Early indications of the difference that a constitutional republic made for Presbyterianism came when in 1789 The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America revised the Westminster confession and catechisms’ clauses on the civil magistrate. The original version’s conception of the ruler posited a kind of Constantine with responsibility to keep the church faithful. Those 1640s commissioners to the Westminster Assembly described the magistrate’s duty as taking “order, that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire; that all blasphemy and heresy be suppressed; all corruption and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed; and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed.” Those same divines may very well have had Constantine in mind when they added that the magistrate had power “to call synods, to be present at them, and to provide whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God” (Westminster Confession, 23.3).

The Westminster Assembly’s conception was clearly a tall order with Charles I on the throne, but now with George Washington as president of the federal government, who was an Anglican of sufficiently soft conviction to also join the Masons, Presbyterians recognized the time-bound character of the Westminster Confessions chapter on civil government. For that reason, they revised it to be compatible with the principles of disestablishment, free exercise, and voluntarism, both explicit and implied in the U.S. Constitution. For the American church, civil magistrates now functioned as “nursing fathers” who were responsible “to protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest.” In case anyone thought this statement merely recognized the plurality of Protestant denominations in the new nation, the revision also asserted that magistrates were bound to “protect the person and good name of all their people” such that no one should suffer any “indignity, violence, abuse, or injury” on the basis of “religion or infidelity.” It almost went without saying that the civil government should also protect “all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies” from “molestation or disturbance” (revised Westminster confession, 23.3).

D. G. Hart, Protestants and Patriots: Presbyterians in the Age of Revolution (University of Notre Dame, 2026), 236.

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