The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

God’s law is unchangeable. American law is not. The Constitution is not perfect. The framers knew this, and none left the Convention having secured everything they wanted. In his closing address to the Convention, Franklin consented “to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.”25 Adams, writing a few years later as vice president, was more specific: “The Constitution is but an experiment, and must and will be altered.”26 These were not men acting with the certainty of religious conviction. They were thoughtful, reasonable men aware that they, and other delegates, were governed partly by passion and self-interest. And so, certain mostly of their own fallibility, they crafted a provision to alter—to amend—the Constitution. They would take advantage of Article V almost immediately, to write and pass the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights. The Constitution has been altered twenty-seven times and nearly always improved. The glaring exception to this steady improvement was partly due to religious groups, such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which advocated for the Eighteenth Amendment, Prohibition, and which was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment.