Rev. Dr. Kevin DeYoung and Rev. James Baird, two teaching elders in the Presbyterian Church in America, have recently carried on a civil but substantive debate on the nature of the 1788 revisions to the Westminster Confession. Deyoung posits that American Presbyterians in the new United States “did not believe what the Westminster divines believed about the civil magistrate. They rejected an older, European model whereby the magistrate ensured that only the right religion (his religion) was practiced in the land.” If American Presbyterians in 1788 in particular wanted “to look to their confessional past for a model of church-state relations, they will have to determine if they are going back to London or back to Philadelphia. They cannot be in both places at the same time.” Baird sees more fundamental continuity between the 1788 Confession and the establishmentarian Reformers. American Presbyterians, Baird says, affirmed magistrate’s duty to “countenance the church, defend the church, and maintain the church, providing all things necessary for the souls of their people. These were beliefs held in common by both the Westminster Divines and the American Presbyterians.”
While at first glance DeYoung and Baird might seem to have irreconcilable proposals, I submit that both men are fundamentally correct. The Presbyterians at the 1788 meeting were not united on questions of political theology, any more than the Presbyterians at the 2025 PCA General Assembly are united on every aspect of cultural, intellectual, political, or religious life. To think differently is to treat presbyters as angels, rather than humans. In 1788, Presbyterians in the United States hailed from a variety of different cultural, social, and even political backgrounds. David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed provides good background on how diverse British Protestants were in the 18th Century. All the commissioners agreed on disestablishment, largely because disestablishment was aimed squarely at the Church of England, but they did not necessarily agree on the consequences of disestablishment. Presbyterians in the South, for example, had a distinctly more separationist bent than their northern brethren. Southern Presbyterians—the Scots-Irish that gave the country Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, and US Grant—loathed anything that smacked of Britain, and that included religious establishments. Those same southern Presbyterians turned into Francophile Jeffersonians and celebrated the French Revolution to a degree that horrified their northern, and often Federalist, counterparts. One South Carolina Presbyterian continued to celebrate the French Revolution even after the Terror began. In 1794 James Malcolmson praised “the latest instance” of man’s God-ordained struggle for full civil and religious liberty, “the REVOLUTION IN FRANCE, which has been joyful to upwards of 25,000,000 pleasing to every friend of liberty, and humanity—and astonishing to all the world. THIS DAY being the 14th of July, calls up to our minds the destruction of the Bastille that place devoted for the innocent victims of tyrannic fury.” Five years had elapsed, “since that happy and astonishing event took place; and as friends of the human race we rejoice at the deliverance. In this happy revolution we acknowledge the hand of God and remember the day on which our fellow-men were delivered from the enemy.” This southern divine stated flatly that in France’s revolutionary struggle he saw the “sacred influence of sympathy, and Christianity teaches us to ‘rejoice with those who do rejoice, as well as to weep with those who weep.’” But even some southern Presbyterians had reservations about the degree to which state and church were no shared their historical fraternity. Patrick Calhoun, a Presbyterian ruling elder and father of the southern statesman John Calhoun, wondered aloud if the new constitution granted too much latitude in matters of religion.
Federalist northern Presbyterians mixed politics and religion more readily than their southern comrades, and saw disestablishment in a different light than southern Presbyterians. The removal of the establishmentarian principle at the federal level did not, particularly for New Englanders and New Yorkers, mean the overturning of the older understanding of the state’s relationship to religion. Civil rulers were still understood by northern Congregationalists and Presbyterians to be divine ministers. Election sermons, for example, remained common in northern states, as did more aggressive enforcement of blasphemy laws compared to southern states. The Reformational pattern, at least in New England, New Jersey, and New York, largely stayed put. John Fea notes that New Jersey’s new constitution under the American republic “codified the existing pattern of church-state relations in the colony” which had been in place since the 17th Century.
The 1788 meeting of Presbyterians in Philadelphia had widely divergent beliefs on political theology and politics. Near-establishmentarians gathered with Jacobin sympathizers. There was never a unitary motivation for the revisions. Baird and DeYoung both present motivations that were certainly reflected by the various commissioners at the 1788 meeting, and therefore hold positions that are not in fundamental disagreement with each other.