of Covenanter Identity in the Atlantic World,” September 13, 2014.
Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
“Covenanters and the Limits of Christian Nationalism in the Early Republic,” at the Society for
Historians of the Early Republic. July 21 2013. St. Louis, MO.
“Moderating Extremism: Irish Radicals Adapt to Slavery in the Early Republic,” as part of the
panel “How Should We Study the Middle?: Different Approaches to Historic
Moderation”. 2011 Organization of American Historians, Houston, TX. Panel
Organizer.
“Religion, Work and Politics in a Divided Community: Freedmen and -women in Reconstruction
Abbeville District, South Carolina. February 18-19, 2011. Fifth Annual New
Perspectives on African American History and Culture Conference, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Ulster Covenants, Southern Petitions: How Whites and Blacks Used Covenanter Rhetoric to
Moderate Slavery” as part of the panel “Holy Heritage: Covenanters in the Atlantic
World”. 2011 American Historical Association, Boston, MA. Panel Organizer.
“Black and White Millennialism and Providentialism in Antebellum Abbeville District, South
Carolina” at the Conference on Millennialism and Providentialism in the Era of the
American Civil War. October 2, 2010. Rice University, Houston, TX.
4
“Irish Nationalism, Southern Unionism, and Atlantic Slavery.” Presented at the American
Conference for Irish Studies, May 5, 2010. Pennsylvania State University, State College,
PA.
“Brick Masons, Methodists, and Republicans: Armed Self-Defense in Wimbushville, Abbeville
District in 1877.” Presented at the Conference on Race, Labor and Citizenship in the
Post-Emancipation South. March 12, 2010. College of Charleston, Charleston, SC.
“Slavery and Moderation in the South Carolina Upcountry” as part of the Colloquium on
Religion and American History (CORAH), October 14, 2009. University of Notre
Dame, Notre Dame, IN.
“A Necessary Middle: Reformed Presbyterians and Moderate Stances on Slavery in the South.”
Presented at the XVII Ulster-American Heritage Symposium. June, 2008, Omagh,
Northern Ireland.
Teaching Positions
2011-Present, Assistant Professor of US History (tenure-track), Gardner-Webb University
Slavery in the Atlantic
Making America: Colonial and Revolutionary America
American Christianity
The Long Civil Rights Movement
US History Survey
Western Civilization
Global Understanding
2010-2011, Instructor of Record, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
The Age of Democratic Revolutions
United States History to 1865
Unites States History post 1865
Research and Teaching Interests
Revolutionary America, the Early American Republic, Atlantic World, Religion
Mentored Student Awards and Publications
2017: Chris Beghul (Junior, Gardner-Webb University)
*Undergraduate Summer Research Scholar
*Gilder Lehrman History Scholar
*“The Curious Case of the Missing Concept: Third Gender in Nineteenth Century
American Historiography”
* “Politer Ladies: Cherokee Women’s Perspectives on Sex with European Men during
American Colonization”
Nominee: Best Paper Prize, Life of the Scholar Interdisciplinary Conference
2016: Elisabeth Moore (Ph.D. student, West Virginia University)
*Accepted into 4 graduate programs with full funding
*Undergraduate Research Summer Scholar
*“Northern Color Writers and the Creation of the Southern Appalachian Stereotype,
5
1865-1913”
presented at the Appalachian Studies Conference, 2016
*“Affrilachian agency and the Myth of Western North Carolina’s Racial Tranquility: the
Integration of Brevard High School”
R&R from The North Carolina Historical Review
presented at the Appalachian Studies Association annual meeting, 2016
nominated for Hugh T. Lefler Undergraduate Award (best historical study of North
Carolina from a North Carolina university)
2016: Sarah Lynch (Graduate Student in Museum Studies, University of Leicester, UK)
* “Boiling Springs, NC: A Community at Its Core” (Museum Exhibit)
* Also accepted to George Washington University
2016: Lindsay Frazier (Law student, UNC School of Law, Chapel Hill, with scholarship)
* “The Desegregation of Rutherfordton, NC”
* Accepted to four law schools, all with scholarship
2015: Stephanie McKellop (Ph.D. student at University of Pennsylvania, fully funded)
*“Marital and Sexual Non-Conformity in the Colonial Carolinas”
*Accepted into Ph.D. programs at Universities of Indiana, Maryland, Michigan,
Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, all with full funding
*Undergraduate Research Summer Scholar (competitive award to fund summer term
research agenda)
2014: Spencer Bevis (Town of Salisbury, NC)
*“Klansville, NC: the Desegregation of Salisbury, NC Schools”
*Life of the Scholar Interdisciplinary Conference, Outstanding Presentation Prize
2013: Madison Cates (Ph.D. student at the University of Florida, fully funded)
* “A Town Under Siege: Floyd McKissick’s Soul City and the Unmaking of the Black
Power-Moderate Republican Entente in North Carolina, 1972-1977”
2013: Virginia Priest (MLIS student at UNC, Chapel Hill, fully funded)
*“The American Revolution from the British Perspective”
* published in The Gardner-Webb Review, 2014
2012: Amy Snyder, (MLIS student at UNCG, with funding)
*“Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: A Window into North Carolina Slave Experiences”
*C.Y. Benedict Fellowship Paper Prize, 2013 ($2500 graduate school scholarship from
Alpha Chi Honors Society)
2011: Lindsay Kohl (accepted into Ph.D. program, UNCG, fully funded)
*“Defining the Natural Rights of Man: Burke, Paine, and Wollstonecraft”
* published in Explorations: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative
Activities for the State of North Carolina, Vol. VII
Book Reviews
Journal of Southern History
Journal of Southern Religion
6
North Carolina Historical Review
Center on Religion in the South
Professional Leadership
History Program Coordinator, 2015-present
Department Assessment Coordinator, 2015-present
Chair, Faculty Technology and Facilities Committee, 2015-2016.
Chair, General Education Committee, 2016-present
Chair, Department of Social Sciences, 2016-present
Professional Service
General Education Committee, 2015-present
Faculty Advisor, Release the Captives, a chapter of Historians Against Slavery: 2014-present
Faculty Technology and Facilities Committee, 2014-present
Chair, 2015-2016
Departmental Web Content Administrator: 2013-present
Curriculum Committee, Gardner-Webb University: 2012-2014
Honors Committee, Gardner-Webb University: 2012-2014
Co-leader of Coffee & Controversy, a weekly student discussion group (with Dr. Ben Gaskins,
Political Science): 2011-2013
Reviewer, Explorations, The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities for the
State of North Carolina, 2012-present
Professional Memberships
Organization of American Historians
American Historical Association
Southern Historical Association
Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
The Historical Society of North Carolina
Public Writings
Op-Ed: The State
“In shooter’s arrest, racism’s history lingers” (June 29, 2015)
7
Op-Ed: The New York Times
“Lincoln, God and the Constitution” Disunion, Civil War Commemoration Series
(December 4, 2014)
Extended Interview: The Shelby Star
“The history of the Confederate battle flag” (June 28, 2014)
Guest Posts: Teaching United States History (http://www.teachingushistory.co/)
“Teaching without textbooks (& requiring reading anyway)” (April 28, 2014)
“Writing together- class projects as learning experiences” (March 24, 2014)
“Musings on integrating the various histories” (February 24, 2014)
“Slavery research & undergraduate classrooms” (January 27, 2014)
“Teaching Civil Rights Research” (November 25, 2013)
“Twitter Failure” October 29, 2013
“In Defense of Sticking to the Schedule” (September 23, 2013)
Op-Ed: Greensboro News and Record
“Revisiting 1787 with Tea Party Fervency” (October 17, 2010)
Academic References
Charles Bolton, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. PO Box 26170, UNCG,
Greensboro, NC 27402-6170, (o) 336.334.5209, CCBOLTON@uncg.edu
Mark A. Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, University of Notre Dame, 219
O’Shaughnessy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, mnoll@nd.edu
Christopher Cameron, Associate Professor of History, The University of North Carolina at
Charlotte. 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, (o) 704.687.5134,
ccamer17@uncc.edu
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Print Marked Items
Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery
Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the
Constitution
Gideon Mailer
Journal of Southern History.
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p664+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution. By Joseph
S. Moore. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 214. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-
026924-1.)
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
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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 morality. Though their efforts often fell on deaf ears, their
contributions in antislavery work surely did not.
Gideon Mailer
University of Minnesota Duluth
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mailer, Gideon. "Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the
Constitution." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 664+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078124/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f7fd4f25.
Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078124
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Moore, Joseph S.: Founding sins: how a
group of antislavery radicals fought to put
Christ into the Constitution
C.H. Lippy
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.7 (Mar. 2016): p1072.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Moore, Joseph S. Founding sins: how a group of antislavery radicals fought to put Christ into the
Constitution. Oxford, 2015. 214p index afp ISBN 9780190269241 doth, $29.95; ISBN 9780190269258
ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-3206
BR516
CIP
Moore (history, Gardner-Webb Univ.) examines a neglected strand of the Presbyterian heritage rooted in the
Covenanter tradition of 17th-century Scotland. He probes how this Presbyterian fringe understood the
character of the American nation, noting that many on today's religious right insist that the US is a Christian
nation that has lost its roots. Moore's Covenanters believed that the Constitution made the US a secular
state, what Moore labels a "founding sin" because "we the people," not a covenant with God, formed the
body politic. Efforts to insert God into the Constitution made Convenanters anti-Federalists. Slavery was
another founding sin. Though not monolithic in views, most of this fringe rejected slavery. Convenanters
argued that the Bible allowed only direct descendants of ancient Hebrews to enslave direct descendants of
biblical slaves. Many endorsed the colonization movement. After the Civil War, this fringe fought for a
constitutional amendment to designate the US a Christian nation. Concentrated in the South, Covenanters
gradually lost their radical edge, morphing into political conservatives. Bibliographic notes represent a
quarter of this engaging book, one of value at all levels for persons interested in church-state relations and
US religious history. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.--C. H. Lippy, University
of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Lippy, C.H. "Moore, Joseph S.: Founding sins: how a group of antislavery radicals fought to put Christ into
the Constitution." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Mar. 2016, p. 1072. General
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Review: Founding Sins
Timothy L. Wesley
Timothy L. Wesley is Assistant Professor of History at Austin Peay State University.
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Timothy L. Wesley, "Review: Founding Sins," Journal of Southern Religion (18) (2016): jsreligion.org/vol18/wesley.
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Joseph S Moore. Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 232 pp. ISBN 9780190269241.
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In Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, Joseph S. Moore traces the American rise and fall in prominence and importance of the Covenanters. Presbyterians with ties chiefly to Scotland, Covenanters were convinced that nations should be established entirely in covenant with God. Having governed Scotland in the middle of the seventeenth century as a part of a Presbyterian alliance, Covenanters experienced persecution after being defeated by Cromwell’s English Puritan forces. “By the end of 1651,” Moore writes, “Scotland was defenseless, and the Covenanter alliance was a mere puppet for parliamentary rule out of Westminster” (20). By the time the “Glorious Revolution” (1688) made Presbyterianism safe again, the Covenanters had grown too radical even for their fellow Presbyterians throughout the realm. Harassed in the Old World and hopeful that immigration might occasion the creation of a sustainable yet sanctified state of their own, Covenanters “crossed the Atlantic and became America’s other Puritans” (8).
Thus it was that the Covenanters were on hand to participate in the ideological contest (and chaos) that was America’s founding. Patriots during the Revolution, they nevertheless soon maligned the Constitution as an unholy writ mandating oaths, legitimizing slavery, and most damnably, ignoring Jesus Christ. Having denigrated the nation’s “godless” founders, Covenanters next “took up arms against the federal government in the Whiskey Rebellion” (2). As that participation and other similar turns in the book make clear, Covenanters relentlessly challenged the legitimacy of secular power in America, convinced that any such authority was invalid. Covenanters were for example among the most vociferous members of the abolitionist chorus, zealously conservative participants in one of America’s most liberal movements. Their religious and political descendants continued their critique of the profane American state throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and if one looks hard enough, twentieth centuries. But their numbers and influence as “America’s original religious right” dwindled sharply over time (157). In their unfailingly condemnatory tone toward both competing faith traditions and America itself, fundamentalist Covenanters ultimately and all but completely alienated fellow religious reformers and liberal secularists alike.
Founding Sins is in many ways an exemplary history book. Thoroughly researched and skillfully crafted, it rescues these important players in America’s religious and political past from near anonymity. In so doing, its author weighs into the heated historiographical debate over the Christian or secular origins of the nation, a debate that is more than merely academic in the current political climate. And while some may take exception to the author’s critical consideration of contemporary conservative heritage rhetoric later in the book, there is really nothing that is biased or otherwise controversial in Moore’s recounting of the Covenanters’ tale. There doesn’t need to be. By telling the story of a group of religious activists who longed to establish the nation upon Christian principles and who, after failing in that effort, spent long decades bemoaning the nation’s innate godlessness, Moore leaves the Covenanters themselves to answer the “so what” question. Always a nation with lots of Christians in it perhaps, America was plainly not founded as a Christian nation. And that was assuredly not because the Covenanters, America’s original Christian nationalists, didn’t try.
Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution by Joseph S. Moore (review)
Ned Landsman
From: Journal of the Early Republic
Volume 37, Number 2, Summer 2017
pp. 387-390 | 10.1353/jer.2017.0033
University of Pennsylvania Press colophon
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Ned Landsman (bio)
Slavery, Antislavery, U.S. Constitution, Presbyterians, Christianity, Covenanters
Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution. By Joseph S. Moore. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 223. Cloth, $29.95.)
Founding Sins, by Joseph S. Moore, looks at the American outgrowths of Scotland's covenanting sects, those Presbyterians who split off from the established Church of Scotland and adhered to Scotland's seventeenth-century national covenants—the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant with England five years later. In those documents, Scots Presbyterians committed themselves to maintain the true religion at home and to reform the Church of England according to "the example of the best Reformed Churches." Most Scots would eventually abandon those commitments either at the Restoration or the "Glorious" Revolution. But a remnant retained their commitment to the documents and to the ideal of a Christian and Presbyterian state, suffering imprisonment, exile, and executions under the later Stuarts, and [End Page 387] remaining aloof as their fellow but uncovenanted Presbyterians regained control of the Scottish Kirk at the Revolution.
In recent years, several Scottish historians have given renewed attention to the later covenanters and the political traditions they inspired. That has not, until now, been accompanied by much discussion of their co-religionists in North America. To be sure, Gideon Mailer has recently explored links between the covenanting heritage and the political principles of one of America's Revolutionaries, John Witherspoon, and others have noted also the adoption of the terminology of "Solemn League and Covenants" by Massachusetts radicals. But neither Witherspoon nor the Massachusetts men followed the covenanters's literal insistence on the renewing of the covenants. Witherspoon in fact was a minister of the established Scottish Kirk against which the covenanters testified.
That neglect is not all that surprising. Covenanters were a collection of small sects, whose insistence on the necessity of state integration with the Church would seem to have been out of step with American views of religious liberty. Moreover, their commitment to upholding a very precise version of the Scottish past, one that happened long before and far away, kept their numbers low. Thus Moore has undertaken a substantial task for himself in not only recovering the story of those small groups but in insisting on their significance, as the "most important religious sect in American history that no one remembers today" (36). He succeeds surprisingly well in both telling and selling their story.
Among Moore's targets are current claims by the Christian right that America was established as a Christian nation, by founders supporting its subordination to a Christian God. Moore follows recent historians such as John Fea in discrediting such an ahistorical notion of what the founders actually thought they were about. Moore goes farther. Not only were the Founders not devoted to establishing a Christian nation, but their most fervent opponents were orthodox and conservative Christians who recognized that and castigated the new American government for having been created in sin. Indeed, some went so far as to denounce the legacy of the founders for their omission, including George Washington, with whom some of them clashed as well over his western land claims.
If many historians today would condemn the covenanters for such intolerance, they would be more sympathetic to covenanters' views of what they came to see as the other of the original sins of the Constitution: its acceptance of slavery. At a time when other conservative Christians were employing biblical literalism to justify slavery, covenanters followed [End Page 388] the same path to a different result. Yes, slavery was to be found in scripture, but so also were condemnations of man-stealing, hereditary punishments, and the like. Unless Christians could find evidence in the bible that either they or the slavery they practiced were the direct descendants of biblical slaveholders, covenanters contended, they had no warrant to hold slaves. And the differences they discovered were legion, from the planter's adoption of a lavish lifestyle to the absence of a jubilee year. Covenanters not only opposed slavery in their pronouncements but also worked on behalf of abolition and freedom...
Joseph S. Moore. Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution.
Joseph S. Moore . Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 214. $29.95.
Nicholas P. Miller
The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 4, 1 October 2016, Pages 1281–1282, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.4.1281
Published: 03 October 2016
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Joseph S. Moore’s new book is a reminder that history is at its best when it punctures our assumptions about both the present and the past. To do only one or the other makes history appear either overly presentist and preachy or purely antiquarian and irrelevant. Moore’s work calls into question the current claims of many “Christian America” advocates by pointing out that American is actually more overtly Christian today than it was at the founding. He also resurrects the story of a largely overlooked group of reformed radicals who were both highly Biblicist in their outlook, and very progressive in their racial politics, two views that were not often acknowledged as coexisting.
The Covenanters were America’s first Christian nationalists. With roots in Scotland and Ireland, they engaged with the issues of constitutionalism and slavery in the early American Republic. They were a branch of reformed Calvinist Protestantism, known for their strong commitment to a conservative literal reading of the Bible, a Presbyterian representative form of church government, and a political belief that the nation should be in covenant with God.
These beliefs were generally common in conservative Calvinist groups, but the Covenanters held them with a tenacity and doggedness that often exceeded that of their Calvinist brethren. Early American Calvinists, most of whom descended from the English Puritans, saw the importance of the magistrates working in concert with church leaders to bring spiritual and moral order to the community.
But where the Puritans and their descendants, beginning even with the iconic Jonathan Edwards, began to relax and move away from notions of a national covenant with God, the Covenanters clung to this belief with great vigor. As Moore shows, they were the original Christian America watchdogs, and what they saw in the new U.S. Constitution did not please them. Not only did it not mention Jesus Christ, but it also made no reference to God. Its only mention of religion was in the negative—a prohibition against creating a religious test for public office. Such a restriction would in practice thwart the ability to ensure a rule only by the godly, a basic requirement for any nation “in covenant” with God.
Moore documents the various efforts and battles the Covenanters undertook to alter these features of the Constitution, both at its creation and later on. In one episode, Covenant ministers came surprisingly close to convincing Abraham Lincoln to recommend an amendment adding an acknowledgment of God to the Constitution. Lincoln actually had the proposed language in a draft of his State of the Union address and removed it only when prevailed upon by his entire cabinet (120–122).
Despite Lincoln’s failure to support their crusade, the Covenanters continued their efforts. Shortly before the end of the Civil War, they formed a coalition of Christian conservatives that became known as the National Reform Association (NRA). The NRA focused on creating a “Christian Amendment” to the Constitution so that America’s relationship with God would be formally acknowledged. They also became involved in movements for Sunday sacredness laws, a movement that culminated in a successful effort to keep the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 closed on Sundays, and the introduction of Senator Henry Blair’s Sunday Rest Bill (1888) (136–137).
But mostly the NRA, as well as the Covenanters who spearheaded it, were known for their political failures. And it is here that Moore makes his greatest contribution by explaining how understanding history’s dead-end paths provides important insights into the meaning of current events. This history of failure provides context for the arguments of the neo-Christian Americans among us today, who would like to revise our nation in the form of a historical image that never was, at least outside Presbyterian Scotland and John Calvin’s Geneva. Our founders were very aware of these models and consciously and explicitly rejected them.
But we should also remember the Covenanter’s success regarding their surprising antislavery crusade because it also imparts important lessons. First, it teaches that historical understanding cannot be driven purely by the logic of beliefs or ideas. The Covenanters were somewhat unique among conservative Calvinist groups for their antislavery positions. Generally the Arminian and dissenting groups like the Methodists, Quakers, Moravians, and Free Will Baptists were antislavery. Jonathan Edwards himself was a slave-owner, and the Old School Presbyterians of the nineteenth century tended to support or at least defend slavery, whereas the New School believers, who adopted a free-will outlook, more generally opposed it.
The Covenanters’ unique combination of conservative Calvinism and vigorous antislavery appears to have come about through their experiences in Scotland and Ireland. The British engaged in “bond” slavery of Scottish royalists and Irish dissenters. In the mid-seventeenth century there were more “bond” slaves from Scotland and Ireland in the British New World than there were “chattel” slaves. This experience led the Covenanters to develop a rich theology of liberty and freedom that encompassed not just the spiritual, but the social and civil. This development, though, is not one of pure logic or ideology, but one that can only be understood in light of the unique experiences of the Covenanters (32–34).
Thus, the Covenanters’ story tells us that while our founders were suspicious of a formal link between Christianity and the government, the civil and natural moral views of religious people did play an important and central role in making our Constitutional framework what it is today. Those who use the anti-Christian America view of our founders as an argument against the use of moral-based public policy arguments go too far. In learning from the failure of the Covenanters, we cannot ignore the successes that they were a part of and which must inform our view of morality and government today.
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