The "Moral Duty" of Public Covenanting: Old World Response to New World Exigencies

This paper is a case study of cultural adaptation—and resistance to adaptation—among immigrants to the United States during the antebellum period. I will examine Presbyterians from the north of Ireland who attempted to recreate their particular ethnoreligious culture upon settlement in transmontane Pennsylvania. Adjustments to life in the United States, itself undergoing political transformation and market revolution, provoked particular responses and strains as transplanted Irish Presbyterians renewed—and constructed—their sense of identity. The Reformation in Scotland and two foundational documents of the Scottish reformed church (the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643) helped define the content and contours of their religious belief in Ireland and America. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the willingness of new-world Presbyterians to engage in social covenanting—the public pledges of individuals as a congregation to each other and God— served as an indication of adherence to old-world values and an indication of resistance to cultural adaptation. Even as social covenanting fell into disuse in the north of Ireland, eighteenth-century immigrants in western Pennsylvania revived the practice. These examples appear as a reaction to threatened erosion of the traditional ecclesiastical polity. Smaller Presbyterian denominations disproportionately favored by recent Irish immigrants, covenanting represented both a moral duty and an indispensable marker of ethnoreligious identity. This paper will 1) examine the record of social covenanting in western Pennsylvania in the early national period and 2) explain how differences over this issue frustrated attempts in the 1820s to unify two smaller, traditionalist Presbyterian denominations. The failed merger between the Associate and Associate Reformed Synods is ultimately a debate about the requirements of an American church, revealing the tension between old-world principles and new-world realities.