America as Zion: A Nation Founded By Replacement Theology

It is impossible to understand the religion of America's founders, without grasping their embrace of a Covenantal hermeneutic

It’s become an annual tradition—equal parts sacred and sentimental. Fireworks crackle overhead, Lee Greenwood blares through Bluetooth speakers, and well-meaning Christians across the country proudly announce that “America was founded as a Christian nation.” And for once, they’re right.

But then they stop short.

Because as true as that statement is, it’s only the first half of the story. The other half—the part that actually matters, the part that makes modern evangelicals squirm—is this: America wasn’t just founded by Christians. It was founded by men who believed America was the New Israel. They saw themselves not as allies to God’s covenant people in the Middle East, but as God’s covenant people themselves.

That’s not speculation. That’s the theology that saturated the sermons, declarations, and founding philosophy of the colonies. It wasn’t Christian Zionism. It wasn’t Scofield claptrap. It was Reformed, covenantal, and explicitly supersessionist. The Founders believed the promises made to Abraham belonged to those in Christ—and that unbelieving Jews, like all Christ-rejecting nations, were outside the covenant.

And yet, try saying that in a modern evangelical church and see what happens. The moment you point out that the Founders held to what would now be labeled “Replacement Theology,” you’re treated like a heretic, an anti-Semite, or a fringe radical. Even as they sing about America’s Christian roots, today’s patriotic pastors fumble through theology that the Founders would’ve rejected as sentimental garbage.

Senator Ted Cruz recently sat across from Tucker Carlson and said, plainly, that he believes the Abrahamic promise applies to modern Israelis. Despite not being able to recall where in the Bible it was located, he was sure that - for some reason - Christians owe something to the inhabitants of Palestine thanks to God’s promise to Abraham, despite Talmudic Jews rejecting God’s Son and despite Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews (the majority of Israel’s inhabitants, being unrelated to Abraham genetically. Within hours of the interview, Cruz was in donor circuit mode, promising unconditional support to Israel as if the cross never happened and Romans 11 was a scratch-off ticket for political favor.

It was an interesting news cycle, with new convert, Steve Bannon, firing back a moderately accurate rebuttal on the New Covenant replacing the Old, and although not terribly articulate, was an accurate reflection of the Bible’s teaching. I’m not sure how many of today’s Christians understand how profound this debate is, or precisely how amazing it is that the debate is happening in public (and the public cares).

THE FOUNDERS’ CHRISTIAN VS DISPENSATIONAL KOOKERY

David Barton has made a name for himself by chronicling America’s Christian heritage—and in fairness, he’s done good work documenting forgotten sermons, quotes, and creeds that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Founders were committed to biblical truth. He’s recovered the voices of men like Witherspoon and Langdon and has reminded a generation of Christians that the First Amendment was never meant to banish God from the public square.

But Barton has a fatal flaw, and it’s not a small one. While he loves to remind us that America was founded on Christian principles, he simultaneously preaches a theology those same founders would’ve spit out like lukewarm tea.

With one hand, Barton waves the banner of Christian America. With the other, he shovels out the propaganda of Scofield Zionism, insisting that the Abrahamic promise in Genesis 12:3 requires the United States to give blind support to the modern Israeli state—regardless of its apostasy, blasphemy, or rejection of Christ. And although I might have missed it, I’ve not heard Barton yet explain that the Founders would have strongly rejected the notions of dispensationalism, if it had even been invented yet while they were living (it was invented decades after America’s founding, and not popularized until more than a century after.

Barton knows what the Founders believed. He has read their sermons. He has published their letters. He has quoted their pulpits. He has, by his own hand, documented their covenantal theology. So how on earth does he turn around and preach the exact opposite of what they confessed?

Barton speaks often of America’s “Judeo-Christian” heritage, a term that, had the Founders heard, would have mocked as an oxymoron. The term came along long after the concept, which itself is not old. The term is a genius piggy-back of a tiny group of people (less than one percent) who have found a way to attach themselves to one of the world’s most prominent religions. The concept that Talmudic Judaism is somehow similar to Christianity, or that their values are similar, is one of pure fiction - something that was realized byAmerica’s Founders who were no dummies when it came to religion.

The Founders did not believe in two peoples of God. They did not believe in a geopolitical plan for unbelieving Jews. They did not believe that God would bless America for defending a Christ-denying nation. They believed that the promises of God were fulfilled in Christ and extended to His people—the Church, which they saw as visibly manifested in a righteous nation ordered under divine law. That nation, in their eyes, was America.

Not because of race. Not because of land. But because of covenant.

They saw themselves as the New Israel, not as Israel’s Gentile cheerleaders. They viewed the Revolution as an Exodus. They believed the Atlantic crossing was their Red Sea. They believed the king of England was Pharaoh. They preached that if America obeyed God’s law, it would be blessed, and if it rebelled, it would perish. They weren’t just borrowing imagery. They were declaring typological fulfillment.

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And that belief system is utterly incompatible with the Scofieldism Barton promotes. It is incompatible with the dual-covenant theology promoted by John Hagee and most of America’s prophecy industry. It is incompatible with the idea that America’s chief calling is to underwrite a secular nation state filled with synagogues that blaspheme the name of Christ.

BARTON’S THEOLOGY IS A FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER

What Barton has done is create a Frankenstein theology—stitched together from Puritan covenantalism, patriotic nostalgia, and Zionist talking points. The result is a monster that claims the fruit of Christian nationalism while denying the root of biblical covenant.

The Founders weren’t confused. They believed in a God who judged nations. They believed in Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of every covenant promise. They believed that liberty was the blessing of a people living under God’s law. And they believed that America had been given a chance—a chance—to become a righteous nation under Christ, like Israel once was.

But the blessings of Abraham weren’t to be found in foreign policy toward Tel Aviv. They were to be found in fearing God, keeping His commandments, and proclaiming the Lordship of Christ over every square inch of public and private life. That’s what the Founders believed. That’s what they preached. That’s what they bled for.

And that’s what the evangelical Zionist machine has buried under a mountain of Star of David lapel pins and Genesis 12:3 out-of-context bumper stickers.

IT’S TIME TO ASK AN INCONVENIENT QUESTION

As the war in Gaza reignites American attention toward Israel, and as the political right once again scrambles to virtue-signal its loyalty to the Israeli flag, the time has come to ask an inconvenient but necessary question:

If America was truly founded as a Christian nation, then whose theology did the Founders believe? Was it the Scofield Bible and its modern political stepchildren? Or was it the theology of covenant, judgment, obedience, and national accountability before a holy God?

The answer is obvious. But to accept it requires something evangelicals aren’t used to offering: repentance.

What I’m about to do will be to lay out the historical, theological, and documentary evidence that the Founders believed America to be the New Israel. It will show that this belief—far from being some vague metaphor—shaped their political theory, their sermons, their legal structures, and their view of divine blessing and national identity. It will demonstrate, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Christian Nationalism—not Zionism—was the founding theological framework of the United States.

And it will show that those who attempt to merge these two systems—like David Barton—are either dishonest, deluded, or both.

Because if America is the New Israel, then there is no room for an Old Israel that bypasses Christ. There is no room for divided loyalty. And there is no room for blessing those who reject the Son of God while our own nation burns from the inside out.

No king but King Jesus. No covenant but the one He ratified in His blood. And no future for this nation unless we return to Him.

THEOLOGICAL CONFUSION

In an age of theological confusion and geopolitical sentimentality, modern Americans—especially evangelical Christians—have been conditioned to believe that God’s special blessing remains irrevocably tethered to ethnic Israel, and that modern Jews, regardless of faith, still carry the divine mandate for national destiny. This is the cornerstone of dispensationalist fantasy, a system barely older than the telegraph, birthed in the 19th century by John Nelson Darby and popularized through Scofield’s study Bible and modern prophecy culture.

But America wasn’t founded by dispensationalists. It wasn’t founded by Christian Zionists. It wasn’t even founded by men who believed the Jewish people, apart from Christ, still stood within God’s covenant. No—the American Founders, and especially the generations of Puritans, Calvinists, and preachers who laid the foundation for the Revolution, believed something far more radical:

AMERICA WAS THE NEW ISRAEL

The Founders weren’t shy about it. They didn’t spiritualize it. They proclaimed it, published it, and structured their political theory around it. They believed that just as ancient Israel covenanted with God under Moses, so too had they—a new people in a new land—entered into covenant with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But unlike Old Israel, this covenant would be built on the completed work of Jesus Christ. And the blessings and curses of Deuteronomy 28 were just as relevant to Boston as they had once been to Bethel.

This wasn’t metaphor. It was national self-consciousness. Without this belief, there would have been no American Revolution—no Declaration of Independence, no appeal to divine justice, no covenantal framework for liberty. Let’s explore how this theology shaped the American founding—and why it utterly rejects modern dispensationalist fables.

THE FOUNDERS’ VIEW OF AMERICA AS NEW ZION

The idea that America was a New Israel begins long before 1776. It begins aboard a ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

In 1630, John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered a sermon aboard the Arbella titled A Model of Christian Charity. In it, he warned his fellow Puritan settlers:

“We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

This was no random metaphor. Winthrop was explicitly drawing from Matthew 5:14, in which Jesus tells His disciples they are the light of the world. But Winthrop, and the entire Puritan movement, interpreted this not just ecclesiastically—but nationally.

The Puritans believed that England had failed as a covenant nation. They had fled its apostasy and persecution just as Israel had fled Egypt. The Atlantic was their Red Sea. The New World was their Promised Land. And they, the remnant of the faithful, would now constitute the New Israel if—if—they kept covenant with God.

Winthrop warned:

“If we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken... we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.”

That’s not Enlightenment humanism. That’s Deuteronomy 11:17 theology. The Puritans didn’t see themselves as colonists—they saw themselves as covenant heirs. The Mosaic covenant was now being applied—not to Jews under the Torah—but to Christians under Christ’s lordship, establishing a righteous nation governed by God’s law and upheld by national repentance.

John Cotton, a leading Puritan minister, explicitly declared that New England was to be “a nation of visible saints,” and compared the Puritans’ journey across the Atlantic to Israel’s exodus.

“The Lord made a way for us through the Red Sea (our passage through the great sea) and gave us an entrance into a land not inhabited, like the Israelites’ possession of Canaan.”
(God’s Promise to His Plantation, 1630)

Rev. Jonathan Trumbull Sr., governor of Connecticut, called the “Brother Jonathan” by George Washington, urged national repentance in terms drawn straight from the prophetic literature:

“Behold how the Lord dealeth with a sinful people. Let us consider our ways and turn again to the Lord. If we return unto Him, He will return unto us, as He hath promised His Israel.”

Presbyterian minister, John Witherspoon, signer of the Declaration, president of Princeton preached in a sermon titled “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men” (1776):

“If your cause is just—you may look with confidence to the Lord and entreat Him to plead it as His own. You are all my children; you are the seed of Abraham, and heirs of the promises.”

In A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765), John Adams praised the early colonists:

“They looked upon themselves as a chosen generation, a royal priesthood.”

Rev. Jacob Duché (1737–1798) Chaplain to the Continental Congress, preached in a 1776 sermon:

“No temporal blessings are to be compared with national liberty... We are now acting the same part which once distinguished the highly-favored Israelites — we have fled from oppression and are pursuing the path of freedom.”

For brevity, here are the shortened quotes from above:

John Adams: “They looked upon themselves as a chosen generation, a royal priesthood.”

John Cotton: “Our passage through the great sea is as Israel’s through the Red Sea.”

Samuel Langdon: “Expect the same divine vengeance which punished Israel.”

Ezra Stiles: “Behold... the hand of God, as in the deliverance of Israel from Egypt.”

Jacob Duché: “We are now acting the same part which once distinguished the highly-favored Israelites.”

These expressions and arguments are not compatible with Dispensational theology, but are an affront to it.

AMERICAN EXODUS: THE POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF DELIVERANCE

Fast-forward a century, and this same theology had saturated the political imagination of the colonies. The Great Awakening had reinforced it. The preachers of the mid-18th century thundered against tyranny not with French slogans, but with Old Testament texts.

Rev. Jonathan Mayhew—a Congregationalist pastor and key influence on revolutionary thought—delivered a sermon in 1750 that laid the theological groundwork for resisting the Crown. Preaching on Romans 13, Mayhew argued:

“Tyranny is too lustful and monstrous to be the ordinance of God.”

But more importantly, he placed this resistance in the Exodus tradition. The King of England, like Pharaoh, had oppressed God’s people. Rebellion was not merely justified—it was righteous, if it flowed from covenantal fidelity and fear of God.

This theological frame wasn't fringe. It was the mainstream. From Patrick Henry to Samuel Adams, from Ezra Stiles to John Witherspoon, the American revolutionary class spoke in biblical terms—not because they were engaging in rhetorical flourish, but because they believed it.

In a 1783 sermon celebrating the Treaty of Paris and the end of the war, Rev. Ezra Stiles declared:

“We may be led to behold in this event the hand of God, as in the deliverance of Israel from Egypt, and to acknowledge our dependence upon Heaven for national blessings.”

Israel was the type. America was the fulfillment.

When Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, he invoked a Creator, a Supreme Judge, and Divine Providence. While modern scholars interpret this as generic Enlightenment Deism, it was received by the colonial public as something very different: a national covenant lawsuit.

The Declaration is structured almost identically to Old Testament prophetic rebukes of Israel’s kings. It lists grievances (like Jeremiah), declares broken covenant (like Isaiah), and calls on divine judgment (like Moses). The Founders were not simply appealing to Enlightenment reason. They were appealing to a higher law, one above king and parliament—a law written by God and accessible to men through conscience, Scripture, and moral order.

This is why so many clergymen supported the revolution. Rev. John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration and a staunch Calvinist, said:

“He is the best friend to American liberty, who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion.”

To Witherspoon, liberty was not the end. It was the fruit of covenant faithfulness. Just like Israel, the survival of the American republic would depend on national obedience to God’s moral law.

THE FOUNDERS WERE NOT DISPENSATIONALISTS

Let’s be blunt: No one at the time of the American founding believed the Jewish people, apart from faith in Christ, retained any special divine blessing. That idea would have made absolutely no sense to the Calvinist, covenantal worldview of the era.

Dispensationalism did not exist. It would not emerge until the 1830s. No Founding Father believed the modern Jews were still God’s chosen people in any salvific or political sense unless they were Christians.

John Adams referred to the Jews with respect for their history, but wrote in 1808:

“This country has done much—I wish it may do more—for the Jews. But I see no evidence that they are to be restored to their own land or that their temple is to be rebuilt.”

Even George Washington, in his famous letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, did not affirm any continuing divine covenant with unbelieving Jews. His language was tolerant, generous, and civic—but his theology was rooted in the same assumption all the Founders shared: God’s blessings come through national virtue, not ethnic identity.

Throughout the founding period, sermons abounded with direct comparisons between America and ancient Israel. When calamity struck—be it war, disease, or natural disaster—preachers called for days of fasting and humiliation, echoing Israelite practices of national repentance.

Samuel Langdon, president of Harvard and preacher to the New Hampshire legislature, said in 1775:

“If God be for us, who can be against us? But if our country shall persist in wickedness... we may expect that the same divine vengeance which punished Israel shall come upon us.”

He wasn’t using Israel as a metaphor—he was identifying America with it directly.

This was not heresy. This was standard colonial theology. It came straight from Puritan covenantalism, shaped by Calvinist readings of Scripture that understood the Old Testament not as a discarded relic, but as a blueprint for national life under God.

A BIBLICAL REPUBLIC

The American Founders weren’t trying to restore the ceremonial law of Moses. They weren’t theonomists in the modern sense. But they absolutely believed that God governs nations, that laws must reflect divine moral order, and that a righteous nation is one that honors the Lord through justice, virtue, and covenantal obedience.

They believed that God punishes nations just as He blesses them. That the survival of a republic depends on virtue. That liberty is not man’s default state, but a gift maintained through fear of God.

These are not Enlightenment beliefs. They are Old Testament beliefs—filtered through a Protestant lens. They are New Israel beliefs.

Contrary to the modern prosperity gospel of patriotic sentimentality, the Founders did not believe America would be forever blessed just because it existed. They believed America had a chance to be a righteous nation because it had covenanted with God—but that the terms of that covenant included curses for rebellion.

This idea was captured succinctly by Benjamin Franklin, who—though not orthodox—nevertheless echoed the covenantal assumption:

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

Franklin was not quoting Deuteronomy—but the theology behind his statement is Deuteronomic. Freedom, to the Founders, was not a birthright—it was a blessing, and blessings were conditional.

The Bible they read was clear: when nations rebel, they are judged. When they turn back, they are healed.

NO ZION WITHOUT OBEDIENCE

The Founders did not believe in two parallel covenants—one for Jews and one for Christians. They did not believe that God had a geopolitical plan for modern Israel while America sat on the sidelines. They did not believe that America’s destiny was to defend unbelieving Jews while ignoring national repentance.

They believed America was the New Israel—not as a replacement, but as a continuation of the biblical pattern. A people, delivered from tyranny, covenanted with God, entrusted with law, and called to righteousness.

And like Israel, America would stand or fall based on one thing:

“Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” (Proverbs 14:34)

They didn’t put that on currency. They put it in their hearts, in their sermons, and in the very bones of their republic.

If we’ve forgotten it, it’s not because the Founders were unclear. It’s because we stopped reading what they actually believed—and worse, stopped believing it ourselves.

THE TRUE ZION

Let’s be clear: America is not Israel. No modern nation is. Neither are England, Hungary, Uganda, nor any other country, no matter how Christian its constitution, how pious its heritage, or how conservative its present-day leaders. No civil body, no legislature, no republic on earth stands today in the same covenantal role that Old Testament Israel once held under Moses and David. That identity, in the wake of Christ’s coming, belongs exclusively to His Church.

God’s “chosen nation” is not a geopolitical state—it is the Church, a blood-bought people drawn from every tribe and tongue, every kingdom and caste, joined together in covenant with the resurrected Christ. This is not poetic language. It is theological fact. When Peter wrote that the Church is “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,” he was not flattering his audience—he was applying the exact Old Testament language once reserved for Israel to a new covenant body made up of Jew and Gentile alike. Likewise, Paul did not mince words when he referred to the “Israel of God” in Galatians 6. The Church, not any ethnic lineage or political state, is the dwelling place of God and the vessel of His redemptive work.

But acknowledging that only the Church is Israel does not mean that nations don’t matter. It does not follow that earthly governments are irrelevant, or that civil law should be indifferent to God’s standards. On the contrary, the exclusive covenantal status of the Church makes its example all the more essential to any nation seeking to avoid judgment and receive blessing. The fact that America is not Israel should not lead us to relativism or neutrality. It should compel us to imitation.

If the Church is the nation in covenant with God, then it is also the moral template for all nations. Its customs, its laws, its virtues, and its ethical structure should serve as the framework for how earthly nations order their societies. No, that does not mean governments should administer sacraments or pass laws about church membership. It does not mean we need bishops in the Senate or forced confessions on tax forms. But it does mean that any nation that refuses to acknowledge Christ as King and rejects His moral law is not neutral—it is rebellious.

Nations are not exempt from covenantal principles just because they are not the Church. God has always judged nations. He judged Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Moab, Edom, Israel, and Judah. And in the New Testament era, He judged Rome. He judged Jerusalem itself. The cross of Christ does not erase this pattern; it fulfills and magnifies it. Every nation, whether Christian in name or not, will answer to the King of Kings. That includes the United States. That includes the nations of the West. And that certainly includes the modern state of Israel, which no amount of Scofield footnotes or evangelical sentimentalism can excuse from its rejection of Christ.

The pattern of covenant—command, obedience, consequence—still governs the world. When nations walk in righteousness, they are exalted. When they rebel, they are brought low. The law of God is not suspended in the public square. Its authority flows from the throne of Christ, and it is binding on magistrates and mobs alike. This is what the American Founders understood, even if their children have forgotten it. They believed in divine judgment, not just for individuals, but for peoples. They believed liberty was not a natural right granted by man, but a blessing conditioned on national obedience to God.

What modern America has forgotten is that every nation must choose between aligning itself with the covenantal order of the Church or else building its own false Israel. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. In the evangelical world, a false Israel has been crafted out of political Zionism, where support for a Christ-rejecting state is seen as the highest form of obedience to Genesis 12. In the progressive world, a false Israel has taken the shape of racial grievance movements, intersectional hierarchies, and endless revolutionary mantras that claim divine favor on the basis of victimhood. In the secular world, the false Israel is the utopian state itself—an idol of democracy, pluralism, and technocratic rule that bows to no God and recognizes no moral law but its own.

In each of these cases, the world substitutes the true covenant people of God—the Church—for its own project of redemption. But the truth remains: there is only one Israel of God, and it is found in those who are in Christ. The rest is smoke and judgment.

Still, that reality does not remove the need for righteous nations. In fact, it heightens the need. Because while no nation is itself the chosen people, every nation is judged by how it relates to the people of God and the King they serve. The goal is not to turn civil government into a church—but to turn civil society toward the values, laws, customs, and structures modeled by the church under the lordship of Christ.

America once knew this. Our forebears didn’t believe that the state could save souls, but they did believe that the state should honor the Savior. They didn’t want the government to mimic ecclesiastical structure, but they believed the justice and mercy found in biblical law should guide our legal codes and societal norms. They saw Israel as a type and pattern—not to be copied in its ceremonial rituals, but to be honored in its reverence for divine law, its submission to God’s authority, and its pursuit of national holiness.

This is what must be recovered. Not a shallow nationalism. Not a return to civil religion or patriotic nostalgia. But a mature, covenantal, Christ-exalting vision of the nation as a servant of God’s moral order and protector of the Church’s freedom. The state is not Israel. It is not the bride. But it is accountable to the bride’s Groom.

So no, America is not Israel. It never was, and never will be. But if America desires the blessings once promised to Israel, it must fear the same God, heed the same moral law, and honor the same risen Christ. A nation cannot become the people of God—but it can submit to the rule of God. And it must, or it will fall.

The Church is the chosen nation. All others are on notice.

And as Psalm 2 still warns kings and parliaments, courts and congresses, cabinets and coalitions: “Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and you perish in the way.”

The Founders took that warning seriously. May we have the courage—and clarity—to do the same.

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