Four-hundred years after those brave and bold Pilgrims thanked God for His care as they built Plymouth guided by their constitution called the Mayflower Compact, this Thanksgiving Christians should celebrate God’s goodness and trust Him to continue caring for them.

Over four-hundred years after the Pilgrims celebrated God’s preservation of their lives through a difficult winter and his gracious gift of an abundant harvest in the spring of 1621, the United States will once again have its annual holiday of Thanksgiving on November 27, 2025. As this holiday is remembered, it is timely to recount the founding of the nation and its relationship to American Presbyterians and the Christian influences on the nation as seen in the body politic known as the Pilgrims of Plymouth. A key factor common to both the nation and the Presbyterian Church is that each is governed by a constitution. According to Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, a constitution is—

The established form of government in a state, kingdom or country; a system of fundamental rules, principles and ordinances for the government of a state or nation. In free states, the constitution is paramount to the statutes or laws enacted by the legislature, limiting and controlling its power; and in the United States, the legislature is created, and its powers designated, by the constitution.

Webster expressed the definition well as it was understood within his historical context. He descibed the political aspects of the term which emphasize that a constitution defines and limits what legislators can do, but then he goes on to give alternate definitions,

A particular law, ordinance, or regulation, made by the authority of any superior, civil or ecclesiastical; as the constitutions of the churches; the novel constitutions of Justinian and his successors. [then the next alternate] A system of fundamental principles for the government of rational and social beings.

A constitution is the source of authority for the government of rational and social beings whether in a political, ecclesiastical, or any other body of individuals desiring government limited by a definitive and final authority. There are republican similarities between the political body that is the United States government and the ecclesiastical body that is the Presbyterian Church. Elders rule within the sessions of ecclesiastical parishes and gather for meetings in presbyteries and synods that constitute the general assembly. The general assembly then deliberate issues of common church interest; senators and representatives gather in their respective chambers for legislative purposes while representing their political parishes.

In 1789, the United States and the Presbyterian Church experienced important events relative to their constitutions. Ratification of The Constitution of the United States  had been completed the previous year when nine of the thirteen states voted in favor of the document with the ninth state, New Hampshire, casting the deciding vote June 21, 1788. Per the Constitution, George Washington was elected the first president of the United States and he took the oath of office April 30, 1789 (postponed from the stipulated date due to bad weather) while standing on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York before a great crowd. Washington was concerned that the populace might view him as a king and he took seriously the constitutional limitations on his power while realizing as the first holder of the first office that his actions would set precedents. His popularity is clearly visible because he received all sixty-nine votes of the Electoral College. The national constitution defined and restrained power through a republican representation of the people in Congress and a system of checks and balances on the power of the three branches—executive, legislative, and judicial.

Three weeks after General Washington was inaugurated president, the First General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America was convened by John Witherspoon in Second Church, Philadelphia. The assembly elected John Rodgers moderator to replace aging and ailing Convener Witherspoon at the podium. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America stipulates Scripture is the primary standard of the denomination with its confessional standard the Westminster Confession of Faith and associated catechisms, to which are added the tertiary documents of the Form of Government and Discipline and the Directory for the Worship of God. This constitution had been ratified (the word used in the minutes) May 28, 1788 with its publication assigned to local printer of note, Thomas Bradford, who made the books available in 1789 after some troubles getting it to press. The introduction to the Form of Government states that the source of all authority is Scripture and the purpose of Presbyterian constitutional law is to restrain those who shepherd and serve the church as ministers, ruling elders, and deacons. The following is from the introduction to the Form of Government,

That all Church power, whether exercised by the body in general, or, in the way of representation, by delegated authority, is only ministerial and declarative: That is to say, that the Holy Scriptures are the only rule of faith and manners; that no Church judicatory ought to pretend to make laws, to bind the conscience, in virtue of their own authority; and that all their decisions should be founded upon the revealed will of God: Now though it will easily be admitted, that all Synods and Councils may err, through the frailty inseparable from humanity; yet there is much greater danger from the usurped claim of making laws, than from the right of judging upon laws already made, and common to all who profess the Gospel; although this right, as necessity requires in the present state, be lodged with fallible men. (page cxxxv)

Both the United States and the Presbyterian Church constitutions establish the importance of law to limit their actions, with the Presbyterians having the added direction to not make laws that bind the conscience by requiring obedience to what is not clearly taught in Scripture. An interesting similarity of the U.S. Constitution with the Presbyterian one is the national one was composed when revision of the Articles of Confederation was abandoned, and the Westminster Confession of Faith was composed when revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England was abandoned. Does this show that intentions to revise inevitably lead to re-composition?—something to keep in mind when considering revision of constitutions whether they be those of church or state.

The Presbyterian Church was an important influence in the era as the years of the eighteenth century drew to an end. In the seventeen eighties the number of Presbyterian churches was second only to those of the Congregationalists. The two denominations are named for their presbyterian and congregational systems of church government, but they had a common confessional bond in the theology of the Westminster Confession (at least in theory). Presbyterian and Congregational churches combined to constitute over forty percent of the nation’s churches. If there had been a state church, it may have had the Westminster Confession for its standard of essential Scriptural doctrine.

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