The Eternal Return of the Christian Nation

Richard White

John Adams once wrote, “It was never pretended that any persons employed in [drafting the founding documents] had interviews with the gods or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven.” Ours was a government “founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery.”

That Adams had to disavow divine inspiration always surprised me before I taught in Utah in the 1980s. Evangelical Christians and Mormons are often at odds, but at some point they united in the belief that the Founders had acted as scribes for divine revelation. Some of my students thought angels bearing the word of God had been at the Constitutional Convention. I began inserting into my lectures reasons why this probably was not true. Why the disputes over what passages meant? Why the amendments? Had God—or the angels—forgotten stuff?