Disestablishment by the middle of the 19th century led to an ecclesiocentric order in the South, where practical secularism had been the norm during the Enlightenment-influenced 18th century. In the 19^th century South, secular politics created the conditions for a disestablished dominion of unparalleled ecclesiastical socio-political influence.

What did the Presbyterians who met in 1788 intend regarding political theology? If the amended Confession did fundamentally change the church’s ostensible relationship to the state, did even a conception of the federal (or national) government that was explicitly secular nonetheless leave room underneath-in municipalities, states, and in other socio-cultural institutions for a diversity of approaches to political theology? My proposition is to answer yes, and to propose what I hope is a useful taxonomy to understand the development of the political theology within the United States in the 19th century.

Between the federal Constitution’s promulgation and Massachusetts’s disestablishment of its state church in 1833, Reformed Protestant communities could be organized into three relatively distinct theopolitical tribes:

1. New England’s waning pseudo-theocracy, complete with establishmentarian constitutions, legally sanctioned tithes, and state supported churches and clerics.
2. The Middle State’s Whiggish cultural establishmentarianism, that presumed a Christian social and political order and the state’s rhetorical—but not politically establishmentarian—affirmation of that order.
3. An aggressively Aristotelian South per William Goetzmann, where the lack of churches and a history of Anglican establishmentarianism bred forceful anticlericalism and a reliance on natural law and natural rights over Biblical political prescriptions. Bertram Wyatt-Brown described the South as an almost primeval and pagan political society that was nonetheless informed by Biblical folk-culture.

Two recent examples from Presbyterian ministers—James Baird’s King of Kings and Alan Strange’s Empowered Witness—provide examples of good faith engagements with 19th century political theology that nonetheless miss the mark on the theopolitical imagination of the Early Republic and Civil War Era. Baird’s King of Kings lays out a compelling case for what he sees is the necessity of government support for the Christian religion rendered from the Westminster Confession and American Presbyterian history. Baird is certainly right that Presbyterians in the Middle States presumed that the government would rhetorically affirm Christianity. But he carries this too far and seems to make it a case for government politically ensuring Christianity through by state action, a notion that was widely and ferociously rejected in the Early Republic by every major Protestant group except for Unitarian-influenced New England. His assertion that the Founding generation continued to see government as nursing father of religion in continuity with previous generations of Protestant thinker is problematic, precisely because the magistrate’s participation in the ecclesiastical order was what the Revolutionary generation wanted to curtail; the fact that they were not aggressive secularists did not mean they accepted the magistrate’s role in ecclesiastical governance or even survival.

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