Puritan Covenant

Religious image, scripture, and doctrine provided individuals in Colonial America with an ideal representation of the understanding of their desires within a divine order. In the United States, political culture is based in a religious ideology through which individuals acquire within themselves a rational ordering of their desires. In doing so they achieve, in several forms, an undivided amalgamation of rational and natural interests. The religious life of Puritans is fundamentally introspective and in almost always related to representation. Ethical life, while based in religion, cannot be reduced to religion alone when examining emergence of the American state. Civic institution, in its traditions and laws makes explicit the objective rationality of the subject, the fundamental principle and right of an enlightened self-consciousness.
In America, the religious roots of the state are given explicitly rational form in Enlightenment thought. There is a remarkable transition from a...