What does it mean to be an American? As we reflect on our nation’s semi-quincentennial, the meaning of American identity demands renewed attention. For generations, we have looked backward to the ideals and events of the Founding to understand our origins and, consequently, our future as heirs of this distinctive creedal nation. Yet looking only at the events of the Revolution, without seeing them in light of our nation’s deeper covenantal roots, one fails to grasp the exceptionalism that lies at the very heart of American identity. The Founders did more than draft a contract, transactional and revocable, in the manner of Enlightenment secularism. Rather, they sealed a covenant that was older, deeper, and more binding than any Lockean agreement between the government and the governed. Only by recovering the meaning of that covenant – and what it asks of us in return – can we comprehend not just what the Founding meant, but who we, as Americans, are still called to become.
When examining seventeenth and eighteenth century political thought, scholars often begin with John Locke, whose social contract theory envisioned government and the governed as separate parties, bound only by mutual consent. Yet America’s founding documents chart a strikingly different course. The Declaration of Independence does not merely establish a contract between colonies and colonists. Rather, it invokes a higher authority, the divine, thereby diverging from the secular logic of contracts entirely. This departure has deep roots of its own. As historian Eric Nelson observes, Hebraic political theology had, for a century before the Founding, challenged Europe’s contractarian tradition, carrying echoes of God’s covenant with Israel. Even Thomas Hobbes, no champion of republican ideals, engaged this tradition in Leviathan, referencing the promise God renewed with Israel at Sinai writing, “I will reign over you, and make you to stand to that Covenant which you made with me by Moses.” Read in this light, the Declaration appears not as a contract, but as a covenant — an enduring promise sworn by the Founders before God Himself, binding their heirs, including us, to an eternal sovereign. This covenant proclaims that our rights originate not from earthly kings but from the King of Kings, and that no temporal authority, however mighty, can rescind what Heaven has bestowed.
This pattern of covenant reaches far beyond the American experiment, tracing its roots to the earliest chapters of Biblical antiquity. God’s covenants with Noah, Abraham, and Moses forged intimate bonds between the Lord and His people. Throughout the centuries, these bonds were repeatedly tested, broken, and ultimately renewed. Their endurance across generations stemmed not merely from the agreement itself, but from the way it was handed down: not by statute or decree, but through story, ritual, and collective memory. Each generation, inheriting this legacy, assumed both its privileges and obligations anew.
America’s inaugural covenant crossed the Atlantic more than a century before the Declaration, aboard a modest merchant ship, the Mayflower. In 1620, a little over one hundred English Separatists, known by posterity as Pilgrims, set sail for the New World fleeing religious persecution. Their journey echoed that of the Israelites fleeing bondage in Egypt – seeking freedom not only from persecution, but freedom toward a promised land of their own. After sixty-six grueling days at sea, they drafted the Mayflower Compact while anchored off the shore of Cape Cod. Despite fears of the hardships ahead, the Pilgrims pledged themselves to one another and to God in explicitly covenantal terms, vowing to “covenant and combine ourselves together in a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid.” That covenantal doctrine did not disappear with these Separatists. More than 150 years later, it echoed in the lecture-halls and pulpits of Princeton’s Rev. John Witherspoon, who taught early American statesmen, preachers, and Founders that political society itself was an everlasting covenant made before God.
The chords of this covenantal thread only strengthened with time. When George Washington assumed the presidency, the promise first sealed aboard the Mayflower had inspired a new covenant forged in revolution. In October 1789, at the request of Congress, Washington issued the first national Thanksgiving Proclamation, calling on Americans to set aside a day “to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.” Here was a covenant renewed in the most public terms available to the young republic, delivered by a president, not a preacher, summoning a diverse and fragmented people together to bind them as one nation in gratitude to the Lord.
Yet, even the noblest covenants are vulnerable to distortion. When severed from their original restraint and purpose, they can devolve into the very idolatry they were meant to prevent. If history teaches us anything, it is that people have an innate need to worship something. During the American Founding, this worship was often channeled toward monarchs. Commentaries like Nelson’s pose the historical argument that monarchies are either sinful or at least not pleasing to God, because they usurp our purpose to worship the Almighty and instead direct it to lesser rulers. Theories founded in the Devarim Rabbah condemned monarchy as a sin because it requires subjects “[to bow] down to flesh and blood instead of God, and is therefore tantamount to idolatry.” Analyzing this tradition, Nelson goes so far as to compare the idol of monarchs to an “empt[y] … desert mirage,” citing Psalm 146:3: “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”
The crown, in other words, was never merely a political office. It was a rival altar, and every subject who knelt before it stole reverence away from God and elevated the pedestal upon which man was never meant to sit. America’s revolutionaries boldly proclaimed this in their antimonarchical writings and political sermons, among them Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Rev. Witherspoon’s The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men. According to these authors, and the Patriots they influenced, dethroning a king was an act of reclaiming the devotion that rightfully belonged to Heaven alone. In breaking free from monarchy, the Founders sought to create a nation grounded in a different kind of unity — one that drew its strength from a shared covenant.
This is at the heart of American exceptionalism. Differences in beliefs, backgrounds, and ancestries were built into the very foundation of our covenant. We must allow ourselves to truly embrace our nation’s de facto motto, that out of many there is one.
Washington understood this when he secured liberty of conscience even as he fostered national unity. Our covenant is capacious enough to welcome the Puritan, the Catholic, the Quaker, the Jew, the skeptic, and the stranger, so long as each is willing to be bound by its generational promise in return. Thus, alongside religious liberty and our claims to individuality, we must also embrace the exceptionalism of America.
The question of American identity is not new. It has been deliberated, discussed, and transformed throughout our nation’s history, and it has once again resurfaced in our present debates over birthright citizenship. At the center of that debate is the same question our Founders wrestled with: is American identity a matter of birth alone, or is it a matter of covenant, an everlasting promise one ascribes to, and is in turn bound by? Our tradition teaches that heritage is not determined by blood but by the inheritance of our covenant, a promise defined in our founding texts that makes us direct descendants of the nation’s exceptional legacy. Like this divine oath, our identity must be passed down from generation to generation and taught to all citizens, both newly arrived and long-established. Our covenantal bond must be renewed, lest we forget who we are and allow the ties of our founding to dissolve.
To keep this identity alive, we must remember that freedom and covenant are inseparable. Both must be nurtured if they are to endure. Washington understood that a covenantal nation could bind its people together only if it also refused to coerce their conscience. The strength of the covenant depended on keeping freedom and commitment together. Two hundred and fifty years later, we have allowed one side to weaken. We remember liberty but neglect the promise it was meant to secure. A people no longer bound by a common oath to God or to one another cannot remain free. Freedom without covenant curdles into license. Covenant without liberty hardens into tyranny.
At our nation’s anniversary, we must recognize the need to return to our founding principles if we are to endure the next 250 years. To be a covenantal nation is to be, as Abraham Lincoln said, “blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh” of our founding generation. Their sacrifice and their liberty are our own. The future of America depends on how faithfully we carry our past into the renewal of our covenant today.
Image Credit: Embarkation of the Pilgrims (1857); Robert Walter Weir – Wikimedia Commons
Copyright © 2026 The Princeton Tory. All rights reserved.